The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound 1501335391, 9781501335396

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Contributors
Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound? Holger Schulze
Part I Living with Sonic Artifacts
Pulse Michael Bull
1 The Headphone Naomi Smith and Anne-Marie Snider
2 The File Jens Gerrit Papenburg
3 The Instrument Rolf Großmann
4 The Software Katrine Wallevik
Coda Sebastian Schwesinger
Part II Sounding Flesh
Pulse Salomé Voegelin
5 The Voice Ulrike Sowodniok
6 The Food Melissa Van Drie
7 The Intimate Holger Schulze
8 The Dance Inger Damsholt
Coda Astrid Ellehøj Maaløe
Part III The Habitat in Sound
Pulse Jean-Paul Thibaud
9 The Plaza Sam Auinger and Dietmar Offenhuber
10 The Home Jacqueline Waldock
11 The Street Juhana Venäläinen, Sonja Pöllänen and Rajko Muršicˇ
12 The Workplace Andi Schoon
Coda Marcel Cobussen
Part IV Sonic Desires
Pulse Marie Thompson
13 The Admiration Marcus S. Kleiner
14 The Entertainment Macon Holt
15 The Consonance Annemette Kirkegaard
16 The Quietude Tore Tvarnø Lind
Coda Jordan Lacey
Part V The Listening Machines
Pulse Jens Gerrit Papenburg
17 The Recording Toby Seay
18 The Amplification Carla J. Maier
19 The Studio Matthew Barnard
20 The Reproduction Anders Bach
Coda Jessica Thompson
Part VI Sensologies
Pulse Holger Schulze
21 The Model Gabriele de Seta
22 The Everyday Jacob Kreutzfeldt
23 The Unheard Tobias Ewé
24 The Ear Marc Couroux
Coda Sam Auinger
References
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound

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The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound Edited by Holger Schulze

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © by Holger Schulze, 2021 Each chapter © of Contributor Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Michał Chudzicki: Like City, Like Bruegel 2 (121x180, oil on canvas, 2018). For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 539 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3539-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3541-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-3542-6 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents

Contributors  viii

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?  Holger Schulze  1

Part I  Living with Sonic Artifacts  Pulse  Michael Bull  23 1 The Headphone  Naomi Smith and Anne-Marie Snider  27 2 The File  Jens Gerrit Papenburg  43 3 The Instrument  Rolf Großmann  59 4 The Software  Katrine Wallevik  77 Coda  Sebastian Schwesinger  101

Part II  Sounding Flesh  Pulse  Salomé Voegelin  107 5 The Voice  Ulrike Sowodniok  111 6 The Food  Melissa Van Drie  129 7 The Intimate  Holger Schulze  147 8 The Dance  Inger Damsholt  163 Coda  Astrid Ellehøj Maaløe  181

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Contents

Part III  The Habitat in Sound  Pulse  Jean-Paul Thibaud  187 9 The Plaza  Sam Auinger and Dietmar Offenhuber  191 10 The Home  Jacqueline Waldock  211 11 The Street  Juhana Venäläinen, Sonja Pöllänen and Rajko Muršicˇ  225 12 The Workplace  Andi Schoon  241 Coda  Marcel Cobussen  257

Part IV  Sonic Desires  Pulse  Marie Thompson  263 13 The Admiration  Marcus S. Kleiner  267 14 The Entertainment  Macon Holt  279 15 The Consonance  Annemette Kirkegaard  295 16 The Quietude  Tore Tvarnø Lind  311 Coda  Jordan Lacey  331

Part V  The Listening Machines  Pulse  Jens Gerrit Papenburg  337 17 The Recording  Toby Seay  339 18 The Amplification  Carla J. Maier  353 19 The Studio  Matthew Barnard  369 20 The Reproduction  Anders Bach  385 Coda  Jessica Thompson  401

Contents

Part VI  Sensologies  Pulse  Holger Schulze  407 21 The Model  Gabriele de Seta  411 22 The Everyday  Jacob Kreutzfeldt  427 23 The Unheard  Tobias Ewé  443 24 The Ear  Marc Couroux  463 Coda  Sam Auinger  485 References  487 Acknowledgments  539 Index  541

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Sam Auinger is a composer, sound artist, and sonic thinker. He served as associate at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA, 2013–2015, as a guest lecturer in the Art Culture and Thechnology program at MIT, USA, 2017, and as guest professor for experimental sound design at the University of the Arts Berlin, Germany, 2008–2012. He works in collaborations with artists and composers Hannes Strobl, and with urbanist and media artist Dietmar Offenhuber. Together with Bruce Odland, he founded O+A in 1989. Their central theme is hearing perspective. They recently initiated a discourse around Sonic Commons with an article in the Leonardo Music Journal. They are authors of Harmonic Bridge (MassMoca/US since 1998) and Sonic Vista (Frankfurt am Main/Germany, since 2011) among others. Anders Bach is an independent musician and writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied Music Performance (BMus) at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory and Digital Aesthetics (MSc) at the IT University, Copenhagen. His research focuses on environmental music and the aesthetics of underground electronic music and automated music making. He is co-founder of the label Wetwear and serves as an active musical figure on the Danish underground scene. Selected publications: “Climate Catastrophe as Environmental Music: The Aral Sea” (International Computer Music Conference, 2019), “Human Excess: Aesthetics of Post-Internet Electronic Music” (International Computer Music Conference, 2017), “A Liberated Sonic Sublime” (Sound and Music Computing Conference, 2016). Matthew Barnard is a Lecturer and Researcher in Applied Music Technology at the University of Hull, UK. He studied for a BA in Creative Music Technology and a PhD in Binaural Composition at the University of Hull. His research focuses on the ambisonic and binaural method of recording and reproduction, specifically its compositional applications and wider esthetic implications, in addition to the phonographic spatial tendencies in music production practice. Selected publications: De Facto Cubists: Multi-Microphone Utilisation as Spatial Polyperspectivity (2018), Woche: with apologies to Ruttmann and Brock (2016), The Sounds of Displacement (2010). Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He studied Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Bristol. He then studied Modern European Thought at the University of London, completing his doctorate in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, London. His research focuses upon sound, technology, and sociality but also upon sensory studies more broadly defined. He is founding editor of the journals Senses and

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Society and Sound Studies (Routledge) and is book series editor of The Study of Sound (Bloomsbury). Selected publications: Sirens (2020), The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018), Ritual, Performance and the Senses (2015, coeditor), Sounding Out the City, iPod Culture and Urban Experience (2007), The Auditory Culture Reader (2003/2016, coeditor) and Sound Moves, Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (2000). Marcel Cobussen is Full Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. He studied jazz piano at the Conservatory of Rotterdam and Art and Cultural Studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He is editor-in-chief of the open-access online Journal of Sonic Studies. Selected publications: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (2020, coeditor), The Field of Musical Improvisation (2017), The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art (2016, coeditor), Music and Ethics (2012, coauthor), Deconstruction in Music (www. deconstruction-in-music.com, 2002). Marc Couroux is an Associate Professor of Visual Art, Sonic Praxis, and TheoryFiction at York University, Toronto, Canada. An inframedial artist, pianistic heresiarch, schizophonic magician, and author of speculative fictions, he is also a founding member of The Occulture: a collective (ir)responsible for the yearly “Tuning Speculation” workshops in Toronto. Selected publications: Xenaudial, a Psychoacoustic Fugue (2020), “The Auditory Hallucination & The Sonic Egregor” (Unsound: Undead, 2018, coauthor as part of The Occulture), Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away from Contemporary Technoculture (2017, coauthor), “Towards Indisposition” (The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today, 2014), Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society (2013). Inger Damsholt is an Associate Professor in the Section of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Focusing on activities concerned with “choreomusical relations” from the mid-1980s onwards, she studied Musicology and Dance Studies at Marlboro College (USA), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), University of California (Riverside and Los Angeles, USA) and University of Roehampton (UK). In her practice-based research she draws on experience from a vast range of theatrical, social, and popular dance and music genres. From 2002 to 2006 she was chairman of the board of the Nordic Forum for Dance Research and as an extension of this work she contributed to the establishment of the transnational and cross-institutional Nordic MA in Dance Studies program as well as the international research group Dance in Nordic Spaces. Selected publications: “Identifying ‘Choreomusical Research” (Musical Cultures in the Twentieth Century: MusicDance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse and Practice, 2018), “Troublesome Relationships: Gendered Metaphors in Modern Dance and Its Music” (Discourses in Dance, 2012), “The One and Only Music for the Danish Lanciers: Time, Space, and the Method of East European Ethnochoreologists” (Danish Yearbook of Musicology, 2009), “Mark Morris, Mickey Mouse and Choreomusical Polemic” (Opera Quarterly, 2007).

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Tobias Ewé is a vibrational ‘pataphysician and theorist. He is writing a PhD on xenophonia in  the Department of Art History at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research focuses on psychoacoustics in the sonic arts as the crossroads between vibrational inhumanism and speculative aesthetics. His most recent work appears in Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (edited by Holger Schulze, 2021); and Xenofeminisme: En politik for fremmedgørelse (Laboria Cuboniks, translated by Tobias Ewé, 2018 [2015]). Tobias is a founding member of Research in Art & Media, and a member of University of Copenhagen’s Sound & Senses Research Group along with more occulted patchworks of online research.   Rolf Großmann is Professor of Digital Media and Audiodesign and Director of the Center of ((audio)) Aesthetic Strategies at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. He studied Musicology, German Literature, Philosophy, and Physics at the Universities of Bonn, Siegen, and Gießen in Germany. His research focuses on the aesthetics of contemporary music and technocultural perspectives on music and media art. He has given guest lectures on digital production, aesthetics of music, and media art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Popakademie Mannheim, Universities of Hamburg, Siegen, and Basel, and Bern University of the Arts. Selected publications: “Silence, Sound, Noise Aesthetic and MediaTechnological Observations” (Texte zur Kunst, 2018), “Sound as Musical Material” (Sound as Popular Culture, 2016), “Sensory Engineering: Affects and the Mechanics of Musical Time” (Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics, 2014). Macon Holt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Copenhagen Business School’s Department of Management, Society and Communication. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, in 2017. His work focuses on speculative approaches for examining affective atmospheres as expressed through cultural productions, such as post-financial crisis popular music. He is a contributing editor at the music magazine Passive/Aggressive and his writing has appeared in Atlas Magasin, Blacklisted Copenhagen, The Ark Review, and Full Stop. He has taught at Lund University, the Royal Danish Academy of Art and the Leeds College of Music. His first book, Pop Music and Hip Ennui: A Sonic Fiction of Capitalist Realism, was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic. Annemette Kirkegaard is Associate Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and at the Grieg Academy at the University of Bergen, Norway. She studied Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Copenhagen and has been attached to the Center for African Studies at University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on musicology, ethnomusicology, African and global musics, live music and festivals, music censorship, and human rights issues in music. She is adviser for the journals Ethnomusicology Forum and Swedish Journal of Musicology. Selected publications: “Silencing Artists: Reflections on Music Censorship in the Case of Mahsa Vahdat” (Researching Music Censorship, 2017), “The Nordic Brotherhoods: Eurovision as a Platform for Partnership and Competition” (Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, 2013), “Music and Transcendence: Sufi Popular Performances in

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East Africa” (Temenos, 2012), “Entangled Complicities in the Prehistory of ‘World Music’: Poul Rovsing Olsen and Jean Jenkins Encounter Brian Eno and David Byrne in the Bush of Ghosts” (Popular Musicology Online, 2010, coauthor). Marcus S. Kleiner is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Vice-President of Creativity and Interaction at the SRH Berlin University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He studied Philosophy, Sociology, and German Literature at the University of Duisburg. His research focuses on popular culture, media culture and digital culture. He is member of the advisory board for the journals Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power and Spiel.Eine Zeitschrift zu Medienkultur. Selected publications: Handbuch Popkultur (Handbook of Popular Culture, 2017, coeditor), Streamland. Warum Netflix, Amazon Prime & Co. unsere Demokratie bedrohen (Streamland. Why Netflix, Amazon Prime & Co. threaten our democracy, 2020), Medien-Heterotopien: Diskursräume einer gesellschaftskritischen Medientheorie (Media Heterotopias: Discourse Spaces of a Socially Critical Media Theory, 2006). Jacob Kreutzfeldt is an independent researcher, curator, and consultant. He is founding director of Struer Tracks: Urban Sound Art Festival. He studied at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and went on to become Assistant Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. His research focuses on auditory culture, particularly on the intersections between radio, the urban, and sonic environments. He has been involved in projects on sonic environments and acoustic territoriality (PhD 2006–2009), radio heritage and the reportage as genre (Postdoc LARM 2010–2013), and radio in a transnational perspective (HERA Principal Investigator 2013–2016). Selected publications: “The Aesthetics of the Soundmark” (Public Art Dialogue, 2019, coauthor), “State-Controlled Avant-Garde? – Emil Bønnelyche’s Radiophonic Portrait of Copenhagen” (A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925–1950, 2019), Radioverdener (2015, coeditor), “Unidentified Sounds: Radio Reporting from Copenhagen 1931–1949” (Journal of Radio & Audio Media, 2015). Jordan Lacey is a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He completed his creative practice PhD in urban soundscape design at RMIT University in 2016. His research focuses on urban soundscape design, public sound installation art, and ambiance praxis. He has been a practicing musician for thirty years and worked as a secondary school teacher from 1996 to 2006. He is associate editor for the Journal of Sonic Studies and special guest editor for Unlikely: Journal of Creative Arts. His sound art installations are documented on hiddensounds.com.au. Selected publications: “A Listening-Based Methodology for Motorway Noise Design” (Qualitative Research Journal, 2019, coauthor), “Revoicing the Urban Soundscape: A Case Study of Student Soundscape Design Interventions” (Journal of Sonic Studies, 2017), Sonic Rupture: A Practice-Led Approach to Urban Soundscape Design (2016), “Sonic Placemaking: Three Approaches and Ten Attributes for the Creation of Enduring Urban Sound Art Installations” (Organised Sound, 2016).

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Tore Tvarnø Lind is Associate Professor of Anthropology of Music at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Section for Musicology. He studied musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Athens, and with Philip V. Bohlman at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on Greek Orthodox chant at Mount Athos; the use of music in heterodox healing and biomedical practices; music torture; and lately, extreme metal music. He is editor of the open-access journal Danish Musicology Online, and he serves as Executive Secretary of the National Committee for Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae under the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Selected publications: “Heart of Sadness: Fieldwork in the Copenhagen Black Metal Undergrounds” (Living Metal, 2020), “Foltern mit Musik” (Krieg Singen, 2017), “Byzantine Blossom: The Monastic Revival of Orthodox Chant at Mount Athos” (Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, 2016), The Past is Always Present: The Revival of the Byzantine Musical Tradition at Mount Athos (2012), “Meaning, Power and Exoticism in Medicinal Music: A Case Study of MusiCure in Denmark” (Ethnomusicology Forum, 2007). Astrid Ellehøj Maaløe is an independent researcher who graduated in Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2019. Besides previous studies in Middle Eastern languages, her main research focuses on exploring and theorizing the epistemological potentials of the human senses—in the social, esthetic, and the academic sphere, with a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach. She currently investigates the sensory as a source for pedagogical techniques when working with people with mental disabilities, aesthetically and nonverbally. She is the author of “Uden ord: om æstetiske oplevelser som vej ud af fordomme” (Danish Musicology Online, 2020). Carla J. Maier is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and the Sound Studies Lab. Her current postdoctoral project “Travelling Sounds” is situated at the intersection of sound studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology and practice-based research methods. She studied British literary and cultural studies and cultural anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and received her PhD for a thesis on British Asian Dance Music. Publications include the monograph Transcultural Sound Practices: British Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation (Bloomsbury, 2020), as well as articles and book chapters on “The Sound of Skateboarding” (The Senses & Society, 2016), “Sonic Modernities” & “Sound Practices” (Sound as Popular Culture, 2016), “The Sound of Afrofuturism” (coauthor, We Travel The Space Ways, 2019), “Membrane. Materialities and Intensities of Sound” (The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, 2020). Rajko Muršič is Professor of Ethnology/Cultural Anthropology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Faculty of Arts, Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, where he studied ethnology and anthropology at all levels. His research focuses on anthropology of popular music, theories of culture, epistemology, urban anthropology, methodologies of anthropological research, and so on. He was an editor of the Bulletin of the Slovene Ethnological

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Society and the initial editor of the monograph series Zupanič’s Collection. He served as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and a president of the Slovenian Ethnological and Anthropological Association Kula. He participates as expert researcher in the ERC project Sensotra (Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950– 2020) at the University of Eastern Finland (2017–2021). Selected publications: Glasbeni pojmovnik za mlade (Music Glossary for the Youth, 2017), Sounds of Attraction: Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Popular Music (2017); Na trdna tla. Brezsramni pregled samoniklih prizorišč in premislek nevladja mladinskega polja (On the Solid Ground: Analysis of Grassroots Venues and the Youth Non-Governmental Field in Slovenia, 2012). Dietmar Offenhuber is Associate Professor at Northeastern University, USA, in the areas of information design and urban affairs. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT. His research focuses on the relationship between design, technology, and urban governance and he works as an advisor to the United Nations Development Program. Selected publications: “Politics of Sensing and Listening” (Architecture and the Smart City, 2019), “Los Angeles Noise Array—Planning and Design Lessons from a Noise Sensing Network” (Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2018), Waste is Information (2017), Decoding the City: Urbanism in the Age of Big Data (2014, coauthor). Jens Gerrit Papenburg is Professor of Musicology/Sound Studies at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany. He studied Musicology, Communication Studies, and Economics in Berlin. His research focuses on the history and archaeology of listening devices, popular music since the late nineteenth century (focus: Europe and the USA), music and media. He is a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He holds visiting professorships at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, and Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. His current projects include the monograph Listening Devices: A Sound and Music History of Records, Jukeboxes, Sound System (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2021). Selected publications: “Konzeptalben als ‚große Werke‘ populärer Musik?” (Concept Albums as Popular Music’s “Master Works”?, Musik & Ästhetik, 2017), “Plantage, Militär, Maschine. Artikulationen populärer ‘afroamerikanischer’ Musik in Deutschland, 1900–1925” (Plantation, Military, Machine: Articulations of Popular “African-American” in Germany, 1900–1925, AmerikaEuphorie – Amerika-Hysterie, 2017), Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion (2016, coeditor). Sonja Pöllänen is a PhD student of Cultural Anthropology in the “social and cultural encounters” doctoral program at the University of Eastern Finland. Simultaneously, she is working as a project researcher (2017–2021) in an ERC adv. grant (GA 694893) project SENSOTRA. Sonja’s postgraduate studies belong to the field of cultural anthropology, where she investigates processes that produce sensuous and non-sensuous likeness in two different case studies: in a live action role-playing game and in transgenerational pairs in ethnographical sensory walks. She investigates ontological formations and processes that

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produce likenesses in two different case studies: in a live action role-playing game and in transgenerational couples in sensobiographic walks. Her general research interests are in Continental Philosophy, Ontological Theory, Sensory Studies, New Materialism, and Game Studies. Sonja is also a member and an affiliated student of the Aging, Communication and Technology network (ACT) at the Concordia University. She is an author of an annotated bibliography of transgenerational research on environmental relationships and ageing (2003–2015) with Helmi Järviluoma-Mäkelä (2018), and “Enon Louhitalo” (Louhitalo house in Eno, Maaseudun näkökulmasta: tarkennuksia hyvinvointipalveluiden muutoksiin, 2016). Andi Schoon is Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of the Arts Bern, Switzerland. He studied Musicology, German Literature and Sociology at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on Sound and Postcolonial Studies. Selected publications: Die schwache Stimme (The Weak Voice, 2018), sujet imaginaire (2014), Das geschulte Ohr: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Sonifikation (The Trained Ear: A Cultural History of Sonification, 2012, coeditor), Die Ordnung der Klänge. Das Wechselspiel der Künste vom Bauhaus zum Black Mountain College (The Order of Sounds: The Interplay of the Arts from Bauhaus to Black Mountain College, 2006). Holger Schulze is Full Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture, and the anthropology of media. He served as curator for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, is founding editor of the book series Sound Studies, and produced radio features for Deutschlandfunk Kultur. He writes for Merkur, Seismograf, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and Positionen. Selected publications: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art (2020, coeditor), Sonic Fiction (2020), Sound Works (2019), The Sonic Persona (2018). Sebastian Schwesinger is a Doctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Media and Cultural History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. He studied Cultural History and Theory, Musicology, Philosophy, and Microeconomics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and FOM University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on sonic media cultures, the history of acoustics, and cultural economics. He is a co-founder of the Berlin research network on sonic thinking. Selected publications: Sounding Out Public Places in Late Republican Rome (2019, coauthor), Saxa Loquuntur. The Function of (Multi-)Media for Antique Architecture (2018, coauthor), Navigating Noise (2017, coeditor), What Does It Mean to Think Sonically? Contours of Noise as a Sonic Figure of Thought (2017, coauthor). Toby Seay is Professor of Recording Arts and Music Production at Drexel University, USA. He studied music at James Madison University (BM) and library sciences at Drexel University (MLIS). His research focuses on music production and engineering practices that result in sonic signatures and audio recording preservation standards, specializing in multi-track materials. He will become Chair of the Coordinating

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Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations 2020–2021. Selected publications: “Sonic Signatures in Record Production” (Sound As Popular Culture, 2016), “A Workflow Study of Migrating Analogue Multi-Track Audio Recordings to Digital Preservation File Sets” (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives Journal, 2012), “Capturing That Philadelphia Sound: A Technical Exploration of Sigma Sound Studios” (Journal on the Art of Record Production, 2012). Gabriele de Seta is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. He studied Sociology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology in Taipei, Taiwan. His research focuses on vernacular creativity, sensory ethnography, and experimental music scenes. Selected publications: “Scaling the Scene: Experimental Music in Taiwan” (Cultural Studies, 2020), “WeChat as Infrastructure: The Techno-nationalist Shaping of Chinese Digital Platforms” (Chinese Journal of Communication, 2019), “Digital Folklore” (Second International Handbook of Internet Research, 2019), “Headbanging in Taiwan” (Metal Music Studies, 2017). Naomi Smith is a Lecturer in Sociology at Federation University Australia. She was awarded a PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland, where she examined the construction of Facebook as a social space. Her research focuses on the intersection of the internet and bodies, how online communities influence the way we experience, manage, and make sense of our bodies. Relatedly, she also researches the intersection of physical and digital space on platforms such as Instagram. She is a current co-convener for the Cultural Sociology thematic group in the Australian Sociological Association. Selected publications: “ASMR, Affect and Digitally Mediated Intimacy” (Emotion, Space and Society, 2019, coauthor), “Mapping the Anti-Vaccination on Facebook” (Information Communication and Society, 2017), “Managing a Marginalised Identity in Pro-Anorexia and Fat Acceptance Cybercommunities” (Journal of Sociology, 2015). Anne-Marie Snider is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Westmont College, USA. She completed an MSc in subjective wellbeing and suicidology at the Victoria University of Wellington. Anne-Marie was also awarded a PhD in Sociology at the University of Queensland in 2019. Her research focuses on mental health and illness, religion, spirituality, and wellbeing. Selected publications: “ASMR, Affect and Digitally Mediated Intimacy” (Emotion, Space and Society, 2019, coauthor), “Religiosity, Spirituality, Mental Health, and Mental Health Treatment Outcomes in Australia: A Systematic Literature Review” (Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 2014). Ulrike Sowodniok (1968–2019) was a singer and voice anthropologist. Her artistic research focuses on performances for voice and sonic environments, and her scholarly work on the relations and repercussions between voice, corporeality, relation, and movement. She co-founded the a cappella quintet Ensemble Medulla for post-somatic and feminist performances, and she taught Applied Anthropology of the Voice at the University of

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the Arts Berlin and at the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin, Germany. Selected publications: “Voce in Libertà – Freed Voice: An Applied Anthropology of the Voice” (The Senses and Society, 2016), Stimmklang und Freiheit (Vocal Sound and Freedom, 2013), “Stimmklang und Bedeutung. Fünf Perspektiven auf den resonierenden Körper – oder: Was singt mir, die ich höre in meinem Körper das Lied?” (Vocal Sound and Meaning: Five Perspectives on the Resonating Body – or: What is singing to me that I hear in my body the song?, Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 2012). Jean-Paul Thibaud is a sociologist and is CNRS Senior Researcher at Cresson, the Research Center on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment, UMR1563 Ambiances Architectures Urbanités, France. His research covers the theory of urban ambiances, ordinary perception in urban environment, sensory culture and ethnography of public places, anthropology of sounds, socio-ecological issues, and qualitative in situ methodology. He has directed the Cresson research laboratory and founded the International Ambiances Network. Selected publications: “Towards an Art of Impregnation” (The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, 2017), “Commented City Walks” (Journal of Mobile Culture, 2013), “The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances” (Senses and Society, 2011), “The Sonic Composition of the City” (The Auditory Culture Reader, 2003). Jessica Thompson is an associate professor of Hybrid Media at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She studied Fine Arts at York University and Media Study at University at Buffalo. Her artistic practice investigates the ways that sound reveals spatial and social conditions within cities, and how the creative use of urban data can generate new modes of citizen engagement. Her interactive artworks have shown in exhibitions and festivals throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, and have been included in publications such as Canadian Art, c Magazine, Leonardo Music Journal, Acoustic Territories, Organised Sound, and Journal of Sonic Studies. In 2019 she received an Ontario Government Early Researcher Award for Borderline, a research-creation project that uses the sonification of algorithmic data to create new understandings of place. Marie Thompson is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln, UK. She received a PhD in Musicology from Newcastle University in 2014. Her research focuses on the affective, gendered, and socio-political dimensions of music, sonic media, and auditory culture. Selected publications: Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (2017), “Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies” (Parallax, 2017), “To Soothe or Remove? Affect, Revanchism and the Weaponised Use of Classical Music” (Communication and the Public, 2017), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (2013, coeditor). Melissa Van Drie is a historian, performer, and curator. Currently she is a Marie-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where she is building her “Sounds Delicious Project” which explores connections of sound and food. She works across the disciplines of theatre, music, and the history of science and technology to write cultural

Contributors

histories of sound and listening. After training in music performance and musicology at NYU, she did her PhD in theatre studies at the Sorbonne Paris III. She has published on intersections of early mediatized listening practices, sound reproduction technologies, and live theatre—notably on the théâtrophone—in nineteenth-century France. She also worked on sonic skills in medicine during a postdoc torate in the STS Department at Maastricht University. Selected publications: “Refaconner l’oreille, prendre en main la voix: le comedien et le phonographe” (Le comedien et l’objet technique, 2019), “Sharing Sound: Teaching, Learning and Researching Sonic Skills” (Sound Studies, 2016, coauthor), “Hearing through the Théâtrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in Late 19th Century French Theatre” (Sound Effects, 2015), “Training the Auscultative Ear: Medical Textbooks and Teaching Tapes (1950–2010)” (The Senses and Society, 2013). Juhana Venäläinen is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu. His research focuses on transformations of work and the economy, precarity, affect theory, soundscapes, and the notion of the commons. He is a member of the editorial board in the journal Kulttuurintutkimus [Cultural Studies] as well as the monograph series Nykykulttuuri [Contemporary Culture]. Selected publications: “Culturalization of the Economy and the Artistic Qualities of Contemporary Capitalism” (Art and the Challenge of Markets, 2018), “Kuuloyhteisistä kuunteluvapauteen” (From Aural Commons to Freedom of Listening, Äänimaisemissa, 2016), Prekarisaatio ja affekti (Precarization and Affect, 2015, editor). Salomé Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the University of the Arts London, UK. She studied Fine Art Film and Video at Central Saint Martins and has a PhD in Visual Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research focuses on listening as a socio-political practice. She turns to the invisible and mobile dimension of art and the everyday to achieve new insights that can deliver novel answers to pressing issues such as the climate emergency, social integration, asymmetries of belonging, and education. Selected publications: The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (2018), Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (2014), Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010). Jacqueline Waldock is a researcher at the University of Liverpool, UK. She previously studied Music at Lancaster University and went on to complete a doctorate at the University of Liverpool in Musicology and Composition. Her research focuses of sounds of everyday life, listening cultures, and soundscape composition as an ethnographic tool. Selected publications: “Crossing the Boundaries: Community Composition and Sensory Ethnography” (Senses and Society, 2016), “Hearing Urban Change” (Auditory Cultural Reader, 2015). Katrine Wallevik is a culture consultant at the Municipality of Copenhagen, Denmark. She studied Musicology and Modern Culture at the University of Copenhagen and

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completed her PhD as part of an interdisciplinary research project with specific focus on music in Danish radio through the last 100 years (RAMUND). Her research focuses on an anthropological analysis of cultures in (cultural) organizations, specifically on questions of agency in media networks that circulate popular culture. Selected publications: Flow or Stop? Culture Matters in P3’s Music Radio Production (PhD 2019), “To Go with the Flow and to Produce It” (Tunes For All?, 2018), “Hatsune Miku: An Uncertain Image” (Digital Creativity, 2017, coauthor).

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound? Holger Schulze

Are there any humanoid entities left? Are there bipeds and anthropomorphic creatures around you? Indeed, there are cyborgs and simians, alien lifeforms with two legs and two arms, all distinctly vertebrate and seemingly equipped with the ability to interact on the level of concepts, communicating by written inscriptions, engaging in social activities and also coalescing into larger conglomerations, congregations, municipalities of beings with agency, desires and skills, knowledge and goals. In any moment of my everyday life, I am not only surrounded by but also in friendly conviviality and company with a large number of such entities. They are not necessarily only humanoid aliens (Schulze 2016, 2018a: 6–9) that fit in with a heteronormative and patriarchal ideology; these actors are of diverse origins. And they appear in a great multiplicity of bodily shapes, of idiosyncratic agency, and in a quite unforeseeable combination of embodied sensibilities and corporeal and skilled performativity. This wider array of kin, in the words of Donna Haraway (Haraway 2016), belongs to the everyday environment of one’s home or temporary place of living. But how do these entities, agents, or even lifeforms actually perform with and through their senses and sensibilities? Are they interacting in a way that not only includes sounds and senses in their performativities, but that also processes sounds, that performs and reflects through sonic experiences, and is maybe even irritated and caused to have certain doubts because of their sensory experiences?

Delinking Anthropology: Colonialism, the Posthuman, and Aliens Like Us The Anthrocolonial Matrix of Power Anthropology is a contested project. At the same time it can seem rather trivial, if not superfluous, something doomed to reproduce—and thus to stabilize—the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano 1992, 2000, Mignolo 2007). In its theories and concepts, its categories and evaluations, it reproduces the power structures that contribute to the established capitalist societies and economies in their exploitative industry. Therefore, the endeavor to write or to contribute to any sort of anthropology can seem almost impossible to complete,

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and maybe not even desirable to do so; it is simply an enterprise that might resemble a task which not even an extraterrestrial entity would be able to fulfil with a reasonable amount of time, energy, and capital. It is a monster. Yet, this monster also represents an ongoing desire and goal for a wide array of researchers, writers, and thinkers who may not always dare or wish or even feel legitimized or granted the honor to describe themselves as anthropologists. However, the outcomes of their endeavors seem to be situated precisely at the core of providing an anthropological sketch of all the humanoid aliens doing errands and encountering various conflict-ridden and joyful situations in the course of their lives on this little planet. Still, the approaches of anthropologies are manifold, and these days they are not infrequently camouflaged and hidden within or underneath other research areas, in remote and erratic artistic approaches and practices, and even in a wide assortment of publication formats transcending the common genres of the academic treatise or empirical study—far beyond the pale of a work such as Immanuel Kant’s famous Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Kant 1796/1968), an Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant 1979), written at the end of the eighteenth century in Kaliningrad, close to the Gdansk Bay, on the Baltic Sea: [The human] is a being who, by reason of his preeminence and dignity, is wholly different from things, such as the irrational animals whom he can master and rule at will. (Kant 1979: 9)

At least since the deep and consequential deconstruction of anthropology carried out by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object in 1993, the colonizing and appropriating—if not assimilating desire—of anthropological inquiries has been deconstructed. In the early twenty-first century there can be no doubt about Western history and the territorializing and selective erasing and reordering function that anthropology has had in the development, for instance, of the slave trade and the extraction cultures of recent centuries. Anthropology’s colonial past, however, has more recently also been transformed by newer efforts toward a symmetrical and a queer anthropology. Whereas symmetrical anthropologies might suffer the pitfall of powerfully assigning agency to all sorts of organic and inorganic entities on this planet—yet not necessarily to non-white and non-cisgendered beings—a queer anthropology might commit the reverse mistake. In their best examples, though, both approaches indeed represent a joint force to decolonize anthropology on a larger scale: In the most recent phase of LGBT/queer and among anthropology, this move away from exoticization has continued and the range of foci of queer studies opened to include an even wider range of transgender identities and experiences; LGBT/queer families, parenting and reproduction; bondage, discipline, dominance/submission, sadomasochism (BDSM) practices; and LGBT/queer activism, homophobias and even more “at-home” (local) practices; and LGBT/queer …. What has differentiated this latest phase from past phases of LGBT/queer anthropology is not only our moving beyond “a preoccupation with issues of visibility” (Weston 1998: 175) and simple acknowledgement of their/our existence, but also a recognition of the times where globalization, neoliberalism, migration and people’s agency and activism have to be considered. (Walks 2014: 14)

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

An anthropology of sound, though, is neither a queer, a symmetrical, nor a decolonial anthropology. Nevertheless, it cannot be regarded as any sort of convincing proposal for an outline of an anthropology as long as these important contemporary approaches are neglected or ignored. The concept of race in Kant’s anthropology, for instance, is— ahistorically and philosophically speaking—not sufficiently grounded and argued by its author. It is, one might dare to claim, one of the more unreflected upon and not very deeply founded concepts that entered Kant’s writing in order that he might establish an essentialist taxonomy of the races, of the “white (Europeans), yellow (Asians), black (Africans) and red (American Indians)” (Eze 1997: 115). As such it is an impressively horrifying document of the racialized and colonial culture of its time and its foundation on the raciologies in the work of natural historians at the time such as Buffon, Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), and François Bernier (Eze 1997: 119). The colonial matrix of power is fully developed here—even more so, as it is never questioned, doubted, or substantially scrutinized in its qualities and effects (Zhavornokov and Salikov 2018). Furthermore, Kant’s philosophical anthropology reveals itself as the guardian of Europe’s self-image of itself as superior and the rest of the world as barbaric. (Eze 1997: 130)

At this point, with this major trace of its inbuilt colonial power structure at hand, it becomes clear that any philosophical or biologist anthropology, with their more often than not substantially ahistorical disposition, needs to be either abolished as a whole or one might make an effort at historicizing, culturalizing, particularizing, and even delinking (Amin 1985, Mignolo 2007) such practices and disciplines from the colonial matrix of power. The urgency and basic plausibility of this delinking has been recurrently and forcefully addressed ad nauseam, to say the least, in the various proposals and postulates toward an end of the human, insinuating a planetary transgression into the post- or transhuman (Braidotti 2013, Haraway 2016). Now, such a radical disruption from existing and outworn concepts, habits, and dispositives can easily seem an attractive and alluring next step; however, it represents at the same time a thoroughly scary and disturbing move for most of the protagonists in its actual realization. Aside from some more anecdotal hindrances and obstacles to a general transgression of humanoid cultures, there is also an unresolved conceptual issue: what is The Human anyway that it is we intend to transcend?—and what protagonists on this planet are allowed to perform this role of The Human these days? Isn’t this role mainly assigned to representatives who happen by interpersonal accident and political serendipity to represent cisgendered, heterosexual, male, white, European, alphabetized, employed, bourgeois, and registered consumer citizens performing in largely symmetrically normalized and surgically as well as athletically, medically, and even digitally optimized personae with administratively, politically accepted, and mediated agency (Braidotti 2013: 65)? Yet it is precisely these very rare and exotic specimens who exclusively fulfil the description proposed by experimental psychologists Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan in 2010. These specimens are persons who belong to the WEIRD sample of this planet; they indeed belong to, were raised, and live in socalled Wealthy, Intelligent, Rich, Democratic societies (Henrich Heine and Norenzayan 2010). Whereas one surely can argue about each of the four aspects mentioned in this

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unsuspected acronym of WEIRD, it is undoubtedly also correct that most of the widely acknowledged empirical research, field research, and most anthropological concepts in science history only refer to a flimsy sample of people from a fraction of this planet— geographically as well as sociologically. The harsh meme of the Mapamundi Tragico, the Tragedy World Map (Cinismo Ilustrado 2016) thus represents in an appropriately sardonic manner the varying zones where the concept of The Human seemingly applies—and where it does not. The quality of belonging to a normalized sample of The Human is apparently not evenly distributed across humankind, but it is ordered according to the colonial matrix of power as well as the inherent distribution of capital wealth. Only recently, since approximately 2010, have the major anthropological effects and causes of humanoid cultures, economies, societies, and technologies on this planet and biosphere started to be discussed under the geological concept for an epoch, dated by the name Anthropocene. In order not to turn a blind eye on the anthrocolonial matrix that is generating these effects, it is crucial to include in this discussion the specific interpretation of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015, 2017, 2018): this diverging concept stresses the long series of Black Anthropocenes in the form of the slave trade, extraction cultures, genocides, and the gigantic numbers of extinctions of biological species (Yusoff 2019). By focusing on the structural driving force of extinctions and genocides—capital—it does not focus foremost on the lifeforms of individual agents,

Figure 0.1  Mapamundi Trágico (illustration by Eduardo Salles (@sallesino); source: https://cinismoilustrado.com).

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

some of whom might have been certain humanoid aliens. More than a sudden End of Man, or an eschatological Ascension into the Posthuman, or a somewhat optimistic Transfiguration into the Anthropocenic, one should therefore more accurately speak of an end of the dominating and organizing concept, lifeform, and truly “mythical norm” (Lorde 1984: 116) of the cisgendered, heterosexual, male, white, European, bourgeois person discussed above. The good news about the anticipated end of this mythical norm is this: it was almost never fully actualized in any empirically living humanoid alien on this planet, anyhow. It is a pure and idealized fiction, employed mainly as part of a power strategy in the anthrocolonial matrix. It truly is and always was a mythical norm to rule by, to coerce, and to subject other humanoids at will. Humanoid aliens like you or me should actually prefer to rejoice and to celebrate the vanishing of this anthrocolonial propaganda tool, this fnord (Hill and Thornley 1965), into irrelevance and, hopefully, into oblivion. As poet and essayist Audre Lorde stated: Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. (Lorde 1984: 38)

Reweaving Historical Anthropologies The anthrocolonial matrix of power can seem to leave in ruins basically any endeavor to reconstruct, to describe, to analyze or to scrutinize the conditions of the human, les conditions humaine. Maybe this whole urge and desire for wanting to know everything about an entity that simply does not exist in this abstract and immaterial sense, maybe it is all misdirected and nothing more than an outpouring of quirky ambitions and dreams of the homogenization of lives, of bodies and idiosyncrasies? Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of non-universality, of self-centeredness, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? (Lorde 1984: 38)

Yet a desire and a goal indeed remains, in the arts and in literature, in design and in coding, in the humanities and the sciences: a goal, to include in one’s activities a certain account, a notion, or a basic concept of all the manifold and diverse ways that humanoid and alien lives can be lived. One wishes, though, such a concept not to be only arbitrary, anecdotical, loaded with ressentiments, biases, and clichés, with oppressive structures and degrading categories—but for it to resemble some genuinely lived lives and experienced existences (note: this section elaborates and draws from earlier passages published in: Schulze 2016, 2018a: 6–9, 2019, 2020). However, the limits of such an endeavor are clear:

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We cannot avoid admitting the restriction of anthropology to its own point of view, but we can admit it only under the condition that we proceed to objectify this reflection. This makes it possible to search for a way from local thinking to transsubjective and public discourses and concepts that enable us to compare individual cases. Anthropological reflection takes place in the world: from a point of view inside the world it searches for the truth of man in man himself and his life history, which it regards in a finite horizon. (Gebauer and Wulf 2009: 181f.)

The research strand of historical anthropology represents precisely such a self-reflective and decidedly self-conscious endeavor to keep asking such questions as to how people and entities, how groups and figures live their lives and spend their days, how they enact relationships and skills, crafts and desires, their diseases and their humdrum reality, their dreams and obsessions, their anxieties, affects and their particular forms of attention or distraction in the manifold regions of this planet and in varying periods of history and prehistory—while at the same time itself being and performing specific crafts, obsessions, and stabilizing relationships as part of this very research endeavor. The originally largely monolithic desire to describe one objectified, mythical norm of The Human is therefore being split up and dispersed into a seemingly endless kaleidoscopic variety of ways of living and working, loving and fearing, performing and sensing. Historical anthropology is at its core a polycentric and non-anthropocentric, non-Eurocentric, and non-ciscentric anthropology. This also explains its qualification as a historical research strand. The territorializing desire of an essentialist and monocentric anthropology of all previous and future centuries is abolished and rejected by including this historicizing operation on all levels: historicizing research objects, research questions, research methods, research practices, and researchers’ desires for recognition, and the will to power of their very research object. This multi-level historicization is one of the core techniques in the ongoing process of a multi-level decolonization, deterritorialization, and deconstruction. Historical anthropology not only accepts this complex task—but welcomes it as a core motivation and generative nucleus. Historical anthropology undertakes a historicizing, culturalizing, decolonizing, and deconstructing inquiry regarding existing, documented, potential, or implicit concepts of The Human. Therefore, it exchanges a normative central concept and figure of thought of The Human as known from the anthrocolonial matrix for a radically open and generative concept, a model of thinking bound to transformation, idiosyncrasies, and unforeseeable developments and forms of emergence. Since the early 1980s, researchers from cultural history and ethnography, from performance studies, literature studies, and visual as well as sensory studies, from philosophy and various areas of regional studies, came together within this truly interdisciplinary project of historical anthropology to further inquire into how lives on this planet are lived— if possible, without following the normalizing, colonizing, and territorializing desire too much. They met at the Freie Universität Berlin, in colloquia and conferences, at workshops and editorial meetings, with their main goal to review and to rework the age-old and often hopelessly essentialist, Eurocentric and androcentric, decidedly bourgeois, ableist, and Western research tradition of anthropology. Until that time, most of the approaches to anthropology branded as philosophical or biological were apparently mainly interested in

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

preserving an existing social, habitual, biological, and philosophical state of how to think about The Human Being. This sort of approach actualizes and stabilizes the anthrocolonial matrix of power: it reinforces the normative power structure that benefits foremost cisgendered, white, wealthy, and dynastically privileged consumer citizens. In the previous decade, the 1970s, anyone who might have dared to speak about The Anthropological was therefore immediately under strong suspicion of promoting precisely such an anthrocolonial matrix, an only thinly veiled Western suprematism—largely advocating the supremacy of a being who would resemble, rather unsurprisingly, the lifestyles and the habits of all its white, male, professorial, or aristocratic authors. This anthropology indeed bore all the traits of a deeply affirmative, rather elitist, and largely non-critical field of research and of reflection. Contrarily, the Berlin researchers of those years, such as Dietmar Kamper, Hans-Dieter Bahr, Gunter Gebauer, and Christoph Wulf at the Interdisciplinary Center for Historical Anthropology, were very much interested in the quirkier, the weirder, idiosyncratic, and the more troublesome questions concerning anthropology. Together with colleagues not only from Western Europe and North America, but also from South America, from the Middle East, from East Asia, China, Oceania, and Africa, they then founded a journal that already in its title and even more so in its special issues performed the necessary delinking from the anthrocolonial matrix: Paragrana. The Latin title here means tiny gains, minuscule particles and in the understanding of the editors of this journal combines the concept of the core as well as a mineral trace element, a spice. Therefore, the individual articles and issues of this journal might appear to be small, but they also offered a pure and almost unbearably extreme spice—and they can gesture in condensed form toward the whole of a forgotten tradition of thinking, an idiosyncratic experiential space, or a daring new research method. As a consequence, the first issue in 1992 presented rather programmatically a series of papers on the miniature. Thus, the tiniest presentation here can run alongside the most radical ambition. As the editors state in the jacket copy that can be found on every issue of Paragrana since its founding: This journal is supposed to pick up and scatter small grains of thought lying next to the seeds of habit. Its writers, editors, and readers wish to make sure that previous concepts, images, and perspectives that have been used to question history and the human, about their selves as the core of all history, do not predetermine too many answers that are repetitions. We would like to find a direction past the paths we have taken, which leads backwards only to more clarity, [revealing] how much humans have changed and how not, and which lets us get a sense of how differently we must orient ourselves inwardly and outwardly, if we wish to have a further history. (Kamper, Trabant, and Wulf 1993: jacket copy, translated by Holger Schulze)

In the following years, Paragrana published special issues on topics such as self-estrangement (no. 6: Selbstfremdheit), idleness (no. 16: Muße), killing (no. 20: Töten), the foot (vol. 21: Der Fuß), and insecurity (no. 24: Unsicherheit). The second issue of Paragrana ever to be published was on “The Ear as an Organ of Knowledge” (Kamper, Trabant, and Wulf 1993). This focus on the auditory and the sonic, on listening and sensing, is a direct result of the constant interest of historical anthropology in the often incommensurable corporeality

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and the sensory experience of all the various humanoid aliens on this planet. It was this very focus on the auditory and the sonic, on listening and the corporeal reception of sound, that also motivated the initial research, taken up by the author of this introduction under the term of an anthropology of sound in the 2000s (Schulze 2007, 2012, 2016) and which is presented comprehensively, with insights into its contemporary state of research, in this handbook. This continuing focus on the erratic in the everyday, on the minuscule in the existential, and the alien in the all too common has been a core characteristic of research in historical anthropology ever since. The endless differentiations, surprisingly detailed practices and personal rituals, the ways of living and experiencing, of performing and of interacting are the material and empirical resources for this strand of research. Its approach is therefore deeply empiricist, excessively descriptive, differential, and analytic—and far from any normative, moralist, or traditionalist, any essentialist approach: To find out what human beings are, the differences between them are much more important than what they have in common. (Gebauer and Wulf 2009: 182)

The very common and, as such, generally normative reduction to abstract similarities, often following a mythical norm, tends to stabilize the anthrocolonial matrix; whereas an endless explosion of differences and unpredictable aspects, of quirky side details and strange or even unknown minor traditions indeed overloads the matrix: it brings it to implosion—and can then lead to a more detailed on; that is maybe much more empirical if not casuistically proven, and an approach that offers a more complex perspective on humanoid life on earth than any systematically totalizing and concluding model of “what a human being truly is.” This is one of the major effects of a systematic delinking that stands at the core of the project of a historical anthropology, as I understand it, with its goal to find a direction past the paths that Western thinkers and researchers have taken before. Historical anthropologists therefore perform what Walter D. Mignolo calls border thinking: Border thinking is grounded not in Greek thinkers but in the colonial wounds and imperial subordination and, as such, it should become the connector between the diversity of subaltern histories (colonial and imperial like Russia and the Ottoman empires) and corresponding subjectivities. (Mignolo 2007: 493)

Nonetheless, the borders present and reflected in the writings that comprise historical anthropology are not restricted to geographical and cultural borders as fostered, invented, and installed through the anthrocolonial matrix; moreover, the borders implemented in social, racist, and classist as well as sexist, ableist, and even speciesist segregations and their forms of oppression are reflected, questioned, and historicized too. With this historical questioning, deconstructing, deterritorializing, and delegitimizing of all these major categories and their implicit power structures, the research within historical anthropology can move at least a bit more toward a step that might then follow these manifold critical research activities of delinking: a practice of reweaving. Whereas the concept and practice

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

of delinking results, ideally, in an “orientation toward pluri-versality as universal project leading toward a world in which many worlds will co-exist” (ibid.: 499), a practice of reweaving tries to start right from this situation of delinked constituents. Reweaving can and must begin as soon as delinked particles seem to lie around scattered and disconnected, and one might feel—as a researcher, but also as any humanoid alien—ontologically lost or even expelled from any formerly secure ideology of normative categorization and essentialist ontologies. And indeed, one might have left these frameworks of living, self-reflection, and existence behind; in order now not to immediately grab at any seemingly stable concept as just another essentialist ground or unquestionable norm, it might prove helpful to understand the task at hand: to reweave and to rebuild the seemingly delinked relations anew (Schulze 2019: 192f.). Rebuilding and reweaving here mean not only creating new linkages—but also to create them with the critiqued older linkages in mind, thus avoiding them, and rebuilding our relations in a more symmetrical, decolonial, and queered way. Obviously, this is an endless task—as any task in critique and rethinking must always be. However, it is not a task to be rejected or neglected. Otherwise, one might just fall back into newly coined concepts of the oh so comfortable anthrocolonial matrix. It is not easy getting rid of personal bad habits; they are ingrained in our corporeal experience. In a similar way, it is also not that simple to get rid of academic or epistemological bad habits. They, too, are stuck as part of the thinking, reading, researching, and writing of many protagonists in research, teaching, and reviewing. They might even create a sort of phantom pain, a perverted indulging in idealized and idyllic scenarios for all these lost ruling concepts and guiding principles in power—which were really only part of an invented tradition. This is the postcolonial melancholia of which Paul Gilroy speaks: It now appears as though any desire to combine cultural diversity with a hospitable civic order (one that might, for example, be prepared to translate its own local terms into other languages or see immigration as a potential asset rather than obvious defeat) must be subjected to ridicule and abuse. (Gilroy 2004: 1)

This task is indeed not easily completed and it is also not easily taken up and successfully completed in every single paragraph or article, handbook chapter or research workload; however, this is precisely the reason why it is necessary to expand, to further, and to properly detail an understanding of the urgency and the basic courtesy and rationality of this task, to work toward and contribute to it—a task of remapping and reorganizing, rebuilding, and reweaving research in all its aspects. The pitfalls and the intriguing goals of this practice of reweaving are then also clear at a glance. A researcher, compelled by this perspective of reweaving, might simply jump too quickly over the tedious and painful and endlessly detailed work of delinking, to the more joyful and better rewarded work of reweaving—and, at the same time, they might thus be reproducing all the given power structures of the anthrocolonial matrix. Reweaving might then just be a fallacy and a misunderstanding, or even an overly hasty blunder. And indeed, many of us might, will, and even did perform such a blunder. However, if this reweaving is performed as a next and daring step after delinking, then the appropriate care, the right respect for the newly

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linked cultural practices and environments, as well as the reflected awareness of trace elements of the delinked colonial practices and environments are all necessarily present in this process. Reweaving cannot take place as long as none of the practices of delinking are performed in the course of the same research. They are inextricably connected: the delinking of colonial, oppressive, essentialist, sexist, racist, and ableist traditions is a fundamental and necessary requirement for reweaving—and it implies foremost the inclusion of authors, of political issues, of theoretical approaches, and research publications, and also of everyday life practices from all the colonized, the violently territorialized, and consistently oppressed peoples and areas of life on this planet. As long as this delinking, understood as an exclusion of traditionally oppressive and an inclusion of traditionally oppressed approaches and actors, does not take place, then what remains is nothing more than an ambitious argument for a future process of reweaving. This is a crucial and necessary move in the area of research politics—but it is not yet the process of reweaving itself. It is, therefore, an incredibly slow and arduous process that might not even be comprehensively completed in the lifetime of this author or of you, the reader. It is a multigenerational project that very possibly will never come to an end, given the ongoing refashioning of anthrocolonial practices in the wake of contemporary postcolonial melancholia. I must concede and disappoint you, in that this handbook, too, will only manage to take certain steps, in selected areas, in this direction; the reasons can be explicated as much as we like, but they cannot be excused. They thus represent a contemporary struggle on various sides. They also represent the institutional, the epistemological, and the political limitations and challenges for research today. And they embody the contemporary research gaps and next steps in research for an anthropology of sound.

An Anthropology of Sound: The Generativity of Idiosyncrasies Provincialization and Experientiality At this very moment, it is a Monday morning in a surprisingly mild late fall in Sydney. Right now, I am reconnecting to the issue discussed in this introduction that I had to leave in an unfinished state some weeks earlier. Now I return to writing, recognizing the loose ends that need to be tied up, maybe; detecting also some of its argumentative flaws or inconsistencies in regard to subsequent main chapters, in light of the methods applied by some of my fellow researchers and the areas they scrutinize. In this moment, I am aware of our twins playing outside, I hear their sounds of play and struggle; I focus on this chapter and listen to a playlist on the globally dominant streaming service of this historical era, Spotify (cf. Eriksson et al. 2019), which through its software has catered to my supposed sonic desires. It is a minuscule moment; some would claim an irrelevant, arbitrary, totally random instant, a mere anecdote that tells the readers of this chapter

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

and handbook absolutely nothing. Maybe it uncovers aspects of social class and certain particular elements in the lifestyle of this author. I beg to differ. What might appear to some readers and researchers as only an arbitrary and irrelevant, random item on a supposedly endless list of detailed specifics, surely looks to others as a material mark of particularity, of locating one’s research endeavor at a particular moment in history and at a precise place on this planet; only following on from this first step can the aforementioned operations of historicization, deconstruction, deterritorialization, and—ideally—decolonization then begin to take place. By tying my research practice, my research experience, and my research background to these specific markers, it becomes virtually impossible (or at least meaningless) to claim a power-hungry transhistorical and transcontinental truth from analyzing this very moment and this very situation. This particularization of anthropological research is a valid critical operation, and one that offers a potent remedy against the anthrocolonial will to power. Hence, the process of provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2008) and its hugely robust research traditions of recent centuries, and even perhaps millennia, can start with such a particularization. Through such a situated, momentary, corporeal, personal, and also idiosyncratic anchor of research, with this grounding in myriad minuscule sensory and sonic experiences as explored in the subsequent chapters of this handbook, is not only another style of writing and presenting research proposed and demonstrated; the goal of this anthropological research is also further questioned, deconstructed, and reconceptualized (this is, notably, not a simple operation of historicism and its ideology of linear progress as a “‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ structure” [ibid.: 7; and cf. the substantial deconstruction of historicism in: ibid.: 3–23]). Yet how can this actually be done in detail? An anthropology of sound that wishes to follow this critical goal can take many shapes: it can attach—as I proposed at the beginning of this section—to one specific situation of listening and sounding as its experiential, situated, and corporeal core. It can start, therefore, with this one peculiar sound practice or erratic mode of listening and follow it through thick descriptions in the tradition of autoethnography, including deep and thick listening experiences (Geertz 1973a, Oliveros 2005, Schulze 2018: 156). It can also take one established or rare concept of sound culture and make an effort to unfold, unravel, dismantle, or multiply and diversify, even deconstruct and reconstruct it—with, again, continuous references and autoethnographic narrations of deep and thick listening experiences. It can also focus on a single, particular piece of technical apparatus or machine that plays a surprising role in contemporary or historical practices of listening, trying to understand its embedding and attachment to its practitioners, users, players, and the role it plays in their lives—here also including autoethnographic narrations, interviews, and written accounts of their deep and thick listening experiences. Each of these three distinct approaches, approaches of autoethnographic experientiality, of experiential histories and critique of sonic concepts, and of apparatus-focused experiential histories are possible, thinkable, doable—and they are all to be found in the one or other of the chapters here. Strong on autoethnographic experientiality are the chapters by Bach, Barnard, Couroux, Holt, Kleiner, and Schulze and also those by Großmann or Damsholt; experiential histories and critique of sonic concepts can be found in the contributions from Sowodniok and

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Papenburg, Maier, de Seta, Seay, and Lind or those by Ewé, Smith, and Snider; and the chapters by Auinger and Offenhuber, by Kirkegaard, Kreutzfeldt, Schoon, Venäläinen, Pöllänen, Muršič, by Van Drie and Waldock focus on a selected item of apparatus or a situated nexus of technologies and practices, of dispositives, in their experiential and sensory aspects. What connects all of these approaches to a sonic anthropology are three categories of inquiry—historicized, deconstructed, deterritorialized—that by definition lie outside of the anthrocolonial matrix: (a) the object of research finds its material and empirical substance in a sensory, a corporeal, and an often highly particular culture of listening and sounding including the areas of the non-aurocentric and the imaginary; (b) the main research approach is then to closely examine the entanglement of performers and participants, the personal and even intimate embedding of their experiences, their personal lives, their thinking, and their corporeal practices and interpenetrations with this research issue in question; (c) the researcher focuses mainly on erratic, often marginal, or even strictly intimate and idiosyncratic sonic experiences which might potentially also be bordering on infra- and ultrasound, or even on imaginary and fictitious sonic effects. With these three categories of research, a study that qualifies as an anthropology of sound is defined by its particular approaches to research objects and by the main categories applied therein. In transcending textual paradigms and stressing corporeal epistemologies and sensologies (Perniola 1991), an anthropology of sound can therefore scrutinize the aforementioned autoethnographic experientiality, the experiential histories and critique of sonic concepts, and the apparatus-focused experiential histories via its categories of sensory-material substances and experiences, by personal and experiential entanglements and interpenetrations, and, finally, through erratic and idiosyncratic sonic experiences. In all these three cases, the insights are—as Steven Feld phrased it, after a lifetime of treasured contributions to this very research field—developed and acquired “in years of listening to how sounding-as- and sounding-through-knowing [as] an audible archive of long-lived relational attunements and antagonisms that have come to be naturalized as place and voice” (Feld 2015: 19). An anthropology of sound, understood and explored as such an anthropology of the senses (Howes 2005, Howes and Classen 2013), represents precisely this endeavor: to explore in years of listening an audible archive of long-lived relational attunements and antagonisms that encompass sounding-as and sounding-through-knowing. Indeed, listening over years and decades is its main research practice. This rich intersection of approaches and categories stresses pervasively the provincialization of its epistemology and experientiality as a major recurring category on all levels of an anthropology of sound. This combination can then also be understood as a translation of one main goal in sonic materialism—understood not as an ahistorical philosophical ontology and white aurality (as correctly criticized by Goh 2017, Thompson 2017b, cf. Schulze 2020a: 27–34), but as a generative approach that focuses on a wider array of material sonic experiences, expanding into and reflecting a broader range including a black aurality (Schulze 2020a: 61–82). With this methodological provincializing and experientializing of an anthropology of sound, it becomes possible to explore the endless multitude of all the minuscule, erratic, and entangled encounters with sounds and the

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

sonic, with the unheard and the barely audible, as well as the accidentally overheard and all the phenomena of extreme loudness in everyday life—all within a wider spectrum of corporeal and idiosyncratic experiences. In the words of historical anthropologists Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf: Everyday observations, reflections, interpretations and judgements should not simply be dismissed: It is the task of anthropology to account for them when forming its own theories, and to integrate them into an academic context. (Gebauer and Wulf 2009: 181)

Or, paraphrasing Dipesh Chakrabarty (2008: 19): in this handbook, the authors try to demonstrate how the stable categories and strategies dominant in previous approximations to anthropology are both inadequate and yet indispensible starting grounds: they represent the particular and material cases of the idiosyncratic, mediated, and often transcultural sensory experiences of an anthropology of sound. Humanoid aliens experience a wider spectrum of divergent sensologies.

Toward Sensory Xenologies People are strange. It might just be a momentary exclamation or a second thought in anyone’s life at a given time—or even the title of a track by Stina Nordenstam, recorded in 1992, covering the original song written by Jim Morrison and Robby Krieger and released in 1967 by The Doors. In any case, it is the starting point for the series of twenty-four investigations in this handbook exploring the idiosyncratic sonic experiences of humanoid aliens. The starting point is therefore not a fundamental resemblance, a verisimilitude, or some deeply hidden shared experience in all of us humanoids. Even if that might be, it may constitute not much more than just the lowest common denominator, close to insignificance if not irrelevance; and if one operates outside of the anthrocolonial matrix, such a common denominator might not even serve as a relatable and shared, a recurring and common experience at all—but only applies to all the WEIRD exceptions, being born and raised in comparably wealthy, intelligent, rich, and democratic (i.e. WEIRD) societies (Henrich Heine and Norenzayan 2010). The experiences, though, of feeling actually or allegedly weird and strange, exotic and dumb, left out and out of the ordinary, far from most of the widely accepted norms and reiterated standards—such can and indeed must qualify as a relatively common experience, occurring in various social strata, all the way to the remotest regions of this planet, for a wide spectrum of lifeforms in regard to class, to sexuality, gender, abilities, or age. This is an experience that does not focus on the one “mythical norm” (Lorde 1984: 116) of the aforementioned cisgendered, white, bourgeois consumer citizen (Braidotti 2013: 65); a norm that has only ever existed as an imaginary and truly weird ideal—but never as an actually representative and lived reality. Realities of lived existence can be found in the wider and erratic weirdness of all possible deviant, estranged, and alien lifestyles one might be performing. These unreckonable and idiosyncratic moments constitute, therefore, the convincing starting points of research activities presented here, and their results. The more minuscule, erratic, and entangled

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the situations and moments explored herein, the more convincing surely their arguments become. All the ordinary affects and experiences contain, especially when observed in quirky, ephemeral moments, the immanent richness of presence (e.g. Stewart 2007, Berlant and Stewart 2019). To put in bluntly: this shared experience of being an anomaly or a freak is not the lowest denominator—but more a common multiple of alienation and estrangement, of bewilderment, and of unsettling and uncomfortable emotions and affects of not-belonging, not-fitting in, not-blending in. In this handbook, such a fundamental experience of strangeness and estrangement is being considered as a major and generally shared experience of humanoid aliens. Some might go to various lengths at this point to demonstrate its aspects of existential unhomeliness, the Unbehaustheit, or of a genuine obsolescence of humankind, the Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Anders 1956), but I would rather go for a praise of [t]hose of us who are unable to reconcile ourselves to our existence. Those of us whose dissatisfaction and disaffection, whose discontent and whose anger and whose despair overwhelms them and exceeds them … drawn together by the impulse to fashion a vocabulary. By a target. By a yearning. By an imperative to consent—in the words of Fred Moten quoting the words of Édouard Glissant—not to be a single being. (Eshun 2018: 15:02–16:02)

Hence, we have a praise of alienation, xenofeminism, and xenology (Laboria Cubotnik 2018) in general: a path to acknowledging the actual and lived realities of oppression and exclusion, of existential doubt and sorrow, of a feeling of lack and of being a failure. This experience of being a humanoid alien translates then into all aspects of everyday life covered by an anthropology of sound. One’s alienated life might be studied, for a start, via the practices of “Living with Sonic Artifacts” (Section I of this handbook): Are you wearing headphones right now? How did you learn to do so? How is it that you are living with all these audiofiles on various devices or streamed from some company while you have no clue where it is located precisely on this planet? How do you play with all the software that supports you in playing, composing, producing, and distributing music? One might then move onwards to more personal issues of the “Sounding Flesh” (Section II): How do you experience dancing—or even thinking about your dance? Do you like the timbre of your voice? And how did you learn to use it, live with it, expand it maybe, or enjoy speaking, chatting, singing, screaming, hissing, whispering, moaning? How do you experience intimate encounters in sound? Do they actually bring you closer to another humanoid alien or what specific sonic experiences guide you in these moments of closeness? What role do listening and sounding play when cooking, when foraging, when fermenting or preparing and finally eating food and in any other circumstances? Let us also have a close look at where us humanoid aliens live, regarding sound, let us listen to “The Habitat in Sound” (Section III): Where do you perform what one could call work— and what sounds surround and engulf you in these locations? What do you experience on public streets and the sonically contested zones they represent? How and why do you feel at home in a certain place? What role do entrances and stairs play when they might function as sonic amplification and domestic eavesdropping? Do you know of a plaza or a square or

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

a marketplace where you enjoy to stay and so remain there for longer? Or how are these places more structured by business interests and strategies applied by lawmakers? We could then explore in more detail how humanoid aliens experience, perform, digest, and expand their “Sonic Desires” (Section IV): Do you feel deep admiration for certain performers these days or did you earlier in your life? And what role does this experience of admiring play? Can you enjoy a concert as a form of entertainment, maybe in an openair setting, and how do you experience your joy of corporeal listening in such a concert situation? How can any musical or sonic ensemble then actually perform together—and how is this performance and its sound embedded in its rehearsal environment and how does it take inspiration from there? Furthermore, what moments of quietude do you seek and enjoy, do you avoid or fear? Do you regularly perform purposeful moments of quietude or even silence, every day or once a week or once a year? In a next step, we arrive at all the apparatuses that allow us to perform and to listen to performances: “The Listening Machines” (Section V). Many performers have worked and continue to work in recording studios, recording and manipulating recorded tracks—but how is this rather common way of producing music actually experienced? How do contemporary studios, for instance those equipped with an Ambisonics surround sound system, influence the production of work in quite different ways? How does the amplification of sound through machines or through software actually transform a humanoid alien’s relation to a sonic experience— maybe, indeed, enhancing and complexifying it? In what ways can sound and music these days be produced with reference to forms of reproduction found in earlier musical styles and approaches? All of this leads then to the encompassing and structuring concepts and theories by which you or I are enabled to sense, to hear, to listen to, or to selectively ignore “Sensologies” (the final, Section VI of this handbook): How do you imagine those organs on the sides of your head might actually work, might trick you, mislead you, or take you into thoroughly unexpected territories—those all-important things we know as ears? What role does sound play in the extraordinary situations one can call everyday life? What models guide you or me in thinking about sound and listening, how do we understand this sensory activity? In the end, how do you imagine all the unheard sounds actually effect one’s life? Or are we just thoroughly unaffected by the unheard? All of these general questions can, obviously, only be answered specifically, in reference to particular biographical moments, in spatially and materially located situations and environments on this planet, and also by researchers with their very particular and ineluctably limited and distinctly framed biography and experience of doing research and in experiencing sound themselves. While these questions are of a fundamental kind, the way to answer them carries researchers, the authors here, as well as the reader into the surprising and pertinent details of many and various sonic experiences in the early twentyfirst century, located in many different areas of this planet. The selection of these research approaches and the researchers that enact them is guided by the state of the art of the research and the literature, its character as pursuing the goals of an anthropology of sound, and—last but not least—by the distribution of sound-studies-related research in research cultures and in the political and economic structures of universities and higher education institutions in the nearly two hundred nations on this planet.

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Right now, research in sound studies, in the anthropology of sound, is still largely pursued by researchers in Europe and North America, with single researchers or smaller groups of researchers on all continents, but who are not as organized and well published. This is an unfortunate situation that mirrors a deeply damaging form of inequality in global research and education. Until today, only researchers in Europe have managed to form an academic society for sound studies—although including members from all continents. However— and this should serve as a future encouragement—there is not so much a methodological or institutional limitation than basically a systemic and cultural one. The specific methods in sound studies and in the anthropology of sound are actually more easily accessible and repeatable than other research methods: they are characterized and also motivated by this general access to idiosyncratic and particular experiences and environments. Through the approaches of transcending textual paradigms and stressing corporeal epistemologies and sensologies discussed earlier, an anthropology of sound is especially apt to scrutinize an autoethnographic experientiality, the experiential histories and critique of sonic concepts, and the apparatus-focused experiential histories via its categories of sensorymaterial substances and experiences, in terms of personal and experiential entanglements and interpenetrations and, finally, in the sense of unreckonable and idiosyncratic sonic experiences. The everyday is indeed also the strange. But by immersing, by sensing and refining sensibilities, by training skills and perceptual intricacies, by reflecting on, questioning, and discussing their effects and repercussions, their intrinsic limitations as well as their qualities of opening up situations and self-perceptions are revealed. However, this strangeness of everyday experience is not easily retrieved and articulated, as most of the time us humanoid aliens perform as if unquestioning of their enveloping environments. Therefore, again, the historicizing perspective as well as a transcultural one provides a necessary foil in order to recognize this strangeness. It was a painting by Pieter Bruegel that inspired one of the most important and still inspiring monographs in the prehistory of sound studies and an anthropology of sound: Jacques Attali’s 1977 book Bruits. The painting in question, The Fight between Carnival and Lent (118 × 164 cm, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna) from 1559, represents various aspects of everyday life—in this case contrasting between lives enjoying worldly pleasures and lives being religiously restricted, coming together in a market square, around a well. Whereas Attali touched upon this painting when explicating how sonic and noisy desires had been restricted in Western history by governments and religious congregations, the sonic experiences of later times might well differ in a good many aspects—be it five or be it fifty decades later. The painting on the cover of this handbook represents one artistic perspective on how sound cultures might have transformed since then. The artist, Michał Chudzicki‎, depicts here a street from his hometown, Urzędów, in Eastern Poland that represents at the same time the prolific technologies of transmission, of sound experience, and of everyday joy—and in a way that is not particularly stressed but laconically embedded in a lifestyle that does not seem too contemporary, too twenty-first century, or too futuristic. The parallel presence of older technology and older lifestyles alongside electronic and networked media and music can be witnessed here in Chudzicki’s Like City, Like Bruegel 2 (121 × 180 cm, oil on canvas) from 2018. The older traditions of play, of sound practices, and

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

sonic experiences can still be felt—but the satellite dishes, a tablet, a cable drum, or the logo of a famous contemporary composer, Aphex Twin, as well as references to contemporary horror movies or kid’s anime, all perform the clash of ages, cultures, technologies, and practices. There is no linear progress. It is all there: the older cars and older habits even a background from Pieter Bruegel’s painting The Gloomy Day (1565), but also newer styles and technologically advanced gadgets. Although the scenery here is situated in Europe, one recognizes an idiosyncratic bricolage of lifestyles, tools, and forms of habitus that could equally be performed in other regions of the planet as well. This scenery is definitely not situated inside Fortress Europe or of one of the major fortified nations that exhibits authoritarian tendencies, or even a fully developed totalitarian surveillance society indulging in retinal scans, DNA testing, and pervasive tracking of every single consumer citizen. Yet this scenery at least appears to be situated close to an area outside this gated league of nations. The sound culture in this work represents, therefore, a thoroughly contemporary collage and mixture of apparatuses and practices, of sonic experiences and cultural forms. Technological progress is blatantly obvious here, though it is definitely not the center of these cultures or their most prominent interpretation. It structures life in these societies to a large degree—but it is by no means the center of attention or desire. The scenes in this painting show, on the contrary, the importance of mimetic processes for the emergence of performative knowledge and action. From this perspective, society, community and culture can be understood as crucially determined by performative social action. It is precisely because of their physical and performative aspect that gender, identity, ethnicity, rituals, and ritualized acts are easily regarded as “natural.” Thus they create illusions and obscure their historical origins as well as the power relations implicit in them, and the possibility of change. (Gebauer and Wulf 2009: 185)

These historical origins as well as the power relations represented therein are characteristic for the sound and the sensory cultures unraveled and unfolded in this handbook. The personal and sensorial relations and desires, the practices and the habits discussed and narrated in the chapters gathered here stress recurrently the personal and intimate idiosyncrasies of the various protagonists. With this focus, they all move the debate in the direction of a sensory xenology: alienation and strangeness are no longer regarded to be surprising exceptions from the mythical norm. On the contrary, they are seen as the empirical reality that forms and triggers the motivation of users, listeners, researchers, and writers to transcend and to develop these scenarios. They are not taken as a stable and never-altered situation—but as a starting point from which future and different states of an anthropology of sound can be reached. In order to leave the limitations and the irrational coercions of an anthrocolonial matrix behind, this approach moves in the direction of a whole range of xenosonics and the xenosensory, into idiosonics and the idiosensory: the unknown and unfamiliar, the strange and alien, weird and surprising, inconvenient and unsettling in one’s personal, individual, and intimate experience—the idiosyncratic is given a generative role in researching sound. Only if the sounds one experiences are understood as belonging to a surprising and strange specimen, not as a comfortable norm which others should be following, then this idiosyncratic and xenogeneic experience can

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indeed obtain a generative and an epistemological value. Your personal weirdnesses and quirks are then an explicit and reflected—not a camouflaged and strategically positioned— source for insight and a motivation for research.

Idiosyncrasy as Method Idiosyncratic and erratic moments or ruptures constitute the main grounds of experience, of the sensory and the sonic. My or your material experiences with sounds might be similar or comparable on some superficial and highly abstract level—but just from an uninvolved and disconnected outside perspective. However, if one dares to dive into the intricacies and unsettling, as well as exciting, aspects of one’s biography, one’s everyday experience, and one’s disturbing or uplifting encounters, sensations, thoughts, or habits—then one opens up an endless plenitude of the senses and of sound. What this needs is a sonic rupture (Lacey 2016) in order to open up the highly inertial routines of life in the midst of a sonic experience in any given sound environment. So, how is it actually possible now to put idiosyncrasies to work? How can one apply certain idiosyncrasies as a method? In this handbook, such idiosyncrasies are explored in the twenty-four individual main chapters through a guiding structure—again with some idiosyncratic aspects to it—that is then interpreted by each author in a thoroughly different way, with a wide spectrum of aspects going into each. The basic schema, with many variations and departures, is as follows. Every chapter starts with a specific case that the author focuses on: these cases are narrated and explored in all possible details, bordering on a way of writing between thick description or sonic fiction—and often also touching upon very personal if not intimate aspects of research. These sections provide for you, the reader, an introduction into the empirical field in a sort of erratic richness that is often regarded as irrelevant or overly detailed. However, the presentation of research in a specific sensory field requires a substantial orientation, a sensible and maybe unconventional but always highly individual account of what is actually going on: What is there? What do we have here now? This opening section is intended to provide the reader with a way into this specific research, into its particular multisensory and experiential constellation. You are invited in these paragraphs to explore: on which sensory-material substances and experiences, on what personal and experiential entanglements and interpenetrations, or on what specific and idiosyncratic sonic experiences is this author now focusing? In a second step, the authors then move on to argue for the cause, the reason why they are focusing on this issue. They explain how they understand and interpret the urgency one may find in this particular case. They expand on the specific contemporary context in which the given example becomes an important research issue. Here, the personal research experience and individual interpretations of the state of research and research gaps are unfolded. In a third step, each chapter presents reflections and decisions regarding the researcher’s individual choice of research approach: What given methods did they actually choose and apply? How do they seem beneficial and more appropriate than other methods

Introduction: What Is an Anthropology of Sound?

in regards to this research issue? What obstacles does one encounter when actually working with this approach and following this method? What unwelcome new issues arose from this application that the researcher then had to resolve? How does one situate their research in the aforementioned triad of autoethnographic experientiality, experiential histories and critique of sonic concepts, and apparatus-focused experiential histories? Toward the end of each chapter, the authors of the various contributions to this handbook then look back into the past of their research object and their research method: How was this object being researched in earlier decades? How does a researcher in the twenty-first century potentially benefit from the development of research methods, of academic institutions, and of the still growing complexity and hazardous self-reflection witnessed in research methods? What kinds of research restrictions and limitations to professional research have had to be loosened or overcome in order even to make it possible to do research on this issue—and what new problematic illusions or false assumptions have maybe been generated along the way? The very last section of each chapter then dares to look into the future in a double sense: the authors imagine and propose further aspects, issues, and approaches for the research field in question—but they also envision, anticipate, and outline future developments in the research field itself. In this way, the twenty-four main chapters are not so much the final word on research in this area—rather, hopefully they can open up, inspire, and provoke further, even more surprising, bold, and astonishing research endeavors in the area of an anthropology of sound. This sequence of case, cause, approach, past, and future provides a grounding structure that each author (or group of authors) works with quite differently in their respective chapter, depending on the specificities of the research field, their particular focuses in the given chapter, and their personal writing style. Whereas this structure allows the authors to expand at length on the actual empirical and situated, and also the idiosyncratic substance of their research, the various aspects outlined also give them the opportunity to attach to this even more idiosyncratic or strange, surprising, and sometimes radical theories and approaches for interpretation. The broad chapter structure thus functions as a malleable and constantly transforming dynamic structure—and also as a guide for you, the reader. The multiplicity of methods, writing styles, and backgrounds on display in these pages is only a brief glimpse into the multitude of approaches possible in an anthropology of sound. This array of approaches and enquiries can be understood in parallel to the idiosyncrasies that exist in experiencing sounds or performing listening practices. In listening to and sounding in a given material sonic environment, with a given number of material sound sources with agency and vibrancy as well as a certain number of humanoid aliens present and involved, the sonic experience can be understood along the lines of the previously proposed approaches and categories—in order to grant idiosyncrasies and xenogeneic experiences a valid and generative position in the research process. Research in the anthropology of sound might then, methodologically, begin by documenting and reflecting on the autoethnographic experience with personal and experiential entanglements and interpenetrations in a particular sonic environment. Its materialities in terms of spacing and timing are being explored, which might lead a researcher to an almost involuntarily embodying of this very field of research. Spatial arrangements and time structures can thus

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become virtually second nature to a sonic anthropologist. Maybe one is not going totally native in this field—but we should find ourselves becoming very familiar with its many constituents and all the various practices, experiences, and materialities it holds. We might almost foresee, or so it would seem, the next actions to occur in this environment of sound practices and sonic experiences. We can then take action of our own in the field of research: We can try to write parts of an experiential history and critique of selected sonic concepts, including their most erratic and idiosyncratic sonic experiences. A researcher decides then to cut out elements, sections, aspects, things, or situations, forms of action or of utterances, practices or personae. They get scrutinized in an effort to start actually intervening in this sensory research field. In performing our observations and reflections, insights and conclusions, we actually promote new and different, exploratory and analytical, disruptive or harmonizing actions. By publishing and disseminating research, we may actually provoke newly situated events, generating dissent and consent, ruptures and new experiences, new conclusions and new, sometimes unfounded claims. Finally, research can then be performed on the apparatus-focused experiential histories, including their sensory-material substances and experiences. Such research then presents to others—those unfamiliar with this sensory or non-sensory field—what occurred during the research process. One might even be forced to tell of moments of insecurity, doubt, and euphoria, excess and boredom. Researchers thus make accessible artifacts that were generated in the course of research. They give the collaborators in their field a voice: a chance also to contradict their observations, assumptions, and claims. A certain insight into a perhaps secluded and secretive aspect of contemporary cultural life might even be possible. Through this handbook and with the whole project of an anthropology of sound, I wish to pick up and scatter small grains of new thought that might lie next to habitual seeds. The writers, researchers, and collaborators contributing to this volume try to make sure that previous concepts, images, and perspectives that have been used by humanoid aliens to question their histories about themselves as the core of all history do not predetermine too many answers that are then mainly repetitions. It is my wish to find a direction past the paths that prior research has taken, a direction that leads backwards but only to achieve greater clarity about how much humanoid aliens have already changed and how not. One might then get a sense of how differently humanoid aliens like you and me might have to orient themselves, both inwardly and outwardly, when there should be a further and future of history for humanoids, idiosyncratic and erratic.

Part I Living With Sonic Artifacts

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Pulse Michael Bull

Objects do not speak for themselves. They are embedded in a wider cultural matrix that is materially, conceptually, and sensorially based. Objects, however defined, might have a range of potential sonic affordances. Yet even this observation raises the question as to wider issues concerning the nature of sonic objects. This section illuminates a variety of sonic objects through the examples of headphones, toys, databases, and musical instruments. These objects weave in and out of sound in complex ways. Does the connection between a database of sound files and a piece of software for radio programming reside solely in its sonic results? If a day on the radio is skillfully programmed it might give joy to a listener—yet the software itself just lies there silent, dormant. Maybe the talking doll doesn’t make any noise at all but merely speaks as the child’s sonic imagination. Equally, the object that is the headphones placed over or into the ears makes no sound in and of itself but remains a vessel for the audiovisual messages it mediates, amplifies, transforms (while perhaps also indicating to others “do not disturb”). Does sound constitute a new equivalence of exchange then, while each object possesses its own specific sonic affordances? Sonic objects can be simultaneously global and local. They can be intimate, friendly, threatening, domestic, public, and universal; there are more mobile phone accounts, for example, than inhabitants of the whole world— making the mobile phone a truly global object of the twenty-first century. Is it necessary for a sonic object to be a material artifact, and if so what sort of material artifact? Could it be animate? A bird, for example, or the wind, the ocean, the rain as it accompanies human subjects through their daily lives? Does the explanation of any object necessarily reside in its “use”? Do we have to wait for the literalness of its vibration—or are its vibrations merely the “end” product of the social, cultural, political, and economic nature of the object that sings, squeaks, talks, rumbles so as to emit a response? The anthropology of sound objects has always contained a level of ambiguity, from the birds in Malinowski’s early study of the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski 2001), which could supposedly inform them that a relative on a neighboring island was ill. On islands with no telephones or other mechanical ways to communicate, the relatives awaited the arrival of their cousins at the water’s edge; when asked how they knew when to wait, they would say “the birds told us.” Similarly, Steven Feld grasped the link between the sounds emitted by the Muni bird and the human

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emotional responses among the Kaluli people (Feld 2012). Bird sound is certainly a rich seam in the history of anthropological sonic objects. What role do sonic objects play in the constitution of any cultural system, be it the Kaluli people of the Papua New Guinea rainforest or the contemporary urban dweller? Sound objects can be understood as cultural connections, threads that pass through the individual, the collective, the historical, the economic, and the political. For the purposes of this introduction, these connections begin with an object that lies on my desk. It is a cylindrical piece of metal, just over three inches in length; it makes no sound. It is just lying there—my grandfather’s First World War trench whistle. Engraved upon it are the words Hudson & Co, Birmingham 1916. I have no stories of my grandfather’s wartime experience; he died many years before I was born—ironically of a heart attack while digging a civil defense trench in the United Kingdom on the outbreak of the Second World War. This is unlike the case of my Corsican grandfather, who would tell his teenage grandson many tales of his experiences at the Battle of Verdun. I never thought to ask him whether he had used or possessed a trench whistle. As a child this whistle was my pride and joy, to be looked after, used, and guarded. With my friends I would play war games in the nearby woods and fields. These fields near Southampton had been bombed in the Second World War—and through a trick of time we would imagine ourselves in the war: me with my First World War whistle, anachronistic, in the wrong war. The excitement at finding a spent ammunition cartridge was intense, as was my joy in using my grandfather’s whistle, which I would place between my lips and blow: the sound was immense, reaching over 1,000 meters! I didn’t realize then the nature of the mediation between technology, sound, and the body. As I grew up, I stopped using the whistle of course. It has not been blown for over fifty years but has remained tucked away in a draw, rediscovered by me some years ago while going through my mother’s possessions after her death. The issuing and use of trench whistles in the First World War was a response to the sonic nature of that conflict. The Western Front frequently produced a sonic ceiling of sound in which troops could distinguish little and where shouted commands went unheard. Trench whistles attempted to overcome this with a loud, shrill sound. The whistle itself might engender fear or expectation, as its blowing could signify an instruction for troops to attack— to scramble out of their trenches and march towards the enemy, with death, injury, or success at the end. The design of the whistle meant that it could be held in the mouth while keeping both hands free so as to pursue the attack. Whistles did not merely signify attack but also warning—of the arrival of trench mortars, an impending gas attack, and so on. The design and sonic qualities of the whistle were a product of a dialectic of warfare within Western industrialization of that period. It acted as both an antidote to, and a furtherance of, the industrial noises of war in its destructiveness and protectiveness. The blowing of the whistle, and sonic objects in general, cannot and should not be isolated from the culture and values that engender their production and use. The object, in this instance the trench whistle, possesses an individual, collective, political, and historical narrative. And now it sits on my desk—a thread in my own narrative, extended as I write this. I probably first encountered the whistle as a child while watching television: Dixon of Dock Green, which was all the rage in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Each week it portrayed

Pulse

the life of a fictional police constable who was friendly and wise. At some point in each thirty-minute episode, a police whistle would sound, signaling the pursuit of a criminal or as a call for assistance. Whistles had been introduced for London’s Metropolitan Police Force in 1884 and, like their subsequent military counterparts, could be heard at up to 1,000 meters depending upon the nature of the terrain. Police whistles fell silent in the 1970s, to be replaced by the use of radios both in the street and in police cars, their sound traversing greater distances than the whistle while simultaneously remaining silent to the public ear. Police whistles have recently been partially reintroduced in Cambridge to alert the city’s many cyclists of danger. Whistles have, however, fallen rather silent in Western cities of the twenty-first century. As sonic emblems they are largely a product of an earlier stage of industrialization—few remain, factory whistles no longer punctuate the working day; the age of the steam train, with its shrill yet exciting warning whistle I would hear as a child, has largely disappeared. Yet this is no Schaferian nostalgia for the disappearing sounds of an earlier age—merely an observation. Nonetheless, the whistle remains a part of other social spheres, not merely as a local artifact but as a global one. Perhaps it has more in common with the ubiquitous mobile phone than we might imagine? The whistle is still an everyday sonic object on the sports fields of the world, from the village green to Wembley Stadium. Soccer, the world’s most popular and most monetized sport, continues to use the common or garden whistle to control and punctuate the game, even alongside the presence of contemporary technologies such as VAR (video-assisted refereeing). Yet it would be an error to separate the whistle from the matrix of objects of which it is a cultural part. Just as in the First World War the sound of the whistle only made sense within the context of various technologies designed to maim and kill, so the use of the whistle in the soccer game is embodied within a range of sonic objects broadly defined. As young teenager, I would attend every Southampton Football Club match at the club’s home ground, the Dell. I would travel to each match with a group of older family friends and we would stand in the same spot, under the clock, at each match. The Dell itself was of course a sonic object, coming to life every match day: a secular temple of sound in which over 20,000 people would stand—singing, talking, eating while they awaited the whistle that would start the match. In those days there was little manufactured sounds, no prompts, no sonic accompaniments to the match. A rudimentary sound system would play a few songs before the match and an intercom system would give instructions when it was time to leave afterwards. However, most of the sounds came from the supporters. Singing would erupt early on, spreading out beyond the stadium and throughout the surrounding streets. The matrix of sounds of football matches and football stadiums is now global and mediated, watched by millions worldwide on televisions, laptops, mobile phones, and so on. In the sports grounds themselves, while the whistles remain the same, the sound matrix of the event has been transformed and is increasingly corporately organized. Indeed, when I go to a football match today it reminds me of sitting in an expensive seat at a theatre. All those years ago, a ticket, at a mere fifteen pence, came out of my pocket money—today I have to pay £30, £40, or even £50 to watch an equivalent match. Globalization, sonic or otherwise, tends increasingly to exclude those who, in James Baldwin’s phrase, “cannot afford the price of the ticket” (Baldwin 1999).

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Yet as I walk past my local stadium, adjacent to the university in which I work, I can hear the roar of the crowd just the same. And I easily recognize the volume and timbre of that roar—it’s a home goal!—the relief it embodies is clear and strident. Then I hear, somewhat fainter, the referee’s whistle as the game restarts, and all is well in the world. All in that fraction of a second, in that cultural moment, in that place at which the sounds of my feet on the frosty path crackles along with the sigh of the wind. The sound object of this particular whistling also has its place within a cultural matrix.

1 The Headphone Naomi Smith and Anne-Marie Snider

Figure 1.1  Assembling ASMR listening: headphones, video, and a digital device. Photographer: Naomi Smith.

Crinkle Crinkle Lil Shirt Maria—also known under the name of GentleWhispering—gazes intently into the camera and sways softly from side to side, her hands fluttering gently, her expression is warm, relaxed, and calm. She has long blonde hair and a slight Russian accent. She is whispering to you and explaining the premise of the video—*Crinkle Crinkle lil shirt … * - ASMR/ binaural/hair brushing/whisper (GentleWhispering 2014a):

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Good evening, as you can tell by the title this video is going to be dedicated to crinkle shirts; and I have three of them … I would love it if you would tell me which one you like the best … And I will be gently brushing your hair—I will try to whisper mostly so you can hear the sounds of the shirts better … I am going to include the soothing sounds of crinkling.

The first shirt, as Maria explains, is “very crinkly” and appears to be a pink waterproof outdoors jacket; she explains that the loud crinkles of the shirt mean that her movements must be “extra slow for you.” The crinkly shirt sound helps recreate the sensation of sound all around the viewer as it is highlighted by Maria’s movements. The dimensionality of sound created by the crinkling shirt, should, as Maria hypothesizes, add something “extra” to the experience. She stops talking and turns her back to the camera, moving gently to create crinkling sounds with the jacket. Excusing herself, she grabs a hairbrush that she describes as “very dear to her heart” and commences slowly brushing your hair. She disappears from the screen, and all you can hear are the sounds of the shirt and the hairbrush moving through your hair from “behind” you, along with some inaudible whispering that carries an air of calm and reassurance. I think that getting your hair brushed is one of the most intimate and pleasant feelings a person can feel. And I think that has to do with the feeling of us being vulnerable and someone taking care of us; calming us down, touching our hair … I think for a lot of people the feeling of hair being brushed is as close as they can get to tingles [no talking, sounds of shirt crinkling, hair brushing and gentle breathing; Maria is mostly out of frame] … it is definitely one of the most pleasant feelings and every time it makes you feel so relaxed. (GentleWhispering 2014a)

The soundscape is carefully arranged. The first shirt is the loudest, with its stiff fabric generating deep crinkling sounds at the slightest movement. Maria describes the second shirt as subtler but still very capable of producing pleasant crinkling sounds. The subtle crinkling sound of this second shirt allows Maria to introduce additional elements into the soundscape, specifically hair brushing. Maria is something of an amateur ASMR theorist, and many of her videos propose potential explanations about the nature and significance of ASMR: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (GentleWhispering 2014b). As Maria brushes your hair, she theorizes about why the sound of hair brushing might be so soothing; she explains that the sound of hair brushing serves as a memory trigger, it is “going back into the childhood time [sic] … with someone who cares about you.” Maria connects the feeling of ASMR produced by the shirt and the hair brushing to a broader sense of childlike enjoyment of the world and connecting with nature, “smiling into the sun, hugging a tree, climbing a tree” (GentleWhispering 2014a). Crinkle Crinkle lil shirt … (2014a) is the first ASMR video that I, Naomi, ever listen to. At the time, I am procrastinating about grading papers and drifting around the internet. I find myself reading an article about ASMR that emphasizes its strangeness, the whispering, the waving hands. I am curious and I am bored, searching for what Paasonen (2015) calls an “affective jolt.” I fish around for my headphones and plug them in, pressing play. I start with the volume turned right down, trying to avoid any “nails on a chalkboard” response,

The Headphone

but I don’t perceive the sounds as misophonic. Rather, I find myself straining to hear the small sounds, pushing my earbuds further into my ears. So I turn up the volume, and a warm, relaxing sensation washes over me. The headphones allow me to forget that I am in an open-plan office and direct my attention inwards. They narrow my perception and I do not experience the sounds as coming from outside in; rather, they feel like they are being dredged up from pleasant corners of my memory. My thoughts, tense, jittery, and restless, almost immediately relax. It feels like the headphones are a way of injecting a blissed zen feeling straight to my brain. It is strange, it is intriguing, and it feels good. Is a crinkly shirt a good thing? Usually, the answer would be no. A shirt that crinkles is likely to be made of stiff, low-quality fabric. Insofar as a button-down shirt has a sound, it might be best described as an almost inaudible rustle. One of the many tensions in ASMR is that it forces us to reorient ourselves to objects, instead of valuing objects for how they look or feel; they are valued for how they sound. In an ASMR content, the parts of an object that are usually discarded, including the plastic packaging, are often carefully kept (for example, the plastic comb that is still in its plastic packaging in Crinkle Crinkle lil shirt … [2014]). In this way, objects become separated from their capacity to be used for their original purpose. You cannot use a comb in its original packaging for combing your hair, but it can make satisfying crinkly noises when it is gently pressed. As such, objects move from their direct relationship with an intended use, to objects whose primary purpose is to produce sound. In a sense, ASMR makes instruments of the unexpected. It does not matter that the comb is still in its packaging: ASMR sound production allows it to become a new hybrid object—a combinpackage (as we call it)—whose purpose is to make gentle, plastic-crinkle noises as part of a pleasurable soundscape. Likewise, the cheap, crinkly shirt, probably profoundly unpleasurable to wear, finds new life and utility in sound. Using things in a manner that they were not originally intended for often makes people uncomfortable. Why is she fondling that comb, they might wonder, and why is it still in its package? The tension exists because the uninitiated (to ASMR) do not recognize the new object, the combinpackage, whose only job is to produce sound. The use of mundane, everyday objects to create ASMR demonstrates that these objects can “generate and transmit affects themselves” (Ash 2015: 85). Headphones play a central role in producing and approaching these new objects. Previous scholarship implies that headphones act as a bubble, distancing the urban citizen from their surroundings by drowning out the sound of the city with other noises (usually music) and turning public spaces into private auditory experiences. Bull (2012) highlights the power of headphones, and by extension the iPod, to transform and transcend the geography of space. However, the way headphones are used to experience ASMR is substantively different. Rather than blocking out or transmitting sonic geographies, the brushing, tapping, crinkling, scratching, and typing sounds typical of ASMR content allow the listener to experience the unremarkable sounds of daily life as immersive. Headphones help ASMR listeners to focus on particular experiences of sound. Without headphones it is difficult for the viewer to “get” ASMR. Think about everyday sonic experiences without headphones: for instance, unless someone is rustling a packet of crisps behind you in a

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movie theatre you are unlikely to pay much attention to the sound of crinkling plastic. As overwhelming as the noise of the crisp packet can be, it is accompanied by a host of other sounds in the theatre, including those of your body, the creak of patrons shifting in their seats, and the movie itself. ASMR via headphones allows the lister to encounter all these sounds intimately, individually, and pleasurably. In ASMR videos, sounds move from their immediate and mundane domestic context, which allows them to be highlighted, elevated, and experienced as immediately and consciously pleasurable. The kind of listening that ASMR videos enable is akin to Pauline Oliveros’s concept of “deep listening.” Deep listening, as described by Oliveros (2005), is mindful attention to the layered dimensions of sound present in the soundscapes that surround us. Oliveros makes a careful distinction between listening and hearing; listening is intentional, while hearing is incidental. Oliveros proposes that the practice of listening turns the ordinary sounds of life into an aesthetic experience. ASMR is similarly focused on the transformation of ordinary sounds into affective triggers. However, the labor of listening that Oliveros describes is removed. ASMR videos do not require careful listening, to focus on one sound among others, because this work is done for the listener by the ASMR artist. In ASMR videos, sounds are usually presented one by one to allow for maximum enjoyment. Although deep listening is not required, close listening is, and headphones serve as a way to facilitate this. The sound levels in ASMR videos are usually very low. In order to fully experience the dimensions of the soundscape, the listener must generally listen with the sound turned up on both the YouTube video and the listening device itself. The use of headphones assists in the practice of close listening by heightening the noise and blocking out other sounds, increasing the chances of an immersive experience. The sounds are, quite literally, brought closer through the use of headphones. ASMR as a sound culture is perhaps uniquely dependent on a range of technologies for its existence. The first recorded discussion of ASMR on the internet occurred on a healthfocused forum, under the title “Weird Sensation Feels Good.” In the extract below, we have redacted the reference details to preserve the privacy of participants. This thread is the first attempt to name and label ASMR as a discreet experience: i get this sensation sometimes. Theres [sic] no real trigger for it. it just happenes [sic] randomly. its been happening since i was a kid and i’m 21 now … sometimes it happens for no reason at all that i can tell, though. i’ll just be sitting or whatever doing whatever and it happens. its like in my head and all over my body … what is it?? i’m not complaining cause i love it, but i’m just wondering what it might be … help.

Another user replies: I think I know what you may be talking about … Since I was a child I got this strange sensation in my head. It happens to me, I discovered, when certain people talk, especially when they talk slowly, or when people move slowly, or when even sometimes someone is driving slowly … I love the feeling … It is like this tingling in my scalp. The only way I can describe it is like a silvery sparkle through my head and brain … almost like a sort of head orgasm, but there is nothing sexual about it … Is this the same feeling you were describing?

The Headphone

Other posters continue to contribute their own experiences of this “weird sensation,” elaborating on the embodied sensation of it, and possible triggers. In this instance, the internet has facilitated the discussion and recognition of ASMR as an experience and afforded space for a community to emerge around it; however, it is not yet a distinct sound culture in and of itself. At this stage, ASMR is a rather ephemeral and fleeting experience that participants in this discussion are trying to pin down and identify. While the ASMR community only exists online, many of those who experience ASMR report tingly sensations in day-to-day life, going back decades. Some of the common triggers for the tingling sensation include the ambient sounds of a library, the painting demonstrations of Bob Ross, and pleasant customer service interactions. ASMR content is designed to capture these “real-life” experiences through role-playing, where ASMR artists perform ritualized and stylized interactions as doctors, flight attendants, beauty therapists, librarians, or receptionists. In these role-play videos, ASMR artists focus on recreating the sensation of personal attention with a stylized overemphasis on the associated sounds. The point is less the role play itself, but rather the soundscape that the role play facilitates. For example, a role play set in a library would heavily feature book and paper sounds. These role-played interactions are central to some of the tensions of ASMR.

Beyond Positivist Approaches and Oversexualization ASMR is ripe for mockery. ASMR performers (or artists, as they are called within the community) whisper up close to the camera, tapping and caressing mundane objects like hairbrushes, books, and plastic product packaging. The result is a cascade of “small sounds”—the type that surround us every day but to which we pay little or no attention. This listening/feeling experience may be euphoric or repulsive. In one early article explaining ASMR, a writer describes the sensation induced by ASMR as a “horrifying feeling … I wanted to rip off my skin and bathe in alcohol,” and suggests that ASMR videos are all fetish videos (Shrayber 2014: n.p.). Of course, this is not the intended or desired reaction; for those who experience ASMR, the result is supposed to be a state of skin-tingling relaxed euphoria. It is safe to assume that most people have not watched or experienced ASMR. So when you tell your thoughtful colleagues that you are writing a paper on the subject, they might probe as to why you are doing this, being concerned for the integrity of the work. They may say, “What is there to gain about studying people tapping stuff, or watching someone brush someone else’s hair?” Or, “What is the ‘so what’? If some people get tingles from watching these strange videos and some don’t? Why is a video of someone waving their hands over the camera something that should concern social scientists?” If you are getting dangerously close to proposing a project on ASMR, your colleagues might remind you that any work done to isolate and observe a phenomenon that is “weird” needs to be informative of a social phenomenon as well as just intriguing.

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Rather than studying ASMR and its community of viewers as a type of sound culture, studies of ASMR, thus far, are dominated by positivist approaches that work to define responses to ASMR as a type of neurological condition (Barratt and Davis 2015, Smith et al. 2017). This means that much of the previous research and commentary on ASMR tends to view the drive to watch ASMR as inborn, and the “tingles” individuals get from watching it as deep-seated or inherited; these assumptions focus on ASMR as a biomedical trait. Another essentialist view that runs through discussions on ASMR is it that it is sexual and especially so for women. Even though ASMR artists have done careful boundary work to assert that what they do is not arousing, but relaxing (Smith and Snider 2019), there is no shortage of articles and video blogs linking ASMR to porn and creepiness. Take, for example, a video from Russell Brand’s YouTube channel, titled “Is ASMR Just Female Porn? Russell Brand The Trews (E298)” (2015). Brand’s comments are brash (and dated); however, his “observations” demonstrate how commentators in the past have perceived ASMR as sexual and intended primarily for a female audience. Some scholars have suggested that despite the ASMR community’s understanding of ASMR as non-sexual, ASMR can be interpreted as a “radical mode of sexuality” (Waldron 2017: n.p.). The issues Waldron raises when arguing that ASMR is a sexual(ized) experience point to some key issues regarding sex, pleasure, and intimacy that deserve further examination. We do not dispute that ASMR is both intimate and pleasurable, which makes it easy to read as sexual. This tendency to label ASMR as sexual speaks to a broader conflation of intimacy and pleasure with sex. Although intimacy, pleasure, and sex are doubtlessly intertwined, they are not necessarily co-occurring. We can experience pleasure and intimacy without them necessarily being sexual in nature. As Waldron (2017) identifies, there is a specific subsection of ASMR that is intentionally sexual in nature and NSFW (not safe for work). The challenge for academics working with phenomena such as ASMR is to hold the tensions inherent within it, and in doing so, to disentangle concepts (such as intimacy and sex) that often get stuck together. We also need to remain attentive to the cultures and norms within the communities themselves. For instance, the ASMR community specifically and repeatedly works to distance itself from sexualized interpretations of this practice. According to Andersen (2015), the ASMR community first adopted the name ‘Society of Sensationalists’; however, the name quickly changed to the acronym ASMR. This acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, using terms that are suggestive of the weight of scientific investigation, was deliberately selected to avoid sexualized interpretations of ASMR. ASMR is not a site without tension. In order to maintain the ASMR community, viewers and the creators of ASMR content engage in constant boundary work or boundary policing—a practice that has long been noted (e.g. Erikson 1996) as central to the maintenance of communities, both on- and offline. In online spaces, boundary policing or boundary work can take a variety of forms. In this case, ASMR is created and maintained as a distinct affective experience through definitional work advanced by ASMR creators and reinforced by viewers. Pile (2010) outlines how emotions are constructed through language, discourse, and representational practices. This also applies to the ASMR community, who use discourse and representation to solidify the social

The Headphone

meaning and experience of ASMR. Naming ASMR defines it as an affective object but also functions as a way to create and reinforce boundaries within the ASMR community. ASMR is undoubtedly an intimate experience, but the intimacy expressed in ASMR is more spatial than relational. The sounds of ASMR whispering, soft speaking, crinkling, tapping, and so forth are the sounds of proximity. Part of what makes Brand’s (2015) ASMR commentary off-putting is that ASMR artists are pushed into a “sexual” space if they carefully construct their videos to be intimate—with props, role play, silent face-to-face interactions, prolonged eye contact or no eye contact, as well as layers of sound. A “sexual” label is further reinforced by the focus on whispering in some analyses of ASMR. For example, Andersen’s analysis of ASMR focuses primarily on whispering, arguing that ASMR creates a “suggestion of physical proximity and intimacy” (2015: 684). Whispering is also culturally associated with romantic intimacy—for instance, the phrase “whispering sweet nothings” ties whispering to seductive and romantic behavior. Indeed, ASMR is a risky site of inquiry as it continually bumps up against cultural understanding of intimacy, sensuality, pleasure, and sex. Obert (2016) posits that interpersonal intimacy is dependent on four key feeling-states: curiosity, vulnerability, empathy, and the recognition of irreducibility. Whispering in ASMR videos may evoke some of these feeling-states. The result is that these sonic collages are suggestive of intimacy, and not intimate in and of themselves, being made distant through asynchronicity and mediated through digital technologies and space. Intimacy is increasingly implicated in digital spaces (Cockyane, Leszynski, and Zook 2017). ASMR is a further example of how intimacy, mediated through digital technologies, is implicated in the “entanglement and indivisibility of proximate and distance spaces” (Pain and Staeheli 2014: 36), and made possible through an assemblage of technologies including headphones. Additionally, although whispering is an important trope within the ASMR genre, it exists alongside other noises such as tapping, crinkling, and rustling. A singular focus on whispering as central to ASMR reduces a complex and multifaceted sound culture to a single aspect. ASMR artists work hard to produce a certain affective atmosphere for their viewers, and it is up to us as researchers to explore its social importance as a sound culture. ASMR artists frequently emphasize that the ASMR experience is not intended for sexual pleasure, focusing instead on its possibilities for relaxation, stress, and anxiety management (Andersen 2015: 692). As one AMSR artist, Olivia Kissper (2014), explains, viewing ASMR videos “triggers the relaxation response, so when you experience your tingles they feel super relaxed, they help you with your stress, anxiety, depression or falling asleep.” These explanations additionally reinforce the definitional work of the ASMR communities: for boundaries to be effective they must be maintained and, in this instance, reiterated. The “tingling” physiological response that comprises ASMR and the intimate, personal nature of the videos often means that ASMR is interpreted as being sexual or erotic. This does not foreclose investigation into the sexualized subculture within the ASMR community, but it also does not mean that we can neglect the careful definitional and boundary-making work in which the community repeatedly and pointedly engages. To ignore this work would be to overlook the collective and social aspects of nascent sound cultures like ASMR.

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A Grounded Theory of Affective Experiences From an anthropological perspective, it is important to understand sound cultures such as ASMR from the point of view of those who experience and participate in them. Therefore, in this section of the chapter we include several useful tips from the sampling approach that we used in our study (Smith and Snider 2019). We will also explain the process of analysis of ASMR content that we use in our article, which include a grounded theory approach to the ASMR artist’s and viewer’s comments. There is an emphasis in current research about the “performance” of ASMR, but less research that actually considers ASMR as a “sound culture,” with all the social aspects that it provides, including media representation, communities on Reddit, YouTube comments sections, and comment amalgamation channels such a SootheTube and Unintentional ASMR, both of which collect and redistribute a variety of ASMR videos—deliberate and unintentional (Gallagher 2019). Although there has been some content analysis on comments by viewers of ASMR videos, current research is mainly focused on studying the relationship between ASMR and “tingles” and sound, and what a “typical” ASMR video employs—for example: “a quiet, private scene, with a relaxed, friendly and intimate actor (ASMR artists)” (Kovacevich and Huron 2019: 1). Yet if we are to consider a study of ASMR through the methods employed by anthropology, we need to move beyond reading the work of ASMR artists as creating aesthetic paradigms (Andersen 2015), or naming and exploring physiological responses to sound (Smith et al. 2016; Barratt and Davis 2015), to reading and understanding the community/culture of ASMR sounds. In our previous research (Smith and Snider 2019), we began to outline an approach to the study of ASMR by explaining how ASMR artists intentionally construct and strategically heighten affective experiences, and how the ASMR community defines these affective experiences. We did this by using a grounded theory method informed by an ethical approach to sampling, to note themes in video content (Smith and Snider 2019). However, sampling ASMR materials can be difficult as many ASMR artists post new content every day. For those in the process of creating a study on ASMR, it is time consuming and potentially not feasible to watch all the videos with certain tags: a single video search in Google for “whispering” and “ASMR” in July 2019 came up with over 2,500,000 hits. In our study we narrowed the focus to how various popular ASMR artists, as well as members of the ASMR-viewing community, discuss and envision what ASMR is. We did this because we think that ASMR provides an interesting space to study the social aspects of sound and the cultures that form around them. Moreover, as sociologists, we were more interested in understanding the ASMR as a community, rather than as a neurological phenomenon. We are also interested in using a socially driven framework to theorize about how ASMR might “work” as a phenomenon. In order to study the community and culture of ASMR, which is centered on sound, ASMR content must be carefully selected. Depending what social aspect of sound you

The Headphone

are investigating, we suggest that you choose videos that are created by ASMR artists who regularly post their own content. We also suggest that your search criteria include the work from ASMR artists who post videos that are directly connected to specifically what you are studying. For example, when selecting research content for our study on ASMR and digitally mediated intimacy, we viewed and included commentary from ASMR community members who intended to educate those outside the community (Smith and Snider 2019: 2). We selected this type of content because how ASMR community members define their boundaries, and how they understand and explain the sensation of ASMR, were large components of our research focus. When examining ASMR communities from an anthropological perspective it is important to use the appropriate research methods as well as an ethical approach to understand the point of view of those who create this content and those who participate in viewing it. Since there is an ethical risk that comes with selecting content from ASMR forums, steps need to be put in place to limit the exposure of members commenting on ASMR videos. We suggest that you limit exposure by de-identifying data of any unique markers that might identify participants offline. We also encourage you to remove online handles, but include the name of the forum that the comments came from; for an example, please see Smith and Snider (2019). An anthropological study of sound not only includes a study of community and culture, but also a history of both listening and feeling (Feld and Brenneis 2004). Therefore, this part of the chapter also needs to offer an example of a more embodied approach to studying of ASMR as sound culture; in doing so, we implore you to get out your phone or computer and experience ASMR. We will do this too. After scrolling through her recommended videos, I, Anne-Marie, select a video of a young ASMR artist who is clicking and touching the video screen, while saying, “touching, touching, touching your face” (Chynaunique 2019). While this interaction could be perceived as “weird,” the 667,000 views this video has received in the two months since posting suggests there is something more to it. To describe the room Chynaunique (2019) is in, one could say it dark and not much else; but if you follow her channel it emerges that Chynaunique has many videos shot while sitting on the floor of a bedroom, in a beam of late afternoon sunshine. These videos in the sun are especially calming; there is something about the way the light often hits Chynaunique’s room, a soft, mid-afternoon light that usually makes me, Anne-Marie, fall asleep if I am reading a book in a quiet corner, or experiencing ASMR with headphones. Moreover, the pace of Chynaunique’s voice and the way she manipulates everyday found objects, such as a lip-gloss container, are intrinsically linked to the speed of the movement of turning a page in a book. The speed in which everyday objects are slowly and carefully tapped or scratched demonstrates how the pace of speech and movements play an important role in building ASMR content. In comments left below Chynaunique’s videos there is a community of viewers engaging with each other about the material, and expressing appreciation and preferences for specific types of video content. A close analysis of such comments provides a way to study online communities of sound as well as a history of listening and feeling.

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After watching a few videos, have you noticed that ASMR artists sometimes wear headphones during video creation? At academic conferences and within academic journals, anthropologists of sound used to rely on recordings to share their research with others, and because of the quality of playback equipment there were issues with promoting the discipline. As ethnographer Steve Feld noted in an interview with Brenneis (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 470): think of journals, anthropology or ethnomusicology; very few of them include sound or the option to connect to a website to hear the sounds that are part of an argument or interpretation in an essay. As for books, there are virtually no anthropological books with CDs, and the CDs packaged in most ethnomusicological books I know are of an utterly miserable audio quality.

ASMR videos, and the use of headphones to experience them, have shifted the experience of analyzing our research as well as sharing our research and promoting an anthropology of sound. Without headphones the sound quality would be compromised; with headphones academics, artists, listeners, and readers are able to experience the same sound. ASMR artists will recommend that you use headphones too; so put them on. Do you sense anything different with them on? What is it that you feel? Do you sense anything different with headphones on? Watch more videos. After doing so, did you notice that the more you tapped into what looked interesting, watching video after video, you started to choose certain types of videos? Do you have a sense of, why these videos? Do you feel a kinship or loyalty to a certain ASMR artists or sound? To investigate these questions, we suggest you reflect on transcriptions of ASMR artists’ videos, using a grounded theory approach to analyzing ASMR community. One can thus begin to establish the themes around why certain groups of people are convening around specific types of ASMR content. An embodied approach to your own feelings as to why you are repelled or drawn to certain ASMR content can assist in the process of analysis. As you approach topics of ASMR, we suggest again that your research should focus on how ASMR is defined by the communities that produce and view it—and this may include you, the researcher. Regardless, all sampling and analysis of ASMR content should be guided by an ethical approach.

Therapeutic Claims and New Aesthetic Paradigms The field of ASMR research is still in its infancy, but there are emerging and identifiable trends in the literature. There are two general approaches to ASMR research: biomedical and social/cultural. The first is rooted firmly in biomedical and positivist assumptions, and its goal is to find the “cause” of ASMR, whether that is found in the neural functioning of the brain (Smith et al. 2019) or in the personality characteristics of those who experience it (Roberts, Beath, and Boag 2019). There is some nascent academic research that attempts to

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find a potential biological mechanism for ASMR as well as additional scholarly work that has linked synesthesia to the ASMR experience (Barratt and Davis 2015, Smith et al. 2019). Yet the descriptions of triggers and tingles occupy a slightly different frame of reference, resisting full translation into biomedical discourse. For example, research by Roberts et al. (2019), despite its biomedical focus, concludes by highlighting the importance of ASMR’s individualized and context-specific nature. Research conducted from a biomedical perspective also tends to discuss ASMR as something that has tangible and measurable practical benefits, including improving one’s mood and reducing chronic pain (Roberts et al. 2019). The key therapeutic claims of ASMR are as follows: that it is a sleep aid, a general relaxant, and beneficial for anxiety and stress reduction. These claims are often supported by ASMR viewers who state that engaging with ASMR sounds or videos helps them sleep and feel relaxed. As previously mentioned, these interpretations stand in direct contrast to sexual or erotic interpretations of ASMR. It is not surprising that a substantial focus for ASMR research is the potential for an identifiable and empirically based “condition” that is causally linked to “tingles” (Barratt and Davis 2015, Smith et al. 2019). This type of research includes scanning participants in an MRI while they watch ASMR videos, in order to locate the neural location and effects of AMSR (Smith et al. 2019). Researchers who have used this approach demonstrate that individuals who experience ASMR, when shown ASMR videos, have a higher level of activity in the right cingulate gyrus, right paracentral lobule, and the bilateral thalamus compared to control participants (Smith et al. 2019). Indeed, mapping physiological responses to viewing ASMR is these days a common theme among biomedically informed research. For instance, Poerio et al. (2018) measured autonomic nervous system responses while participants watched ASMR videos that they enjoyed. This activity corresponded with an increase in skin conductance response and a decreased heart rate in participants who experience ASMR. Poerio and colleague’s findings are consistent with the ASMR community’s self-described “tingling” or “chills” response. Typically, an increased skin conductance response is associated with physiological arousal and thus an elevated heart rate (Boucsein 1992). The co-occurrence of a decreased heart rate and increase in skin conductance response may explain the “tingling” physiological response that is triggered by ASMR. Importantly, it also distinguishes ASMR from musically induced frisson, which corresponds with an increased heart rate and “chills” (Smith et al. 2019). While the conditions and neural underpinnings of ASMR are interesting, they may also be a misunderstanding of how ASMR is experienced. This is particularly apt when examining the construction and representation of gender in ASMR videos. ASMR videos largely reproduce gendered notions of care. Many ASMR artists are women and their videos are constructed around helping, soothing, or reassuring scenarios. One individual from Barratt and Davis’s study “described her tingling sensation as changeable depending on the gender of the voice in the ASMR video she was currently watching” and noted “that a female voice would cause the tingles to extend more strongly down one leg, whereas a male voice would increase the sensation in the other leg” (2015: 11). Furthermore, “[s]everal individuals responded similarly, specifying that different triggers hit different parts [of the body]” (Barratt and Davis 2015: 11). These responses imply that ASMR is not “purely” biomedical,

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but rather that it is tied to our social understandings of the world. The gendered responses to ASMR videos suggest, as with many aspects of social life, that gender plays an important role in how individuals interpret and respond to ASMR “triggers.” Biomedical approaches therefore cannot account for the social context in which an ASMR “experience” is located. ASMR explicitly seeks to create intimate, caring, comforting, and nurturing experiences for their viewers—qualities typically associated with femininity and womanhood. It is no surprise then that ASMR viewers may sense a change in their physiological response to ASMR content when a man embodies these qualities. Social and cultural examinations of ASMR tend to focus on ASMR videos as a central site of analysis. For example, Waldron (2017) considers ASMR as a type of performance. Treating ASMR videos as texts instead of as part of a community allows researchers to consider them, as Waldron (2017) does, as a sexual practice. On the other hand, Gallagher approaches ASMR as part of “new aesthetic paradigms” (2019: 2), and takes a particular interest in how videos circulate. He argues that ASMR itself is possible partly due to the systems and affordances of Web 2.0, specifically the shift from a text-based to a multimodal web that includes social networks, blogs, content aggregators, webcams, and easy-to-use video editing software. He emphasizes that understanding the digital and technical architectures that afford ASMR are just as important as understanding the videos themselves. Similarly, Andersen (2015) highlights the technical and social aspects of ASMR videos. However, while Andersen references the ASMR community, limited research has actually examined the community itself, instead often treating it as an adjacent issue, rather than an important part of the commercial and cultural mainstreaming of ASMR. ASMR videos are a distinctive aesthetic genre, both sonically and visually. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, ASMR highlights the mundane and sometimes unappealing sounds of daily life. Gallagher (2019) argues that a central part of ASMR as an aesthetic culture is how ASMR artists amplify what might otherwise be flaws or incidental features of recording, such as unintelligible or accented speech. Moreover, ASMR has emerged out of the noise of daily life and the (informational) noise of digital spaces to become a unique sound culture. At present, research that focuses on the social or cultural aspects of ASMR is limited. However, the social field of research is a promising and compelling avenue for further study. Why ASMR and why now? The potential answers to this question may illuminate important aspects of contemporary life. Manon (2018: 228) contends, following Lacanian theory, that ASMR can be understood as part of “broader digital-millennial trends in its repudiations of the lack of lack itself.” That is, ASMR is a response not to absence, but to too much presence and too much noise. Manon suggests that this is apparent when we consider the background for ASMR triggers which is designed to be as subtle and unobtrusive as possible. This backdrop allows low-amplitude, or what we call “mundane” sounds, to “rise to the surface” (Manon 2018: 230) through a combination of binaural microphones and the viewer’s use of headphones. Yet in suggesting that the sounds of ASMR simply emerge, Manon erases the labor that goes into creating ASMR. This absence points our attention to future questions and approaches: Why do ASMR artists labor? Do they merely seek to profit, or is there a sense of mutuality and connection in what would otherwise be a

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parasocial relationship? The tensions between these social aspects of ASMR again point to future avenues of research.

ASMRtists at the Super Bowl ASMR is at a transition point, moving from a niche internet subculture to a more mainstream one. During the 2019 Super Bowl, Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold aired an ASMR ad titled “The Pure Experience.” In it, we see video flashes moving through a lush tropical landscape with a loud (but not unpleasant) buzzing noise that suddenly cuts to silence. Zoë Kravitz sits on a polished wooden platform surrounded by lush Hawaiian landscape. She is wearing headphones as she whispers into the microphones: “Let’s all experience something together.” She slides a full and unopened beer bottle covered in condensation across the wooden desk, picks it up, and begins tapping on the glass slowly; she uses the bottle on the desk to create an ASMR soundscape. By tapping into the affective power of ASMR, Michelob creates a bridge for its audience to establish a relationship with the product. Michelob beer is not the only, nor the first company, to jump aboard the ASMR train. Dove Chocolate, Sony, Toyota, Pepsi, Ritz, and Ikea have also tapped into the power of ASMR. The co-opting of sound by corporations looking to sell products highlights how research into sound cultures such as ASMR is necessary if we hope to understand how comfort, intimacy, and privacy are both experienced and socially constructed through sound. ASMR also has implications beyond the sensory and affective responses of the individual. As part of writing this chapter, we (happily) revisited the ASMR community as a site of research. We found a complex web of interconnected ASMR artists who appear in each other’s videos (for example, WhispersRed’s video “Personal ASMR Sound Treatment feat. GentleWhispering,” 2017) and participate in gift exchanges that are then recorded and shared (see GentleWhispering’s “ASM   Secret Santa Unboxing   Crinkles    Tapping Chewing,” 2017). The reciprocal gift giving suggests that ASMR artists are a community in and of themselves, separate, but connected to their audience. Audience connection is a key ASMR trope, as ASMR artists address the viewer directly. The perceived relationship between creator and viewer is at the core of the ASMR experience. However, the mainstreaming and commercialization of ASMR means that creators are under constant pressure to create new and more sophisticated ASMR videos. In WhispersRed’s “ASMR Trigger Favourites Whisper Tapping, Crinkles, Jewellery” (2019), Emma explains that ASMRtists can feel the pressure to produce more high-tech, more complicated, more professional, snazzy videos. And I find myself on purpose making something simple … of course I like to make snazzy ones too, but not all the time ’cause I don’t want that to define what ASMR is; ’cause it’s not. [pause] ASMR is more just about this [she touches her hand to her heart] to yours [she reaches toward the camera where your heart would be], and simple sounds.

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This quote highlights the ways in which the ASMR community is growing and developing from its organic and accidental roots into a more professionalized era, where ASMR artists partner with and endorse brands. The influx of ASMR artists creates additional pressure for ASMR videos and soundscapes to stand out in a crowded field through regular uploads and more professional production values. In a comment below her “(((Need a Hug))) ASMR” (2016), an impromptu, lo-fi video, GentleWhispering (Maria), says: Please forgive me for not making any exciting and inventive content lately, it is my fault for not working harder. I hear you, I know I need to do better and I will. Thank you for continuously giving me a chance, I appreciate it more than you know.

Future research could tease out this tension between professionalized ASMR, audience, authenticity, and creativity. To what extent is ASMR dependent on creators enjoying their own soundscapes and creative practice, and does the pressure of constant innovation and production imperil this? ASMR artists are experts in creating a sense of intimacy and connection with their audience as part of the soundscape. It is difficult to tell at this point the extent to which the relationship between those who consume ASMR and those who create it is mutual and reciprocal. The most striking example of audience and creator reciprocity is in the low-fi video created and uploaded by GentleWhispering a few days after the 2016 US presidential election titled “(((Need a Hug))) ASMR.” Maria begins by apologizing for her irregular uploads: “Hello my friend, I’m sorry I’ve been away, I’m fighting a little bit of a stubborn cold that would not seem to go away, so my voice is not the best.” Voice is an important aspect of many ASMR artists’ personas and self-presentation, so the sense that Maria is pulling back the curtain of perfection to “hang out” with the viewer, gives the video an air of authenticity. She explains: But, I thought it is an emergency time, I felt like I needed to hang out with you, just be here by your side for a second. I know it’s been quite a challenging time … we will take care of you, hopefully relax you enough so that you can have nice and sweet dreams.

Maria then goes on to present a variety of household objects that produce pleasant and soothing sounds for the viewer. Each object is presented with a short explanation of why she likes the sounds, which she offers to the viewer as a gift to soothe their anxieties. The sounds of the objects are interspersed with whispered reassurance, and emphasize the relationship between her and the viewer: I’m here and we’re together, we go through things together, we help each other out … no matter what we’ve got each other, we love each other, we need each other, we look out for each other.

The final object Maria produces is a studded leather bag. In introducing it she invokes the common community of interest that has formed around ASMR. Maria is not simply producing random objects and seeing what works; she chooses sounds that are personal and pleasurable to her in the hope that the viewer might enjoy them too. She holds the bag up to the camera and taps on the studs, squishing the leather:

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I kept thinking, “oh my gosh, I know my friends on YouTube would want to listen to it all day too.” [pause to let the listener enjoy the bag sounds] See, it feels better already, right?

Can the ethics of care that pervades ASMR videos be sustained in a growing and commercialized sound culture, and is the authenticity of ASMR dependent on its pseudoamateur status? The relationship between ASMR creators and viewers is close and loaded with yet unexplored expectations. For Maria, the viewer is ever present in the way a loved one might be: I always think of you. I’m always thinking of you. I always think, how are they doing, what are they doing, I wonder how they feeling; and it’s important to me, and I want you to know that you matter, and that your opinions and your voice matter too. No matter what happens in life, we’ve got each other, and that’s what matters. Everything will be ok. Everything will be great. Yes. (GentleWhispering 2017)

As ASMR is a sensory response, it also is an emotional one, this is because it plays on feelings of intimacy and comfort and highlights the importance of sound as part of our geographies of care, intimacy, and affection. Further, ASMR suggests that technologies such as headphones have an important role in the ways that new media and digitization can expand the senses and the capacities of the biological body. Does the experience of ASMR render us, briefly, cyborgs—plugged into technological assemblages, our hearing enhanced and heightened by headphones, the mundane background noises of everyday life made instrumental and aesthetic? Listening to an ASMR video, via our headphones, we certainly feel both more human and more than human. As ASMR becomes increasingly co-opted by corporations, does this unsettle its fundamental pull, despite the intimate and direct-to-camera style of address? We believe that ASMR is a sonic phenomenon at its core, one closely tied to the mundane sounds that shape our domestic intimacies. Future research could more deeply explore this, asking whether ASMR viewers develop attachments to particular sounds or specific ASMR artists. The audio quality of sound is yet another avenue that remains unexplored. ASMR videos are increasingly becoming high-tech affairs with excellent production values. Moreover, the sounds that induce ASMR are not made to be “nice.” They are incidental and accidental; the fact that they produce an embodied affective response is what makes ASMR so unusual and intriguing as a sound culture. This raises a related question for future research: by producing sounds through high-quality recording equipment, are they being stripped of their affective power? ASMR is a low-fi phenomenon, first noted in the painting demonstrations of Bob Ross and the accidental encounters of daily life. Can ASMR thus be overproduced in the same manner as a musical recording? Is there a relationship between the quality of the sound recorded and the likelihood of ASMR being triggered? ASMR also raises interesting speculative questions for future research around the social construction of intimacy. Does ASMR provide a basic primer for artificial intelligence to learn about how sound, connection, and intimacy are intertwined for humans? Future research will help unpack many of these questions and broaden our understandings of intimate, domestic, and private sound cultures.

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2 The File Jens Gerrit Papenburg

Figure 2.1  The so-called Quiet Zone (“Ruhezone”) of a German high-speed train (ICE).

Soundfile Listening in the Quiet Zone Being an academic and a researcher in the early twenty-first century also means traveling—be it to give a lecture in another city, on fieldwork or for an archival research trip, or to commute to one’s home university. In an article for the German weekly Die Zeit, commuting assistant professor for philosophy Philipp Hübl (2015) argued that

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Deutsche Bahn’s high-speed trains, the ICE, with their “BahnComfort-Zones,” offered a latter-day substitute for coffeehouses, salons, and bistros as milieus for intellectual work, contact, and discussion. In the past, such places were sometimes transformed into prominent loci for intellectual exchange—think, for instance, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus at Cafe Les Deux Magots in postwar Paris. Hübl argues ironically that these BahnComfort-Zones, where passengers with frequent traveler status can often find a seat without a reservation, could be understood as present-day milieus for scholars, especially those who work in the field of social and cultural studies. Hübl calls these scholars, and himself too, “ICE intellectuals.” Such intellectuals are most often living in Berlin and work as assistant professors on short-term contracts or as tenured professors for a university somewhere else in Germany. Commuting in these cases is not motivated by a Berlin-hype, as Rembert Hüser stated in a currish answer to Hübl’s article (see Hüser 2017), but rather by a family living in Berlin—which does not want to move— or by short-term contracts that render relocation to another city infeasible. Thus, the soundscape of the BahnComfort-Zone can also include the discussions of commuting high-speed rail intellectuals. One might find another zone, characterized by a quite different soundscape, as another natural habitat of high-speed rail intellectuals. In this zone, again within the German ICE, every form of verbal communication is required to be kept to a minimum and the sound of smartphones, tablets, and laptops must be channeled through headphones instead of speakers. Here, all the sounds of fellow passengers using their mobile devices to coordinate appointments, chatting on mobile phones, as well as of gaming and TV series-watching, are at the very least unwelcome if not outright detested and rejected. One most often encounters this area directly adjacent to the BahnComfort-Zone. It is called the Ruhezone: the Quiet Zone. In the Quiet Zone it is also possible to detect some performativities of academic life. Here it is something of a training in “creative meditation” (once again Hübl) to be able to write academic texts and presentations, to prepare seminars and meetings—constantly interrupted by emails. Such a meditation and focusing is technologically supported by the notoriously “weak mobile network” in and by the “unstable WIFI” of these German highspeed trains (Hübl 2015). Moreover, this quietness of the Quiet Zone can be technologically mediated, enhanced, and tweaked by a phenomenon that media scholar Mack Hagood calls—in reference to Foucault’s technologies of the self—“media of sonic self-control”, Overear noise-canceling headphones help to successfully cancel or at least reduce noises that are also coded regarding race, class, and gender (Hagood 2019: 177–219), alongside apps and smartphones providing mood- and situation-oriented playlists. Playlists that are dubbed “Chill Tracks” or “Relax & Unwind,” that promise “Maximal Concentration,” “Beats To Think To,” “Reading Chill Out,” “Binaural Beats: Gamma Brainwaves,” or that outright offer to optimize the whole experience of “Traveling” or “Commuting.” Alternatives to such playlists could be one of Brian Eno’s ambient albums or even parts of the impressive soundscape recordings by Steven Feld, such as Voices of the Rainforest, track 1: “From Morning Night to Real Morning”; or one of the releases on Bernie Krause’s Wild Sanctuary label as well as some historic records from Irv Teibel’s Environments series might do a good

The File

job here as well. In these cases, the Quiet Zone is not quiet at a personal level. Instead, it is shaped by dozens of individualized or, rather, personalized soundscapes. However, the main environment or ecosystem of Hübl’s high-speed rail intellectual is the high-speed rail carriage itself. It is not one of the ecosystems endangered by Western modernity, such as Feld’s rainforest in Papua New Guinea or Krause’s Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. The ICE high-speed rail as an ecosystem includes foremost a selection of mobile devices—headphones and smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Such sonic devices present sound and music but not silence. They present sound and music most often in the form of a list of soundfiles: in the form of a playlist. This chapter offers a cultural analysis of soundfiles as listening devices (Papenburg 2012) that mediate productively between the listener and the sound and music being heard. I argue that soundfiles as well as the apps and devices that play them, are involved in the constitution of a new listener and in the constitution of sound and music. There might be some similarities between soundfile listening and other forms of mediatized listening—such as radio listening or record listening. However, I like to start here by outlining soundfile listening as a form of listening that is informed by at least four specifics (see also Papenburg 2013). First, soundfile listening accesses huge catalogs, databases, or collections of recorded and produced sounds and music. As a digital file, sound is addressable and controllable in new ways, at least when compared to old music collections that include music as a thing, as an object, such as collections of scores, cassettes, records, or CDs. These new ways to address and control music also include new forms of playlist generation. However, one could object that there is not really music in the catalog. Rather, there is just different forms of data—audio data and metadata. It is precisely in the form of data that music becomes controllable in new ways—not only by humans but primarily automatically or algorithmically. Thus, we can find an algorithmic knowledge about listening in the case of soundfile listening: “Metadata here need to be understood as a key element in setting the stage for what later becomes music listening, as they form a central part of contemporary algorithmic knowledge production” (Eriksson et al. 2019: 83). The catalog can thus be understood as that which virtually can be heard in the case of soundfile listening. Against this backdrop, the catalog is a condition of the possibility of listening. So, music catalogs define what is hearable for the soundfile listener. Second, the soundfiles of the catalog are connected with each other in the form of a playlist. There are different types of curated as well as algorithmic procedures to configure a playlist. A playlist is a kind of linearization of the catalog that is virtually accessible. Or, in other words, the list marks a concrete and maybe personal path through the non-linear catalog. In a certain way, the access to millions of the catalog’s soundfiles on the one hand and curation and recommendation that is presented in the playlist on the other hand form a dualism, a dichotomy. Access to the catalog follows the logic of plenitude, abundance, unlimitedness, and of the “database as a symbolic form … characterized by an associative, nonlinear, and open-ended structure” (Drott 2018: 330)—in contrast, curation follows more the logic of “selectivity, exclusion, and ordered succession” (ibid.). However, it is a dialectic dichotomy, as Eric Drott points out: “The database is itself already curated, just

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as curation is itself a means of realizing access” (ibid.). Hence, the database of a streaming platform is characterized by what Drott calls a “scarce abundance.” It is scarce because, the “musical cornucopia promised to listeners was limited to but a few commercial platforms, accessible only under certain conditions” (ibid.: 332). Furthermore, Drott argues, that unlimited access is no inducement for the listener anymore, not least because the catalogs of different streaming services are only differentiated from each other by rather minor details—and are also only just starting to produce content, most often podcasts. Instead of access, personalization as offered by playlists has become the new inducement. So, in soundfile listening we have the non-linear, associative, network structure of the database, and the linear structure of the playlist, which marks a potential way through the catalog. However, in soundfile listening there is also a concrete moment in which the playlist is actualized. We can call this moment the listening situation. Here we find another characteristic of soundfile listening: Third, the sound of the soundfile is finetuned in the moment it is being heard. It is not only reproduced or simply played back by listening apps and devices, but the sound signal is again tuned actively, in addition, relying to various apps and devices. Automatic volume control and mastering become relevant, bass enhancement might be switched on, personalized headphones might be used and a “treble culture” (Marshall 2014) might be more important than bass culture for the various listening situations of soundfile listening. Finally, fourth, soundfile listening is organized as a social practice—and the word social here refers primarily to the social of social media. This social practice includes various processes of subjectivation and subject constitution. Rather than being a subject defined “by Oedipus or agency or any discrete unity” (Kassabian 2002: 139), the soundfile listener is part of network, part of a “distributed subjectivity” (Kassabian 2013b). The soundfile’s subject also has a characteristic temporality: a strong orientation toward the future. We can observe this orientation in two versions in soundfile listening: (a) Each soundfile playlist also integrates—as Drott points out—the future in the form of the next song. This integration of the future is part and parcel of recommendation, discovery, and curation. Or as Jimmy Ioivine, co-founder of the headphone company Beats by Dre puts it: “What song comes next is as important as what song is playing now” (cited after Drott 2018: 326). If we understand soundfile listening as a form of listening that is informed also by the permanent question What comes next?, we understand it as not only an activity that takes place in the present. Instead, it is massively conditioned by the catalog and its integration of the future. There is a second aspect, (b), in which the soundfile listener’s orientation to the future becomes obvious: in the utilitarian transformation of music into a productivity tool, a tool that includes a promise to be more productive and more efficient, simply much better optimized in the future. As part of a creative meditation while on the high-speed rail, sound and music have become means of what scholars have dubbed mood management—rather than means for what popular music scholars define as identity construction (although of course these are not really separable in the end). Mood is more a background experience and has become—as Liz Pelly critically analyzes (Pelly 2019)—an increasingly prominent factor in organizing playlists. Pelly cites Jorge Espinel, Spotify’s former Head of Global

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Business Development: “We love to be a background experience. You’re competing for consumer attention. Everyone is fighting for the foreground. We have the ability to fight for the background. And really no one is there. [We inhabit that time when y]ou’re doing your email, you’re doing your social network, etcetera” (Pelly 2019). Soundfile listening transforms the semi-public high-speed rail into a personalized space, especially in the Quiet Zone. Hübl imagines the soundscape of the BahnComfort-Zone as shaped by “inspiring exchange, spontaneous discussion, the intensive encounter.” He welcomes this—not entirely ironically—as a new public sphere that, once again, performs a “Strukturwandel,” a structural transformation (Habermas 1962). In contrast to this zone, the Quiet Zone is more of a highly personalized space that can also be transformed into a workplace of commuting intellectuals, sonically organized and individualized by noisecanceling headphones and by playlists of cloud-based music streaming to conform to selected mood, functional, or situated goals.

The Datafication of Listening and Its Optimized Subject For an anthropology of sound, with its interests in sound practices, techniques of the body, corporeality, (auto-)ethnography, sonic fiction, and situatedness, the study of soundfile listening is a risky issue. Certainly, following anthropology’s “sensory turn” (Howes 2005: 9) with its critique of conceptualizing culture as text, such a critique is obviously also important for an understanding of soundfile listening. However, soundfile listening is not reducible to an anthropological practice. It also includes digital operations and processing, insofar as soundfile listening includes human and non-human actors, human practices and forms of non-human agency. The study of soundfile listening therefore brings up a series of fundamental questions apropos listening and technology: Is listening a specifically human ability? Are machines at all able to hear or even to listen? Or do machines (only?) register vibrations and transduce vibrations into grooves in records, traces on magnetic tape, and the processable data of digital media? What is the difference between (human) listening and (machinic) registering, processing, and classifying? Is there, in fact, a difference at all? Are popular concepts such as “algorithmic listening” (Humanising Algorithmic Listening 2019) or “machine listening” (Technosphere Magazine: Machine Listening 2018) not basically problematic or misleading because they (a) ignore that listening is a specific human ability and (b) try to understand digital media by anthropomorphizing them? The first objection against a term such as “algorithmic listening” would be an anthropological one; the second objection we can find in media archaeology. The latter argues—developing Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology (Heidegger 1982)—that media technology can not only be understood in anthropological terms but rather in terms of cybernetics, such as communication, control, self-regulation, information, and feedback.

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Sound studies offer a couple of positions that mediate between these two perspectives. We can ask how listening as a human practice and experience is culturally and historically transformed into and conceptualized as a technique—a technique that subsequently can be delegated to a machine. Following this thread, an apparatus such as a nineteenth-century phonautograph is one of the “machines to hear for them” (Sterne 2003: 31–86), a twentiethcentury perceptual coding as included in the mp3 format is a technology that “perceives for them” (Sterne 2006: 828), and a twenty-first-century app such as Shazam identifies unknown songs for them, it recognizes patterns for them. Certainly, it is not listening in general that is delegated to a machine in these cases. Instead, it is a specific concept of listening, a specific form of “auditory knowledge” (Hör-Wissen im Wandel 2017). Sound studies reconstruct the cultural and medial conditions under which machines can listen in a specific way. It is against this backdrop, I argue, that machines can, indeed, listen if they were built to model, simulate, or mimic listening or, more precisely, rather a certain form, a certain conceptualization of listening. John Durham Peters pointed out that McLuhan’s media anthropology, which famously conceptualized media metaphorically as “extensions of the human nervous system” and demands thereby a similarity between the human organism and media, was not “aware of a long tradition of physiological investigation that understands the human nervous system as precisely an extension of media” (Peters 2004: 178). Peters shows that media and instruments of nineteenth-century physiological research such as the phonograph intended, indeed, to simulate, mimic, and objectify listening. Sonic technologies such as the phonograph are thus not only metaphorically anthropomorphized: they represent efforts to attribute human characteristics to non-human entities. They model a certain, technological form of listening, and are involved—vice versa—in the production of knowledge about what listening is (Siegert 1990). Some media studies scholars contend that the conception of media as extensions of the human body is reaching its limits at the latest with an undefined usage of the digital medium, the “unbestimmte Verwendbarkeit des digitalen Mediums” (Tholen 2002: 19f.). The technicity of a digital medium cannot be reduced to terms of its means and purpose. The mechanical phonograph of the late nineteenth century was a sort of an objectified ear (Rieger 2006: 67–82) and, at the beginning, its function was in fact unclear but not undefined (cf. Edison 2012 [1878]). However, the function of a computer as a universal machine is necessarily versatile and also undefined. There is a clear and explicit “technological end of function,” an end of teleology and anthropocentrism within digital media (Hörl 2016: 34). Against this backdrop, I believe that the study of soundfile listening also exceeds the anthropological domain. Algorithmic processing of sonic data is not reducible to human listening, and vice versa. But we can understand soundfile listening as a form of listening as long it strives to model listening itself. If soundfile listening is after all a form of listening that includes human as well as non-human actors, it is possible to bring back anthropology with the following question: How is listening constituted in soundfile listening as a specifically human ability when algorithmic forms of listening are included too? How has soundfile listening the potential to be a “cultural technique[] of hominization” (Siegert 2011: 99) by discriminating between

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humans and machines in a new way? These questions expand the scope of an anthropology of sound by asking how the difference between the human and the machinic is produced and constituted—specifically through soundfile listening. Even if auditory media were explicitly developed to mimic human hearing and listening in the first place, such media today, after decades of refinement, research, and retail, organize listening quite differently compared to humans. It is precisely this point, I contend, that makes soundfile listening a risky issue for an anthropology of sound. Or in other words: In what way does machine listening—which includes registering vibrations, transducing vibrations, processing data, classifying data, maybe even “understanding” these data—differ from human listening? And how are these machinic forms of listening, again, included in the everyday life of humans, for example in the listening situations introduced in the first section of this chapter? With this question, sound studies would approach a form of “humanising algorithmic listening” (AHRC network Humanising Algorithmic Listening 2019) which would beneficially extend an anthropology of sound. The study of soundfile listening also challenges an anthropology of sound on a methodological level. Soundfile listening supplements ethnographic research approaches via algorithmic data mining. This form of listening is not only documented by ethnographic and autoethnographic research; it is incessantly documented by the ubiquitous streaming services as well. A datafication of listening (Prey 2016) is part and parcel of soundfile listening. Certainly, there is a fundamental difference between the technologization and datafication of listening that is modeled in the soundfile and the “personal, highly suggestive, stylistically innovative, and idiosyncratic narration of an individual auditory experience” (Schulze 2016 and see also Schulze 2013a). There is a difference between the personalization of listening and personal listening. Soundfile listening is a cultural and anthropological practice that can be studied by ethnographic research, and it is also a cultural technique that is organized by both humans and machines. It constitutes and it demarcates the difference between human (listening) and machine (listening) in a new way. Soundfile listening thereby constitutes new forms of subjectivity at the same time. Through soundfile listening, we can study crucial aspects of the specific form of subjectivity that correlate with networked digital media, media ecosystems of clouds and streams, apps and devices and the so-called platform economy. As Hesmondhalgh and Meier note, IT companies have developed a great interest in music consumption and listening in recent years; they argue that music can be analyzed as a “testing ground for networked mobile personalization technologies, such as social media” and a “testing ground for the introduction of new cultural technologies” (Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2017: 12, 1). Following this assumption, the soundfile listener is a subject that is emblematic for the organization of subjectivity correlating with networked digital media. They are mobile, have a strong orientation toward the future, and are a personalized subject rather than a privatized one. The bourgeois subject had a private sphere where it could nearly do everything it wanted. In contrast, the private sphere of the soundfile listener is something that is under pressure. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s statement on privacy (“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” [Schmidt 2009]) seems more spot-on than Marc Zuckerberg’s newly awakened

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interest in the protection of the private sphere (in 2018, German Facebook included the function “privacy at a glance” [“Privatsphäre auf einen Blick”], promoting it with an extensive ad campaign). The soundfile subject is because it is substantially distributed (Kassabian 2013b). And it is not a subject because it is by itself. This shift from one mode of individualization to another, a shift from privatization (and its dialectics within the public sphere) to personalization (and its dialectics within corporate data mining) is echoed by an evolution in listening devices, from the Walkman to the smartphone. The Walkman, developed by the consumer electronic (read: CE and not IT) company Sony, created in the late twentieth century a private auditory bubble in public spaces. It was a listening device of what cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams termed a technology of “mobile privatization” (cf. also Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2017: 5). In contrast, the listening apps and mobile listening devices of the early twenty-first century correlate with a new form of subjectivity shaped by what Hesmondhalgh and Meier call “networked mobile personalization” (Hesmondhalgh and Meier 2017: 7). They provide foremost a form of mood management and regulation that differs quite significantly from the old and dated acoustic privatizing technologies of the Walkman or the iPod that could help the listener to tune out of the public sphere and into a private sphere. Streaming services promote a combination of personalization with a listening for efficiency, mood boosting, and self-improvement. Personalization through soundfile listening thus includes an intrinsically utilitarian dimension. Rasmus Eriksson and the whole Swedish research project on Spotify identifies a “general selfhelp ethos and cheerfulness of playlist descriptions” (Eriksson et al. 2019: 125). Pelly describes Spotify as a “mood-boosting platform” (Pelly 2019). She argues that there are a lot of playlists for “Coping With Loss,” “Sorrow,” and so on. However, “Spotify evidently did not want me to sit with my sorrow; it wanted my mood to improve. It wanted me to be happy” (ibid.). Pelly also points out the importance of mood for Spotify to define its audience: the “enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers.” Music is for Spotify not the core commodity anymore, but data about listening habits: “In a data-driven listening environment, the commodity is no longer music. The commodity is listening. The commodity is users and their moods. The commodity is listening habits as behavioral data” (ibid., emphases in original) According to Pelly, Spotify uses music not as its primary commodity but as some kind of promotion or bait to collect data about the behavior of the listener. This is data that can be sold again. Hence, Spotify is “not only a music provider” but, moreover a “private data broker” (Eriksson et al. 2019: 4), a company that registers the behavior of the listener in the form of data. Such data that can be explored and exploited in multiple ways—for advertisement, surveillance, and control. This also leads to the question of in which industry Spotify is actually active—Eriksson et al. locate it at the interstice of “music and technology, advertising and finance” (ibid.: 46). Thus, Pelly understands Spotify as a commercially driven experiment, one that wants to find out who you are through your streaming habits. Or, as Spotify’s Global Head of Monetization put it in 2017: “What we’d ultimately like to do is be able to predict people’s behavior through music. We know that if you’re listening to your chill playlist in the

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morning, you may be doing yoga, you may be meditating … so we’d serve a contextually relevant ad with information and tonality and pace to that particular moment” (cited in Pelly 2019). Spotify defines its subjects, Pelly argues, by “moods, moments, and activities instead of genres” (ibid.). We can add here that the notorious cultural values that for a long time stood in the center of interest for popular music studies appear to lose their relevance in this new context. As a consequence, soundfile listening comes close to being a kind of productivity tool, a tool for improving work’s efficiency and for optimizing your exploitable personality. Through such technologies, contemporary music is moving closer to the tradition of functional music, stretching from work songs, baroque’s Tafelmusik, “Gebrauchs-,” and “Umgangsmusik,” to Muzak and BBC’s Music While You Work program. The new technologies and apparatuses of soundfile listening are therefore also some kind of investment—or as the German blogger Melina puts it in a review of productivity tools: “So, it was a good calculation for me to buy the [noise-canceling, JGP] headphones. Look at it this way, after about 4 working hours the price is back anyway and maybe you can even deduct the headphones from the tax if you are self-employed” (Royer n.d., translation by Jens Gerrit Papenburg).

How to Study Listening Devices? Any transformation of listening can be studied in multiple ways, approaches that start at different points. There are, for instance, approaches that study what is being listened to, who is listening, and how it is being listened to. A study of the transformation of listening that starts with the study of the heard object—such as a piece of music—analyzes what kind of listener is implied or inscribed in the heard object or how a particular piece of music positions the listener. Approaches that start a study of listening by considering the listening subject rely on ethnographic methods or on discourse analysis. For example, the listening subject is constituted and normed by certain discourses, such as discourses of a pedagogy of listening (from musical ear training to soundscape listening) or discourses of an economization of listening (from Edison’s tone tests, to the listener that is presented in the commercials of headphone manufacturers). A study of the listening subject also includes a study of how the listening is being carried out, by analyzing the categories in which listening is primarily organized. The approach to the study of listening I am suggesting here commences with a study of listening devices: the technologies, instruments, and materialities through which sound and music is being heard. I developed this method elsewhere (Papenburg 2012) by analyzing jukebox listening in the context of 1950s rock ’n’ roll culture, and sound system listening in its context of disco, house, and techno culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Listening devices mediate between the heard object and the listening subject. However, such devices also have a constitutive function for the formation of the heard object as well as for the formation of the listener. The major claim of this method is that listening is organized substantially

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differently if it is organized primarily as, say, jukebox listening, hi-fi listening, or soundfile listening. Such devices, of course, neither fully determine the listener nor the heard object— yet they are involved in the co-constitution of both: they are not neutral instruments for listening. They co-produce, in a kind of recursive relation and while relying on discourses and listening practices, a new listener. Furthermore, they not only reproduce sound and music, but they are involved in the tuning of that sound and music as well. This is a rather implicit relation, because hardly anyone really listens to a record, a soundfile, or a CD as a material object as such. We listen to the music (which just happens to be on a CD). Finally, listening devices might also include a certain model of listening: they listen themselves, comparable to the machinic and algorithmic forms of listening I mentioned above. The jukebox (Papenburg 2012), for instance, is a listening device for the serialization, repetition, and programming of single records. Although these records are called “singles,” they are not single: in a jukebox singles are a part of a series, a part of a material playlist. Neither coherent programs nor completed works are played back in jukeboxes. The playlist is an actualization of the selection that the jukebox offers to the listener. The jukebox listener is a listener who, for a small amount of money, may choose from a pre-selected collection by picking a title. As a part of this selection process, records are not only things—as in large record collections—or objectified music; rather, as part of this selection process records must be used, otherwise they will be substituted out. In particular, short songs whose sound could easily be persuaded to become part of a playlist were well suited for jukebox play, as customers paid per tune and not per absolute playing time. It was through specific mastering techniques that the sound of records was adapted to these requirements. The sound of the jukebox is also determined by its electromechanic technology, as is evident in the clicking sounds of the automatic record changer and the bass-accented “belly resonance” (Handke 1994: 88) of this device. The speaker of the jukebox usually sits at knee height and hence its sound does not have much to do with the balance paradigm of hi-fi culture. Consequentially, a listening practice is established in which the sound of produced records in a playlist is being heard in relation to the sound of other records—and not in relation to the sound of a live performance. Especially through the ever-changing extension of the jukebox selection in the 1950s, the potential for comparison increased, furthering a listening practice in which music listening was primarily organized as listening to records. Such a listening practice resonates with the particular sound esthetics of rock ’n’ roll. At a more general level, my analysis of listening devices problematizes an understanding of listening and hearing as a universal human faculty. Instead, I am arguing for an analysis of listening and hearing in its cultural, historical, and medial specificity. Such an approach can also be found in sound studies, musicology, media theory, and the anthropology of the senses (see, for instance, Scherer 1994 or Erlmann 2004). Furthermore, historical anthropology rejects an “idealized and normative concept of ‘The Human’” and “analyzes the surprising multiplicity of everyday lives in all their idiosyncratic richness” (Schulze 2019: 5). A concept of listening as a normative faculty of the human is being rejected by historical anthropology. Instead, it would also study listening as a sensory practice shaped by culture and history. However, we can problematize this anthropological approach

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too, by asking how listening as a human faculty is discriminated from listening as, say, a machinic or algorithmic faculty? Following an approach developed in the study of cultural techniques, we can then ask how the difference between human and machine is produced under certain, that is historically, culturally, and medially specific conditions. If we study listening as a cultural technique, we are looking at it as a body object technique. Listening as a cultural technique is organized in a different way if it relies on say, a score, a piano, a jukebox, a sound system, or a listening app. Moreover, in soundfile listening—and this precisely creates a problem for a monodisciplinarily organized approach in anthropology— we have a case where not only human subjects are listening but, in addition, also machines or, more precisely, algorithms. What I suggest here is to begin a study of listening as a study of the devices of listening. In the case mentioned above this means smartphones and headphones, soundfiles and apps. What interests me here is not the mere technical functioning of such devices primarily (even if I have argued in the tradition of media archaeology). Instead, I wonder how such devices are involved in the co-constitution of the listening subject on the one hand and the heard object on the other hand. That is, I am not contending that these devices fully determine listening practices or the sound of music. Rather, I argue that a certain form of listening and music is implemented or modeled in these devices already. That does not mean that these models must be realized in a concrete practice (as it is studied with ethnographic methods), nor in a concrete piece of music. However, and this is a crucial point for my approach, listening here is not just the privilege of humans. Moreover, it is technologized, thus it is a process in which machines, devices, and technologies are involved.

What Was Digital Music and Sound Production? In the soundfile, digital media have become an integral part of sound. The digital, as it is articulated in concepts such as digital audio or even digital music, is most often associated with the digitalization of audio signals via pulse code modulation, the computer, the internet as well as in opposition to the analogue. However, there were also proto-digital media before the computer that became culturally relevant—for instance the player piano that was able to automatically “read” a partly discrete (re: pitch) and partly continuous (re: duration) arbitrary code materialized in the paper of its piano rolls (Gitelman 2004). Furthermore, sometimes the opposition of the digital to the analogue seems to be rather part of a continuum than something discrete. Mills and Sterne (2017), for example, start their history of time-stretching and pitch-shifting as it is implemented in software such as auto-tune, YouTube, and Ableton Live with an analysis of the rotating heads of a specific tape recorder that is based on patents from the 1930s and that already allowed a decoupling of pitch and duration. Finally, a couple of concepts we are using to think the digital, such as virtuality, simulation, algorithm, sampling, cybernetics, preceded digital technology as a whole—as did the concept of the digital itself.

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The discourse on music, sound, and digital media in sound, music, and media studies is infinite and multifaceted. The influence of digital media on music making, music listening, and the sound of music have been studied widely. Such research stresses economic, legal, cultural, technological, and esthetic questions. At a very basic level, researchers ask: What is digital in digital music and how does digitalization correlate with a new understanding, a new concept of music (Sterne 2005, Großmann and Pelleter 2014, Théberge 2015)? Prominent in this discourse is the study of the transformation of the music industry and especially music distribution. Such a transformation coincides with the establishment of the computer (WinAmp) and later mobile devices (e.g. the iPod, smartphones, apps) as machines to listen to music—and with the success of filesharing networks (Napster) and later streaming services (Spotify). Against this backdrop, the question of what kind of a commodity music can be was also discussed: Is music a “thing” (cf. Sterne 2012: 184–226), is it a “service” (Anderson 2014), or is it even a form of “promotion” (Meier 2016)? The challenges to and transformations of copyright that coincide with digital sampling have been widely analyzed, especially as to how legal and creative questions correlate in this context. Sampling as a form of music making informed by digital technologies is studied as an esthetic strategy (Großmann 2005) between copyright and new definitions of music making (Ismaiel-Wendt 2016) in neoliberal capitalism (Taylor 2016). Digital forms of music making include the digitalization of the recording studio, a development that leads to “virtual” rooms, instruments, and devices (Harenberg 2012, Théberge 2012) sometimes operated by MIDI (Diduck 2017). Not only is the studio digitalized but also the stage—and new performance practices such as laptop performances (Ismaiel-Wendt 2016) and performances by “virtual” stars and bands (Conner 2016). Finally, the sound of music, too, is organized in a new way relying on digital technologies. This is being discussed as “digital signatures” such as auto-tune, digital glitches, and new forms of silence (Brovig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016) or as the “postfidelity” (Guberman 2011) sound world of mp3. Is there even a specific form of “internet music” (Harper 2017)? The subjects and forms of subjectivity that came up with digital sound media have also been studied. This includes the media pirates and peers of file-sharing networks but also fans as bloggers and influencers (Théberge 2006). In general, such subjects are described as agents of a “distributed subjectivity” (Kassabian 2013b), which is also distributed by the digital networks of ubiquitous computing. Such subjects can then even be tuned by the “biopolitics of athletic capitalism” (Gopinath and Stanyek 2013). Finally, and this brings us back to listening, we can point out that listening is also organized in a new way when digital media come into play; we can diagnose a growing interest in listening from IT companies and players of platform capitalism. Hesmondhalgh and Meier (2017) underlined that IT companies have begun to supplement CE companies as dominant producers of technologies of music listening. However, this process is far from being a linear one, stepping from 1999’s Napster to 2003’s iTunes and 2008’s Spotify. Certainly, IT companies’ interest stands in a firm tradition of communication and telephone industries’ interest in hearing and listening that had already emerged in the early twentieth century. As Jonathan Sterne has shown, the psychoacoustic model of hearing, which became a crucial part of

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the mp3 format, appeared in psychological and psychoacoustical research in AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories to increase the efficiency of the company’s telephone system. Sterne reveals that AT&T started to encounter “hearing as an economic problem” (Sterne 2012: 45). We also find this encounter of hearing and of listening in the listening data collected by contemporary IT companies and streaming providers. This datafication of listening has been studied from different perspectives in the context of digital media. Crawford (2012) asks how listening is networked and shaped by biometric and geolocative data in the case of the iPhone. Koutsomichalis (2016: 24) considers how listening is organized in a new way as informed by big data and the archiving of a “huge collection of music files.” Datafication and personalization are prominent terms in the discourse of listening and digital media too (Prey 2016). This is again connected with the analysis of music experiences organized by playlists (Morris and Powers 2015) and algorithms, curation and discovery systems (Razlogova 2013, Gebesmair 2016). Finally, the re-entry of the analogue and concern with materiality has also entered the discourse on music, sound, and digital media. This includes the remediation and simulation of analog surfaces as digital interfaces in audio workstations—such as piano rolls in a DAW’s piano roll editor or a kind of enhanced simulation of multitrack tape in the audio tracks of a piece of software. Moreover, the new boom of sales of vinyl records despite the prevailing conditions of digital media (Bartmanski and Woodward 2015) and even, out of an ecological perspective, the materiality of data (Devine 2015) have been studied.

Short-Circuiting Music and Emotions? There are at least three possible futures for soundfile listening: (a) a future of progression and improvement, a future in which the number of titles in catalogs of soundfile listening grows steadily, the personalization of playlists but also of hardware devices advances, and the mobilization as well as the connectivity of the listener improves continuously and incrementally. This future—and I will present a critique of it shortly, at the end of this chapter—correlates with another future of soundfile listening, a future that we can call (b) a future of obsolescence, even of planned obsolescence. This second future is reflected by discourses on “digital obsolescence” and “builtin obsolescence.” The new technologies of soundfile listening today will be the old and obsolete technologies of tomorrow, for sure. For instance, the virtually non-replaceable, non-upgradeable batteries of wireless earbuds—“future fossils of capitalism” (cf. Haskins 2019)—are becoming slowly unusable. More and more mobile devices are relying on batteries, disclaiming headphone jacks and only offering wireless connections. Also the product lifecycle of a soundfile-reading device is quite short. With their need to grow economically, the corporate actors of soundfile listening will have to calculate and organize, plan and even fuel this transformation. Losing all your soundfiles stored on Apple’s iTunes might be happening these days—but what if your carefully curated library and playlists from Spotify disappear in the 2020s?

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Software upgrades and updates of listening apps generally appear to be running pretty smoothly; however, personal music collections are a part of the accounts that listeners set up on a streaming service. Yet these libraries do not exist independently from this account. If the account is closed or a service is shut down—think of the liquidation of simfy in 2015 for instance—the personal music collection might well be liquidated at the same time. A couple of years ago, it was not clear whether business models counted on streaming or models counted on downloads would be the most successful. Even if the former seem to be winning the race at the moment and right now there is no important online music service that relies primarily on downloads, it is comparatively probable that the future of soundfile listening will not develop in a linear fashion by only diversifying current business models based on streaming. Instead, new disruptive business models will surely emerge and this will also lead to a series of problems with the compatibility of different file formats. Finally, there is a third future of soundfile listening: (c) a (media)archaeological future. This is not necessarily a future of “techno-retro-kitsch,” a nostalgic future of “resurrecting dead media” (Druckrey 2006: ix). Rather than seeking “the old in the new”—for instance the Walkman in the iPod or 1950s radio DJ playlists on a streaming service—this third kind of future can be about finding “something new in the old” (Zielinski 2006: 3). Thus, this kind of future disrupts a linear progression. The success of soundfile listening opens up a possible, thoroughly new approach to old media. For example, the practice of having a record collection is organized in a new way by relying on online platforms such as Discogs. YouTube becomes some kind of wild archive if shellac records are presented there, or if the curves of the phonautograph are transformed into soundfiles and are played back relying on digital technology. However, the future of soundfile listening that is speculated about most prominently is, certainly, the first future (a) I mentioned above. We can find an example of this first future in the stimulating bestseller 21 lessons for the 21st century (Harari 2018) by historian Yuval Noah Harari. In his book, Harari also speculates about the development of music listening in the twenty-first century; he sees this future as one massively informed by artificial intelligence and by big (bio-) data, and he sketches a rather clinically inflected scenario. In this scenario, the generation of playlists is regulated by measuring “electrochemical patterns of neural storms” and “biochemical processes.” Following Harari, such patterns, storms, and processes correlate with “emotions” and will be measured by sensors and analyzed by learning algorithms in the future. In this light, the “emotional impact” of a specific song on “us” will become calculable very soon, at least if we are willing to follow Harari’s thought-provoking science fiction prose. Obviously, and also Harari underscores this point, his foresight is based on a rather old conceptualization of art and music—one that understands music primarily as a way to express, produce, and manipulate human emotions. Soundfile listening in the future would then be supposed to short-circuit sound data, bio-data, and emotions. As Harari puts it: Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of soundwaves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of

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neural storms. Allow a learning machine to go over millions of musical experiences, and it will learn how particular inputs result in particular outputs. (Harari 2018: 32)

In this possible future, soundfile listening undermines consciousness and a critical ability to decide and reflect, and might be driven by an excess of personalization: Suppose you just had a nasty fight with your boyfriend. The algorithm in charge of your sound system will immediately discern your inner emotional turmoil, and based on what it knows about you personally and about human psychology in general, it will play songs tailored to resonate with your gloom and echo your distress. These particular songs might not work well with other people, but are just perfect for your personality type. After helping you get in touch with the depths of your sadness, the algorithm would then play the one song in the world that is likely to cheer you up — perhaps because your subconscious connects it with a happy childhood memory that even you are not aware of. No human DJ could ever hope to match the skills of such an AI. (Ibid.)

There are undoubtedly a couple of significant problems with such a scenario and its rather bureaucratic dream of a precise matching of music and emotions, of sound data and emotional data. First of all, some popular music studies scholars focus their analyses of music on the construction of identity and subjectivity instead of emotions (Whitely et al. 2005). Psychologically speaking, a focus on emotions might be relevant, while in cultural terms such a focus might not only not necessarily be very productive, but could lead to a creative and esthetic cul-de-sac. However, all the mood-oriented playlists on Spotify can also be understood as an argument for short-circuiting music and emotions—and affect theory might give us a more detailed account of what is happening here than the rather simplistic and often just behaviorist talk of emotions. Second, the input/output model that Harari propagates is far from being as clear as it seems. Certainly, both the input (“mathematical patterns of soundwaves”) as well as the output (“electrochemical patterns of neural storms”) are not so well defined as Harari suggests. Part of the input might also be the listening situation and the listening technologies. We can listen to the same song or sound event in multiple ways. Especially, psychological discourses on embodied cognition as well as cultural studies discourses on “corporality” (Papenburg 2018) have argued that music is not only perceived by a brain organ situated in our heads as the sole locus of neural storms. Finally, bio-data and also electrochemical data are still in a state of mainly being buzz words of some kind. It is just not clear yet if the sensors of listening devices will ever be able to develop a precise sensibility for the specific bio-data correlating with a particular emotion. Certainly, the heartrate sensors and pedometers, microphones and accelerometers, blood pressure and glucose sensors of current-day smartphones will be supplemented by additional sensors before long. However, despite the current developments of nano-sensors and bio-sensors, there might be some dysfunctional and even fake elements in soundfile listening while matching sound data and bio data. In that case such a matching will not be an automated process done by learning and “intelligent” algorithms. Instead, it will be supported by human work. Comparable, for instance, to “automatic” speech recognition systems such as Alexa that were supported by temporary teleworkers in Poland (Fuest 2019).

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The Instrument Rolf Großmann

Figure 3.1  Pete Rock playing the MPC (Screenshot from: Rock 2006)

The 4×4 Matrix When the hip-hop legend Pete Rock demonstrates one of his favorite instruments, the MPC, it is as if a magician is producing a big hit with a simple touch of his fingertips (Rock 2006). But the “instrument” does not appear very magical; it looks more like a specialized office machine than a traditional musical instrument with strings or keys. There is a

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4×4 rubberpad-matrix, a number pad, knobs, button rows, a slider, and a small display. And indeed it has a quite bureaucratic function; it accesses an archive and rearranges and transforms parts of it. In this case, it is not located in an office handling an archive of invoices and contracts, but in a music studio and the archives are the crates of records owned by parents and friends. For example, one of the two songs from the video presentation, “Love is a Battlefield,” is transformed from a long-outdated hit of the early 1980s (Pat Benatar 1983) into a hip-hop track with a new sound, new structure, and new vocals (C.L. Smooth 2007. Prod. Pete Rock; CD “The Outsider”). There are no secrets about the production and playing techniques of the instrument Pete Rock uses. It is a standard in new school hip-hop beat-making that goes back to the first widely available digital drum machines of the 1980s, the SP1200 (Sampling Percussion 1987) and the MPC60 (MIDI Production Center, 1988). But of course, as soon as it comes to the historical originals—as with classical instruments (e.g. the “Stradivarius”!)—myths exist about the nature of the hardware and the sound characteristics associated with it. While the SP1200 became a legend with its special 12bit-sound, the MPC became famous for its special timing and created a new instrument interface that has competed since then with the traditional chromatic keyboard controller in the area of sampling. Its 4×4-pad matrix renounces the representation of tonal structures from the beginning, even if it is possible to play melodies with the pads. Developed by drum machine pioneer Roger Linn, it does not provide piano keys but mini-drumpads for fingers. Samples are freely assignable to the pads, be it from percussion or melody instruments, or be it looped breakbeats. As with any sampler, it is possible to transpose everything on the fly, while the tempo of the sample to be played is being modified. Complete chords or motifs, hook lines and so forth can be tonally adapted to a new context or even played in chromatic sequences. Yet its focus is neither melodies nor tonal structures but the rhythmic playing, the temporal arrangement, and layering of heterogeneous preformatted musical elements. Pete Rock (2006) characterizes his work with the MPC as “a jigsaw puzzle” (1:25) that if it succeeds “sounds like a record” (5:33). For me as a traditionally trained musician (guitar and piano), this instrument is an unfamiliar challenge. A traditional approach of direct instrumental mediation from body movement to specific characteristics of sounds does not lead further here. To form a sound with your finger movements or your breath flow, as on a guitar or a trumpet, is clearly not the purpose of the instrument. Hitting a pad on my “Maschine” (an MPC-derivative from Native Instruments, Berlin; I don’t know if they followed the man-machine concept, but consequently, it is called with the German word “Maschine”) “plays” an instrument or some “half-ready music” (“halbfertige Musik,” cf. Großmann 2010) that I did not make myself. In technical terminology, I would say it triggers some fragments of music but if I begin hammering the velocity-sensitive rubber pads or if we watch Pete Rock turning knobs and hitting pads it is definitely more playing and grooving than triggering in a technical sense. And, as with any conventional instrument, the tones of the chromatic scale can be played—each pad can be assigned a playback speed of a tuned sample corresponding to the correct pitch. Nevertheless, this type of playing stands in contrast to playing a traditional instrument: It forms a different relationship of sound production to physical activity,

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involvement, and musical structure. The MPC is an experimental machine that allows the user to playfully explore the aesthetic qualities of fragmentary and decontextualized material. In the experience of playing with the MPC, there are more familiar and more alien things at the same time: the familiar playfulness, the instantaneous reaction, the felt gesture on the one hand; the alien missing feeling of direct sound shaping, the missing instrumental intonation on the other. Direct intonation is also what forces corporeality, discipline, and physical adaptation in traditional instruments. In general—including the traditional acoustic instruments—the whole process of tone formation is not directly controllable by the mind during playing, because elaborated musical structures are simply happening too fast. They require a trained predisposition, an automatism of motor processes. But these in turn—and here is the difference to the automatic processes of the machine—form a continuous labile state of balance between the human motor automatisms and consciously controllable action, and can thus be instantaneously modified. Instead, in case of playing with complex structures stored in or generated with machines, there is a stronger rational component, as the stored and automatically running processes with their option spaces are constantly there to think along with during playing. This difference, when it is not used sensibly and reflected by the player, causes unsatisfactory aesthetic results. Of course, this new type of requirement can and must also be trained; new skills must be developed and learned. This also clears up the misconception that one does not have to acquire any skills in order to make music with machines (which seem to play automatically perfect music), which is often cited as a flaw of the new practice—the idea being that only music of inferior quality could emerge from a practice of such crude play. But here we are focusing not on virtuosity but on a new relationship between playing a musical instrument and music. I would call it second order playing: the performance of building new structures with fragments, chopped out of already existing structures. It transforms recorded sounds and allows a trial-and-error approach to form new configurations of several parts playing a rhythmic musical performance. Its greatest difference to conventional instruments results from breaking with a simulative drum machine tradition. While its predecessors, the LM-1 and the LinnDrum, were intended to replace a drummer in a band, the MPC—as its name “Production Center” reveals—is a phonographic workstation that focuses on montage and rhythmic composition. The LM-1 was the first sample-based drum machine developed by Roger Linn, introduced in 1979 and announced by Linn Electronics with the slogan “Real Drums at your fingertips.” It was followed in 1982 by the widely popular LinnDrum and 1988 by the first MPC. In the use of DJ-Culture, something fundamentally new emerged from this machine: an instrumental device for recombining fragmented archives. The current MPC derivatives like the “Maschine” (see above) or the “Push” (Ableton, Berlin) further develop this aspect by continuing the merging of instrument and computer and offering a combined unit of laptop, software, and interface. The interaction of soft- and hardware opens up a supplementary field of practical options and theoretical discussion. It is by no means clear whether this breakup of hardware features actually offers an advantage for the instrumental play. The question of

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the relevance of the standalone character of electronic hardware instruments plays a central role in the discourse on the body–technology relationship in an advanced technocultural future environment and—as with the “running status” of music and the implicit rationality of instruments—will be discussed later. To sum up, sound formation as an expression of emotional sensitivity or interpretative significance thus recedes here in favor of a combinatorial rhythmic experimentation in a “puzzle situation.” But it is a great experience and can be a lot of fun—just like playing a traditional instrument. Of course there is a mental gap between a traditional approach and instruments with these new technocultural configurations. In this situation, it is helpful to become aware of the fact that the built-in cultural and musical knowledge of the MPC belongs to a specific universe of music making, to the technocultural hybridization of everyday music.

Playing Phonographic Material This type of instrument is not only important as subject of research because it has established itself as a standard controller and generated a number of derivates. It was created in the 1980s, the historical period of transition from analogue to digital studio technology, and it represents a profound change in the relationship between human, instrument, technology, and musical composition/performance, its Gestaltung. The commonly used term “Sound Design” does not fit here, because a qualitatively essential activity is addressed, for which the terms composition, interpretation, and performance used to be valid and which are can be contained in a superordinate term of Gestaltung. In order to understand this process of transition and the corresponding practices of composition and shaping of musical material, it is necessary to precisely describe continuities and discontinuities. First, it stands for the shaping of creative instruments of the phonographic workbench, for an extended work with phonographic archives and sound material. Second, it stands for a current form of a (music-)instrumental playing a complex machine, for an elaborated interaction with generative automatisms. These two aspects are mutually dependent, simply because the basic procedure of phonographic reading and writing is not a culturally formed symbolic act as in musical notation, but a technical process. In this process, initially conceived as a machine-internal procedure, a human intervention takes place. Such instrumental access to the media-technical signal processes is at the core of the musical interaction with media devices. This insight into the first aspect, the fundamental change of musical memorizing, archiving, and composing systems in the twentieth century, I owe to Friedrich Kittler’s “Aufschreibesysteme” (1985) and “Grammophon, Film, Typewriter” (1986). From my point of view, Kittler’s achievement is to have presented sensitively and in detail the consequences of a change in writing, or better cultural distribution and memory systems, from Gutenberg to computer data. However, some of these detailed descriptions lead to esoteric assumptions and misunderstandings—in this sense, the title of the English

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edition with “Discourse Networks” (1990) misses the clear and striking statement of the original title. In our context, it is rather irrelevant whether the new recording systems really “write” in the literal sense of the word. They are technical systems whose storage media are mechanically “written” and “read.” Here, reading and writing refer less to a practice of human symbolic transformation than to their cultural function of enabling a spatio-temporally independent availability of sound-events and the formation of archives. The suffix -graphy used since the nineteenth century serves as a familiar label, not for technical processes but for cultural functions. Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature” or Edison’s “Angel with the Pen”—which adopts the analogy of writing with a pen and engraving with the phonographic needle—are metaphorical images of the cultural appropriation of technical media with mechanical storage and access mechanisms (Großmann 2016). The musical instrumentalization of this mechanical writing accesses the technical parameters of the reading process; the technical signal flow is transferred to the level of human influence. In the case of the turntable tradition of DJ-Culture, this is literally done by manually manipulating the movement of the record and pickup. At the same time, the mixer with crossfader, filters, and effects interrupts the signal path to the amplifier and becomes part of the “DJ setup” consisting of two turntables and a mixer. This tradition goes back to the dub-mix of the Jamaican sound systems, where the mixing desk and various effect devices form the haptic instrumental objects of the live performance (Williams 2012). If we are talking about an instrument here, it is the complete configuration, which partly comprises media equipment that have been used other than intended. The MPC, in contrast to the turntable and the mixing console, was neither thought of as a simple recording nor a playback device; it was designed as a simulation tool for drum and percussion tracks and a production workstation (as mentioned above). But the hip-hop community used it from the very beginning to intervene in the digital code, to rearrange and transform it, to make it playable. They were inventing a new instrument for playing music with phonographic archives: [T]he hip-hop musician’s instrument, the sampler, is a piece of studio equipment. This simple fact totally obliterates conventional distinctions between performing (or practicing) and recording. (Schloss 2004: 46)

Of course there are more or less developed approaches pointing in this direction. Following Simon Frith, from the perspective of music technology “the history of music can be divided into three stages, each organized around a different technology of musical storage and retrieval”: In the first (or “folk”) stage, music is stored in the body (and in musical instruments) and can only be retrieved through performance … In the second (or “art”) stage, music is stored through notation. It can still only be retrieved in performance, but it also has now a sort of ideal or imaginary existence … In the final (or “pop” stage), music is stored on phonogram, disc, or tape and retrieved mechanically, digitally, electronically. This transforms the material experience of music. (Frith 1998: 226f)

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The passage quoted shows that the immense significance of this change of storage media has been recognized and that an epochal classification is already part of the discourse. However, it is not helpful to assign only some styles, stories, or particular cultures (“pop”) to these epochs, since they refer to all areas of musical practice in this new technical-cultural space. As a “final stage”—or better: a current phase—of the rationalization of instruments, phonography and algorithms are a general condition beyond genres or music-cultural categorizations. To classify the resulting practice as pop, mainly because it concerns the media formerly discussed under the label “culture-industrial,” makes little sense. So it is, for example, also for “serious” or “avant-garde” music both a prerequisite and a design tool to apply phonographic technologies and strategies such as sampling, layering, remixing, and so forth. Even a seemingly purely acoustic musical event is—staged in media environments as an “unplugged” transmission—a media phenomenon; it uses the mechanisms of digital postproduction (equalization, filtering, compression, etc.) and is processed by the respective subject in a media-specific situation as an individual media reception. The considerations so far lead directly to media theory and to discourses on instrumental rationality, knowledge, and agency. These aspects are precisely the topics that make the question of the transformation of musical techno-instruments interesting from a broader anthropological perspective. It is not just a question of a specific instrument and a specific genre. It is about the human interaction with technical environments that goes beyond purely purposeful control. Traditional musical instruments have always been “extensions of man” in the almost intimate sense of the coupling of motor skills, sensory skills, cognition, and technology, not to mention their complex emotional implications. They are media in a McLuhanian sense (McLuhan 1964), not of everyday life but of aesthetic experience. Their function is explorative, searching, testing, and playful. When media technology is used as an instrumental configuration, it at the same time unfolds its own agency. This media reconfiguration of the inside and outside, the “self-world of the apparatus world” (Dunn 1992) and its visible surface, eludes the regime of everyday practicality and opens itself to access to aesthetic play. This is also the reason why in McLuhan’s perspective the artist’s sensorium is the only one capable of perceiving and reflecting the medium and its transforming effects as such (McLuhan 1964: 31). McLuhan is also the one who, with reference to the ambivalence of extension and amputation, describes the painful losses associated with new media and technological “tools.” Technological rationality here is directly linked to bodily processes and opens up a new spectrum of options through rulecontrolled functions, but it also imposes strict limitations. Aspects of cognition, “thinking,” and acting are delegated here to machine instances, whose framework conditions simultaneously expand and limit the existing optional spaces. Media-theoretical positions like this correspond very closely to a well-known position in the traditional view of musical instruments, whose role can be summarized “as mediators between the performer’s body and the sound they produce” (Hardjowirogo 2016: 15, original emphasis). Their sounding bodies replace or expand the human body for sound production and thus become an intermediate instance between a genuinely human and an instrumental sphere. As David Burrows attempts to outline for traditional instruments with the term “transitional objects” (1987: 121f.), they are specially shaped external objects that have a “strong link to the body” (ibid.: 119) and transform physical

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and mental states into the realm of musical art. Like a mask “an instrument replaces the performer’s own sonic face, the voice, with a proved impersonal sound used only for making music” (ibid.: 122). The more these instruments are technically shaped, the more apparent their preformedness contains a powerful momentum of its own or (with Bruno Latour) “agency,” then this creates the conditions for the musical process. Traditional discourses of the musical instrument also take into account its implicit agenda, its framework for possible performances, the hidden knowledge about musical shaping and composition that dwells within it. One of the most influential thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, Max Weber—who as an astute observer of the socio-economic conditions of industrialization and rationalization provides the basis for many other theories (such as those of Theodor Adorno)—characterizes the conception of instruments as a decisive moment for the development of a system of musical tonality: Historically the rationalization of tones normally starts from the instruments: the length of the bamboo flute in China, the tension of the strings of the kithara in Hellas, the length of the strings of the lute in Arabia, of the monochord in Occidental cloisters. In their respective areas these instruments served for the physical measurement of consonances. (Weber 1958: 94)

Industrialization and the division of labor led to another decisive step in rationalization, the machinization of the world in which we live, work—and play music—for which Max Weber already discovers early signs with the church organ in the world of music: The organ is an instrument strongly bearing the character of a machine. The person who operates it is rigidly bound by the technical aspects of tone formation, providing him with little liberty to speak his personal language. The organ followed the machine principle in the fact that in the Middle Ages its manipulation required a number of persons, particularly bellows treaders. Machine-like contrivances increasingly substituted for this physical work. (Ibid.: 117)

It is not only the loss of freedom to “speak his personal language,” but also the McLuhanian dialectic of enhancement and amputation that is addressed here. The almost superhuman “divine” power of the church organ is paid for with a physical alienation from the shaping of the tones, the splitting into playful control and technically fixed sound production without direct bodily influence on the physical factors of tone formation. With these aspects—rationality and control—already two central concepts of the development of algorithms and automation in “machine instruments” are specified. Weber traces their emergence farsightedly and identifies them as basic elements of progressive instrument development. Another fundamental factor could hardly be recognized by Weber, since— beyond the first compositional experiments in the 1930s—it did not establish as a broad practice until the second half of the twentieth century: phonography as compositional and performative literacy, which—as described above—is part of a new technical environment. Rationality and control of these media machines and musical instruments no longer refer just to precise tones and clockwork-controlled mechanical time grids but encompass the complete palette of acoustic-physical processes. This already applies to analog phonographs

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and gramophones with their—desired or undesired—pitch and time manipulations, but is established entirely by electronic audio technology from amplification and sound effects to the microsecond-grids of digital phonography. In digital phonography, with its discrete listings of measured values, the new materiality of phonographic writing as a representation of the sounding “reality” changes into a symbolic state. Thus, as with the discrete pitches symbolically represented in the notation, the sounds themselves can now also be subjected to calculatory rationality and technical control. Digital sequencers and DAWs (digital audio workstations) use this new phonography for integrated environments for auditory design and thus enter a further level of rationalization, that of the universal medium computer. The integrated automatisms make these technologies seem to play by themselves; they access already played material and generate and process sound sequences. Agency here is not only a quality to be discovered through intensified awareness, it becomes directly and unmistakably perceptible as an instrument’s independent sounding action. It can be also helpful for the understanding of machine agency to give an interpretation of Mark Butler’s book title Playing with Something that Runs (Butler 2014). Music always “runs.” Something that is ongoing and happening independently of the player is not unusual; on the contrary, it is the normal state of the musical flow. For instance, the challenge in jazz is not only the spontaneous composition of an improvisation line, but also the constant perception of the ongoing interaction and the continuous harmony framework, an almost sporting achievement. In this respect, there is no fundamental difference to a running sequencer. But the sequencer is a running machine, that’s the crucial difference. So what is really meant here by Butler is “playing with a running machine,” that constitutes its own framework and processual flow. The machine becomes a new participant in this playful musical interaction.

Instrumentality The crucial question for fundamental changes in the relationship between human beings and instruments that produce and shape sound remains: In what respect are the media and music machines of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries “musical instruments” and what new quality do they constitute in this respect, does it go beyond the perspective on instruments already discussed in traditional discourses? Current academic literature is certainly concerned with the phenomena mentioned, their aesthetic objects and transformations, but—despite the “performative turn” proclaimed—the instrument and its performative access to recorded sound and algorithms remains strangely under-explored. However, there are some exceptions and more recent approaches that also form parts of the framework for my contribution here. First, there is the area of the recording itself and phonographic material. Since the 1980s, there has been scholarly debate about the “studio as a compositional tool,” starting with a lecture by Brian Eno that describes his reflections on the role of creative work in the studio. In this context, the character of recordings as composed and fixed works has been considered, as opposed

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to the rock song (Gracyk 1996). Paul Théberge sees—similar to the positions discussed here—a “fusion of instrument and recording device,” hardly surprising in view of the spread of samplers as playing instruments beginning in the early 1980s. After discussing the existing positions, Butler uses the term “recorded text” to characterize the new materiality for musical creation, before approaching instrumental examples for “performing performances” (Butler 2014: 27ff., 65ff.). A broad discussion of current approaches can be found in the anthology Musical Instruments in the 21st Century (Bovermann et al. 2016), which allows me to summarize some positions elaborated there and to focus on specific problems. In our context, this step from phonographic materiality to the identification of technical devices as instruments and their performative characteristics is decisive. Yet the relevance of this aspect is undeniable: as with classical instruments, it is the key to the specific processing of musical material and the qualities of the resulting aesthetic process. And a perspective on being a media device or a musical instrument is not only important for understanding the cultural practice of music but is also the subject of the definition regimes of the social groups involved. “Serious” and “popular,” high and low culture are striving to distinguish themselves from one another by means of genres and styles, but also by means of their creative tools—for example the habitual difference of a violin player and a DJ. As can be seen from the stages model of media storage cited above (Frith 1998), such classifications also occur in critical discourses, even if procedures and techniques are already used as part of an overarching practice. But in this technocultural field, innovations often reverse the highly culturally proclaimed order: pop culture here does not follow a preceding explorative “avant-garde” elite but establishes new practices itself—innovative pop and “serious” artistic scenes follows and use, often differently than intended, widely established pop-cultural aesthetic strategies with their corresponding media technologies. Whether such a creative environment is included in the (academic) canon of the established instruments or not has an impact on musical practice, curricula, and offerings of public educational institutions such as music schools and universities. The decision to treat media technology environments as instruments is also a commitment to liberate the technological practice of music from the notion of consumerism and cultural industry and to take it seriously as a culturally relevant creative field. But what are musical instruments? How does a sound (re-)producing device become a musical instrument? Here an approach is necessary that avoids the misunderstandings of an ontological assignment: To be an instrument is—especially from a transcultural point of view—not a question of the “nature” of an object but of the perspective from which it is viewed. A turntable, for example, is neither a reproducing device nor a musical instrument, but gains the respective attribution through its use. Being a musical instrument is an attributed property, which can be assigned both dynamically and gradually. Depending on the goal, the investigation of this property can be useful or not. This rethinking of the term leads to a new conception in the direction of an instrumental quality: instrumentality. This specificity of musical instruments as distinguished from other sound-producing devices is expressed by the concept of instrumentality, which … seems to be a graduable

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and dynamic concept that is not tied to an object per se but is rather a matter of cultural negotiation. (Hardjowirogo 2016: 12)

Starting from Philip Alperson, who from a philosophical perspective coined the concept of instrumentality as a characteristic of music itself, the properties and contexts of musical instruments are an elementary part of musical practice: [O]ntologically, musical instruments need to be understood as musically, conceptually, and culturally situated. Or, to put the matter more formulaically, I wish to argue that musical instruments must be understood as instrumentalities in the context of human affairs … [T]he conception of musical instruments I have been advancing has implications for our understanding of music itself as a particular human practice, or perhaps more accurately, as a set of musical practices. (Alperson 2008: 47f.)

This approach, combined with Burrows’s already cited concept of “instrumentalities” (1987), makes it possible to go the next step and ask for the special properties and the instrumental characteristics of the devices addressed in our context. The twofold role of media devices, which can be seen both as reproduction devices on the one hand, and as instruments involved in the process of musical creation on the other, is particularly problematic here. Instrumentality can only be achieved if they are thought of as part of a performance that is not dominated by a reference to another performance but which enables an independent creative act. This possibility seems to be so far away from Western thinking that an independent media performance can only be thought of to a very limited extent. As in Thomas Mann’s chapter “Fülle des Wohllauts” (“Fullness of Harmony”) in his novel Zauberberg (1924), the gramophone is conceived and staged as a “transitional object” that, in contrast to the corresponding object in Burrows’s approach, does not target the here and now but evokes through technical magic the spiritual realm of a past performance. This use of a media device can already be seen as a performative act in itself, which constitutes a specific reception situation—but hardly as an instrumental performance. Another example is the introductory scene in Performing Rites by Simon Frith, which depicts a dinner party going on while listening to and talking about records (“Johan said, ‘Let me play it to you!’,” Frith 1998: 3f.). This specific situation of a performance of recordings is the starting point for the discourses of an entire book but is not recognized as a musical performance in itself. With the focus on instrumentality, it is necessary to consider the electronic and digital media not only from the point of view of a reference to a performance that has already taken place. The liberation from the dominance of the media functions of reproduction and transmission is a prerequisite for understanding their instrumentality. Media devices produce sound and define production and listening situations. They form the environment for generating an individual aesthetic experience and are also controllable in the sounding parameters of their “performance” (such as volume, tone control, selection of excerpts). Alperson already grants—based on similar arguments—the playback devices the character of an instrument, as they are actively used as such, to determine the hearing situation and produce sound:

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Anything that can be utilized to bring the music to a listener can be regarded as a musical instrument. Radios, iPods, computers, high-fidelity stereo systems, in-store broadcast equipment, audio and video discs, and podcasts are all devices by means of which listeners may hear. (Alperson 2008: 44)

To summarize the preceding considerations: From my point of view, there are two steps that lead to an understanding of media devices as musical instruments. First of all, as explained here, it is important to recognize the performance character of the use of media devices. As a second step, their instrumentality in the sense of musical play is to be analyzed too. As the instrumentality discourse shows, it is not only the sound production that makes up an instrument in the sense of cultural practice. An investigation by Sarah Hardjowirogo identifies the following criteria that, based on a literature review, appear to be “crucial for the construction of instrumentality”: “Sound Production,” “Intention/ Purpose,” “Learnability/Virtuosity,” “Playability/Control/Immediacy/Agency/Interaction,” “Expressivity/Effort/Corporeality,” “Immaterial Features/Cultural Embeddedness,” “Audience Perception/Liveness” (Hardjowirogo 2016: 17ff.; in the following text these criteria are used as terms marked in italics). With this background, it becomes clear that media devices can and should be understood as musical instruments if their use corresponds to the above criteria. In a phase of technocultural hybridization, familiar patterns and body relations of instrumental play dissolve. From this point of view, the MPC is an early prototypical step on the way to renegotiating the term “instrument,” in which these devices “blur the boundaries between something we are prone to call ‘instrument’ and other categories such as ‘medium’, ‘system’, ‘configuration’, ‘machine’” (ibid.: 10). Its instrumentality is its character of playing with sounds in a direct interaction, which corresponds to the mentioned categories, especially the core criterion of playability. And of course its cultural embeddedness, a property that many electronic instruments lack, is clearly visible: the well-established role of the MPC interface in the current cultural practice of music—the new school of hip hop. “Sampling is playing with sound, or playing sound—like it’s like an instrument, or a game” (Chuck D, as quoted by McLeod 2015: 85).

Player Pianos and Interfaces From the point of view of musical tradition, playing a running machine is seen as in opposition to playing a musical instrument. In Western European art music, the musical instrument is a tool of the performer that allows an individual to unfold the structure of the work as an acoustic event in time. As performer, they stand as an important autonomous element in the chain between score and recipient. As soon as the instrument contains a part of the score, either as a running program (as with a pianola, other musicautomata, or digital software) or as a sounding music structure (a DJ’s turntable or a sampler), the traditional division of composition and performance, which includes as an essential

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moment the independent interpretation of the structure defined in the score (the work), is broken through. “Performing performances,” as Butler aptly puts it, would be a paradoxical action. But, as previously mentioned, the performance of music with media machines and programmed sound generation has a prehistory. Long before electronic instruments, the keyboards of fortepianos and the organ decoupled sound production from direct human touch. The play of music automatons via manual operations such as turning a crank or winding a coil spring also have also a long tradition, for example in the operation of barrel organs and musical clocks. These reproduction instruments, musical automata, or music boxes that—like running MIDI-sequencer programs—play “by themselves,” were always treated as special cases in the history of instruments. But there are some occurrences where reproduction instruments are played in an individual performance like “real” musical instruments. Thus, there is a missing link in the history between playing technically complex mechanical musical instruments, such as the organ or the fortepiano, and the electronic and digital self-playing instruments such as sequencers, samplers, drum machines, or groove boxes: the historical phase of playing self-playing automatons such as pianolas and self-playing pianos (“player pianos”). Playing a piece of playing equipment, of running machines—that is, what I have called “second-order playing” above—is in fact a fundamental difference that repositions the question of instrumentality in the history of musical instruments. Such a differentiated play, which touch on the border of advanced instrumental play, emerged with the development of ever better pneumatic playing mechanics for player pianos at around the turn of the twentieth century. A new kind of machine-playing instrumentalist emerged at this historical moment: the pianolist. With their piano-players (or “push-up pianolas”), by which the keys of the “remote” instrument were operated, pianolists gave concerts with the repertoire for which piano-rolls were available (Reynolds 1927). Not only was the expressive interpretation of concertante playing now possible with these machines but, and especially for the interactions with traditional ensembles, the essential elements of human interpretation and adaptation in the form of dynamics and agogics was also feasible. Nonetheless, the era of the pianolists was limited and remains a more or less forgotten episode of media music history. With the Wall Street Crash of 1929, manufacturers and customers were reduced in numbers, while other media such as the gramophone and radio developed into overpowering competitors. One of the last pianolists, Rex Lawson, still demonstrates at various events how artistic this performance with a piano-roll machine can be. It enables dynamics, agogics, and adaptations of tempo to an ensemble and, of course, an expressive action, comparable to performance on traditional instruments. Here, nearly all categories of instrumentality as stated above are easily applicable—except cultural embeddedness, since this practice remained in general existence only for a short phase and did not establish itself as a broad musical practice. Like the virtuosos of the Theremin (Clara Rockmore) or the Trautonium (Oskar Sala), the pianolists were bound to the continuity of their respective instrument’s technology, which, however, could never establish itself in a larger market. Following exotic analog devices for the phonographic simulation of vocals and instruments like

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the Chamberlin, the Mellotron, and Mattel’s Optigan, in the 1980s digital samplers first became established as instruments of reproduction for a wide range of practices, from that of producers to non-professional users, as products of the consumers industry. They were able to draw on the already popular DJ-Culture that had developed outside the Western art music tradition. At this moment, it becomes clear that “consuming technology” (Théberge 1997) belongs to the dialectic of instrumentality; it simultaneously means complex reduction, conventionalization, and accessibility in a process of culturalindustrial rationalization. If we examine the newer tradition of interfaces like the 4×4 matrix, we encounter a similar dialectic, which provides valuable insights for the development of digital instruments in the twenty-first century. In a historical phase that has been ongoing since the 1980s, in which the algorithms of digital control and sound generation can be directly influenced by data streams, the digital version of pianolas turn into “controllers” and the piano-rolls into pre-programmed software. An example of one of these lines of tradition would be the Slabs controller by computer-instruments pioneer David Wessel, presented at the NIME Conference 2009, which with its 4×8 or 4×6 pads has a matrix structure like the MPC. This interface, developed at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, represents the characteristic approach of computer music to view the instrument as a sensory data source and is a natural culmination of Wessel’s work since the 1980s on “composed instruments” (Freed 2016: 151). Unlike the MPC’s 4×4 matrix of “little drumpads” intended for sample playback, whose output data correspond to the basic parameters of the MIDI standard (on/off; velocity), Slabs generates dynamic data streams in several parameters. The hardware of Slabs consists of a matrix of twenty-four or thirty-two touchpads, which are components usually built into commercially available laptops (such as the Sony Vaio). This construction also—as with the numberpad of the MPC borrowed from office machines—follows a logic of availability in the commercial consumer market, which here originates from the area of the home office and mobile business computing: The VersaPad semiconductive touchpad (by Interlink Electronics) is used to estimate the X and Y position and applied force (Z) of fingers touching its surface. It is usually used as a pointing device in laptop computers and in hand-written signature recognition applications. (Freed 2016: 153)

The concept is based on “using gestures as signals, not as just triggers” (Wessel 2009: 1:10). The data stream of up to ninety-six independent parameters directly generates the resulting sounds by mapping them to program components and audio data, which thus become an integral part of the instrument. As a human–computer interface, it stands between human action and sound generation and thus corresponds to the abovementioned “transitional object” without, though, producing sounds itself but actively executing parts of the composition. Composition and instrument merge in the arrangement of controller and software patches: “the patch in MAX/MSP is certainly another part of the instrument” (ibid.: 1:02). This concept is associated with an improvisational way of making music. Unlike Roger Linn, who is oriented toward pop and popular classical music, David Wessel’s

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Figure 3.2  David Wessel playing on Slabs. Screenshot: Wessel 2009.

approach is influenced by jazz and follows “the idea of composed improvisations using complex performance environments” (Akkermann 2013: 234). Instruments such as Slabs have particular problems with some of the instrumentality categories discussed, such as playability and learnability. Even just the number of parameters there are to be controlled directly from the tips of the ten fingers exceeds the control characteristics of any other traditional instrument. Here complexity turns into a perceived arbitrariness—as already seen in the final phase of serial composition in the middle of the twentieth century (in works like Pierre Boulez’s “Structures”). Its complexity counteracts the original intention of control; as a result, the device becomes hardly playable without a massive reduction of capabilities. In order for the instrument to be learnable at least in its basic features, it is necessary to dispense with the freedom of mapping and to introduce fixed relations between hardware and software. These advanced instruments do not manage to reach the status of cultural embeddedness either, as they initially serve exploration and experiment, not a broad launch into the consumer market, even if they are intended as prototypes for actual new instruments. Virtuosity and repertoire are mostly limited to individuals or small groups focused on the compositional model implemented by the combination of hardware and software. An integration into any sort of broad cultural practice only takes place when such

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instruments can tie in with an established compositional model and provide added value to conventional instruments. Even if the Slabs interface works in much more differentiated way from the technical aspect of dynamic control than the simple 4×4 matrix of the MPC, the less elaborated interface remains decisive in the practice of phonographic work and gains a higher level of instrumentality. The MPC was able to take up the existing practice of DJ-Culture and became a new instrumental standard. But there is no doubt that technical developments of advanced musical machines will play an important role in the practice of the twenty-first century. So, if such complex interfaces are to become musical instruments in the future, a fundamental broadening of the perspective and a rethinking of the relationship between machine and musician (in particular from the viewpoint of control) is necessary.

Playing the Programmed Future The change in musical instruments is not only a phenomenon of individual genres such as hip hop or EDM. In such genres the change becomes particularly clear: they are built on a DJ-Culture approach working with phonography or on producing tracks with sequencercontrolled electronic sound synthesis. Their instruments, such as turntables, samplers, synthesizers, controller interfaces, sensors, and digital audio workstations, established themselves in the second half of the twentieth century and can be found on most of the virtual surfaces of mobile devices in the twenty-first century. In other genres, new music technology tries to tie in with familiar ideas. The most common role in the practice of Western European art music is the conductor who “controls” the orchestra. Here a simple hierarchical conception of “real-time control of music performance” seems valid: It is similar to the role of the conductor in a traditional orchestra. The conductor controls the overall interpretation of the piece but leaves the execution of the notes to the musicians. A computer-based music performance system typically consists of a human controller using gestures that are tracked and analysed by a computer generating the performance. (Friberg and Bresin 2008: 279)

Even if this view is evident at first glance, it contains a misunderstanding of both the role of the conductor and the role of the orchestra. The members of the orchestra are not machines that follow the movements of a conductor one to one and the conductor is by no means independent of the active participation of the orchestra. In fact, the concept quoted paves the way for an analysis of the conductor’s intentions and the translation of these into a meta-code that acts on a set of rules for the individual sound generators. The prerequisite for this is to develop high-level descriptors that can be controlled via parameters. This requires a musically operationalizable knowledge at all levels, which however—and this is the main problem of this approach—is to be gained mainly at the level of the musical structure of specific genres, which are suitable for a transfer of their structure into abstract sign systems. These corresponding genres are, in an obvious way, the structures of

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Western European art music or of scale-oriented jazz. However, it is not clear whether the (re-)search for such overarching rules and their algorithmic implementation, as provided by some “music similarity measures” derived from machine learning, for example, actually delivers on the promise of musical meaning. A lot of research on these issues is to be expected in the near future, driven by the sheer practical potential of music similarity measures. To put it simply: computers equipped with good music similarity measures may not be able to make sense of music in any human-like way, but they will be able to do more and more sensible things with music. (Widmer et al. 2008: 186)

This kind of research thus makes more sense when the perspective turns: the agency of the computer as a creative tool now becomes audible, independent of human criteria of meaning. This could lead to an exploration of auditory aesthetics by algorithms and automatic machines that goes beyond conceptualizing them as mere hierarchically subjugated tools. In a new kind of collaboration with machines, their own dynamics might provide novel aesthetic experiences: Machines can become more equal partners in heterarchic networks of human and machine actors. Giving them similar access to decisions opens intriguing possibilities: They can provide a variety of “director’s input,” from oracular hints à la Oblique Strategies, concrete instructions about playing roles, to directly switching the selection and configuration of the modules the human players are currently playing with. (Lopes, Hoelzl, and de Campo 2016: 358)

But there are some more and perhaps deeper doubts about the validity and relevance of this as a model for contemporary music. Our sense of mutability between performer, instrument and environment is heightened by our engagement with computers, and our confusion in this regard is evident in our vernacular with regard to their place in performance. We habitually refer to computers (and associated software, or just the software) as instruments. We refer to just the same elements as “performing or composing environments.” And in some circumstances we imbue the computer with sufficient agency that we regard it as “performer.” The incommensurability of digital hardware and software with the habitual divisions of “attention” or responsibility in musical practice may not have prevented much research into replicating the perhaps archaic notions of “conductor”, “score follower”, etc., but the extent to which such concepts inadequately represent the algorithmically-equipped world is clear. The uncertain status of current laptop performances, the activities within which may vary from simple eventtriggering through to “live coding” is instructive here, the latter making distinctions between performer, instrument and environment particularly difficult to sustain. (Waters 2007: 4)

Let me continue and sharpen these considerations: a total control of musical performance resembles the promise of artificial intelligence to generate sonic results that perfectly achieve at the desired emotional effect—both represent a scientifically fascinating but aesthetically not satisfying goal. It equates designed sound with an algorithmic and accurately tuned, personalized medicine, the application of which is projected into a

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fulfilment phantasm. Aesthetic practice would be reduced to the consumption of drugs, a simplified and radical version of the cultural-industrial model of society in the middle of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that methods such as deep learning, both in the analysis of notated structures and in the dynamic spectral analysis of audio material, can achieve results previously unattainable and that these can establish themselves as algorithmic tools, for example in studio production and performance. In the aesthetic sense, however, such applications only become interesting when they are played with, experimentally explored, and playfully experienced. So, what are the consequences for the future agenda of instruments in a digital culture? Research on the technological progress of instrumentality cannot be limited to improving convenience and efficiency, but has much more far-reaching perspectives: it focuses on (a) digital play with the technical writing of phonography and aesthetic and creative access to the recording archives, (b) aesthetic exploration of the inherent dynamics and the networking of algorithmic processes, and (c) consideration of a new balance between musical playing, the disciplining of the individual and virtuality. While the first two points have already been described in detail, I would like to conclude by unfolding the last aspect that is crucial for future instrumental playing and the relation between the corporeality of musicians and the data space they interact with (and which corresponds to the abovementioned category expressivity/effort/corporeality). Against developments such as Slabs, traditional instruments such as the violin seem almost archaic. This is due not only to their centuries-old practice, but also to the inherent culture of disciplining their players. In order for a violin or trumpet and the repertoire associated with it to become the extension of the body as mentioned above, a rigid process of adaptation and discipline, often accompanied by physical pain, is necessary. In a phase of human development characterized by technological means and possibilities, such problems can be overcome for a broad musical practice. The rigid retreats to which professional musicians are subjected already in their childhood years are not established in any other area of society apart from top-level sport, the legitimacy of which can equally be questioned. Western European art music and its performance conveys an instrumental ecology of discipline and subordination, values that do not fit the advanced Western societies. A playful music making in this ecology of violence is—despite the promises of the music schools—doomed to fail. For today’s “dilettantes,” elementary parts of the classical-romantic repertoire are simply not playable. It goes without saying that the residual proponents of such an archaic physical practice continue to exist and reposition themselves as contraries in technical societies, but it is important to discover and develop a new culture of aesthetic play. Perhaps it is necessary to give up aspects of the usual desired control and work with algorithmic machines in an open and non-hierarchical sense. This can—and it is already apparent in some respects—happen in two main ways. On the one hand, in a rigorous experimental practice, in the probing of instruments, that are quite evidently designed such that the ambition to master them becomes meaningless. If the very inner workings of the instrument change with each cable that is dis-/connected,

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predictability is gone in the blink of an eye. As a consequence, learning and performing cannot be separated, so the audience can witness the musician’s learning process on stage; arguably a defining feature of experimental art practice. (Lopes, Hoelzl, and de Campo 2016: 351f.)

Here the point of reference is the artistic research of Peter Blasser, whose instruments fundamentally question a traditional approach in the sense of control and intention. On the other hand, another possibility is to tie in with more familiar, already introduced twentieth-century technical-cultural creative strategies, not in order to improve them in terms of efficiency and impact, but to playfully expand their limits and let their technicality itself emerge. An example would be Auto-Tune, which was designed as a correction algorithm for perfect vocal intonation and works in this sense as a standard now in pop productions and is also used as an audible sign of hybridization of a technical-cultural musical practice. The task for current research is precisely this extension of perspective: in digital culture, music machines are no longer just controllers or tools, but challenges to the very anthropological conditions of aesthetic production. They are harbingers of a technocultural fusion, which are already thought of in the discourses of the post-digital, the post- and transhuman, and the “post-instrumentalities” (Lopes, Hoelzl, and de Campo 2016). We are in a situation of progressive anthropological change to a hybridization of human and technical environments, which can already be seen in music in everyday practice. Technicization, rationalization, and algorithmization have long been part of musical structures and thus of the aesthetic and emotional ecology of human beings. The farreaching mechanization of musical composition and design has a prototypical character for other areas of human social and societal action. These aspects can be proven, analyzed, and reflected upon in the specific instrumentality of technical devices in the process of musical creation.

4 The Software Katrine Wallevik

Figure 4.1  A row of workspaces in the big P3 editorial room.

Good Morning P3, June 221 The sun is rising as I drive across Kalvebod Bridge on the outskirts of Copenhagen in my old car. It is just after four in the morning, and I am traveling from my home in Valby toward the Danish Broadcast Corporation’s main buildings, DR Byen,2 on Amager. It is very early and I am tired. I feel a little worn out by the last couple of years’ long stretched-out

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hard work on my dissertation, in the field and at my desk, and from the daily handling of my now almost three-year-old twins. Today is June 22. It is near the end of my fieldwork period, and I am on my way to do participant observations of a complete live production of the radio program Good Morning P33 (“Go’ Morgen P3”) made by the Danish Public Service Broadcast Corporation, DR. As I arrive at the main entrance of DR Byen, the time shows 4:35 a.m. I got up this morning at 3.30 a.m. with the hope that today—by carrying out participant observations on an entire Good Morning P3 program—I would find out more about sociality in the production practices of doing music on such a program, and about what matters in the everyday practice thereof on this particular, very popular, show. Prior to this morning, over the last year and a half I have carried out extensive fieldwork investigating the P3 Channel and in DR’s Department of Music and Radio. I have engaged in conversations with the head of music, with experienced music radio DJs on DR, with editors of music content, with the “headmasters” for the Host Talent School, with superiors at the Music and Radio Department, and other actors involved in the daily making of P3. For two weeks now I have been following Jens, who is employed by DR in the apprentice program; he is training to become a host. As a part of his training program, he has been working as a researcher for Good Morning P3 for the past month. This morning, though, I am not accompanying Jens. Søren, the producer on the program, suggested two days earlier that I come “from the beginning instead of turning up at 8 o’ clock together with Jens.” This was an offer I could only welcome of course. So today I am meeting with Good Morning P3 producer, (Søren 2015).

The Planning Outside the main entrance to DR Byen, I bump into Mads, a P3 news employee I have encountered before. He lets me inside with his lanyard and leads me farther into the big P3 editorial suite. This room has four large rows of tables, separated by shoulder-high room dividers. Each row has twelve desks and twelve computers—forty-eight workspaces altogether—plus a meeting area and a kitchen that leads to the big P3 studio and an arrangement of sofas outside. “You’re early today,” says Søren as I arrive at the last row before the kitchen and studio. “Yes—I thought I would do the full package since I was getting up anyway,” I reply. He had told me to be there before five o’clock, and I couldn’t risk being late. “Exactly,” Søren says. He seems engaged in something else. I continue, “I’ll just get a coffee and sit here and scribble a bit.” “Yes, you do that—right now we are checking out the stories of the day. Just ask if there is anything.” “Great,” I reply. Søren is an educated journalist. He is about my age, with brown hair and dark, superfriendly eyes. He is the long-term substitute for the “real” producer on Good Morning P3. She has been ill for a long time. I met Søren on my first day in the field. He has taken really good care of me, for instance by inviting me to join in on this early morning experience.

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Figure 4.2  A drawing of the big P3 production space on the ground floor in Section Two. This space contains a large open-plan research area, several meeting areas within the open space, and a kitchen. These facilities surround the big P3 live studio that sits in the middle of it all.

Standing by the coffee machine, I see Mads again. “Ah, coffee!” I say, still waking up after another night of too little sleep with my little toddlers. “Yes,” he replies, “just to kickstart the whole system.” “Uhm,” I say, “completely necessary!” We go back to our desks with our coffee. I can hear a whistling sound from the ventilation in the big room. I hear the clicking of computer mice and the clacking of keyboards—it is the sound of concentrated work silence. There are many cups of coffee on the tables. The clock on the wall says 04:51. The three news workers are hard at work on the news blocks. Søren—my guy—is working on lining up the detailed program for today’s show. He works mainly in Google Docs. There must be six blocks with speech for every hour, he explains to me: “The blocks cannot be longer than two and a half to three minutes, in order to create the right flow between speech and music.” In order to create flow, Good Morning P3 is, like popular commercial morning programs, organized in a “segmented” structure, in blocks (Chrisell 1994: 72). It is made up of a thoroughly organized flow of blocks with speech, music tracks, and adverts/jingles that all have a certain short length of around three minutes. In producing a “flow of music/commercials/talk” (Berland 1990: 231), right now Søren is working on the particular part that concerns the “talk.” He needs to have the first hour ready (meaning that he has to have six speech blocks ready) before the program starts. The

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rest can be made after the initial editorial meeting at 5:00 a.m. and within the first hour of the program as it goes along from 6:00 a.m. It is fascinating—the quietness and the efficiency of work. These young people (younger than me, anyway) get up and sit here working while everyone else is asleep. I find it somehow touching, as if they do this for me. Like when bakers bake at night so we can have our freshly baked morning bread. Or when the newspaper delivery people run up and down staircases, or when the garbage collectors come in the morning. I ask Søren if there is a particular status connected with working on this program, despite the odd working hours. This is an attractive job, he tells me, and it is “the flagship of the channel— the program that sets the tone for the whole day,” he explains. I ask if I can go around and take some pictures. Claus, the news host and the unofficial fourth member of the Morning Team, tells me that I can do whatever I want: “We will tell you if you cross any boundaries,” he says in a very friendly and reassuring voice. Søren adds: “Yes, you can do almost everything here. The only thing that we have ever been a little cautious about is when students wish to record our editorial meetings. That we do not fancy too much.” I go around taking pictures without getting too close to the people working. I take pictures randomly. I photograph the clock that seems to be guiding much of the activity in the room and the two big screens that hang beside it. The screens on the back wall have a prominent place, I notice. Earlier, Jens had explained to me that the screens show “how our content is doing on social media” (see Figure 4.3a). On another wall on the side, so not directly in the line of sight, hang four other smaller screens where different TV channels are shown (Figure 4.3b). I take two pictures of some general directions for the news host (Figures 4.3c and d). I take a picture of a sponsor gift that has been sent to the Morning Team (Figure 4.3e). I take pictures of the meeting area, the whiteboards, and the empty chairs (Figures 4.3f and g).There are also plants and humans in this entangled environment. I take a picture of the hands of a journalist at work and a plant on the table (Figure 4.3h). Just before 6:00 a.m., after the 5:00 a.m. editorial meeting, after the team of three hosts has apologized for being late (again!), after having solved some trouble with dysfunctional Google software on one of the computers in the studio, we all take our places and the news comes on. I sit besides Søren in the producer’s booth. In the beginning, Søren is highly preoccupied with getting the program started and writing the remaining speech blocks. Looking intensely through the glass window at the hosts in the studio, he speaks into the hosts’ headphones via a microphone at our table and delivers good speech cues and punchlines. He suggests a phrase into the microphone, and two seconds later I hear the same words coming out of the host’s mouth as if it was the most natural thing for him or her to say. Søren also responds to incoming text messages and telephone calls. He tells the hosts when they have to stop speaking, so the speech blocks won’t be too long. For the second hour—from 7:00 a.m.—things loosen a bit up. The program goes well. I ask Søren about the different screens in the studio. There are many buttons and machines, but he tells me that it is really quite simple when you have learned it. The screen I am most interested in is the one right in front of me, which shows the playlist and the lineup of music—both background music, playlisted tracks, and jingles (Søren 2016).

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(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

Figure 4.3  Various artifacts in the P3 open office.

Figure 4.4  The clock on the wall shows 05:57:57. Søren is ready at the producer’s desk. I sit to his left. He is working on the computer in front of him on the rundown. On the computer to the far left (in front of where I sit) is the DJ’s log from the software Dalet.

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Figure 4.5  The DJ’s screen containing the log. This shows the playlist, the background music, and other sound elements.

I am particularly interested in this screen because it corresponds with a screen that I spotted earlier in Peter the Head of Music’s office. “The log” of sound sequences here on this screen is a mirror (in a different layout) of “the clock” that Peter makes—and that he has shown me on a previous occasion. Let us now quickly jump out of this setting and go upstairs to Peter’s office to get a sense of how the music was planned and programmed in order to flow along with a program like the one we are airing this morning.

The Programming I met up with the head of music, Peter, three times. On the third occasion, we sat in his office in the editorial section for DR Music and Radio. Peter’s office had solid walls on one side, behind us. In front of us were a desk and a computer; the walls behind the computer were made of glass. Peter’s office was literally a glass box located in the middle of the P3 editorial office. If we wanted to, we could look directly at the P3 employees at work outside the office. We did not look outside the office much, though. Rather, we peered at his computer, mostly at the interface of Selector. Produced by the company RCS Sound Soundware, Selector was launched in 1979 and, according to the company, is one of the bestselling scheduling tools in the world. RSC describe their product on their website: You create a station, design clocks, enter and code your tracks, and then Selector will schedule them according to their natural demand. You’re still in control because you can

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Figure 4.6  Peter’s computer screen, showing his computer, the Selector interface, and the glass wall between Peter’s office and the editorial section of the P3 Department of Music and Radio.

adjust overall rotations, sound and flow with simple-to-use attribute sliders. Improve your station with just a few clicks, then sit back and watch Selector create schedules that reflect your changes. (RCS 2017)

Working in Selector, Peter turned on some music that blared loudly from the speakers. He turned it off very quickly. His fingers moved swiftly over the keyboard, and he steered the mouse with unconscious precision as he clicked himself in and out of the different interfaces on the screen. One moment he was using Selector, looking at categories and setting the parameters for the track in question, the next he was using the Dalet software to edit the track. The track he was working on was “All We Know” by the Chainsmokers feat. Phoebe Ryan. He was thinking out loud while he worked: “So, is this a track that we wish to open with? No, it isn’t.” He clicked off the category “N” under “Opener” in the Selector interface (Figure 4.7a). I asked Peter how he knew that this was not an “opener,” and he responded: “Because of the jingle … try and listen to how this sounds.” He then played the well-known and very characteristic P3 jingle: “W … W … W … WHAT YOU HEAR IS WHO YOU ARE. This is P3!” The jingle was loud and forceful. Immediately after the jingle, he again played the intro to the track by the Chainsmokers. It had an electric guitar as the only instrument, and even though a great deal of chorus and delay effects had been added to the guitar, it sounded rather thin compared to the jingle we had just heard. All of this took less than fifteen seconds.

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“It simply feels too tinny, too thin, compared to what has just played, right?” he asked rhetorically, though he had already moved on, clicking and ticking off more boxes on the screen. “Oh, it is a question of texture, right?” I asked. “Yes, texture,” he replied. “Texture … tekstur [he repeated it in both English and Danish, savoring the word]. I do not know what it is called in Danish: tekstur? Yes. It simply has to be more voluminous.” To be able to classify as an “opener,” a track’s texture thus had to correspond with the P3 jingle to allow an adequate flow between jingle and track. (a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

Figure 4.7  The computer, the interfaces, and the various parameters used by Peter to control music on a daily basis.

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And so it went on. Peter coded all incoming songs according to certain parameters. Texture with the options: Barely There; Thin; Average; Full; Wall of Sound (Figure 4.7b). Mood with the options: suicide, sad, average, happy, ecstatic (Figure 4.7c). Energy with the options: death, soft, average, hard, chainsaw (Figure 4.7d). Tempo with the options: slow slow, medium medium, fast fast (Figure 4.7e). Sound Codes with the options: White pop, White MOR, Black pop, Urban pop, Urban, Hip hop, Reggae, Rock, Alternative pop, Dance, POP. (Figure 4.7f). And he placed them in certain libraries (Figure 4.7g). Hence, in order to make up the daily scheduling of music for P3, Peter intra-acted as part of a “meshwork” of actors (Ingold 2011: 64). This meshwork consisted of the music scheduling software Selector and the workflow and sound editing software Dalet. Selector was used to organize the tracks according to a certain infrastructure (e.g., five options in all categories), using certain categories (e.g., mood, energy, tempo, texture, opener, era, type, sound code), certain descriptive presets (e.g., mood: depressing, sad, average, happy, ecstatic), and a certain scaffolding for organizing time (e.g., the clock shown underneath). When working in Selector, Peter also interacted with particular tracks and with common perceptions of channel formats and various tracks’ embodying of a given genre. Furthermore, he and Selector interacted with the musical materiality or “texture” of the P3 jingle, which seemed to be a particular anchor point (probably made by a DR corporate branding unit) when it came to the textural character of the channel’s flow. Besides (and inside) these tangible technologies and materialities, Peter interacted with cultural models (Hasse 2011)—mental technologies, one might call them—that seemed to govern his daily practice: associations of the P3 universe as mainstream, ideas of flow as the natural stylistic aesthetics of format radio, as well as an overall corporate rationalization strategy of attracting and retaining listeners by giving them, as he said, “what they want, when they want it!” After programming and categorizing the music, Peter designed “clocks” that were used as an overall structuring tool for fashioning the station’s daily program, hour by hour. Every radio hour was scaffolded, so to speak, by Peter and his meshwork of everyday tools and helpers. Figure 4.8 shows a clock for the P3 program Ghandi, which airs from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. on Monday morning, set in relation to the log that the DJ uses every day to control the music on the live show (Peter 2016). With this picture of a clock and a log in mind, let us jump back into the producer’s booth, where I am sitting on this morning in June during a Good Morning P3 program. On the screen immediately in front of me sitting beside Søren, I have one of Peter’s clocks in a slightly different layout, namely as part of “the log.” The log of music and sound sequences was organized here in Dalet, which on its website describes itself as a “Workflow Orchestration Platform” (Dalet 2018) and was used by the DJ and by other members of the morning team to navigate in the premade compilation of sound sequences. This morning I am curious to learn how the music tracks selected by Peter are being entangled in the program flow of an actual Good Morning P3 program. Peter gave the impression of a highly rational system enacted by him and his tools but governed by corporate “values, formats, and ambitions” understanding the processes of music programming as part of a larger corporate endeavor—that is, among other things, as a craft made up of a network of different positions, ambitions, and technologies supporting

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Figure 4.8  A “log” taken from the DJ’s computer in the studio shown in relation to a “clock” created by Peter the Head of Music in his hour-to-hour music planning.

the overall corporation (Wallevik 2019: 101). But what happens when the music in the log, programmed by Peter and his different tools and helpers, meets the DJ and other professionals on a radio program such as Good Morning P3? Let us continue the walk-through with producer Søren, but also with the DJ, Anne, who in this particular morning team is in control of the music.

The Presenting As I sit beside Søren, he tells me that Anne is a highly renowned DJ in DR. I am curious about the fact that Søren describes and recognizes the position of DJ as something that can be ascribed special expertise and knowhow. I tell him I presumed “that music in this kind of formatted flow radio program did not need any specific person to ‘do’ the music.” But Søren responds, to my surprise, that “it is common practice to pick a DJ that permanently acts as DJ on the show, particularly on a show like Good Morning P3, that is one of the channel’s anchor programs and considered very important for the channel.” During the program, in addition to socializing with the other hosts, Anne is the one who introduces and ends songs with phrases like “Drake, WizKid, and Kyla with ‘One Dance,’ and the time is four minutes to seven.” But in addition to presenting the music in a stylized and uniform way (and hereby being the keeper of time, sounds, and music in relation to the listener), Anne manages the log of music tracks and the time on her computer. Working in the Dalet software, she manages different sound elements while maneuvering within the log. She makes changes “on the fly,” for instance by swapping tracks in the premade

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playlist. She also smooths out the transitions between segments of sound in the log, using the software to “sew” sound sequences together and make them intertwined. As part of these processes, she also thinks of softening her voice, effecting neat musical transitions, creating an atmosphere in the studio in relation to the music—and once in a while she even adds a new track of her own choice to the playlist (Søren 2016). Inquiring further into the matter of the flow DJ, I had to leave aside my presumptions about a lost link between the DJ and the music (Have 2018: 146) that occurred as collateral with the introduction of rationalization and digital conditions to the new media and radio production landscape. The flow DJ matters, too, in this setting of presenting music on the radio.

The Humans Let us get on with my look into public service mainstream radio production by continuing the story about the producer, Søren, and reaching an understanding about what music comes into the radio and about agency and flow in rationalized (and also highly irrational) networked practices such as this one. So, as I sit beside Søren I chat with him along the way. I ask if what music is played on the radio while he is at work means anything to him. He says it does mean something. He prefers, for example, not to have Danish rock band Volbeat and “De eneste to” played during his shifts. But if they are on the playlist, he says, then he shifts over to P4 while working. Actually Volbeat does come on later—and Søren indeed switches to P4. It seems a little awkward to sit and listen to P4 while we are doing P3. Still, unfazed, he shows me the texts that come in. It is often the same few people that write. They have some stalkers too, especially Anne, who has a very persistent stalker. This piques my interest and I keep an eye on the incoming text messages. Søren is about my age. He has just come home from France where he watched some of the soccer matches in the European Championship. He saw Ireland play and is full of that experience. He keeps singing a particular song that apparently the Irish football fans were singing during the match. He sings this while drumming on the table with his fingers (it sounds to me like the White Stripes). And he uses every opportunity to recount this experience to his colleagues. It was a fantastic atmosphere in the stadium, he says, and his eyes go daydreamy. He returns there again and again. He also tells me—secretly—that he is going to be a father. Not many people know yet, so I must keep it quiet. He seems happy. In the third hour—after 8:00 a.m.—I see him searching on the computer. He is looking at clips from the very same football match he attended. He works fast, then gives a piece of paper to Anne. And just before 9:00 a.m., at the end of the program, I hear Anne’s voice through the loudspeakers: “We have had numerous wishes from listeners via SMS to play this particular track—here comes ‘Freed from Desire’ by Gala.” This comes as a surprise to me, as I have kept track of all the incoming text messages. Anne’s words are followed up by a sound clip from a football match: the audience is singing “Will Griggs on Fire” in the stadium. This sound clip goes straight into the pop track it is scaffolded over, “Freed from Desire” by Gala. Søren rises eagerly from his chair and sings along as the song – Søren’s song – comes on. Everyone in the studio laughs.

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Researching Public Service Popular Music Mainstream Flow Radio When, in the mid-2010s, I began my endeavor of creating an anthropological tale about the multiple and entangled work practices that make up parts of the public service radio station P3’s music selection and presenting practices, there was—and had for a long time been—a cacophony of problematizing and critical voices assailing DR’s public service popular music mainstream flow radio programming on P3. In particular, the head of music, Peter, who we met above, was criticized in much of the public debate for being an overly powerful and unreachable actor. Further, the digital music controlling systems, the kind of music scheduling software—introduced in the 1990s—that we also became acquainted with above, was deemed to be taking “human” agency out of working with music in this national public service institution. In the public debate, DR was also accused of contributing to a massive gender imbalance in Danish musical life; the corporation was depictured as a closed off, opaque, and exclusive organization. Moreover, the production of public service mainstream flow radio appeared to be an under-researched area, which made it hard to engage in a fruitful public conversation about different aspects, problems, and possibilities within DR’s public service popular music mainstream flow radio. Music scholars had, according to radio researcher Heikki Uimonen (2017: 1), largely been “interested in radio as means of disseminating music, i.e. radio being a link in the supply chain extending from the recording studio to the listeners’ ears.” In the course of this project, I wrestle with the challenge of how to work with music on the radio as not just “a link in the supply chain,” but as a cultural practice, existing in relation to other local and global cultural practices of culture production. Radio broadcasting exists through, and also generates, sonic infrastructures of citizenship. It is a political technology that constantly brings states and subjects into being; behind the voices heard on the air are a polyphony of other voices representing political interests as well as imagined and empirical audiences (Western 2018: 259). In order to explore how radio “generates, sonic infrastructures of citizenship” and to reveal some of “radio’s central resonances and tensions” (ibid.: 260), ethnomusicologist Tom Western asks what new, multifarious ethnomusicologies of radio might sound like, what further conceptual axes can be added (further to radio scholars Bessire and Fisher’s five conceptual axes in studying radio, 2012) to radio studies through ethnomusicological approaches, and what attending to radio’s mediations might tell us about the production and circulation of music cultures (ibid.). By engaging ethnographically and through fieldwork in P3’s daily production of (music) culture, I seek to gain knowledge of how different materials—humans and things— get (dis)entangled and (re)assembled in this system of producing music on the radio. What might it “sound like” when moving around amid contemporary daily production of this important Danish public service radio channel? How does P3 exist through sonic infrastructures of citizenship? And how can ethnomusicological studies of this particular

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radio production add to a field of multiple radio ethnomusicologies, as Western proposed above? While seeking a broad understanding of the field of radio production on P3, in my research I also propose more specific questions about the use of digital technologies and software tools as well as gendering technologies in the social world of the daily radio production (see Wallevik 2019). So on one side, this work was motivated by a curiosity to open up, learn about, and hopefully complexify the rather thin stories that have been told around this apparently closed-off area of public service culture production that has such a great impact on Danish music life. I wanted to de-black box and thicken the story about a hitherto unresearched link or, if you will, a black box, in the supply chain of music circulation, the cultural practice of Public Service Popular Music Mainstream Flow Radio production. But my intention has also been—in addition to these curiosities of getting insight in P3’s music production practices—to explore how to study and gain meaningful insights from practices of culture production as rehearsed and refined in a great national institution such as DR and with all its contemporary, perceived changes due, for instance, to new digital software technologies. I have wanted to study cultures at work in institutions that produce culture in contemporary times. And I have wanted to explore how to possibly do research in such an environment, and how to grasp some of the things that can be learned from studying the complexity and the many layers of organization in everyday working practices in the likes of DR, a huge corporation in the realm of culture production. One of my main influences in this thesis has been professor in anthropology of learning, Cathrine Hasse: Organization cultures create the major part of our life conditions. They do so in such subtle and complex ways that we rarely acknowledge to ourselves how it was that we came to put a mark on the future world through our participation in everyday life at work. The connections we learn at work today become the reflection and background for material artifacts of the future, through which the next generation learns about the world. (Hasse 2011: 39, translated by K.W.)

My research is about the daily broadcast of music on P3, one of the biggest radio channels in Denmark, but it is also about culture(s) at work. It is concerned with what happens when you open the door to your office in your workplace and walk out into the common space to make a cup of coffee and chat (or not chat) with your colleagues by the coffee machine. This work is an attempt to do cultural analysis in culture businesses that create cultural material on a daily basis. Besides opening up the practices of music programming, my intention has been to study “life at work” anthropologically and to get a grasp of the public service corporation as an organizational form and as a place for culture production. And this is all in order to understand how employees at DR contribute, on a daily basis, to the making of culture products that have significance for us all, how “the connections that they learn at work today become the reflection and background for material artifacts of the future, through which the next generation learns about the world” as Hasse said above. In an everyday culture production perspective, I have sought to explore the sonic infrastructures of citizenship, how voices get into a nation, and which voices manage to get in and which do not.

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So, on one side my work engages with the making of music on the radio station P3, an important actor in the Danish landscape of culture production. On another side, my work offers reflections on how to approach, from an ethnomusicological outset, such a practice field theoretically and methodologically; how possibly to build a theory that can be considered adequate to account for the complex actions and interactions that make up P3 “as an object that coheres” on a daily basis (Law 2002).

Movements of Opening: Unfolding Artifacts, Touching Objects, and Transforming Realities When I approached DR, I was granted access in order to engage in a mutual and fruitful cooperation around my project. I intended to “run with the natives,” as anthropologist Clifford Geertz did when he gained access to a Balinese cockfighting community after an incident in which he and the villagers ran away from the police (Geertz 1973b: 413–417). In their 2006 article “Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing,” anthropologists Jo Lee and Tim Ingold use this example to illustrate how fieldwork takes to the ground “in shared circumstances”: [W]e cannot simply walk into other people’s worlds and expect thereby to participate with them. To participate is not to walk into but to walk with—where with implies not a faceto-face confrontation, but heading the same way, sharing the same vistas, and perhaps retreating from the same threats behind. (Lee and Ingold 2006: 67)

Taking a co-relational approach—one that sympathized with the overall project of public service broadcasting and simultaneously understood the premise of production as a complicated and skilled practice in an entanglement of humans and things—helped open up the field to me. I was gradually admitted into the field, along with my own theoretical development: opening up to include materials of all kinds as actors in practice, expanding on my previous practices of social constructionism and discourse theory with a materialistic perspective, and understanding the field of radio and of research as a craft. I will expand on the perspectives of materiality and matter, of objects and artifacts, as part of scalar learning processes in work practices in what follows.

Unfolding Matter in Cultures As illustrated above, I met many objects in the P3 production space on that particular early morning in June. There were employee ID cards for secure access to the building, plants, humans, positions, desks, organization structures, computers, microphones, software, feelings of being tired, chairs, coffee machines, and so on and so forth. I encountered a lot of materiality or matter so to speak—for instance the software Selector—that when studied

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up close, opened up like black boxes with many further layers of complexity to be studied, or if you will, a multiplicity of further black boxes to be opened. Through participant observation, Good Morning P3 soon stood out as a multidimensional and multifractional set of objects with lines going back and forth and to all sides and with many partial centers. Encountering the complexity of so many different kinds of matter that all entangled in and contributed to the production of P3 made me think of the show as an “object that coheres,” as an object that is crafted in the “overlaps that produce singularity out of multiplicity” to use anthropologist and Actor Network Theory scholar John Law’s words. Inspired by Marilyn Strathern in her concept of “partial connections,” Law suggests thinking about the production of meaning in practice together with the mathematical principle of fractionality. In this thinking, “a fractionally coherent subject or object is one that balances between plurality and singularity. It is more than one but less than many” (Law 2002: 3, original emphasis): Knowing subjects are … not coherent wholes. Instead they are multiple, assemblages. … [T]he same holds for objects too. An aircraft, yes, is an object. But it also reveals multiplicity— for instance in wing shape, speed, military roles, and political attributes. I am saying, then, that an object such as an aircraft—an “individual” and “specific” aircraft—comes in different versions. It has no single center. It is multiple. And yet these various versions also interfere with one another and shuffle themselves together to make a single aircraft. They make what I will call singularities, or singular objects out of their multiplicity. In short they make objects that cohere. (Ibid.: 2–3)

Law thinks of an object as something that is done in the “overlaps that produce singularity out of multiplicity.” Likewise, as mentioned, I consider Good Morning P3 to be an object that coheres. In my research, I have sought to unfold the P3 production procedures, and in my ethnographic writing I try to show how the spaces of production, through gradual involvement and insights, gradually took the form of specific places with different functions as I came to learn about the humans, the things, the procedures, and the infrastructures that governed those places. Being in the midst of this production environment, among the multiplicity of objects that cohered into objects that cohere, I sought to understand and explore how artifacts (Vygotsky 1978, Cole 1996, Hasse 2008) or “things” (Mol 2002, Barad 2003, Bates 2012) have an effect on the structuring of sociality, and how this structuring happens on a dayto-day basis. My aim was not solely make lists of multiple actors but also to create a space for reflection about the act of making lists and to develop a more nuanced sensibility about the cultures that govern artifacts in the processes of making lists—such as the process of making the daily P3 playlist. When carrying out research in P3’s production environment, I performed culture analysis around actors in production environments. Here, like Hasse, I understood culture “as a force that acts through learned connections tied to materials, [which] emerges as we (re)act and creates new cultural connections” (Hasse 2015: 252). As Hasse writes elsewhere, “[c]ulture can be understood as something we do while we learn to create connections between materiality and meaning in social and physical spaces” (2011: 69). “We are nested

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in collective expectations,” and we use material artifacts as “anchors” in these processes of cultural nesting (Hasse 2015: 245), as she concludes in her 2015 book. Hence, I focused on how culture can be studied through artifacts in processes of scalar learning—artifacts like the music scheduling software, Selector.

Touching Objects in Practices of Production Anthropologist and Actor Network Theory scholar Annemarie Mol speaks of studying “doing” when she describes her idea of ethnography; she speaks of “doing ontology” while “touching objects” (2002: 12). “Praxiography” is the name she has given to her particular “doing” of ethnography—a kind of ethnography that foregrounds “practicalities, materialities, events” (ibid.: 33). In this sort of enactment (of sensing and writing the world as illustrated above), I was doing the ontology of me cohering as human with a specific history in the world while touching the objects around me, and at the same time I was doing the Good Morning P3 program (ontologically) as a media phenomenon that was made up by humans and was continuously “done” in situations like the one illustrated above. In order to do objects (including those within research practices), Mol speaks of “touching objects” (2002: 12) when working ethnographically. She describes a “shift from an epistemological to a praxiographic inquiry into reality” (ibid.: 32), by foregrounding practicalities, materialities, and events. She talks about “enactments” of objects in practices, and in her view, the idea of objects being enacted in practice implies two things: (a) “that activities take place—but [this] leaves the actors vague,” and (b) it “suggest[s] that in the act, and only then and there, something is—being enacted” (ibid.: 33). This leaves us with a rather radical conception of ontology, which I believe corresponds well with Karen Barad’s notion of ‘intra-action’ and ‘intra-agentiality’ and with Donna Haraway’s ‘situated perspective’ of ontology enacted (both speak from an Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective). Something is only in the act. Something is in the enactment of objects in presence, and “only then and there.”

Movements of Opening “Life, in short, is a movement of opening, not of closure. As such, it should lie at the very heart of anthropological concern” (Ingold 2011: 4). Using anthropologist Tim Ingold’s analogy for life as a “movement of opening,” as quoted above, I aimed for my anthropological research to be a movement of opening up the practices and questions related to Peter, for instance, and to the automated music scheduling, rather than judging or providing closure on the issue. I wished to open up a hitherto closed field of culture production—a very influential field indeed—and pose questions about the cultural practice of controlling music, as well as general questions about the role of the individual in a corporate system of culture production. The aim of this work is not to arrive at a list of conclusions but rather to give a sense of what kind of knowledge lies in everyday being and everyday complexity when doing the music for P3, so as to open up or to unfold life in the everyday practices of creating music

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radio for P3. By foregrounding practicalities, materialities, and events, as Mol says, the studied “object” becomes “a part of what is done in practice” (Mol 2002: 12, my emphasis). In her case, the object is disease; in my general study, it is music and the human matters emerging around music in the production of the particular program Good Morning P3. Mol distances her “praxiography” from practices of “perspectivalism” that, according to her, leave the objects “untouched” and “only looked at,” with the result that the objects are made even more solid—“intangibly strong,” as she formulates it (ibid.). In the above stories from my field diary, I was “doing” different elements of the field by touching objects. I was doing the act of going to work as a member of Good Morning P3 and doing the narrative about how touching meaningful objects mattered in this situation; “touching objects” and “being touched by objects,” while trying to take on different perspectives, as described above, is a way to pursue the notion of matter in the text. I will argue that this is a way to make matter stand out and help to create a transformative text, a text where “reality is in the text and is not just seen through the text” (Hastrup 1988: 17, my emphasis).

Ethnomusicologies of Radio Radio broadcasting exists through “sonic infrastructures of citizenship,” as Western argues in the previously mentioned quote. Music is, according to radio and media scholar Andrew Crisell, “the mainstay of radio’s output” (Crisell 1994: 48). But, as Western further contends, even though there is a history of ethnomusicology of radio (Hennion and Meadal 1986; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, Percival 2011, Bessire and Fisher 2012, Lachman 2013, Kunreuther 2014, Western 2015, Ringsager 2018), there seems to be a contemporary “necessity for hearing the medium anew: not just for (re)tracing the relationship between ethnomusicology of radio, but for moving toward multiple ethnomusicologies of radio” (Western 2018: 256). My particular ethnomusicology of radio is one out of many, this one specifically concerned with life and music in radio production environments. It considers music as materiality in the sociality in organizations of production and is built upon theories that engage with the questions of “how and why,” in musicologist Simon Zagorski-Thomas’s words, rather than “the what, where and who” (2014: 17). These are theories that engage for the most part in what I would call the processual nature of meaning-making around music as artifact in practices; therefore, as in Zagorski-Thomas’ choice of theory, these theories also include the “stuff of psychology and sociology” (ibid.). In order to respond to a field of production that is best described as a complex and multidimensional affair containing multiplicity, ambiguity, contradiction, and coherence all at the same time, I have chosen a polyamorous theoretical approach. Here I seek to bring many different theoretical arguments into conversation with my studied field of production. I refer to Post-Actor Network Theory mainly as a research sensibility; I engage Actor Network Theory theories of (dis)entanglement and (re)assemblings (=doings) of

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sociality around actors in networks (Callon 1986, Law 2002, Crawford 2005, Latour 2005, Gad and Jensen 2010, Mol 2010, Ingold 2011, Law and Singleton 2013, Krogh 2016); I work with materiality and the notion of the artifact as dual material-conceptual, as discussed within culture psychology and some areas of Marxist dialectical materialism (Vygotsky 1978, Cole 1996, Hasse 2008); I bring in theories of learning culture around artifacts in work practices presented in cultural-historical activity theory and culture analysis as I engage in the processual character of meaning-making and learning in practices (Wittgenstein 1958, Cole 1996, Engeström 2004, Hasse 2011, 2015); I continue to look at the processual nature of meaning-making in practice—as I investigate theories of material instantiation through repeated interpellation as presented in performativity theory (Althusser 2011; Butler 2011; Foucault 2013); I consider feminist science studies to suggest an apparatus that takes up notions of the performativity, agency, and situatedness of actors in complex networks that can be comprehended within Hasse’s concept of “processes of scalar learning” (Haraway 1991, 2003, Hasse 2000, 2015, Barad 2003). Finally, while referring to the realm of ethnomusicology (Merriam 1964, Nettl 1983, Hennion and Meadel 1986, Blacking 1995, Porcello 1998, DeNora 2000, Kirkegaard 2004, Ringsager 2015, Krogh 2016, Uimonen 2017), I suggest looking at music as co-situated and co-situating material-discursive actor or “affector” (Wallevik 2019) entangled in situations of cultural learning in the networks that make up the production of Public Service Popular Music Mainstream Flow Radio on P3. Although I am not necessarily seeking coherence between the abovementioned theories, there are similarities in the practices that I have chosen to bring into my research: they all theorize over the matter of matter/materiality. They work with the meaning of matter in practices of life and with the continuous production of agency around/and matter in practices. They all have a very wide definition of matter and of the artifact or the actor—a definition that includes all actors in the social (as in Bruno Latour’s definition of an actor as “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference” [2005: 71, my emphasis]). Artifacts/objects/actors are understood as matter that matter, that is feelings, expressions, sounds, chairs, concepts, and so on. For instance, when ethnomusicologist Eliot Bates speaks of materials “thing-power” (Bates 2012: 373), he references political scientist Jane Bennett who in her book on Vibrant Matter (2010) argues that we must “readjust the status of human actants: not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting these powers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality. In other words, human power is itself a kind of thing-power” (Bennett 2010: 10). This brings me to one of the foundational premises of my research: namely, the importance of envisioning in ethnographic research the situated perspectives of everyday practices and production. Donna Haraway talks of “co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exists the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” and where “[h]istorical specificity and contingent mutability rule all the way down, into nature and culture, into naturecultures” (Haraway 2003: 12). When Barad writes that “[t]he world is intra- activity in its differential mattering” she speaks of intra-action and of how phenomena such as Good Morning P3 are intra-acted into existence in relation (Barad 2003: 818). So, what kind of matter do I wish to create, what kind of ontology around music radio production will I—with my particular thing-power touching on all the

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abovementioned artifacts/actors in the everyday production practice I experienced—“do” (Mol 2002) here, right now, in concluding this chapter?

Diversity in Everyday Work Cultures In my research I have studied music production at one of the biggest radio channels in the Danish public service institution DR. I considered how “sonic infrastructures of citizenship” (Western 2018: 259) are created with tools such as Selector on a daily basis in our contemporary “digitized democracy” (Born 2005). It has turned out to be a multilayered affair, best studied from shifting perspectives. This multilayered approach has given me insights into an institution that is steered as a corporation with strong rational governing of the music strategies. But this approach has also shown that the institution indeed has “encompassing tendencies” (Goffman 1961: 15) between the institutional worlds and the larger and more ungoverned “cultural worlds in which they are imbedded” (Peterson 2003: 162). Similar (critical) approaches to media and culture production can be seen, for instance, in the above-cited media anthropologist Mark Allen Peterson (2003) or with Danish media anthropologist Ursula Plesner (2009, 2016). I am also inspired by contemporary scholars within ethnomusicology such as Kristine Ringsager (2019, 2018), Eliot Bates (2012), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (2016), Benjamin Piekut (2010), Gavin Steingo (2018), and the research done in Georgina Born’s MusDig project.

Matters of Software and Programming of Humans and Things In this particular mesh of production, surely the software, the categories, the parameters, and the possibilities of categorization within the music scheduling system mattered when it came to scheduling and programming the music. But it was the human matter as well as corporate vision(-matter) in relation to these digital technologies that mattered the most, I would argue, in these complex processes of sorting out how the music would flow from the public service channel P3. The Head of Music, Peter, autonomously chose and programmed the flow of music, utilizing professional and skilled considerations and with help from his networks of skilled actors in his surroundings. He was officially granted the status and agency to take on this responsibility on behalf of the corporation. On “the floor” in the production environment, it was socially accepted and tolerated that he chose music that was “unpopular” there and seen as “bad taste” in the everyday working sociality (“then we just shift to another channel”) because he was seen to enact on behalf on the corporation’s rational considerations about vision, values, and goals for the channel. He was given a rather wide and independent remit and frame for fulfilling the assignment. He could (and did) mold the software and adjust the categories according to his likings. And to illustrate the particularity of how his particular

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human matter colored his position, one could, for example, look at the parameters he used as setups in the software. They bear witness—in my worldview—to some rather distinct underlying masculine logics of cultural categorization. Also the producer, Søren, could (and did) put in his “own” tracks on the playlist. He inserted a soccer-related track. As it was during the time of the European Championship in soccer, this subject was highly popular in the everyday sociality “on the floor” in the editorial section of P3. Hence such a choice of track to come on air did not seem daring or dangerous, but it seemed to be widely accepted and even cheered for within the sociality of the work environment this particular morning. As mentioned above (but more thoroughly explained in Wallevik 2019), the highly recognized DJ, Anne, also momentarily influenced the playlist by changing and swapping and cutting music in the log. On her last day at work, before leaving the organization for good, she boldly put her own music on the playlist. In this entangled environment, it was human matter, it was sociality, social status, and it was agency that were intra-acted within relations between “things” and their “thingpower” in particular situations (in relation to music) that mattered. On different levels of the production, these matters made music matter and made this particular system of music radio production come alive (Ingold 2011).

“My mother was a computer”: Mattering Vibrations, Vibrant Matter, and Social Programming in the Workplace The particular humans and their “thing-power” mattered when they were touching and being touched by different artifacts in the process of producing music for P3. Each of them could be considered what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls SPIDERs (Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness) (Ingold 2011: 91–92), spinning lines and threads in their personal webs of life. Human matter mattered here. But what also seemed to matter was an ongoing construction of what kind of human matter was seen as socially accepted in these particular surroundings. In order to comment on the continuing debate about gender representation in the Danish music industry, I will now finish off with a reflection on social programming, on processes of gendering in the social, and on music as an affector on different levels of the organization in this workplace for culture production. I mean to posit a slightly different take on the gender diversity debate than those we might have encountered previously. This debate often, in Denmark at least, tends to take a representational angle, such as by focusing on how much music made by whom is broadcast on P3. Instead, my engagement concerns a curiosity for how looking at everyday matters in the production site can be understood to matter for what comes on the radio. DR has diversity policies and when it hires staff this is done according to considerations about gender, ethnicity, and disabilities. So, who gets into DR is a rather controlled

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process. But what happens to the diversity of human matter once inside the institution? To me, this huge organization of culture production opened up as a great arena for internal competition, for informal recruitment processes, and a lot of anxiety among employees about succeeding in climbing their long-wished-for carreer ladder. And in this social play, music and gender—among many other things in the sociality—played important roles. According to Ingold, SPIDERs act on the vibrations in the web in which they live. One of those “vibrant matters” (Bennett 2010) or, put differently, “mattering vibrations” in this web of entangled lines and threads at DR was a persistent gender play in the social and more informal layers of socializing when working together to produce Go’ Morgen P3. The gender play happened in the form of small comments across desks, like ironic remarks about female workers’ ability to work (because of their maternity leave) or as sexualizing comments on the female workers’ behaviors or bodies. It was all quite subtle and not easy to put a finger on. It was (probably) not meant in any harmful way but it contributed to a persistent marking of the female body in this workspace, while the male body was quite uncommented upon and not spoken about (Wallevik 2019: 187–188). In this environment there were “hots” and “nots.” So-called male things such as soccer, indie music, hardcore hip-hop music, and P6 Beat were described by many as “hots” in the social and informal work environment; while the likes of soft pop, feelings, and motherhood (and otherness to the hip-hop brutality) were perceived as “nots” and often taken in this sociality as laughing matters (Wallevik 2019: 191). The area in the big editorial room where the music programs had their workplaces seemed to exert a “centrifugal force” (Hasse 2015: 294) on the female workers. The female workers seemed to seek elsewhere to socialize, with other groupings in the big room. Many of the female workers did not thrive in this environment, they told me, where particular ideas of “good taste” seemed to dominate the social interaction and hierarchy. This kind of relating—by making jokes in the sociality or by sharing music preferences—could affect who went to lunch with whom and who made important relations with whom in the corporation (Wallevik 2019: 191). As such, music could be studied on many levels in the organization as an “affector” (ibid.: 29) in processes of social structuring and in work environments of cultural production. Music was intra-acted in situations as vibrant matter used, for example, in everyday processes of gendering, of positioning, of creating personal authenticity, and of relational intra-acting of agency in work situations. These kinds of gendering patterns in the sociality of production, I would claim, had an effect on what human matter stayed and what human matter left this production environment. At the time of my engagement, the P3 music production environment had 80 percent male employees and 20 percent female; numbers that resemble the gender (im)balance in the Danish music industry in general. How […] can public service broadcasting be reinvented in digital conditions so as to provide channels for “mutual cultural recognition”? How can we flesh out the “politics of complex cultural dialogue” in relation to the future of public service communications? (Born 2005b: 116)

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Georgina Born’s concerns expressed above echo long-standing questions in the field of media anthropology, questions about the role of public service in times of digitization, new media platforms, growing competition from commercial media providers, and shifting political winds. Like Born, I engage in my work in the discursive struggle about how state-financed media providers in a future society might support a public dialogue built on complex cultural understandings and hereby support and strengthen mutual human recognition and togetherness on our planet. My engagement concerns the everyday sociality of production and it reflects on the reiterative entanglement of matter in culture on informal levels in the production of culture. By looking at the particular cultures that are enacted around specific artifacts or matters (such as gender matters or digital technology matters or music matters) on different levels in a huge and complex public service organization, the research seeks to bring forth insights into the intersections between work environment, everyday culture, and cultures of production in the Danish public service radio broadcasting of music. When N. Catherine Hayles (2005) states “My mother was a computer,” she opens up the idea that human consciousness—or other artifacts in the social realm—might be computational and highly programmed by (and programming for) cultural expectations. I would, like Hayles and many other science and technology scholars (e.g. danah boyd [2014], Jeremy Wade Morris [2015], David Beer [2017]), stress that the danger of new digital technologies mainly lies not in the technical shaping of the tools in themselves. Rather, the danger of new technologies (and software such as Selector) is in how they are used in sociality and discourse, in their social programming and positioning. When such “new” things come along, “old” patterns of interaction very quickly tend to stick to these new tools. The threats against a “‘politics of complex cultural dialogue’ in relation to the future of public service communications,” as Born suggested, could in 2020 best be described as old and well-known social technologies such as the gendering of work tasks and artifacts in the sociality of cultural production. Those human technologies of social interaction make the real decisions when selecting between artifacts and matter on organizational levels—not music scheduling programs such as Selector.

Notes 1

This article is based on the anthropological field work in connection to my PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen, 2014–2019. I studied the production of music in Danish Public Service mainstream music radio. Although none of my informants wished to be anonymous, out of ethical considerations I have anonymized the participants and events throughout this chapter. To anonymize in media anthropology poses some serious challenges since the people and events in focus are highly public and hence very hard to “hide.” I have mostly been concerned with anonymizing the “newcomers,” who I considered to be the most vulnerable in this system. Hence, I do not date my references to either field notes or interviews in the text.

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2

3

DR Byen (English: The DR City) is the Danish Broadcast Corporation’s main buildings on Amager, Copenhagen. Public service institution DR has been a cornerstone of Denmark’s media landscape since the mid-1920s, providing license-financed media content and feeding “imagined communities” (Andersson 1983, Crisell 1994, Hilmes 2012) and demarcating Danish national (cultural) borders and identities throughout the twentieth century. The institution gradually lost its national media monopoly of radio and TV throughout the 1980s and 1990s and has since worked side by side with numerous commercial and local media providers. GOOD MORNING P3 is a Danish breakfast radio program with news and music that has aired every weekday from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. for the past thirty years on DR’s P3. P3 is a radio channel that broadcasts popular music with the aim of reaching young audiences (Krogh 2018: 1). In the mid-2010s, the channel was the biggest in Denmark, with approximately 1.6 million weekly listeners. It described itself at the time as a “society channel” with “a natural focus on the music that has relevance for a great deal of people.” In terms of format, P3 calls itself a “mainstream channel” (Politiken 2015).

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Integrating new artifacts into the practices of making or listening to music and sounds alters the way we conceive of these practices. Take, for example, headphones or soundfiles: Discursive or practical reflections on the handling of such technologies, their impact and effects, their potentials, and their shortcomings have fostered historically and culturally specific modes of engagement with these artifacts. This in turn has resulted in new forms of reception as well as production and distribution practices. Around and by such living with sonic artifacts, some communities, such as the ASMR community, and individual attitudes toward sound and sounding artifacts have evolved. It might be worthwhile to emphasize once more that these encounters and involvements happen on a sensory scale. Haptic feedback from new instruments or vocal styles like crooning (McCracken 2015) provide useful examples for the affective register that technologically mediated sound production can service through experiential techniques. In this sense, living with sonic artifacts takes on the form of cultivating an intimate and co-constitutive environment of humans and artifacts. Departing from Heidegger’s notion of “the world [or the things] taken care of ” (1996: 69), one can use the image of sonic gardening to illustrate the modes of interaction and the processes of coexistence that characterize living with artifacts in sound. A horticultural concept of sonic environments could be outlined by tackling two possible misunderstandings. First, the concept of gardening has emerged in the ongoing discussion of the Anthropocene in order to promote a more sustainable micro and macro environmental integration of humans, compared to the miserable testimony of Homo faber (e.g. Diogo et al. 2019). However, sonic gardening should not reinvigorate a new humankind, Homo hortensis (Schwarz 2019), as a solipsistic agent who creates and constructs a surrounding artificial sonic world. Rather, sound itself should be accorded the role of gardener, as the mediating cultivator of a specific and coherent formation of things and humans in sonic environments. This draws attention to the sonic agency that is distributed in every situational network of ears, brains, listening devices, algorithms, cultural norms, and so on. In an acoustic environment, all these elements and inputs are sonically arranged, nurtured, and refined to form or stabilize a configuration of experiences, procedures, and concepts. Second, the sonic in sonic gardening should not restrict sound

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to acoustic phenomena (Ernst 2016, Wicke 2016). In virtual spaces such as digital archives and catalogs, sonic material as coded audio is co-present with algorithms and technology. Solicitously curating playlists on Spotify or hacking presets of digital audio workstations can be regarded horticultural practices, as well as algorithmic playlist compilation or automated mastering techniques as implemented in LANDR (Sterne and Razlogova 2019). Such practices not only refer to acts of sounding and listening; these virtual environments pertain to human conceptions of them (e.g. archive, catalog, or studio), which opens up the field for anthropological research. The socio-technical formation of sonic spaces affords human positioning. These remarks on sonic gardening correspond with an interesting layer of the meaning of the word artifact. Besides artifacts as physical items or digital objects, there is a more subtle notion of artifacts that we see when we speak, for example, of a compression artifact, aliasing artifact, image artifact, or distortion artifact. Here, certain aspects are foregrounded that lead beyond an artifact’s objecthood in socio-cultural contexts which implies specific capabilities of addressing, interacting or dealing with them. In fact, such uses might remind us that artifacts are not only made but that the processes of their generation can have a life of their own. They refer to their modes of becoming—in a negative sense— as defects and flaws. A digital soundfile, for example, is an objective artifact that can display a compression artifact as an unwanted result of its processing. In this way, such artifacts provide an opportunity to reflect on the earmarking of mediation as inaudible or imperceptible. At the same time, it also hints at the underlying materiality of the processes of technical objects. A glitching artifact might remind the listener of an audio CD of the material rendering of sonic events and their contextual forces, such as traces of wear and tear on the disc itself. Transferring this onto the image of sonic gardening, one can think of objective artifacts as a habitat for malfunctions. Such a notion of processual artifacts shows some proximity to the concept of the parasite (Serres 1982). However, while the the parasite has to mask himself in order to be able to safely branch something off for himself, a processual artifact is not cannibalizing on a system in its commanders blind spot. It rather provides a rupture that is likely to enable awareness of the processes taking place and alternative ways of their appropriation. Despite extensive efforts—in the form of technical standards, manuals, and guidelines for human behavior—manifest intentions implemented in objective artifacts and their learned handling might be overwritten in the processes and practices of sonic ontogenesis. In this sense, processual artifacts prove their productive effects in de- and reterritorializing sonic relations and objects. ASMR provides an insightful example for how a sonic garden can be transformed or newly emerge through the experiential and practical cultivation of a technological artifact. We might depart here from the idea of agency as located in humans or objective artifacts when we ask where and how such agency might be effective. If we grant sonic agency the integrative force of sonic environments, we must acknowledge how cultural and technical conditions are always articulated in and mediated through sound. Sound is the dimension or register in which impacts become effective. In this perspective sound is assigned the crucial role to effectively form and operate sonic dispositives; a shift away from human or technical centered agency that might also help to reconcile technological and cultural a priori conceptions (Gerloff and Schwesinger 2017).

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Processual artifacts are recognized deviations; they are perceptual objects that mark a difference. They can be negated, leveled, or ignored, but they can also be appropriated and deployed. Their emergence can lead to improved processing, but also to the transformation of playback devices into instruments and users into musicians. In the latter case, sound as gardener of things, relations, and collectives can foster reconfigurations and mutations. It can cultivate new relations and practices. Sonic environments might thus best be understood as wild gardens—corresponding with LéviStrauss’s distinction between the “untamed” and the “cultivated or domesticated” state of mind (1966: 219)—where sound is not only the effect of new practices and techniques, but where sonic agency is actualizing or reorganizing an assemblage of concepts, techniques, devices, and habits. This presumably small shift could help to align the previous chapters’ research and draw attention to further aspects of a symmetrical anthropology in sound. The section title, Living with Sonic Artifacts, has already encouraged a reciprocal relationship of humans and sounding things. In addition, a sonic living with/of artifacts also calls, for instance, for a reciprocal reflection on how both listening and speaking are mediated and altered. Recent developments, such as digital voice assistants, have focused attention on a sonic interaction with (sound) technology. However, humans have already sung along with music from the radio or other playback devices since their commodification. Historical research has shown that early speech transmission and amplification systems altered users’ voices and language, especially when they heard themselves speak, such as through a public address system (e.g. Epping-Jäger 2006). The same can be observed for vocal communication with recent technology that listens and talks back. In such environments, language is turned into a pure means of information transmission to feed Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and the like with processable short and logical commands and questions. To ensure communicative success, humans try to speak according to what they think is clear and unambiguous, without accent. The Cartesian criteria of truth—clare et distincte (Gabriel 2010)—serve here as a promise for a functioning communication between humans and machines. The sonic agency of content-based audio retrieval is hence cultivating a certain form of “explicit speech” (Schulze 2018). As far as this transformation also proves the technical limitations of speech processing, the processual artifacts that its heavy use, overuse, or misuse will bring about may again serve as nuclei of a sonic wilderness. Focusing on sonic agency here shifts attention to the effective realm, where human and technical domestication strategies intersect. Stressing the role of sound as a gardener is meant to hurdle the idea of reciprocal enculturation (Silverstone and Hirsch 1994) via a shift in perspective: taking seriously the agency of sound (in all its formats) and using it as the starting point to think through the relationship of humans and technical objects. Considering the musical history of car parking sounds or audio deepfakes’ prehistory of acoustic illusions might foreground a historically specific idiosyncrasy of sound— its form and logic as well as the appreciation of its processual artifacts—to which both humans and objective artifacts contribute in order literally to achieve comprehension. In this sense, practices and forms of sounding and listening become relevant in the broader context of anthropotechnics, fueling the coevolution of humans and technology (Winthrop-Young 2013).

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Part II Sounding Flesh

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The flesh is our softness and our sensuous skin. It is what outlines our form and defines the visual boundary of our body while marking the beginning of our being in the world as a being with every other thing. This flesh is our protection and shelter as well as our connection and conduit to being as a being together. It enables us to sense the world, to feel its textures, and to communicate through contact and gestures in a caress that is intimate and reciprocal: if I touch you, you touch me too. This sensory reciprocity enables me to understand myself not as myself only but as a self in correspondence: through my being with and of the world, in co-dependence and co-creativity, as a thing with other things. Here the flesh is stretched and expanded to cover others and be covered by other things, to perform rather than to have a form. This touching enacts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s being honeyed, our sense of honey’s viscous golden liquid that won’t let go of our grasp (Merleau-Ponty, 2008: 41). The conceptualization of which enables David Abram’s eco-phenomenology: the sensory environmentalism for a more-than-human-world with which we are in sensuous correlation. And it creates the proximity and simultaneity that the semantic sign avoids, but which Luce Irigaray’s gesture-words and the intimacy of recitation, speaking and singing—out loud and quietly—make possible and necessary (Irigaray 2001: 21). This section brings these fleshly connections and the ecology of the caress to audition. It extends the visible touch through an expanded listening into unseen connections and grasps the world as a volume of invisible entanglements, as an unseen sphere of codependence made visible by an expanded ear. This listening is not only physiological: hearing as the detection of sound waves moving a chain of tiny bones in the inner ear, or a matter of simple intelligibility and auditory reception, the sense of knowing what sounds and receiving what was said. Instead, it is an attitude and an attention to the invisible space between things that hears how matter moves and forms their connective tissue. This is listening as touching the invisible matrix to which we all belong. To sense rather than hear the correlations, and to be able to understand beyond the definition of things as this or that, as here or there, what they are together: diffuse and viscous, heard on the skin, with an ambiguous source but producing a sensate sense and demanding reciprocity and participation.

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The Flesh listens to the intimate, dances in the liminal, it cooks in the collective, and considers the voice of memory and the present. In this way it picks up on central tropes and themes of anthropology: the tradition of food preparation and nourishment, cultural practices and festivities, socio-economic relationships and sexuality, as well as the performance of social and cultural values in language and in rituals. But it does so from the in-between: between cooking, dancing, voicing, and being still, not as set cultural practices but as the plural doings of bodies made of flesh: sensitive to the performative frame and the contingency of their actions. Each of the chapters in this section evaluates not only what is being done, staging an interpretative reading of a socio-cultural ritual, but practices the ritual, and thus it evaluates the methods of socio-cultural engagement on the body of the writer thus engaged. They cook and dance and are intimate, and have a voice to sing and speak. Thus, they sense these cultural processes through doing them, practicing an anthropology of digging and gardening1 rather than of observation: to come to know what we are as human and nonhuman things through the sonority at the back of my teeth and by twisting and turning my torso away from the normative center of gravity. Therefore, the themes of these chapters are not considered through anthropology textbooks but through the body as flesh of memory and correlation. This body is ambiguous and possibly unreliable but political and urgent in its will to find another method for a discipline steeped in colonial history and the cataloging of the other. In this sense, these texts are not about cooking, dancing, intimacy, or even about the voice—rather, they concern anthropology itself: the need to decolonialize its processes and to rethink the limitation of the human study of humans in a more-than-human-world. To wrestle with this conundrum, these chapters, each in their own way, delve into a participatory and narrative form that is concerned with the personal as a signifier of the plural, and write from private observations into the speculative articulations of an anthropology that firmly focuses on the human while trying to be human with every other thing. This move into the narrative of personal experience as a site of anthropological study is legitimated through sounding and listening as complex modes of socialization. Sound binds us to the world as into an indivisible cosmos—an invisible and indissoluble volume of interbeing—where the meeting of our sounds performs a cultural topography of coexistence, a voluminous map of our asymmetrical being together. Here I learn to appreciate that my sounding effects and affects your sense of self, of space, and of things. And here, my sound making and listening has to take responsibility for your ability to respond. Sound obliges the reciprocity of touch and demands care for the invisible and even the inaudible. It is contingent and contextual, offering knowledge as a site and time-specific knowing not of this or that, me and you, but of their co-incidence and how we orientate ourselves at this particular point. It makes apparent that, as Sara Ahmed puts it, orientation matters. It matters how we stand and sit vis-à-vis and with what we observe for how it comes to matter: for the way it comes to be and mean. And orientation matters also in the way that “subjects and objects materialize or come to take shape in the way that they do” (Ahmed, 2010: 235). The cultural material of cooking, dancing, talking, and singing

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matters according to our orientation toward it and according to our intention of their use. Therefore, to practice rather than to study these activities involves the performance of a normative orientation and invites the unperformance of its habits and preconceptions. Following Ahmed, who follows Merleau-Ponty on this point, a visual study only ever sees one side. It can abstract and make up for what it cannot see by synthesizing different viewpoints, or it can conjure the whole from what is expected to be at its back, unseen. For example, I am able to deduce the back of a table from memory, or I can walk around it and compile the images to make a mental whole. But this whole remains an interpretation rather than a sensation and thus it retains the expectation of a previous knowledge rather than performing the contingent exploration of a present one. This interpretation is guided not by real proximity to the table, sensed contingently, but by inherited proximities: the culturally passed-down sense of what appears familiar. “We inherit the nearness of some objects more than others” (Ahmed 2010: 248). This nearness is our habit and our prejudice, which also makes things disappear. Since, just as it helps us conjure the whole from its parts, other parts and possibilities that do not fit the expected form remain unnoticed and inaudible, unable to come near enough to be felt and have an impact. A visual proximity retains the distance of cultural difference, which it wedged open with a sense of authorial superiority, historical memory, and the vocabulary of a patriarchal language. The proximity of a sonic study, by contrast, is like that of touch: reciprocal and passing. It demands we consider our orientation toward the matter we touch as it touches us, and it creates a practical proximity that senses the audible and inaudible in simultaneity without distance. It wraps itself around us and embraces us with a nearness that gives us no choice but to study the entanglement rather than the object. And from this reciprocal embrace it asks: What is…– there? (Sowodniok 2016). This is a question that cannot be answered with a noun—it needs a verb, an action, to be sensed in a reciprocal and emphatic performance, on a body, that is at once a personal and a general location of knowledge in its tacit form. In relation to these chapters, this question does not stage an enquiry about what is there, but about how close we can go; about what new and unfamiliar proximities we can create without their knowledge losing value and acceptance. Because these texts ask us to be part of the world that we aim to understand; to live in a sonic proximity that does not add up but experiences simultaneity, reciprocity, and responsibility. Therefore, these chapters demand performance rather than comprehension: dancing and reading aloud to the rhythm of their words to avoid the distancing action of an academic register in the agency of an embrace. And so we need to read them in a different way. Not to conjure what is not there through the expectation and prejudice of a scholarly and anthropological convention, as the inherited proximity of knowledge, but to create a performative knowledge of words as scores: to do and sing.

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Text Score for a Sonic Anthropology Put these chapters in a transparent plastic bag Go to a swimming pool Put on your swimsuit and goggles Jump into the water at the deep end, taking the texts down with you Read them out loud under water, enveloping yourself in the volume of your voice. Performing these essays in a practice of the ear and of the flesh, and in acknowledgement of the world as an indivisible sphere, unperforms anthropology into a discipline that studies the being-with every other thing, as a non-anthropocentric anthropology that writes the “I” as a fragile letter that can also read: ice, interim, in case, insecure, irregular, impossible.

Note 1

‘We might have to go gardening, digging and turning the earth to understand the world instead; to practice and perform the unthinkable in-between rather than think about it as the unthought.’ Salomé Voegelin, The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening (NY: Bloomsbury, 2018), 153.

5 The Voice Ulrike Sowodniok (in collaboration with Angela Ankner, Anna Weißenfels, Belinda Duschek, Holger Schulze, and Jonny Labrada Ramirez)

Figure 5.1  Ulrike Sowodniok on the Ohlauer Bridge in Berlin-Kreuzberg, summer 2014; a voice body in kinesthetic empathy.

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Double Naked, a Hum, a Scream, a Recital It was her voice that made me become a listener and a story addict. When I was a child, every evening before I went to bed my mother would read me a goodnight story. Aside from these reading hours, records with fairy tales on were floating around the room. The carpet became an unknown landscape where I sat rapt and filled with extensive listening attention. The voices of the narrators often had a dark and scary tone. They were nasal and when they spoke the German “r” it was somehow stuck in the back of the tongue as in the deep throat of a swallowing wolf. When the wolf ate the chalk in the fairy tale I had goosebumps all over my body—and at the same moment it would jump down from the shelf and eat all the little goats around me; except for me the tiny seventh goat. Many times I discovered myself pressing my palms onto my ears screaming: “Please stop it!” This was especially the case when the little girl who ate the strawberries in the forest lost her siblings and came too close to the bear’s cave. The second-scariest story I heard was that of the Holy Mary and heaven’s closed door. Holy Mary had a very beautiful voice, so full of sound and incredibly soft and spacious. However, when the little girl touched the forbidden handle of heaven’s door her voice became extremely cold and fierce. It took me hours to get rid of the cold shadow that laid on my heart after hearing this. Why did I listen so frequently to all these records of fairy tales? There must have been voices that calmed me in a more embracing and direct way. But I was never that attentive around this age, at two or three years old, when I watched TV, for instance. I always wanted to know where the little doggie—Lassie—had gone? I rushed over to the TV set and tried to peer into the box from behind, just to find this dog. I was really upset when I couldn’t find it there. So, my parents gave up our TV sessions and would leave me alone with the record player towering high above on the shelf, telling its fairy tales. Later, when I was a student learning to sing professionally, I went with some friends to a lake near Berlin and decided on the spot to go swimming. It was a more or less cloudy day in late summer, almost autumn, so nobody seemed to be around. I lay floating on my back in the water and little by little I experienced my body becoming lighter and lighter. There were spirals of sound in my ears. My bones filled up with a bright humming light. I was floating through this sound and light in my own body. My experiments became more and more daring. Later I tried to sing an aria, written by Antonín Dvořák for his famous opera Rusalka (1900), to the moon above this lake. When I finally reached the shallow water near the bank, I heard a full applause coming at me from behind the trees. I had had no idea who could have witnessed what I was doing. I was not wearing any bathing suit. I was naked. But more than that: I felt naked, doubly naked. * A hum. A chosen melody that haunted me all day. A dialogue or maybe a translation of sensation and thought process into each other. I closed my eyes to immerse myself into the world that would open up to me—a world I entered regularly, one that is colorful and organic and where sound animates tissues and muscles, leading them into an organic round

The Voice

dance. With this hum, the sensation of listening differed from that when I spoke or sang with an open mouth. More intimate and self-referential, yet more frightening due to the proximity of vocal change and proprioception. A daring task … The most striking quality that hit me with the first note was the strong sensation of vibrations of inner membranes and the buzz of the skull. My first move seemed likely to change pitch and play around this comfortable tone. With every change, I encountered a moving wave of inner touch, defined at the borders of mucosal skins in the throat and bones. In this play, very occasionally I would find a quality that felt like a metallic rattle in my nasal cavity that mostly occurred with a certain pitch. It had some brightness and sharpness to it, a directness and focusing. So this strange substance that is my voice wandered like tarot’s fool in myriad cavities—the skull, the throat, the chest, the lungs, the lower back. I wondered: Do these vibrations not speak of relations between tissues, cavities, and the oscillation of our laryngeal tissues, the vocal folds? Now then what else study but not this relation and see what unfolds, in the course of studying? I started asking how the tissues could relate to this substance touching them. The larynx seemed to be ahead of myself, even when thinking about a marked change. It responded. The intentionality was fleshly, as if my tissues awaited the touch of sound, in wonderment, furthermore in anticipation and acceptance. While sounding, the slackened or stiffened, withdrawn and inanimate tissues turned toward this vocal invitation. Intellect couldn’t offer such vividness to them. I was still sinking into sound. The strong sensation could have been located above the hard palate, behind the nasal bone, like a standing wave of light it radiated through and beyond what I knew of what I was, my physical borders. The outpouring sound under my eyes in the zygomatic bone area felt like a peaceful white or light-bluish stream. The richer the sound became, the more immaterial, ephemeral, and aural it felt and the more permeated in transparency my body appeared. I chose to switch from humming to singing the first line, over and over again. There were changes during every utterance. The focus wandered to the tongue that performed delicate and subtle movements that grew intrusive with deepened sensation. Somehow, my articulation altered in such a way that the tongue itself revealed a certain behavior of balance and supporting itself in its muscle network. This sensation was accompanied by a new three dimensionality. Just like a matryoshka puppet, the tongue lived as a body within the body in the service of vocality. Accompanied by this, an upsurge of gentle brightness replaced the concept of a darkened, muffled sound. As the muscle chains containing the larynx eased, the larynx had a chance to sink into further autonomy. With the opening up of my mouth, perception again changed as aural hearing, hearing via air conduction, could be included. I switched between a slowed, subtler articulation of words and undefined vowel-like structures, witnessing this newfound articulation principle with immense joy. One of the most interesting places in vocalization receives attention now: the larynx and the space immediately above it. In the steady flow of air and the continuing oscillation, the pitch changes or dynamic changes are accompanied by differing oscillatory traits in the body. I sensed a breathy, hissing quality that derives from the back of the vocal folds. And an instability on the right side of the vocal fold, that could be linked to the trauma of an intubation five years ago. Although brightness improved in sound, an impression of stiffness and immobility in this oscillation remained, as the lower and deeper part of

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the tissues favored the stability of rigidity. The oscillation proceeded sometimes rather irregularly and asymmetrically, with cracks and creaks. I concluded for now that there is nothing that rocks deadlocked perception patterns more than the unpredictabilities and resistance of our visceral voice. * Aki, a three-year-old girl, ran to the patio. Suddenly she screamed with an incredible intensity, her face full of expression. She stood still and waited. Then Kaya, the echo, would scream back from afar. Aki seemed satisfied, even relieved. She turned around to run back inside. From time to time she would repeat this action. I could tell that this peculiar vocal practice emerged out of a sensory overflow of movement, of affect, of existence. I pictured myself at her age, also screaming, but while I was running through the forest. My voice could intrude into a space far bigger than myself and it traveled much faster than my own pace. My screaming would reassure me that I was free yet in an intimate relation to my surroundings. Through my voice, I sensed my very own raw life energy. No limits. Today, this memory appears to me as one of the earliest traces of my embodied voice—a knowledge about my unlimited self. This connection between the embodied voice, movement, and environment is an energetic instrument. You transcend your limitations, you vault over obstacles, outer or inner ones, reaching out into liberty and the voice comes out to play. It is a simple truth and wisdom to be discovered, again and again. Suspended in a moment of joy and fear of the unknown, at a beach, on a coastline. Simply a scream—and a breeze of liberation comes along with just a leap from a rocky cliff and into the deep blue sea. * In the last row of this small concert hall I take a seat. My mood right now is curious, open, awake, tense: the clear excitement in my nervous system and my accentuated, upright position are quite telling. The tympanic membranes are in a tonus of readiness: we are ready to go. Two singers enter the barely raised stage, thoroughly unagitated. The pianist nestles up against the grand piano and her cuddling, her flowing become immediately apparent in her first phrases. I breathe a sigh of relief, deep and wide. The pianist has overcome the percussive element of the piano and transformed it into a legato, playing with the permanently subtle resonance of the grand piano. Weight flows away from me. She seems to have opened up a physical, a sensory, as well as an empathic stake. I continue to calm and notice that I am getting more and more deeply involved in the body—and also my quality of sitting on the spot is thus greatly increased. This is a very pleasant and safe feeling. I am prepared for further listening and further contact. Now the singers follow with a song for two. What flows into me lets me arrive even further in my sitting. The intestines sink even deeper into the pelvic cavity, the throat drops slightly, and even the posterior diaphragm seems to extend toward the lumbar spine. A gentle full-body stretch, so pleasant, while the jaw softens too and so do my eyeballs. My ears seem to swivel back and forth in a kind of joy over the offered arsenal of touches like

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in a shimmering wind, shifting permanently in order to reorient themselves. These two women show a high degree of development in the organization of the physical singing body. The sensory is awakened and very mature in its responsiveness, especially to the higher frequency ranges. The brilliance/vibration is recognized and familiar, and the sensory body has switched to receiving this whole fluid—instead of practicing only recognition, evaluation, or even control as usual. Through this receiving, attentive, and truly present state, the optimum brilliance is potentiated. Furthermore, through the tissues, through the vibrational and stretch receptors in them, the sound can expand as a membrane oscillation, as a material vibration in larger parts of the body. It is a pleasure to be able to listen to this stretching and being connected of all the individual parts of the body. I become whole. The path over the illuminated ears leads first into the middle of the skull, bundles itself there and then experiences a verticalization upwards as well as downwards. The brainstem, the formatio reticularis, and the hypophysis can be sensed. Sensory vigilance compresses, lures, guides, and lets the sound pass through the laryngeal passage far into the torso. Brightness and darkness at the same time represent the opened inner space. It breathes fine and freely in me. I am completely at this place and feel safe and quite alive. It tickles behind my face—and even under the skin of my larger body a subtle touch can be sensed, like a fine stream. This tingling, shimmering, soft hissing, and buzzing increases my alertness even more. I become more attuned and at the same time more relaxed. My partly conscious and partly unconscious questioning drifts more and more away from the stage toward me: What am I experiencing right now? How will it help me? What am I and what will I become at this moment? The vaporized sonic haze of the singers not only palpates and auscultates the interior of the two women, but also radiates with great lightness and flexibility into the outside space. This quality of touch (an agile and energetic vibration with related pulsation in an ordering system) evokes something almost like small shivers in me. It is a good thing that I’m sitting in the last row and don’t feel compelled to give an account of what is happening. After these first long impressions, further differentiations begin now in my system. Yes, I feel myself convincingly alive, touched, connected. Now something in me is asking itself: What is the next step? What do these two mature interpreters, singing at a very high functional level, still trigger in me, beyond the organic and vegetative? I listen to an aria of longing by Handel—and strangely enough, I feel a kind of disappointment. A being left alone. First, I check this and notice that something inside me becomes even more empty and sad. The question What now? emerges. This so well differentiated, coordinated, and unfolded vocal sound could not touch me, it could not move me? How can it be that such an elaborate, physical-sensory system seemed depleted and deserted to me? This shocks me to such an extent that my tears break out involuntarily and—thanks to being in the last row—I am able to let them run out in peace. Maybe it’s just me? Hidden imprints and untouchable sensibilities? Absolutely possible, yes. Everything is resonance. So, I sit somewhat helpless and perplexed in my slightly contracted body. Then, I hear a farewell and death aria from Purcell, sung by the second singer. Suddenly I feel wide and upright again. Something in me feels recognized. I feel wrapped up, cared for,

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and comforted. There is a certain quality in the voice of this singer that exceeds everything that can be functionally worked out. All of a sudden, I notice the lack of empathy of the first singer through this direct comparison: compassion and empathy for herself as well as for the content of the piece. In my perception, the second singer had also turned to the categories of the limbic system. She had obviously faced the layers of anger, fear, grief, disgust, shame, joy, and love and had found these affectual patterns of oscillation, which she could gradually transform and integrate through her awareness. Thus, she was able to devote herself not only to the regularities of the self-organizing voice body but also to the content of the aria without fear, without faults in the tissue, or even the sticky identification with emotions. The inclusion of the empathic body without identifying with it (just as with the physical and the sensory body) threw off such beauty and devotion that it enchanted me. That was exactly what made the difference between the two recitals! The song of the second woman represents for me at this moment all the tensions of human existence. I feel: “It’s alright! It’s alright. The sometimes extremely high tensions of being human are bearable, probably even useful for something …” It is all good in this moment. This singer and her recital touch me deeply in my being. I am recognized, comforted, feeling wanted, nourished, calmed, and encouraged. “It’s alright!” Self-empathy (wants to be practiced further); these tears are of a completely different nature. First of all, it requires a balance between the physical, the sensory, and the empathic body, so that all the non-measurable, the non-nameable may actually appear. A lack of compassion, a lack of sympathy cannot be replaced by any amount of refinement or skill in the performing arts. I had just been able to experience the foreign, the other, the deepest, and the highest at the same time. I had been witness to a crystallization point of human existence. Happily, I waited in my last row for all the quaking and waving and sounding in me; happy to be able to sit there in peace, alone and taken care of. Later I could thank the singer briefly and cordially. * The first experience with the voice and with vocalization at the beginning of this chapter was written by Ulrike Sowodniok. She conceptualized this chapter to present the results of her research in the applied anthropology of the voice for the previous two decades – in academia and in her artistic practice. However, she passed away in early 2019. The following three narrations of experiences in this section were written by Jonny Labrada Ramirez, Anna Weißenfels, and Belinda Duschek—all of them collaborators, friends, and colleagues of Ulrike Sowodniok. Together with Holger Schulze and in conversation with Angela Ankner, they expanded, detailed, and elaborated Sowodniok’s dense sketch into this present chapter. Therefore, this chapter contains the writing and thinking styles of at least five different authors who came together to present the research issues, research methods, and results of Sowodniok’s work—in the best way possible. However, Ulrike Sowodniok’s personal writing style unfortunately cannot be present to the fullest extent on these pages. Yet it can still be accessed in her numerous publications in German and in English (Sowodniok 2009, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c).

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Liberating Vocal Research Practices In more traditional anthropological studies as well as in media studies, one can find examples of research on the sound of the voice. The sound of the voice here is interpreted by some authors as a means of defense, nourishment, brood care, and sex, when considered within the framework of paleoanthropology; or as a screen or a manifestation of linguistic and hermeneutic processes in the bourgeois subject—following the interpretational frameworks of psychoanalysis (Dolar 2006), of media theory (Kolesch/Krämer 2006), or of gender studies (Schlichter 2011). Whereas these approaches provide inspiring directions on how to assess the historical or social functions of the voice under all these perspectives, there can still be detected a certain reductionism: in all of these examples, the voice is being reduced to either serving bare necessities or to representing social or interpersonal phenomena—yet its sound, its sonic body, its material and physical qualities are only rarely addressed in a systematic and foundational way. The voice seems primarily to be subordinated to a sort of biological or hermeneutic determinism: a kind of aphonic or sonophobic reductio ad absurdum. Voice is not at the center, but it is employed as an instrument. How may it be possible to escape these rather compulsive taxonomies or utilitarianisms? How might it be possible to develop a broader understanding of vocal sound as the corporeal arena of personal encounters and of social interpenetration? All of this seems to run counter the established and professional claims, assumptions, and arguments in traditional research. However, selected studies of primate species (Fischer 2006) can access the vocal sound more directly in its genuine quality. This could allow some speculations about the general and situative mental state of a calling ape and its communicative intents, especially in regulating proximity and distance. But this sort of research still relies on a form of questioning that does not access our personal and everyday experience as human beings with sounds and with our voices. After millennia of vocal practice, of vocal mastery on this planet, and an immensely deep and broad expansion of vocal knowledge, this knowledge is only now slowly entering academia, professional training, and research (e.g. Sowodniok 2013, Eidsheim 2015, Thomaidis and Macpherson 2015, Eidsheim and Menzel 2019). The crystalized writing culture, all the discourse networks, and the logocentric obsessions seem to fear a sort of decomposition of their carefully crafted cultural edifices and refined practices of dematerializing presentations—if vocal practices might actually be recognized as a major, constantly moving, transforming, contaminated and humid, swinging and situated, humorous and relational material substance of interpersonal activities in networked cultures. How could these cultures be transformed—as soon as voices are not mere media products, but situated encounters of performers? Is this too intimate? Does it hit too close to home? Anatomically and corporeally speaking, such a fear of transcending these fully elaborated cultural practices and routines makes the tissues dry, stiffens the intestines, minimizes peristalsis: one assumes a tunnel vision and is exposed to the autonomous nervous system with all its reactions of struggle, flight, numbness. The vegetative nervous system activates

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the sympathetic nervous system to defend itself against attack and to escape; and if this does not seem possible, it goes into shutdown: the dorsal-parasympathetic nervous system takes over the basic functions of survival—respiration and metabolism. The system gets solidified, the organism is stuck in an imbalance between activation and deactivation, an insoluble energetic dilemma. There is hardening and imbalance at all levels, accompanied by dissatisfaction and inaccessibility, incapable of regulating affects and moods. This corporeal analysis and critique is very much the approach that various researchers, singers, performers, artists, and explorers have pursued in recent decades. One particular angle that has proved immensely fecund and beneficial for vocal research is that of the angewandte Stimmphysiologie, an applied physiology of the voice—developed in the 1990s by the singer Gisela Rohmert. In the 1980s, opera singer Eugen Rabine, a student of Cornelius Reid, brought a set of ideas of functional voice training to Germany, and subsequently a research group formed around ergonomist Walter Rohmert at the TU Darmstadt (e.g. Rohmert 1984). As member and contributor, Gisela Rohmert enriched these findings and developed her method of angewandte Stimmphysiologie, an applied physiology of the voice (e.g. Rohmert 1992). In her further studies and acoustic analyses of singers, she detected and underlined the development of a series of formants (3000 Hz, 5000 Hz, and 8000 Hz) that have resonances in the outer, middle, and inner ear and evolve in an individual process of self-organization spearheaded by the larynx. Their auditory quality sounds like metal ringing, fine rough silver glittering, or a vertical whistling. Like outstanding queens in the realm of the voice, they point to the phylogenetic skill of echolocation that human beings share with bats and dolphins (Kish 1982). The inclusion of this kind of physiological knowledge in phenomenological research and practical training of the voice leads to an experiential and expert practice of the voice: an artistic research practice that embodies vocal performativity in its research on vocal sound. The applied physiology of the voice teaches singers and all sorts of vocal performers how to access and how to employ the actual physiological and phenomenological processes when singing, speaking, vocalizing, as well as their inherent dynamics, corporeal restraints, unrevealed powers, and their rebellious, transformative energies. Singers and speakers may thus learn to understand and how to care for the intricate instrument that the human voice really is: a chordophone, so to speak, that is activated like an aerophone and expands its vocal resonance with the qualities of a membranophone and an idiophone. The voice as a corporeal and sonic effect, in close connection to the kinesthetic sense and to a wide spectrum of proprioceptive, interoceptive, and visceroceptive activities in a human’s body, allows then for a completely different understanding of singing and speaking, of all the perceptions, observations, and interpretations when engaging in these processes. The sound of the voice provides a representation of the resonant body in sonic material as such. The voice is no longer a mere instrument to interpret or access other phenomena, cultural frameworks, or social processes: rather, it is recognized as a living, vibrant, and highly active reservoir, a corporeal matter, and a resonating memory-house of personal and societal existence and its processes. The sound of your voice embodies your aptness to or fear of resonating and interpenetration in a given moment as well as your tense muscles, your aching cranium, or a pain in the stomach, just as a simmering skin

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might represent these fears or desires. My voice and your voice materialize interpersonal relations, situated expectations, and concepts of the self, urges and repulsions, greediness or openness. Through achieving a higher degree of reflected transparence of one’s own vocal activities, desires, and pathologies, it becomes possible to perform with this resonating and oscillation instrument in a far more professional way than before. This professionalization of vocal performativity then contributes to a substantial liberation of performers. Their expanded knowledge, their self-reflection, and their refined sensibilities, their precision of sensibility (Schulze 2018a: 178–183) facilitate a far greater vocal performativity—highly responsive, subtle, and agile. However, this exciting, surprising, this often-monstrous or heart-breaking practice of singing or speaking that doesn’t let its practitioners just be some laconic craftsmen or craftswomen; the practice transforms its practitioners within its field of experience. This is another reason why this corporeally exhausting practice demands a constant, recurring referencing back to one’s physiology and anatomy. A strong sense of being responsible for this awakening of a sensory apparatus and the reflected and conceptualized integration of the limbic system are necessary in order not to drown in ideologies or glorifications of the voice, but to engage within this dynamic between focusing and devotion, doing and letting be, sending and receiving, on both sides, in oscillation. When researching the voice, throughout the body, one can experience two, only seemingly contradictory, sensations: one that transcends singers at every moment and one that subverts them all the time. It is precisely this oscillation around a center, this incessant negotiation between two opposing poles that might then result in a third, an unknown, other. The bodies of the voice can unfold in this very oscillation.

Five Levels of the Voice Body By singing, speaking, and creating all sorts of other vocalizations, an applied anthropology of the voice investigates the manifold aspects of the voice. This voice is understood then as a voice body or a body voice: The corporeal sensibilities of a particular vocal performance can be investigated within a particular voice body—because through the body voice all the corporeal characteristics of a performer’s corpus become audible. A sonic anthropology of the voice investigates the corporeal in a voice in which the body is resonating. Five levels of the body can be analyzed within the voice through this research practice: the physical body, the perceptive body, an empathic body, a strange body, and the nobody. These five levels of the voice body will provide the structural framework for this section. The physical body is our starting point. Its understanding is constituted by the models and  theories presented in modern natural sciences. Visualizations and visual representations, though, tend to distance themselves from sensory experiences and the aesthetic judgements, that is, from the factual activities of a body while singing and performing. A physical and visual concept of sounds and of vocal performance can be achieved, but personal and subjective self-reflection as well as self-awareness are excluded from this approach. The body appears

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then as an objective, yet dead entity. It cannot be experienced. It is misunderstood. But how is the personal understanding and self-perception as a body actually disappearing within the discourses of the sciences and humanities? Michel Serres stresses the fact that any scientific endeavor begins with sensations and perceptions—even though these initial observations and experiences are then routinely repressed and eliminated in the further process of research (Serres 2008: 26–29). Inverting this elimination of sensory experience from research, an anthropology of the voice makes an effort to reintroduce the perceptive body and the vastness of all its experiential materiality. It analyzes, phenomenologically, the actual traces of a vocal performance, the so-called genotype as defined by Roland Barthes and distinct from its phenotype. The phenotypical sound of a voice adheres to the meaning that is vocally expressed, the phenomena in language; the genotypical sound, however, adheres to the body, its textures, movements, and relations that generate these very sounds. The generativity of the body is stressed here. For this physical interpretation of the voice, Barthes also coined the poetic and prolific term the grain of the voice (Barthes 1972). He claimed—in a famous interview with Hector Biancotti from 1973—that certain classical singers actually lacked this grain: the soprano voice of Gundula Janowitz, for instance, had a quality of “milkweed acidity, of a nacreous vibration, situated at the exquisite and dangerous limit of the toneless” (Barthes 1985: 184), whereas Maria Callas had a “tubular grain, hollow, with a resonance that is just a bit off-pitch” (ibid.; emphasis in the original). In the texture of this grain, the bodily quality of one’s voice is materialized— yet in this texture also the kinesthetic quality of a vocal performance is represented. A voice can therefore be rough or smooth, it can be dark and light, quick or slow, calm or vertiginous. It has a voice body that moves. A voice therefore has an “appellation,” according to Doris Kolesch, transcending and subverting one’s body, unveiling intimate conditions or transgressing into an opposite (Kolesch 2006). Doing research on performativity would thus start from the voice, its kinesthetics and texture, but not from the written word in its static and identical character. This subversive and transgressive aspect of the voice finds its physiological correlation in the concept of transsensus as an intentionally led muscular sense, proposed by Volkmar Glaser in the 1980s (Schminke 2012, Sowodniok 2013): Performativity is always transcending the individual voice body and out into the whole sonic, sensory, and interpersonal environment and integrating it into one’s sensibility. “Glaser has given the term transsensus to the ability to extend our self-perception to other living beings or objects by integrating them into our own proprioception” (Vrobel 2011: 112). The muscular tone of a vocal performer is incessantly adjusted depending on surrounding stimuli, resulting in a sensible embeddedness in the world. This fundamental responsivity of the voice arises, according to Bernard Waldenfels, from the gap between the I and me, subject and object: “I hear myself—there always is a difference or a little gap between I and myself ” (Waldenfels 1999: 9, translated by US). Complementary to this transsensus, there is a proprioceptive sense, an intersensus we might say, with which one’s voice indeed touches all the tissue under the skin, the interstitium and the fascia: it represents the interioception of the whole inner body. This intersensus transfers the experience of an inner and somatic listening of bone conduction

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and tissues, and combines it with the aural listening of the transsensus. This intrinsic sensibility is facilitated by various mechanoreceptors in tissues and fascial structures that convey a passive movement, its directions and energies, into subtle inner movements—for instance those gained by a voice’s pulsation and vibration. This fluid transition between auditory and kinesthetic sensibilities can be traced back to the phylogenetical development of the ear from a fish’s outer organ for oscillations in the surrounding water. In addition to listening with the cochlea—mainly tuned to be affected by frequencies in our core listening range—this often ignored vestibular organ reacts to frequencies lower than 800 Hz in a percussive and pulsatory manner. One’s vocal sound brings all of these sensibilities together synthetically in a “sensorium commune, a sense common to all the senses, forming a link, bridge and passage between them: an ordinary, interconnecting, collective, shared plain” (Serres 2008: 70). The various sensibilities react, reflect, permeate, and regenerate each other. The senses share this commonality (cf. Gisela Rohmert cited in Sowodniok 2013: 114). If a tympanic membrane, for example, is being stiffened by an overly fixed lower jaw in a constant bite posture, then this will repel any tonal touch. Subsequent gustatory impressions triggered by vocal sounds, however, allow the tongue to function as regenerated inlet gate for vocal and sensory touch by its innervation. The auditory sense finds, in this way, its substantial revitalization via the gustatory sense; an empathy for the oscillations of one’s inner physiology also enables us to comprehend the texture of one’s voice in the body, the body voice. It is hence a sort of kinesthetic empathy between individuals that is the empirical and physiological basis for any given intersubjectivity (Foster 1998, Gazzola et al. 2006); they share an empathic body. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings, the combination of all these characteristics is conceptualized as an intercorporeality (Merleau-Ponty 1964, Tanaka 2017): It is a bodily resonance within the intrinsic and connective tissues and the endless interspaces of our bodies. It can turn listening, vocalizing, speaking, singing toward the other and the strange in sounds and in voices: the strange body. This sensibility and performativity follows, to speak again with Barthes, the genotypical grain of the voice body. It refuses to be reduced to a phenotypical listening to character strings or processed signals. It is this voice body and its aural listening that allows us to focus on the sonic environments we are embedded within. Sound surrounds vocal and listening performers like currents that unfold their tactile qualities directly onto their skin, their sensible membranes, and diaphragms. A responsive listening brings out the strange in vocal sound: fearlessly entering an amazement or wonder, eine Verwunderung (Irigaray 1993: 62–70), focused on all that is unheard, alienating, often unsettling. The destabilization inherent in this process is necessary for continually exploring and assimilating new oscillatory patterns. Lead by an empathy that is not limited to one’s self but also to voice as an actual alter ego, this strangeness is thus not a threat anymore. It provides a thread into the factual androgyny of a voice—a motivation for renewal and regeneration. Only in a very last step, in a radical artistic and sensory practice, may a voice body that is maximally distinct from one’s sense of an everyday life experience then be referred to as a positive and generative nobody. Whereas everyday life’s sensations and relations are

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replete with resonances and connections, the nobody allows a performer to step out of all these boundaries and bonds. The voice as a paramount means for orientation allows us to navigate these transcending qualities of everyday life: the voice body constitutes and alters our individual perception. Yet how can these traces of transformations be described? According to the aforemen­ tioned insights I propose three basic parameters for vocal sound: texture, movement, and relation. A voice has and is a substantial texture, and not only in a metaphorical way. The sound of a voice demonstrates and performs textural and haptic qualities: rough–smooth, bright–dark, static–moving, cool–warm, humid–dry. Ontogenetic experiences with these substances constitute the earliest experiences in one’s life. They are the foundation for world-making and relating to others. Within our bodies, by our intersensus, the oscillation and transduction from the vocal folds to other membranous structures is sequenced like a chain of diaphragms. The second parameter I propose for vocal sound, movement, is therefore continually receiving feedback in slow portions and composed by pulsation. A high vocal energy exudes brightness and brilliancy through the audible expression of vibrations. The surrounding room is affected by this, through transsensus: The movements of vocal sound can shape and be shaped by a room and by the vibration of surrounding objects. The third vocal parameter, relation, stresses the subversive and transgressive in a vocal performance. Through texture and movement, a voice manifests sensibilities, insecurities, reflections, desires, urges. It articulates and requests a continual connectivity to spaces, people, things, activities, and a density of its stimulus structure. Vocal sound can, as a form of participating perception, transform the performer and their sensibilities and receptivities. We leave the familiar and engage in the stranger, the alien, the other.

From Voice Product Design to Kinesthetic Empathy Opera singer Manuel Garcia was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of medicine by the university of Kaliningrad, then Königsberg, in 1855: he was the first person who made voice visible. At the peak of his career as a bel canto singer and teacher, in order to further his investigation he succeeded in driving one of the dentist’s mirrors of the late nineteenth century into the back of his own throat (Mackinley 1908: 201–213). By overcoming swallowing and choking reflexes, he could project the picture of his vocal folds onto another mirror that was also the source of light, so as to detect the picture in the dark. Nowadays, a more refined technology, laryngeal endoscopy, is the standard for medical diagnosis of and research on the voice (e.g. Rosen and Murry 2000). Fourier analysis also added visualizations of the acoustic spectrum to the pictures pulled out of the dark of the throat. Laryngologists claim to measure the absolute thresholds of a voice—how high, low, loud, subtle, forceful, and so on—under stable laboratory conditions (e.g. Chen 2016, Zhanga 2016). Perturbations in frequency and amplitude are called jitter or shimmer and

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are understood as reflective of categories of vocal health. Absolute categories such as these, tested under stable conditions, can again be found in contemporary teaching methods that try to apply this absolute knowledge about the voice to train singers in certain skills to become a given type of vocalist: certain constellations of the organs are here directly equated with particular vocal sounds. In the Complete Vocal Technique (Sadolin 2008), a systematic approach to develop certain of these sound qualities is being taught. Although such deconstructive approaches share familarity with functional approaches, they do not follow the quest for a genotypically, a corporeally anchored profile of a vocal sound. In these highly commodified and globally applied types of research, diagnosis, and training, three connected aspects of vocal practice are missing: (a) training in sensing and perceiving not only fixed and predetermined vocal activities but in an open and generative sensibility; (b) training in articulating the richness of a present quality in one’s own voice; and (c) training in discussing and elaborating an idiosyncratic, strange, or even threatening relation to the personal or to other voices. The voice is understood as a concise model, a product that can be sold and marketed, quickly presented, and taught. And such an approach seems to be very effective in a certain area of vocal practices: contemporary ideologies of selfoptimization are obviously very present here. It might almost appear as if one’s voice were a detachable and extractable thing, which somehow sticks to your body, like an appendix or a downloaded set of sound settings (as in the Source-Filter-Model of the voice; Fant 1960)—and as if there is not really a substantial relation of one’s voice to one’s bodily experience and practice or even to one’s personality, one’s state of mind or moods, one’s sensibilities, obsessions, fears, or traumas. Biography, personality, and corporeality appear strangely detached in such pragmatically conceptualized and reduced models of the voice. Is vocal training thus only a sort of disembodied voice product design? Newer approaches to research vis-à-vis the more subtle interrelations between corporeal and sonic functionalities of vocal practices appeared late in the twentieth century. Led by the need for pedagogical methods that would help to sustain maximal resilience, flexibility, and vocal freedom in singing, ideas circling around laryngeal functionality diverted away from disembodiment and fetishization of the voice. These late discoveries and teachings of an applied physiology of the voice built upon a variety of scattered efforts in a wide range of disciplines in order to understand the physiological and ergonomic qualities of individual performativity—including the body, the voice, and all the relationships to others and to one’s own practices and corporeal qualities. A succession of fundamental insights regarding the role of the body and its quality as a material reservoir and store of memories came from Stanley Keleman, one of the founders of body psychotherapy (Keleman 1987, 1996, 1999). In his research, he investigated the emotional and affective body, the soma, as a human’s pulsing anatomy: to understand the voice as a phenomenon in movement means also being able to perceive its different qualities of pulsing that connect it to the various systems in the body. In his writings and with his somatic-emotional methodology, he explored and explicated the central role of the body in the conception of the self. Consequentially, certain reflectory fixations are also manifested in compression and separation of body segments. Following Keleman’s more general reflections, these fixations can then also be addressed, manifested, and maybe even transformed through particular singing techniques, for

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instance breath support. The performed voice is therefore not unrelated to its performing body, and the resonating qualities of its soma percolate into its semantics: not everybody is capable of performing convincingly and with the appropriate energy, dynamics, and endurance on any kind of vocal figuration or articulated issue. The functionalities provided by a particular body and its formation are peculiar to itself—and a high versatility and empathy in performing unfamiliar vocal material must be a major goal in any singer’s education. Another area of inspiration for further research came from an approach by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Steven Porges that proposed a different understanding of the vagal nerve that connects and activates the larynx (e.g. Porges 1992, 1995, 2001). Porges points out that there is a phylogenetic young vagus branch, a so-called smart vagus, that seems to be responsible for certain supradiaphragmatic structures implicating the larynx itself. First of all, because the larynx is innervated by the vagal nerve, it belongs to the realm of inner organs. The “smartness” of this young vagal nerve now implies that it is not purely autonomous but a thoroughly connected branch that attunes the various senses to the surrounding environment. The larynx, therefore, must be understood as a sort of sensory organ of environmental understanding and of resonating relations for social beings. This can be related to insights by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who posited an appropriately complex understanding of emotions that adds various aspects to the research of Keleman and Porges. In the overlapping fields of their work, we find that the larynx can indeed be understood as a corporeal and literally embodied instrument that mirrors human interrelations. What Damasio conceptualizes as a feeling (Damasio 2003) strikingly resembles a pure idiosyncratic perception of vocal sound in a human body. These approaches from the areas of medicine, psychotherapy, and neuroscience shed new light on research that might at first sight seem to reside more on educated speculations and intriguing evidence outside of the narrow field of vocal studies. These studies, however, can be supportive to understanding how one’s own voice reacts and behaves and how it is intertwined with our life and past traumas and desires. On the one hand, one could go back to Jaynes’s psychological hypothesis—still controversial today—of the socalled bicameral mind, which broke down about 3,000 years ago (Jaynes 1976). Before this time, Jaynes argues, the minds of human beings were strictly compartmentalized into two sections or chambers that were largely unrelated—in a parallel to experiences in the state of schizophrenia: the process of decision-making was not reflected and consciously assessed, but it was received in the form of an auditory hallucination, like a divination or some other form of higher inspiration. Because the two sections of the brain—the one of planning, experiences, and memories, and the other of skills, habits, and practicing—were not directly connected, the transition appeared as a sort of magic or even an experience of supernatural power. The capability of self-reflection, introspection, and a complex consciousness was not yet evolved; this emerged only later, according to Jaynes, when the two separate chambers broke apart and then co-developed all the cultural, scientific, and artistic practices and fields that are still present and active today. Vocal practices and vocal reflexivity would have been, obviously, strongly affected by this transformation; and its intuitive practice might still retain some aspects of these ancient divinations and auditory hallucinations.

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One might also look closer at the aquatic ape hypothesis, which claims, with arguments from archeology, marine biology, but also anatomy and especially laryngology and otology, a prehistory of humanity as an aquatic lifeform (Hardy 1960, Morgan 1982, Evans 2019). This should help to explicate some of the bodily and habitual traits still at play today. One of the consequences, if this hypothesis were to be proven fact, would then naturally be that the development of vocal practices, of the whole respiratory apparatus, and of the relation between articulation and movement would have another, much stricter foundation deriving from an aquatic lifeform. Whereas both approaches presented here are still seen as controversial—some critics even claim them to be a form of pseudoscience—they do provide inspiring alternative interpretations and understandings for how humanoid aliens developed all the qualities, properties, habits, and practices that are still relevant thousands of years later. Speculations like these are a genuine driving force for new insights and more complex research initiated from other assumptions. All of these insights, be they from disciplines at the core of academic research or from diverging and still contested areas of expertise at the fringes of academia, substantiate some of the actual experiences in artistic vocal research and in earlier cultural analysis—for instance the famous theories set out in The Grain of the Voice by Roland Barthes. Here, in no more than eleven pages, Barthes outlines the relevant material and corporeal experience, and exemplifies the double communicative nature and the precision of sensibility that exist when listening to or performing vocal sounds: they allow for instance for the intersensus to experience the physical and the perceptive body of a singer—and this basic sensibility can teach a singer to employ their own empathic body and to get a better sense of the sensorium commune, that is, all senses pooled up in their presence. The textures, movements, and relations of another voice become sensible and tangible. The grain of your or another’s vocal persona can be experienced as a magical, almost hallucinatory divination, as well in its tangible, somewhat aquatic materiality. This intense relation to another vocal persona can also be, in a final step, further substantiated by research in the field of dance and dance therapy (Reason and Reynolds 2010, 2012). Through the concept of kinesthetic empathy, developed in the first half of the twentieth century between early phenomenological psychology and dance theory (Foster 1998), it becomes possible to analyze and to understand how an interpenetration and a transsensory relation between humanoid actors is taking place—even when they are mainly observing each other, listening to each other, or if they are just are present in the same space. The sensorium commune can also be highly active in moments of kinesthetic empathy.

The Inbetweenness of an Auditive Wissenschaft What does the practice and the theory of the voice hold for performers and researchers in the future? What textures, movements, and relations might emerge out of a practice educated in knowledge about the voice, as presented in this chapter? First of all, the voice can embody in just a single sound a whole story of personal cultural development—in a

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delicate and densely analogue way. However, this striking quality might be hard to bear for singers and researchers alike, as it might also articulate some of the repressed and neglected truths of singers. It can then easily become just another screen for projections of either futuristic or paleoanthropological perspectives, fantasies, desires, and fears. These vocal insights, if not vocal truths, provide, on the one hand, an incredibly marvelous gift, a rich source that leads from one moment into all the spectralized dimensions of an anthropology. This requires, however, on the other hand, a humble and careful handling because mere marveling at the sound of a voice, its mere conceptualizing would be to neglect its depth, its many other facets, its complex and constitutive bonds. Discoveries of the figurations, repercussions, and relationalities between specific singers, vocalists, or just people with voices demand an embodied, corporeal, and experiential study. For an outside listener to the voice, it can appear as a thoroughly unpredictable, but also surprisingly unerring means to explore these relations. This surprising character might seduce one to just slip involuntarily into means where the intriguing double communicative nature of the voice is not easy to handle: if you try to describe a voice, you easily become affected and empathetic; you are no longer simply an outside listener to, but a listener with, this voice. You listen to the somatic and the semantic qualities in parallel, to the corporeal texture, to the movements in melody and rhythm, but also to meanings and relations, all at the same time. It is a daring methodological endeavor to research the voice in all its physical, corporeal, mental, emotional, and sensible realities—extending widely into sonic environments, urban aural architectures, sound cultures, and biographies. A singer’s movement, their physical and emotional pulsation within the one body and all the surrounding environmental information, are situated in them as a social being in continuous resonating relations. A clear and analytical perspective can then seem too hard to maintain, yet is even more necessary than ever. This aspect of the genuine inbetweenness of vocal research needs to be critically addressed, acknowledged, protected, refined, and expanded. The multifaceted qualities of a voice and its five voice bodies (or body voices) can also be an inspiring starting point for research in all sorts of other areas. The sensations of these transformations, oscillations, and ruptures inherent to a voice can be welcomed as an invitation to assume a new research position and to perform a new way of researching. The voice serves then as generative nucleus in our culture; it provides dynamism and malleability, relationality and embodiment that might more often be lost and neglected in a pervasive culture of writing and crafting media artifacts. The mp3 format, for instance, has historically been developed only within a frequency spectrum deployed for understanding telephone speech—but not the rich breadth inherent in vocal sound. So, when introducing the voice as an experiential and corporeal phenomenon in this research, it becomes clear what further elements would be required in order to represent all this rich vocal sound in an enhanced data format, but which existing data formats surely lack a lot: all the corporeal resonances and vibrations, to say the least, below, above, and to the side of the recording range of the microphones mostly used at present. This critique could even inspire an archaeology of the voice that would then research the textures, movements, and relations in historical or prehistorical voices as documented in compositions, poetry,

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literature, the arts, in diaries and scores; it could also inspire a vocal-based psychotherapy that would focus on undigested introjections performed sonically. Our own voices, as a continuous form of touching and perceiving ourselves, can excavate and enliven past experiences that urgently need reactualization. Moreover, this would not stop at changing the format of therapy but go on to evolve the very idea of the therapist or voice pedagogue itself. Every session could become a chance to have a “blank sheet” for vocal contact. Relating to the three basic parameters of vocal sound description, a therapeutic practice stretches at the corporeal poles of transgression and subversion. A voice pedagogue or speech therapist, then, would serve not only as a catalyzer of a kinesthetic empathetic understanding through the corporeal voice, providing stimulus for mutual exchange and continuous transformation of the senses, and their ongoing critique. The pedagogue themselves would thus also be transformed. For the contemporary arts of dance and singing, research into the (inter)dependencies and the degrees of freedom in both segments could be part of a performer’s studies. On the functional level, the larynx is a hub, a nodal point of movement, respiration, several neurological functions, of perception, and oscillation of a resonating, formed voice. As a kinesthetic organ, this larynx provides information about the liberating or the constraining potential of movements and all the qualities and suggestions facilitating corporeal (self-) encounters when performing voice practices. Refining a singer’s precision of sensibility is not just a nice, but somewhat unnecessary, addition to voice practice; it plays an active role when coordinating vocal tasks in relation to the multifunctional nature of the larynx. A certain humility and aptness for marveling actually pave the way to allowing the potential and all the capabilities of a voice be unfolded, a Selbstentfaltung, a self-unfolding of the larynx in particular and of a vocal and sonic persona (Schulze 2018a) in general. The joy and maybe even effortlessness of phonation may lie in this ability to experience vocal activity as one continuous yet fluid state, a sonic flux (Cox 2018a) in which psychophysical systems can communicate and interrelate by and through vocal touch. In vocal performances with their corporeal voices or Körperstimmen (Weber-Lucks 2008), this genuine state of joy can be experienced. A few readers of this chapter might get the feeling that some of the reflections presented herein have been too speculative or somewhat inaccessible. The insights unfolded here indeed rely on a specific and refined vocal practice. This, however, is the particular benefit of auditory and sonic research, an auditive Wissenschaft that undertakes research also by performing, by listening, and by sensing—transcending the philological, the cartographic and taxonomical, the statistical, and the experimental paradigms of the sciences and humanities by going into the audible and the sensible, the corporeal itself. This studying of sound through sound integrates corporeal and kinesthetic experiences and characteristics into its understanding of sound: sound is no static object, outside of a listener’s or a performer’s body, sensibility, and persona. We are sensing, experiencing, and performing sound, which allows us empathically to receive the oscillations, the resonances, the affects of vocal sound. We are sensing and listening bodies—not only writing, reading, and arguing ones. In the words of Daniel Dennett:

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We are going to have to be speculative, but there is good and bad speculation, and this is not an unparalleled activity in science … Those scientists who have no taste for this sort of speculative enterprise will just have to stay in the trenches and do without it, while the rest of us risk embarrassing mistakes and have a lot of fun. (Dennett 1986: 151)

This fun and this daring potential embarrassment lies in the recurring questions we might ask, again and again, when researching the voice and starting always anew: What is it like? What can be heard? What can be sensed? What is … there?

6 The Food Melissa Van Drie

Figure 6.1  Janna R. Wieland listens to dough, while Carla J. Maier and Anton Sevald dance with microphones (Photo: Katrine Stensgaard, On Rhythming Workshop, February 2019). This publication is part of the ‘Sounds Delicious’ project and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 753565

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The Roar of a Red Deer and a Mechanical Dining Table Setting out on a Saturday afternoon with a friend in search of great oak trees and herds of wandering deer. Quite an uncharacteristically pastoral endeavor I think, as I stand on the regional train platform in Sydhaven—a working-class and socially diverse neighborhood of Copenhagen. The platform sign reads October 5, 2019, 12:30. I frown at the machinedosed cappuccino I carry in my hand: it’s agreeably hot, if too milky for my taste. My caffeine withdrawal headache prompted this hasty purchase at the station’s 7-Eleven, which will certainly end in the sheepish bin disposal of another single-use cup. The overground train arrives. My friend and I board. As we travel north and east across the city, sunlight streams through the windows. I tilt my chin up to absorb its precious rays, emulating the quiet passengers around me. A short thirty minutes later, we alight at Klampenborg station. The atmosphere here feels different: saltier and softer. A fresh breeze blows off a particularly blue stretch of sea, the coast of which has long attracted Danish royalty, and been a site of festivals since medieval times. This station’s stuccoed architecture reflects bucolic sensibilities of early twentiethcentury bourgeois summerhouses. We turn our backs to the water and walk along a paved pathway. A gate bearing royal insignia marks our entry into the Jaegersborg Dyrehaven (the deer park). Immediately, I feel the ambiance change, as we come into contact with old oak trees, some many centuries old. The trees have been protected here since the seventeenth century and are allowed to follow their natural lifecycle, falling in their own time. The terrain is uneven, even hilly in places. Fallen silver tree trunks dot the landscape like skeletons. It is a rare scene in my daily life in Denmark. I breathe deep. Native forests had already been greatly reduced in Denmark by 1669, when the park was created by King Frederick III (1609–1670) as a hunting ground. The royal house consumed 1,000 deer per year. Frederick III’s successor Christian V (1670–1699) expanded the park to its current size of 17 kilometers of fenced-in land. Christian V also introduced “parforce” hunting, a spectacularization of the sport championed by the French court of the Sun King Louis XIV (1638–1715). During parforce hunting, hounds, horses, humans, and horns would noisily chase a single red deer to exhaustion so that the beast could then be ceremoniously killed by a single strike of the king’s short hunting sword (See: Ministry of Environment, “History of Dyrehaven”). We diverge from the path and silently explore the spaces between the solitary trees. Devil’s ear mushrooms grow on the trunks. One has fallen and looks like a dark loaf of bread among the leaves. It is surprisingly dense and it makes a low-pitched, dampened sound when I tap on it with my knuckle. I bend down and examine smaller, delicate white caps popping out of the ground. These caps are visual signs of the symbiotic relationship between fungi and oak trees. The space between trees permits the myriad paths of sensing, communication, and feeding to happen in subterranean depths (Tsing 2015, Tree 2018). A low moaning sounds far off, coming from somewhere deep in the trees and moving

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through the tops of branches. I don’t recognize the sound, but I desire it to be animal. The sound makes the forest feel even more out of time. I smile, imagining the possible encounters in this forest where humans are allowed to roam freely with the deer. I assume though, a bit cynically, that in the end I will discover that this sound isn’t animal at all but human or machine made. Red and fallow deer are native to the area. White red deer were acquired and introduced into the park during the reign of Christian VI (1699–1746). Today 2,000 deer live in the park, and like the mushrooms, are companions to the oaks. The park was opened to the public in 1756 (See: Ministry of Environment, “History of Dyrehaven”). We approach a big field surrounded by younger trees and turn into an enclosure. We are two humans, who sit down and smell the leaves, noticing the canopy of colors above us and feeling the humidity of the earth below. I pop open an industrially made chocolate bar, crumpling the plastic wrapper in my pocket. A short distance away, four young stags emerge. They hear us and stop, turning their heads one by one to look at us frontally. They pause for a brief instant and move past us lightly into the field, unperturbed. We get up and follow. A group of six does chaperoned by a large buck emerge from trees on our right and move toward the young stags on our left. A robust and heavily antlered red deer blocks the does’ path by opening his huge mouth and sounding out a magnificent, deep roar. For a moment, everything stops. I gaze attentively at the source of the mysterious sound I had heard earlier. A grey, stone hunting palace sits on the hill overlooking the afternoon mating parade in the field. Commissioned by Christian VI, the architect Lauritz de Thurah was instructed to build a place of solitude (1734–1736). The construction of a private dining room was key to achieving this utopic eighteenth-century vision, for it was designed as an enclosed space where guests of the court could be entertained without the bodily presence of listening servants. Solitude, it would seem, literally took its roots in the form of a mechanical dining table. Functioning much like the trap door of a theatre stage, the center of the empty dining table descended down through the floors of the hunting lodge into the basement kitchen, where it was filled by waiting servants, according to the wishes of the king. Upon a signal, it wasn’t Hamlet’s ghost which manifested, but “a fully laid table replete with wine, game and delicatessen would emerge from the floor into the dining hall” (Danish Royal Palaces, “The Hermitage”). Such a table helped remove the need for servants in the dining hall. The palace’s monastic name, the Eremitage (the Hermitage), was thus performed through a theatre of machines, through a magical appearance of food from places unseen and unheard.

The Sounding Kitchen Food has a sound. Actually, food has many sounds. Food, as it becomes edible vibrates in all sorts of ways. Stop for a moment and think about the sounds of the food you ate today. What sounds of food really annoy you, or disgust you when eating? What sounds make you salivate in anticipation? Where do the sounds happen in your body, and at which moment in the process of cooking and eating? Which sounds were necessary to getting that dish

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right or what sounds combine with smells to tell you that this coffee will be delicious? Who made them? What about the sounds made in the kitchen (whether human or non-human), how do these combine with your senses and what does it do to the taste of your food? Food is a meeting place, a performance of transformations. This idea flows through many cherished food narratives and traditions. In the stories of food gatherings, the predominant focus is often placed on human actions. Yet there are myriad vibrational filaments set into motion between animals, plants, organic and inorganic materials that permit humans to eat. Sounds remind us that food is a place-event of multiple meetings happening between multiple protagonists, many of whom are never acknowledged, never sensed. I thought this as I walked through Dyrehaven, whose pastoral effect was striking. The gate and fence marked the passage into a protected microcosm, one outlined centuries earlier by humans. This place had a different rhythm. Multiple kinds of creature encounters could be felt and enacted. Indeed, in this space that differed from my everyday urban life, my imagination was stimulated. I imagined all sorts of sounds that could be held in the food as it appeared on that royal mechanical table: an animal voice floating through the trees, the visceral force of the red deer roar, the evocations of the particularly loud eighteenthcentury hunting ritual, the cry of the animal’s death, the heavy bone-cracking and cutting noises of the butchering, the squeaks of certain mushrooms as they are plucked out of the earth, the hisses of hot fat as meat cooks and mushrooms fry, the clinking of plating-up this food for a king, the grinding wheels and ropes of a mechanical table’s mechanism, the sounds of slurping and chewing, the chatter and the burps of digestion. Seeing the red deer roar and learning of the silencing effects of the mechanical dining table made me think about how sound makes food. The mechanical table rather spectacularly created an artificial separation of forest, hearth, and table. It ritualized a physical and spatial distancing between what one ate and where it came from. The aesthetics of this gastronomic theatre suppressed all sounds, odors, and sights of cooking. The laborers and those being cooked remained in the wings—this includes the gestures of preparing and plating the hunted (once roaring) beasts. It clearly reflects who had the power to decide what sounds should be heard, how, when, and for what purposes. Historically, many of the rhythms that feed us have often been deemed unsavory in occidental societies and as mere incidental background in histories of cooking over the centuries. The qualification of cooking as noisy plays a role in an argument that the kitchen should be hidden. Noise, understood here as nuisance, points to the cacophony, the material messiness that is a necessary aspect of cooking spaces. That the real presence of kitchen acts could muddle the digestion of certain eaters—and thus needed to be carefully contained in relation to taste—is bound to a complex entanglement of socio-economic, cultural, and ecological narratives. There is thus something more ghostly in that mechanical table than meets the eye. Because in habitually silencing the kitchen, in both a literal and a figurative sense, the ways in which our stomach’s demands are connected to the real happenings of the people, animals, and resources that feed us can be disrupted. Food is vital through its entanglements, and sound relates this vitality. This black boxing of the kitchen is, of course, not peculiar to the Danish Hermitage hunting palace. Architect and food historian Carolyn Steel has explored the history of

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separating eating and cooking spaces, and effects on urban sustenance, notably drawing on the history of European kitchen design (Steel 2008: Ch. 4). Situated in the back of bourgeois homes, cramped in restaurant basements, even excluded from futuristic architectural housing plans, kitchens have long been placed out of smell, ear, and sight, especially in upper echelons of occidental cultures. Hiding kitchens has contributed to how the actions, conditions, emotions of the cooking event—all registers of affect—are considered to shape food choice, taste, and nutrition. Steel suggests that this architectural separation is related to an increasing disconnect for many urban eaters today in relation to their food sources. Indeed, one could say that the layers of removal from knowing what food is made of and by whom have become exponentially multiplied, that the physical distance from food sources has become monumental in scale. Many people don’t really know where their food comes from, how it is handled, transported, processed, transformed, and packaged—nor by whom. In fact, we don’t really know what the costs of this disconnect are for health and the environment (Steel makes this point in “Cities, Soils” MAD Academy Conference 2019). These are possible ramifications of this architectural apparatus that silences and separates cooking. Recently there has been a culinary turn (Muelen and Wiesel 2017, Flood and Sloan 2019). Kitchens are no longer being silenced in the same way. Quite the contrary, it is as if the noise-canceling headphones have been removed. People want to listen in, especially to famous chefs. Often considered everyday labour or a craft, cooking knowledge and its forms of expression were largely framed within the context of vernacular history. Today, culinary knowledge is being examined for its value that extends far beyond the confines of the kitchen and traditional disciplinary frames. Chefs and their culinary creation have become mouthpieces for policymaking, educational and environmental reform, and for crafting material solutions to food problems (Redzepi 2014). Working on the complex theme of disconnect between food and its production sites mentioned above, the Slow Food Manifesto (1987), the Nordic Food Manifesto (2004), farm-to-table movements, and a budding food documentary genre work toward creating awareness of where food comes from, while laboratory food growing projects offer a different vision for addressing the strain placed on planetary resources by growing human food demands. Given the new epistemic position of cooking as a means of engaging the complexity of food issues, the frames of knowledge, the terrain and the actions of the kitchen are currently being redefined. Throughout this chapter, I examine how situated knowledge and sensory experience function in this program of cooking as activators of social and environmental change, specifically as modes for revealing the relationships people have with their food and the impacts those relationships have on others. In food studies, the interpretive uses of situated knowledge and the senses have long traditions, and are often grounded in histories of tacit knowledge and in the delineation of five distinct senses. Ideas about sound, hearing and listening in food research remain quite limited. To write a historical anthropology of sound in food is an opportunity to critically reflect on the historical and disciplinary roots of these current sensory research methods, as well as to outline an approach that engages with a different set of practices and case studies to explore the multisensorial, multispecies and affective aspects of food entanglements.

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This shift from silencing the kitchen to listening attentively has not happened suddenly. It passes through the emergence of the kitchen that listens to itself. (Breaking with the proposed sequence of subsections in this handbook) I begin with a “past” section followed by an “approach” section. I do this because I think looking at the developments happening in food practices and networks, and in practices and apparatuses of listening and sounding in the nineteenth century is helpful for understanding the politics, discourses, and infrastructures of food today, as well as the roles allocated to the senses in such programs. This first section turns an ear to how multisensorial and multimodal gestures involved in food production are documented and perpetuated, and this does include specific uses of sound and listening. I locate one example of the kitchen becoming audible in post-revolutionary Paris, which became the center of French food culture in the nineteenth century. The birth of the modern restaurant with cult chefs and the systematization of kitchen work were key in the articulation of French gastronomy at this time. Modern industrial, scientific, and cultural projects of mechanisation, conservation, and hygiene, as well as artistic research on the sensory details of the everyday all brought new attention to kitchen work and to the embodied skills of cooking. They make up a rich context that contributed to the elaboration and transmission of food ideologies and behavior at this time. One overarching question involves thinking about how twenty-first-century chefs and the ways they are celebrated for their embodied knowledge are still dialoguing with nineteenth-century epistemologies, their kitchen actions being, in some ways, complex contemporary enactments of past gestures. If my first, “past” section looks at the sounds and modes of listening in human performances of cooking (especially in professional kitchens), the second “approach” section asks how different ways of working with sound can rethink the boundaries between transformative performances of food and its various actors. Built from idiosyncratic moments of cooking, this second section seeks to develop sensory and poetic modes of inquiry that can raise alternative questions and stories that include humans and nonhumans whose actions go unnoticed. Hearing in the kitchen is not only about what is heard through our ears, such as the sounds ingredients make when being prepared, or verbal and kinesthetic interactions between cooks. It is also about vibrations felt through tables, tools, heat, or the inaudible interactions sensed between animals, plants, and other microorganisms. Using sound to explore the situated knowledge of cooking relays many kinds of dynamic contact, which are messy and not only human centered. Sound in food doesn’t necessarily respect the idea of neatly separated bubble worlds of nature-culture, nor relate only “delicious” sounds. As my opening example illustrated, sound has many registers. The upcoming pages investigate how sounds can trouble the more dominant ways we describe, analyze, and measure the world. How can such realizations be used to rethink hierarchies and modes of representation, as well as diversifying ways of knowing? I’ll examine this concretely through performative kitchen experiments conducted in 2019 that conflate the sound studio and the kitchen. Intermingling the experience of microphones directly with cooking creates a new visceral register through which different rhythms can be felt, and multiple life dances noticed (Tsing 2015: 248).

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Embodied Framings of a Sonic Gastronomy In A Feast for the Ears: A Sonic Approach to Gastronomy broadcast on L’atelier de la création radio program for France Culture on June 11, 2013 (Gaxie 2013), French composer Sébastien Gaxie offers a fascinating and concrete entry for working with the materiality of sound in practices of cooking. A study of this radiophonic work and its creative process raises various questions about using a sonic perspective for studies of the gustatory. Accompanied by a group of professional sound engineers, Gaxie took microphones into the Pierre Gagnaire Restaurant rue Balzac in Paris. Source recordings were made by placing microphones both in the kitchen, where the restaurant’s eponymous chef was at work, around a table in the dining room, where professional actors were recorded eating one culinary creation after the next. In an introductory interview broadcast before the work’s premiere, Gaxie expressed his interest in sonically exploring the contrasts between what one can experience during a meal and the distance this can have from the reality of the kitchen. Listening into a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, such as Gaignaire’s, Gaxie considered how the world of the meal is about delectation, while the world of the kitchen is one of agitation (Gaxie 2013: 01:45–02:09, my paraphrase from the original French). In the forty-minute composition Gaxie uses musical instrumentation, a juxtaposition of musical styles, and poetic-dramatic verbalizations to bring out textures and happenings of the source recordings, alternating between the separated kitchen and dining spaces. Of the ideas driving his compositional exploration, Gaxie says:1 The music helps accentuate the instant. There is a sort of game of mimicry where all the intonations, all the very small noises of cooking cutlery are taken by a [musical] instrument … The music comes to reveal all the small details, which in a way make sense. There is a phrase of Chekhov that I like a lot which says that the role of the artist is to have a talent, which is to say to be able to notice [to detect], for the important details of that which is considered insignificant. These important details play together in the smallest instants and this permits this kind of writing. (Gaxie 2013: 02:37–03:30, my translation)

Gaxie’s musical approach for revealing meaning in the sounds of site-specific movements and materials resonates with Chef Pierre Gagnaire’s own description of his culinary poetic language. A key inspiration for his culinary creations involves “tenderly” cultivating an attentive, multisensorial relationship with the matière première, or the raw material of food and the nuances of its transformative processes (this is expressed in multiple interviews and in Gagnaire’s mission statement on his restaurant website, see Gagnaire 2020). As one listens to the radiophonic work, a culinary vocabulary (hot, spicy, pungent, etc.) is theatrically woven between the dining room and the kitchen happenings: between the actors who eat and verbally express their taste experience as they do so, and the musical instrumentation that suggests affective links between taste and sound (Gaxie 2013, 05:40– 07:30). Indeed, the listener has the sensation of moving between the discursive realm of description that makes up eating and the mainly non-verbal and bodily realm of the

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making. If the sounds of the performative modes of the eating and the making are highly contrasted, affinities are also explored between the two sites. The mix of materials, gestures, and commands of the kitchen create nuanced rhythms, textures, and modulating tempos. Even chef Gagnaire’s rapid, brief vocal commands that punctuate the kitchen action sound like precisely attacked notes. The specific circumstances of Gagnaire’s restaurant as an aesthetic project of fine dining, one that is accessible to an elite few, is not lost on Gaxie. The work’s stylized pastiche of musical and poetic forms aims to create a spectacular ambiance, that of “a particular lieu [place] that reflects a certain era,” explains Gaxie. This work has modernist echoes and pairs the menu with contemporary classical music, jazz, a pop song, a poetic-philosophic monologue of chef Gagnaire, himself, and a cinematographic instrumentation for dessert (Gaxie 2013, 03:30–04:30). Gaxie’s composition aestheticizes the constructive side of kitchen work and underlines the virtuosic, artistic capacities of great chefs. A Feast for the Ears also cultivates an approach and vocabulary for using sound to make sense of the material happenings in the kitchen and their multiple registers of affect. Telling the story of cooking through sensation and detail coincides with a larger trend in chef narratives that celebrates the nuanced tacit knowledge and bodily gestures of chefs who cook from scratch; this is explored in various Netflix series and food documentaries, which I will refer to more specifically below. In the citation above, Gaxie refers to Russian playwright and novelist Anton Chekov’s (1860–1904) artistic practice “to notice [to detect]… the important details of that which is insignificant.” This connects his compositional approach and Gagnaire’s culinary sensibilities with certain artistic practices rooted in late nineteenth-century symbolism-naturalism. To notice the important details of the insignificant describes part of the nineteenthcentury occidental worldview that developed new technologies, methods, and institutions of observation and categorization. The movements of mechanical objectivity and symbolismnaturalism belong to scientific and artistic laboratories that created new representational forms, interpretive categories, and registering apparatuses. These developments permitted studying phenomena through a whole new set of modes, practices, and disciplines that made visible the invisible, fixed the fleeting, revealed the workings of Nature, and explored simultaneity through joining disparate spaces and times. As an influential capital at the time, Paris was one epicenter of such experimental research and its applications. Food production became one topic explored by fin-de-siècle artists seeking, like Chekov, to capture immediate sensations of everyday life. Through his fiction, Émile Zola contributed to the movement of naturalism, producing a case study in 1872 called “Le Ventre” (The Stomach), an ethnographic study of nocturnal life at Les Halles, the central market of Paris (Zola 1993). At the Theatre Libre in Paris in the 1890s, director André Antoine (1858–1943) staged Les Bouchers (The Butchers) by Fernand Icres (1856–1888). Hanging real carcasses of beef and spreading offal all over the stage, Antoine sought to create a realist portrayal of ordinary life. A scenery of everyday objects and raw food materials was intended to create visceral sensations and smells of an actual butcher (Schumacher 1996: 5). The audience no longer focused only on hearing actors speak text but engaged in different sensations of odors, sounds, movement and light. To further the realistic effect, actors of this play turned their

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backs to the audience—this is an example of the staging mechanism of the fourth wall. From a darkened auditorium the audience watched the fictional action as if unseen. Such staging techniques mark the beginning of modern scenography. This example of the theatrical fourth wall is another new fin-de-siècle observational device that like the technologies (photography, phonography, microphones, cinematography), institutions (museums, archives, public educational institutes, exhibitions), and disciplinary approaches (such as, anthropology) developing at this time shaped the framing of encounters and modes of perception. Simultaneously, the sites and epistemologies of food production greatly changed. Broadly, the industrialization of agriculture, new sites and regulations of meat production, the discovery of microbes (germ theory, the process of pasteurisation, hygenic measures), and new modes of transportation (railroad and steamboats) all altered the physical landscape of food and its relations. The centralization of French food culture to Paris corresponded to these developments. This meant, for example, that the capital controlled the regulation of agricultural seasons of regional (terroir) products (Aron 2013: 138–139); or that meat production was concentrated at the massive slaughterhouse La Villette in Paris on the railroad tracks that transported livestock into the city and meat out of the city (Claflin 2008). The elevation of the modern chef as expert, the establishment of the restaurant as the site of culinary art, and the formalization of French gastronomy happen within this context. The elaboration and propagation of French gastronomy relied on the construction of an educational and structural model of kitchen work that could assure repeatability. Fully in line with nineteenth-century military and institutional projects, French chef Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) organized the kitchen into a “brigade” system that divided food preparation into different tasks according to a strict hierarchy (Drouard 2019). The ordering of the kitchen through the development of a clear chain of command and disciplined techniques that could be easily adapted everywhere were key to the establishment of the authority of French cuisine at the turn of the twentienth century. The sound of the military call “Service!” and its response “Yes, chef!” characterizes this brigade kitchen and continues to to be used today. “Service”—“Yes chef ” is a visceral gesture of the lasting, if changing, impact of this kitchen project on contemporary chef culture and discourse. The figure of the great chef who is capable of culinary invention is a composite of highly disciplined bodily training, endurance and efficiency; intensive knowledge of products; as well as cultivating highly developed senses and attention to detail that permits poetic creation. One aspect of my current EU research project “Sounds Delicious: A Historical Anthropology of Sound and Listening in Danish and French Kitchens” explores such links between old French gastronomy and new Nordic gastronomy. In Refshaleøen, a recently reconverted industrial area of Copenhagen, the executive chef Matt Orlando (formally sous chef at Noma) opened his own restaurant called Amass. This restaurant concept focuses on no waste, lowering the kitchen’s carbon footprint, and bringing the diner into proximity with local food—in some cases grown just outside the restaurant. Set in a cavernous former factory space, the kitchen is open. Many of the processes of preparation in this restaurant are based on different slow cooking, fermentation, and curing techniques, which happen outside of the time of the meal. The diner encounters big pieces of fermenting meat in a glass case upon arrival. When I ate at this restaurant in

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June 2019, I was aware of small teams working together in the kitchen. They appeared to be concentrated on the aesthetic assembling of these ingredients, which were in different phases of transformation. Those gestures were a vision of masterful choreography. Precise, detailed, and rapid, they were effectuated in a spacious kitchen. It seemed almost like a pantomime with the pulsating rap, industrial, and dance music in the background. Then suddenly the sous chef started the short and swift call and response: “Service”—“Yes chef!” that drew attention to the kitchen. These words set the tempo. Their history speaks of the discipline and training of bodies of professional kitchen work. During his visit to our table, I asked Matt Orlando why this call and response happened, as it didn’t seem that the commands were regular nor functioning in their normal way. Matt nodded and explained that he wanted to bring the team together energetically and consciously in their work (Van Drie, “Conversation with Matt Orlando,” fieldnotes 2019). Eating at this restaurant was a theatrical performance. This rewriting of the brigade command into a dramatic punctuation brought focus to the visual rhythms of the kitchen work being done with mastery. In our conversation about the role of the senses in the kitchen, Matt said that he had learned about the importance of non-verbal affect that happens between colleagues while working in Noma’s kitchen. The team didn’t really need the commands to order the work, as they were performers together; rather, it was a way of emphasizing that connection and drawing attention to the task at hand. The commands that are traditionally private for the closed kitchen were here allowed to be present, like staccatos, in the event of eating. If the Enlightenment aesthetics of the mechanical table suppressed signs of embodied work, noticing the non-verbal work of food making corresponds to those key gestures of modernity that I mentioned above—which reveled in making accessible natural and human phenomena that were hitherto invisible and bringing attention to the sensuous experience of food’s materiality. It is interesting to keep this apparatus of order and productivity of the brigade in mind when considering professional chef ’s accounts of how listening functions in the kitchen and in the roles of sound in cooking. Within the brigade model there is a specific delineation of tasks and kitchen skills. Yet when chefs share accounts of how they listen in the kitchen and for what reasons, the multisensorial and personal aspects of cooking work arise, complicating the linear and efficient productivity model. Chef Titti Qvarnström is the first woman to receive a Michelin star in the Nordic edition of the guide. Living in Malmö, Sweden, Titti is head chef at the restaurant Folk Mat & Möten. One grey winter day, I asked Titti what role listening plays in her cooking (Van Drie, “Conversation with Titti Qvarnström,” fieldnotes 2019). Titti was silent for a moment as she considered the unfamiliar and “nerdy” question. Then she explained that the nature of her job means she often turns her back on the kitchen. She said she can hear very distinctly if something is not being cooked correctly, if some act is out of alignment. Chef Titti then mentioned that the sounds of temperature are peculiar, especially water at different heats has very specific sonic qualities. I immediately had the image of Chef Titti as a chef d’orchestre whose ears were constantly monitoring and diagnosing the various sounds of kitchen stations, attentive to any subtle variance in tonality. What if turning one’s back and listening to what is behind, to the background, is the listening posture that

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defines professional kitchens? Such a listening posture resonates with this idea in other stories of sonic and visual art in modernity of bringing the background to the foreground. I’ll develop this idea of “listening behind” in the next section. The depth of Chef Titti’s knowledge of food processes and the actions of non-human materials emerged in the nuanced detail of her reflections, which went far beyond the kitchen. Chef Titti looks at cooking holistically and is interested in connecting, through cooking, with the environment around her. On a different meeting, we went foraging along the Swedish seashore. Titti showed me various plants and herbs, explaining their properties and flavors. She explained that sometimes she can’t put into words how she knows certain plants, she just knows. She also told me that she prefers hunting to fishing due to the difference of smells of the animals’ blood. This revealed the importance of a certain sensory experience and embodied knowledge of animals and ingredients I hadn’t considered before. Today, as the kitchen becomes a literal stage that is being explored for its potential to educate and catalyze changes on different levels of society, getting people to cook through their senses corresponds to one performative approach for deepening awareness of the impact of food relationships. As I mentioned above, this entails becoming aware of embodied skill. Within professional and more widespread representations and discourses of cooking, the idea of listening to one’s food is very recent. Danish chef Rene Redzepi explicitly incited people “to listen” to food in his introductory statement at the MAD Monday meeting in Copenhagen in late October 2019 (“Cities, Soil” 2019). Different cooking shows are nowadays creating listening pauses in order to bring attention to this sensory perspective. Perhaps the most salient is the American-Iranian chef Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat cookbook and Netflix mini-series (2017). Nosrat’s cookbook (2017) attests of a style of cooking that gets intimate with a knowledge of ingredients and using one’s senses as the predominant gauges of quality: I saw how good cooks obeyed sensory cues, rather than timers and thermometers. They listened to the changing sounds of a sizzling sausage, watched the way a simmer becomes a boil, felt how a slow-cooked pork shoulder tightens and then relaxes as hours pass, and tasted a noodle plucked from boiling water to determine whether it’s al dente. In order to cook instinctually, I need to learn to recognise these signals. (Nosrat 2017a: 133)

This cookbook citation nearly reads as an ethnographic, situated impression of cooking a meal, describing multiple activities happening simultaneously at different speeds. Nosrat notes that time and rhythm are key components to deliciousness. Here all the senses are constantly engaged in recognizing sensory cues and performing different gestures of tasting, feeling, smelling, and hearing. Themes of cooking through one’s own intuitions and embodied knowledge, the locality of the food source, and preserving traditional techniques are recurrent in Nosrat’s book and emphasized in the Netflix episodes. Particularly in the filmed series, Nosrat’s ways of locating sensory experience in cooking can tend towards a pastoral or romanticized representation of food, especially through its framings of ‘terroir’, which may seem disconnected from the realities of many kitchens. However, the interest

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of Nosrat’s approach for this study is how she qualifies hearing for chefs and her interest in making this knowledge widely available. Hearing can be important when other senses can’t be used, Nosrat explains, such as taste or vision. One can use hearing to tell if food is cooked through (Nosrat 2017a: 187). Nosrat’s incitements to stop and listen are often used to make us slow down and notice the more subtle details of food’s materiality: … there are different qualities of sizzle … once sizzling slows and becomes more pronounced and aggressive, it’s a sputter. Sputtering is a sign that there’s a lot of hot fat present, and can often mean that it’s time to tip some fat out of the pan, flip the chicken breast to the other side, or pull the browning short ribs out of the oven. (Nosrat 2017a: 189)

While this seems simple, the description illustrates an expert ear, which knows how to determine the slightest change in the food’s state through the sound of its meeting with a heat source. Training the senses in cooking is a way to change attitudes. For Nosrat, the attention to sensory work brings presence and proximity to the food. It is a conscious entangling. This somatic and poetic approach of reconnection enlists listening to create a literal pause in practices and reveals the professional chef ’s highly cultivated sensory apparatus. There are also histories of sounding. During the Noma MAD Food Festival in Copenhagen in 2016, legendary French chef Jacques Pépin performed the deboning of a chicken (Pépin 2016). The crack of the bone and its removal from the carcass was so clean and effortless that the audience of food professionals literally gasped and applauded (Pépin 2016: 09:28). It was one of the most harmonious culinary gestures I’ve witnessed (I saw this performance on video). It is through the master chef ’s performance of specific gestures in an isolated staging that sounds can become iconic of particular techniques and be perpetuated in the current lexicon of cookery knowledge. The celebration of Pépin’s bone cracking recalls that violent acts in the kitchen are in fact ordinary and that many of us are desensitized to them. Professional cooks are habituated to butchering animals while many people currently buy packaged, unlabeled cuts of meat at the supermarket. The distantiation of urban dwellers from the performance of slaughter was influenced by the movement of abbatoirs out of the centre of cities and their industrialization— as the aforementioned example of the establishment of La Villette slaughterhouse did to late nineteenth-century Parisians. The sonic dimensions of food preparation that I have presented here are mainly constructive and are often associated with proximity, with nostalgia, with the pastoral, with intimacy, and more recently with meditative work in silence. Yet the kitchen also emits sounds of violence against other humans, animals, and the environment. Kitchens sound of danger, stress, mess, mass production, and industrial waste (Bourdain 2000). The recent outing of abuse and sexism in professional kitchens and a growing concern with building support systems for workers in the 2010s and onwards, has been one effect of listening in to the real kitchen. Like all the senses, listening is not neutral: it is historically bound and culturally situated. When elaborating ideas about how listening works in the kitchen, it is also important to ask where the listening apparatus comes from, how and for what purpose it is constructed, and what are its limitations? “Every configuration of hearing and sounding implies power, people, placement” writes Jonathan Sterne (2015: 72).

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A Dancing Microphone in a Moving World As the previous, “past” section showed, certain discrete sounds make up culinary techniques or function as sensory cues when preparing particular recipes: whether it be tapping bread and listening to its hollow knock to discern if it is fully baked, gauging if mustard seeds have opened by the intensity of their pop, or a warning signal shouted by a fellow chef coming around a corner. Each of these moments or cues is an indeterminate performance. The resonant qualities of tools, ingredients, technologies, and surfaces are all aspects of this performance; they are important features of a kitchen. The ways those elements are rhythmed reflect something about the movements and dynamic exchange between the protagonists involved, as well as the routineness of their encounter and even about their cultural situation in time and place. Bringing attention to the sounds and rhythms of a kitchen can thus reveal much about a style of cooking, the technological design of the space, the techniques, and resources of the cooks. If I have just described the capacity of sound to reveal different relational affinities or antagonisms happening in food, simply listening to the sounds alone quickly becomes limited. I think this has something to do with how sound recordings are defined as ethnographic and historical sources. There is a problem with the notion of the sound archive for certain disciplines, which upholds a linear process of observation through recording, playback and analysis—and which separates these activities. Consider the early recording situations of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthropologists encountering their “subjects” of research. For those working in sound, the apparatus of early phonographs demanded a face-to-face configuration, with a big horn being stuck between the subject being recorded and the researcher doing the recording. Later, stories of burdensome recording technologies, some with lots of wires, limited batteries and large microphones, affected the physical setup of interviews and extent of participant observation. Today, such technical problems no longer exist. Microphones can be set up discretely so as not to disturb the recorded environment, from kitchens to underwater worlds. Portable field recorders permit movement, but still have a physical and noticeable presence. Yet the separation of acts between making a recording and listening to the playback often persist. Even in sensory and emplaced research, it is easy to go straight to listening to and analysing recordings. This is a listening outside of the context of making. Forgetting to fully reflect on the technical setup, the technique, and the bodily circumstances of the act of recording—its emplaced experience—ignores a whole set of non-verbal practices of the researcher; and maybe, even worse, creates a distance. Is this actually a prolongation of the traditional observational frame? Could this also restrict the potential of the art of microphonic recording to consciously notice multiple rhythms in the cooking story? What if we include the real encounters of the bodily performance of the microphone within cooking research? Hearing, Jonathan Sterne remarks, implies “a medium for sound, a body with ears to hear, a frame of mind to do the same, and a dynamic relation between hearer and heard that allows for the possibility of mutual effects” (2015: 65). I think paying attention to

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the situation of recording, and what it picks up, can be a way of better considering the dynamics of interactions of sound in food. In making the microphone a full participant in research, the ethnographic event becomes performative and even embraces theatricality. I think that facilitating these kinds of performative situations can help people become suddenly aware of their own situation and their sensory experience, and perhaps imagine other perspectives in that same space. This “approach” section is really about reflecting on how to further develop research methods that give more room and legitimacy to sensed and emplaced experience. This should include descriptions of grounded circumstance, techniques, gestures and impressions that are parts of felt experience. Artistic work on performative practice and situated knowledge is a rich resource for such an approach and should be taken more seriously for its methodological potential by historians and anthropologists. One anthropologist who does draw on art practices is Anna Tsing: “The trick of cooking is in the bodily performance, which isn’t easy to explain. The same is true for mushroom picking, more dance than classification. It is a dance that partners with many dancing lives” (2015: 248). In the context of my current research project “Sounds Delicious,” I’ve been experimenting with the creation of performative microphonic interventions in cooking. Here the microphone is given an exploratory and participant role. The physical gestures and embodied experience of recording intertwine with those of cooking. Making sounds predominately with the hands, not the voice, is perhaps the foremost impulse emerging from work in the kitchen. Perhaps this also goes for working with a field sound recorder. Cultural theorist Carla J. Maier (specializing in transcultural music and sound art) and I conducted various experiments during a workshop in February 2019 and a master seminar in November 2019; we built both events together. In these events we intentionally defined the kitchen and cooking as the space for academic research and shifted focus to “doing and performing” before “thinking.” The preparatory acts included both stocking the kitchen and technically arranging microphones. This made the experience feel staged. The first workshop “On Rhythming: Sensory Acts and Performative Modes of Sonic Thinking” was held on February 20, 2019 in a big teaching kitchen at the KBH Madhus (the Copenhagen Food House). The building where the Copenhagen Food House kitchen is located was originally a soap factory throughout the nineteenth century. Part of the meat-packing district, it sourced certain animal products for soap production. This kitchen is professional and has multiple stations for preparation and cooking (stainless steel countertops, gas stoves, glass and metal utensils). Twenty scholars and artists gathered to cook a four-course meal that was conceived by chef Titti Qvarnström and myself. This meal was vegetarian, seasonal to Denmark and Sweden, and involved distinct, familiar-sounding techniques. We made green kale and potato soup with egg (Swedish version), fresh pasta for vegetarian lasagna, red beet, rutabaga, and goat cheese salad, aebleskiver with cream. The participants chose their own teams based on which station and dish appealed to them. Carla J. Maier and Anton Sevald, a sound engineer at the University of Copenhagen, set up one Zoom 6 recorder as a static microphone conspicuously in the center of the room. This continuously

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recorded the cooking of the meal. Two additional handheld Zoom field recorders were used by “designated” sound-recording participants (I was one of these) who moved among participants who cooked. During the course of the meal, different participants who cooked took moments to use the field recorder to move around the space. Various sorts of sonic interventions happened in this space. One participant, Janna R. Wieland, after making many aebleskiver, described her moment of listening through the field recorder as striking in how much awareness the microphone brought through its direct intervention in the process: “What I liked by listening to sounds of our own cooking with headphones was that it revealed sounds that would otherwise have remained hidden and unheard, so some sounds became suddenly so clear and sharply audible … it made us move around and position ourselves differently” (Van Drie, “On Rhythming,” Fieldnotes 2019). Both her repeated actions and then the change in dynamic through the field recorder worked to create this new perspective. It gave a novel sensation of the material and practicebased happenings in the kitchen. In such experiments, one is encouraged to engage the many aspects of hearing that are not only based in the ears. When Carla J. Maier and I redid this experiment with Master’s students at the University of Copenhagen for a course called “How We Rhythm Worlds: Concepts, Representations, Practices,” we encouraged this movement between cooking and recording in order for the students to play with the change of perspective and notice their actions. Moving between physical modes of doing and creating spatial distances all form the experience and reveal different kinds of contact in such an encounter. As an amateur to the techniques of recording in this situation, I was conscious of my fumblings with the recorder and of not being entirely sure of my own rhythms, movements, and spatial position in relation to the food. I was thus erratic in my technique, always changing my gestures, which felt unhabitual. These listening moments in the kitchen with the microphone were not static. Visual artist Katrine Stensgaard filmed the “On Rhythming” workshop described above. Focusing her camera lens on a boiling pot, or hands kneading dough, she showed different rhythms at play on ingredients. Watching Katrine’s video of the event is like seeing a completely different life dance than the one I perceived. Her video brings attention to a situation where certain main actors in the meal cook quietly in their own nuanced way. Particularly striking is one shot of the pot of potatoes boiling. We notice a trembling potato in simmering water. Around this swirls a much bigger environment that includes bits of human conversation and the noises of other materials (Stensgaard 2019). The sounds are not ordered like in a television show demonstration or documentary. The scale and rhythm of this food has a different quality. Katrine Stensgaard is also a good cook, and like Titti Qvarnström or Samin Nosrat, she shows a refined attentiveness to the ingredients and a unique register of contact through her audiovisual listening. It was the exploratory gesture of recording that held meaning in thinking about the agency of food, and especially concerning what modes of representation could help reveal this agency. These examples point to how sound reveals gestures of food as dynamically relational, allowing for the possibility of mutual affect. Cultural theorist Jane Bennett has pointed out that many of our food narratives still uphold basic (traditionally anthropological) oppositions of humans being active and non-human food being inactive:

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The slow food program involves taking the time not only to prepare and savour the food, but also to reflect on the economic, labour, agricultural, and transportation events preceding its arrival to the market. In this way it endorses a commodity-chain approach to food that chronicles the “life-history” of a food product and traces “the links that connect people and places at different points along the chain.” But the assemblage of slow food could be strengthened further, I think, if it broadened its focus beyond the activities of humans. It tends to perceive of food as a resource or means, and thus to perpetuate the idea that nonhuman materiality is essentially passive stuff, on one side of an ontological divide between life and matter. To the extent that we recognize the agency of food, we also reorient our own experience of eating. (Bennett 2010: 51)

The capacities food and cooking have to alter corporeal constitutions show the transformative power of food encounters. The odors of French cheese, fermented tofu, or, for Anna Tsing, the smell of matsutake mushrooms are pungent examples of how the senses can be altered through encounters of fermentation and fungus: Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form was not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter. Humans and fungi share such hereand-now transformations through encounters … the smell of matsutake transformed me in a physical way. (Tsing 2015: 47)

One of the challenges in this field of enquiry is to find modes that encourage awareness of these physical transformations and can reorient eating. Stopping to take note of processes of fermentation is another interesting path to explore. Listening to my kefir gurgle for the first time made me truly understand that this fermentation process had a performative life of its own, one that was different in nature to rotting apples (for example). My nose can show me the difference as can my stomach, but I personally realized this through the sounds. And it was a pleasurable experience. What other sorts of physical transformation by food are revealed when the experience of sound is brought into the foreground? How can we consciously entangle through sound?

Disrupted Thoughts on Foraging, Marketing, Cooking, Plating, Eating The first COVID-19 lockdown (April 2020) brought the centrality of cooking back into my life. This chapter has been largely re-edited during this moment of coronavirus, when the restaurant business is crumbling and different Michelin-starred restaurants are closing. Changes in social rules have caused me to notice how my food habits have been disrupted on different levels: I think about the economic networks of production and the availability of products; I move differently in grocery stores.

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“Do you know how much flour it takes to make a loaf of bread? 500 grams, this is so much flour!”—so says Archeologist Amala Marx speaking with me on the phone from Paris (Van Drie, Coronavirus Conversation Fieldnotes, April 3, 2020). “We can’t get flour sometimes,” says Donna Lee from the epicenter of the coronavirus breakout in Jackson Heights, New York, “It isn’t that there isn’t any, it just can get out of stock, and if one stands in line to get into supermarket, one doesn’t want to go back” (ibid., WhatsApp call, April 4, 2020). I watch Arte news and see images of markets being sprayed down in Dakar and cockroaches moving to the surface to die in open air. Images of workers in India being sprayed down like cockroaches. People waiting in line for rice. They can’t social distance. Winnie Lee, also living in Jackson Heights, comments: “Restaurants keep closing down. I’m still ordering take out twice a week” (Ibid.). Back in Copenhagen, a buzzer rings and I hear the delivery man slip plastic across the floor toward the door. The next day, loud sounds of frying and fragrant smells of my roommate’s Sri Lankan curry cooking float into my room from the kitchen. This contrasts with the more subdued sounds of my roasting eggplant and boiling chickpeas. Our relationship to ingredients, our spatial movements in relationship to other people, our temporal rhythms have all changed. Some of these shifts are more serious than others. Finally, I notice articles emerging in the newspaper about the loss of smell and taste as a main symptom of coronavirus. The entire multisensorial body configuration of food performance has also been (temporarily) mutated. It is all the more interesting, then, to consider what the ear or touch do—or what they cannot do—alone in cooking. To take notice of what one used to do and what one can do now. How does disruption and distortion make you aware of your food, about the sorts of contact held within it? “I think there must be cooks who are more aware of sound than others,” says Amala Marx. “I don’t have a good sense of taste and smell like my husband, but I am very sensitive to sounds, especially when something goes wrong with food. The sound hits me first before the smell. I wish I could better develop the capacity to find sounds more enjoyable in cooking” (Van Drie, Coronavirus Conversation Fieldnotes, April 3, 2020). Sound, like food, is corporeal. Listening, like cooking, is multisensorial. Both sound and food happen in performances that are situational, indeterminate. Both the kitchen and field sound recording are concerned with the realms of the material, the technical, the visceral, the non-verbal. When Chef Titti Qvarnström turns her back to the kitchen, she is not listening off into another space. Her emplaced and multisensorial work happens in the aural space behind her. Her listening technique is perhaps defined as happening behind. Being present is necessary to many techniques of cooking, as it is to people making sound recordings. The similarities between these ways of being present and attentive to detail could, I think, productively be teased out to critically reflect on the habits of hearing we are accustomed to and their epistemic, political and ethical roots, as well as thinking about the sorts of situations that can stimulate the reflection of other ways of knowing the sonic and communicating through it. I end with Anna Tsing’s observation, which I think resonates fully with this moment, when many of us are finding ourselves unhabitually moving in our habitual spaces: “Sometimes

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common entanglements emerge not from human plans but despite them. It is not even the undoing of plans, but rather the unaccounted for in their doing that offers possibilities for elusive moments of living in common” (Tsing 2015: 267).

Note 1

The excerpt from the original French radio interview of Sébastian Gaxie reads: “La musique, elle vient d’accentuer l’instant. Il y a une sorte de jeu de mimétisme où toutes les intonations, et tous les petits bruits de couverts de cuisine sont pris par un instrument […] La musique elle vient révéler tous ces petits instants qui souvent dans un sens font sens. Il y a une phrase que j’aime beaucoup de Tchekov qui dit que le rôle de l’artiste c’est d’avoir du talent, c’est-à-dire de repérer les détails importants de ce qui sont insignifiants. Et c’est un peu ça. Les détails importants se jouent dans les tous petits instants et ça permet ce type d’écriture” (Gaxie 2013, 02:37–03:30, my dictation).

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The Intimate Holger Schulze

Figure 7.1  A drink, finished.

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A Journey of Transformation I feel—insecure. Unsure. Should I speak with you about this? I am still unsure. Even though you followed my invitation to meet here, right? I decided to meet you today. I decided to write you a message and ask you if we could speak? If we could talk? If we could meet in this spot you and I know very well? But I am still unsure. I am still insecure. I am shaking; after this experience I wish to share with you. Should I? Or shouldn’t I? Is it wrong to share this with you? My body still resonates, apparently. Trembles and oscillates between possible trajectories of our acquaintanceship, our shared friendship, relationship, following this decision. I still feel shaken up from what I experienced. We say hello, share an embrace, a kiss on both cheeks. We acknowledge the nice, sunny weather and the great location we are in. We sit down. We chat a bit on rather light and irrelevant topics; we order drinks. It is indeed an unlikely nice afternoon right now; and I know, I sense, that I need to touch upon actually unsettling, disturbing, deterritorializingly dark and intimate issues that trouble me these days. Would I really dare to do so? Maybe neither of us has ever touched upon such personal issues in our conversations before. Until now. It feels very strange and even a bit risky; though it also feels like the only right thing to do right in this moment. The only thing I would like to touch upon with you right now; the only thing that seems to me sincere enough and personal, urgent enough to engage with you. To ask for your advice and your thoughts, your recommendations, experiences, and all your various perspectives on these issues. So, I start to speak. I have a hard time finding my words. In general, I do not usually struggle to find words. But right now I actually do. How should I phrase this? I never said these sentences before. I never touched upon such intimate and almost ineffable sensations, experiences, encounters, occurrences before. Can I say this? I start with meandering, choosing more common small talk topics: weather, deadlines, the venue, some recent gossip or political turmoil. We are crawling slowly, very slowly and with a lot of detours—but with strong dedication—toward the actual reason for this conversation. Isn’t it just awkward and weird to speak about this, and to draw a person into my quite personal and intimate reflections about this most recent event in my life? Should I leave this aside and not speak about it? Not speak about this to a person I like and I respect, yet until now most of the time in a rather professional context, with the usual sidesteps to having a drink after work or to visit together some gallery opening, book launch, or musical performance. Or should I? Maybe I should. Though I am still not really sure where I would like to start; how I would wish to introduce my issue; what I need to articulate and to give as a deeply personal story right now to this person in front of me. Do I wish to open up about my love—or at least my love-projection—for this persona? Do I wish to tell some pretty rare and shameful, also awkward, and maybe alienating, but potentially very relatable stories from my life to this person? Do I feel an urge, a more general urge to give this persona the present of a very intimate story, a confession, a gift in form of a secret happening in my life that not many people have ever received?

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I can feel this insecurity, I can sense the doubt, the anxiety, in my own behavior and in the one of the person in front of me. It trembles on my skin, my legs, my fingers. My voice might waver a bit. I might articulate what I wish to say in a manner that is a bit too tense or falsely over-relaxed. Okay. I need to start now. Speak! I begin to speak, to speak about the death of my mother. She died just a few weeks ago. It is still hard now for me to speak about it. I had to cease almost all of my commitments because of this; I could not continue writing the chapters, the articles, prepare the talks ahead of me. Also my work on contacting and briefing the authors for a handbook, a handbook on the anthropology of sound I have committed to edit, had to stop; luckily, the commissioning editors at the publishing house had empathy for the situation I am in right now. But I feel tense and lost. My mouth still gets a bit dry when I tell the granular details of how I experienced this major event in anyone’s life. My last parent died. I had to organize a funeral all on my own for the first time, with all the mundane aspects of contracting, of ordering, of reviewing, and of executing everything around a funeral ceremony. I continue my little monologue. Some of the events I am telling this person, I have already told other friends and relatives. In these other situations I tried to expand much quicker on more intimate details. But I wish now to connect to this person, in a deeper sense; and to open up to her with this personal story, this personal event I disclose to her. It feels good and it feels right to do this. It feels also like an appropriate step to further our friendship, our mutual affection, maybe our respect for and even attachment to each other. It feels right. A step in the right direction. I hear sounds around me. Suddenly, all the other conversations of people in this café seem very distant. Strangely distant. Though the sounds of cutlery and dishes, of waiters walking by and tables to be cleared have moved more to the forefront of my attention now. Further, distant sounds from across the meadow in front of this café are now seemingly very close by. Oddly enough, I seem to be able to distinctly listen to certain conversations far away, to couples walking by in the far distance, a tramway halting, several hundred meters away; a shop owner stepping out of his shop, close to the tramway. Why don’t I focus now more on this deeply respected and even admired person in front of me? Why is my listening attention at the same time so focused on this very person—but also wandering in a wider and distracted way all across the meadows and the streets. Distracted and focused at the same moment. Shouldn’t I listen more closely to her movements and activities, to her reactions, her eyes and hands, her lips and fingers; how she reacts to my story? If too stiff and too unmoved or overly interested in the almost exaggerated style of an explicit and official statement? Does she indeed react to my offering, does she respond in the expected way to me proposing an intimate attachment over this story? Or does she seem unmoved and not in the least bit realize what this means to me? As a heterosexual person, a taint of sexual desire might also be mixed in—in a weird and inappropriate way, obviously. But one can never deny this attraction; it plays into one’s relations to another person that basically incites a series of sentiments of attachment and closeness. It is mixed into the complex amalgam of sentiments and affects I might be recollecting from this very moment of conversation, of doubt, of exposing your affects and of therefore progressing our mutual relations.

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This situation is one of high risk—for any humanoid alien. The situation of opening up to a fellow humanoid alien with which such an intimate issue that was never discussed before; but also—and I acknowledge this fact—making this situation a major research issue, as I am doing right now, is a surprising move, and maybe part of an even bigger risk. Especially in this opening section of a handbook chapter. If I remember this crucial situation, this deep and intense conversation right now, almost two years after this moment in August 2017, I recall that the whole sonic environment I experienced then extended almost to the same area as my corporeal self-perception in this situation. I was fully in my sensibilities and in my body. My sensory corpus (Schulze 2018: 136–159) of this very intimate conversational and interpersonal moment is indeed a corpus of an enhanced receptivity. There was a wide variety of proprioceptive, interoceptive, and particularly visceroceptive events going on in my body—that I could sense and observe, or, more precisely: I was surprised and amazed by it. The skin on my face, on my arms, my legs, seemed very thin to me, almost translucent. I felt almost to light to be distinct from the atmosphere surrounding me. I also remember how I felt continually shaken inside. Not that I would burst into tears at any given moment; but I actually did not have the energy to put a lot of time into anything other than reflecting and speaking about this death, letting it sink in, giving myself some space and time to let this experience become a part of me. How would I, how should I remember this incident? How would the woman whom I loved and with whom I had now lived for almost ten years remember this? How would the kids, all in their early school years, my friends and colleagues, and all the people I loved and cared for remember it? Or any other people I met in those days? One could argue, with Didier Anzieu, that a certain sound envelope (Anzieu 1989: 157–173), a particular wrapping of sound (Anzieu 2018: 173–191) around my life had been removed by this incident. Though, if I try to remember this now, it had already removed itself and I had removed myself from it, from my parents, many years earlier: almost thirty years before. It seemed more like a material repetition: an outside ratification of an end, of a transformation, an existential transfiguration that had already happened. This transformation now was definitely ripe to be introjected, to be performed and embodied, to be accepted by myself. It was not a surprising incident, therefore. My mother had spoken with me about all possible details of her death since she went into retirement, twenty-five years previously. I was pretty much prepared for this, equipped with all necessary details, wishes, plans, even some incredibly precise requirements for the funeral ceremony itself. It was not so much a shocking and erratic accident, out of time, out of space, but a final and irrevocable occurrence of the end of a long, long journey—one that had begun decades ago. So, what did I actually expect from this conversation? With a person that did not yet know me as well as all my friends from high school, or previous love affairs and relationships, and surely nowhere near as well as my wife and kids? I am reminded of the openness and a sudden hint of intimacy one can experience with strangers or in brief, almost anonymous encounters when traveling. Indeed, could this woman I talked to right now be a sort of a fellow-traveler that I expected to keep a secret, and to retain a distance, even a structurally anonymous relation to me? I trusted her, apparently. Deeply and lastingly. I have to thank her in this very moment, right here, right now.

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In retrospect, looking at myself in that moment—as if I were a person completely unknown to me—I probably might have stuck then with a concept of the intimate that François Jullien outlined as a “revelation of a possible infinity within the innermost self ” (Jullien 2013: 69; translated by HS) including “the possibility of overturning or a great change” (ibid.). I might have entered this conversation, with this person, on a late summer’s day, and with you, the reader of this chapter, with an intention that resembled this: To encounter the “other”, the other as such and unique: the other who, because at first perceived as completely outside, through his penetration into our inner space brings to light an inner being of oneself and from then on serves as the only reliable basis of this “self ”. (Jullien 2013: 69; translated by HS)

Desires of Research Intimacy is, bluntly put, almost unresearchable—or, at least, so it seems. Intimate situations defy and exclude—by their very definition—an outside observer, an explicit and detailed documentation, or a constant protocolling agent on the one side. On the other hand, though, almost nothing else seems as intriguing and as fascinating for researchers of the senses, of the body, or of sound as they enter this area of highly ambivalent affective sonic intensities and realize how crucial they are for a person’s experience (Pettmann 2017, James 2020). In the area of the sonic the phenomena categorized as intimate can even seem to be a core issue, a consistent, and recurrent major experience that one finds again and again mixed into many other sonic artifacts or sound practices: from music listening to sonic experience, to the joy of quietude, or the multisensory experience of eating, to the experiences of dancing and singing, walking and thinking, admiring—or just reducing one’s listening quite purposefully into receiving all that’s audible, sensible, to hear and nothing else. These desires constitute then the core of an audiopietist approach to sound. This approach—or better, this belief—must be regarded as one of the initial motivations for many sonic researchers to transcend established research fields and methods and professions such as acoustics, phonology, audiology, sound engineering, or score analysis. The early, almost prehistorical, pre-Socratic, or pre-sterneian (cf. Sterne 2004) researchers of sound, of acoustic ecology or sonic theory in the 1970s—such as Raymond Murray Schafer, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, but also Jacques Attali, Walter Jackson Ong, or even, in the 1990s, James H. Johnson and John M. Picker—they all share a tendency to be fascinated by the salutary or the pathogenic, but always the intricately intimate effects that certain historical or cultural transformations of sound environments, musical experiences, or categorizations of noise might indeed have had on the protagonists of a particular culture. Their fascination started with the, in their times still surprising, observation that sound events, or even ephemeral, minuscule noises might not remain transitory and vanishing at all—but indeed have even longer lasting consequences in the realms of the physiological, the corporeal, and the affective, the spiritual, the mental. From these initial observations, the genuine desire of pursuing

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research in sound studies can be traced. The effects of sound that might have been diagnosed in earlier historical eras as forever inexplicable, ineffable, and maybe only imaginary and illusionary, all of these effects seemed, almost counterintuitively, to have stable, intricate, and intimate effects on the soft machines that you and I are: effects that could almost last as long as one might live on this planet. Even if intimacy is for many researchers not anywhere close to their explicit research interest, one might still discover their passion for a certain musical genre, a certain instrument they master, or an ensemble or band they play in. One might diagnose at one point an intimate, very personal motivation: in practices that have affected a researcher and might have contributed, if only to a minor extent, to them following consistently this new and maybe seemingly irrelevant desire in research. Intimate experiences with, around, or through sound are definitely not unfamiliar moments in any sound researcher’s professional life. As sound is then one’s professional issue and at the same time also anchored in a deeply personal experience, it is assigned a central function in one’s selfunderstanding as a person. This transgressing of personal desires into a professional activity is pretty common in nearly all professions and activities that are performed to earn a salary. However, such a blurring of boundaries between these particular areas is problematized in Western societies that focus on paid labor as a source of functionally alienated forms of self-esteem, of societal status, and of existential value. Does the personal attachment then actually inflate the importance of salaried labor—or does it merely contaminate it with thoroughly improper sentiments and bias? Within the research community, such a blurring between the private and the professional is often regarded as either a fundamental prerequisite or an inappropriate taboo. The fact of a researcher being personally attached and affected, of being intimately touched and moved by her or his research activities and outcomes, is commonly seen as an issue that could compromise their work. However, it remains an open secret that personal attachment and affects are also necessary prerequisites for precisely this—and maybe any—activity. You or me, we would surely not engage in one of these activities over a longer period of time, if we did not feel a certain, if only minuscule or transitory, attachment to this issue—aside from all the monetary and meritocratic gains it might also draw in our direction. There is indeed an intrinsic, a deeply object-related, material, and sensory joy and fulfillment possible in the very act of listening itself: in experiencing sound, in playing an instrument, in exploring an auditory environment or a sonic landscape. Even if academic and professional demands require you to perform a rigid and strictly professional, cool perspective apropos sonic experiences, there still remains at least a certain trace element of this original excitement. This intimate arousal or eagerness to know more about, to inquire more, to get to know better how certain sonic experiences unfold, affect, and transform certain humanoid aliens, this experience and desire serves as basic motivation. Such desires to carry out research might be carefully camouflaged and hidden; yet they still retain their core position in a researcher’s everyday practices around, with, and through sound. The existing literature regarding intimacy in sound, though, tends to downplay purposefully (and probably fearfully) precisely this attachment. Instead, it focuses on,

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if you will, a cooling down approach that relies heavily on a logocentric interpretation of situations, encounters, or experiences of an intimate character. Such an approach tends to discuss primarily if not exclusively the vocal and speech-related aspects of performativity; these aspects are then also often focused mainly around religious or Christian traditions of performing and interpreting sound. This holds true, for instance, for Daniel Pettmann’s research that almost exclusively discusses the voice, interpreting it mainly from a psychoanalytical point of view, between the work of Mladen Dolar and Didier Anzieu. Coming from the Freudian or the Lacanian tradition, all of these authors tend to overstate the logocentric and verbal aspects of sonic experiences. It might almost seem that there were no sounds to be experienced that were not verbal and not expressed in an Indo-European language. But there are a lot of sounds, corporeal sensations, sensibilities, and skills that transcend vocal articulation and a focus on oral, textual communication. An anthropology of sound needs to get this balance right. Returning to the start of this chapter and the initial sonic and interpersonal experience of intimacy, it is quite obvious that verbal articulation can play a crucial role in this sonic experience. However, this form of textual communication is never performed in radical isolation from contextual and enveloping sonic, sensory, corporeal, and proprioceptive experiences. It resembles almost a willful if not philosophical ignorance of all the material details in a given experiential substance. The actually experienced situation that can be rich, volatile, ephemeral, surprising, erratic, strange—but always material and specific—is being reduced to a mutual exchange of character sequences. A philosophically well-trained reduction of maybe incommensurable specificities to easily processable sign operations is being performed. With this reduction though, the whole substance of experience and of intimacy might be erased. Another intention of research can be witnessed here, in these cases: the desire to tailor and to fit all details of an empirical situation into a mold that can be used in the professional practices of textual analysis and hermeneutics. All else, all that is not text, must be excluded as this form of interpretation can only hardly be applied to it. It vanishes in the then often socalled ineffable. The genuine utilitarianism in research tailors the empirical substance in such a way that it can fit its routinely executed practices (though obviously also an anthropology of sound practices yet another way of tailoring and stressing, prioritizing and deprioritizing of aspects in an empirical situation). Therefore, when assessing the role and the effect of a verbal articulation in a given situation it is—for an anthropology of sound in the broadest sense—strictly necessary to indeed include the whole phenomenological range of experiential ferments that bring this particular situation to attention. All that is sonic, sensory, corporeal, and proprioceptive must be included as potentially of effect regarding intimacy. The substance of sound is never only the voice: it is, foremost, one’s situated experience in all its richness, its contradictory, at times irrational, imaginary, erratic, surprising, and corporeal aspects: “Any situation, any bit of practice, implies much more than has ever been said” (Gendlin 1992: 201).

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Sonic Writing by Listening Bodies As soon as an area of desperately needed research is recognized as being almost unresearchable, the desire to probe and experiment with certain feasible methods is surely imminent. This phenomenon can be tracked in various research fields and also applies in relation to sound studies, be it the invention of acoustemology to evaluate sonic experiences of various cultures (Feld 1982:), psychoacoustics to account for the particular physiological detours and deformations the resonance of a sound event undergoes in the body of a humanoid alien before one actually might hear it (Deutsch 2013b), the area of aural architecture with its goal to assess how a sonic experience is positively shaped by architecture, its materials and designs (Blesser and Salter 2010), or be it the investigation of data mining and the sound filtering and adjusting of a contemporary music distributor such as Spotify, as demonstrated by researchers “establishing a record label for research purposes, intercepting network traffic with packet sniffers, and web-scraping corporate materials” (Eriksson et al. 2019). New, seemingly inaccessible research areas require novel methods to be developed; being new and touching upon new grounds and including aspects of everyday life and experience in research that had been excluded from it before, these methods obviously are often not well received at first. They are almost immediately and intuitively questioned, even before actually scrutinizing their goals, their precise research activities, documentation, or analysis. The sheer newness makes one wonder and incites strong doubt and skepticism. Rightly so, I might add: Why develop a new method? Why add yet another specific research activity, an evaluation process, and its highly specific forms of documenting, of transcribing, and analyzing to an already existing and surely brimful toolbox of methods? The driving question for developing a new method is: How can one find a way, with the most refined means of technology, methodology, and epistemology, to do research on this particular issue that until now has been deemed an impossible, maybe prohibited, and factually non-existent object of research? Are existing methods sufficient to grant researchers insights into the workings and dynamics of this specific field of everyday life, of experience and material interactions? Or does a completely new method really need to be developed, refined, evaluated, criticized, and applied here? This set of quite unsettling questions, I contend, also applies to the present issue of intimate encounters and their sonic qualities: How could it be possible to research the most intimate affects, self-reflections, doubts, and sensibilities attached to an actual, situated experience? Any contact that a researcher may have vis-à-vis such issues might well be deficient from the outset as it generally comes too long after the actual incident—and precisely this presence of a researcher instantly transforms, deforms, or at least contaminates the actual experience of intimacy. In that case, how might one actually do research on the intimate and the personal without the risk of thoroughly corrupting, destroying, or simply ignoring the delicate empirical substance one wishes to work on? Is it in any way possible not to narrow down the messy and rich empirical substance to a sufficiently

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feeble and thin skeleton that one would be able do research on it—in a socially and institutionally established context, for instance by doing interviews, sending out questionnaires, or measuring bodily reactions? Reasonably, one has to assume that everything that characterizes such a fragile, relational, and intimate encounter is basically lost by transferring it into an accepted research dispositive and the techniques of analysis inherent therein. Is it possible not to subject this research issue to the existing dispositives of research, but rather to subject precisely these dispositives to this actual research issue? How can one transform research practices by applying them to new fields of research and by asking new research questions? An anthropology of sound is, by its basic definition, an area of research that applies a range of historical, empirical, ethnographic, autoethnographic, artistic, and autofictional methods. Concerning the particular issue of intimate encounters and their sonic aspects, there are two methods in particular that seem highly appropriate here to resolve the aforementioned research dilemmas: the listening bodies (Schulze 2018: 156–159) and the sonic writing (Schulze 2020b). The method of sonic writing allows for a rich representation and elaboration of personal and intimate experiences; this specific practice does not believe in the illusion of a full and only one true documentation, yet it also materially includes all the intense and individually experienced affects of a specific listening situation. Sonic writing, in all its versions and variants between thick description (Geertz 1973), sonic fiction (Eshun 1998, Holt a2019, Schulze 2020), and sonic thinking (Herzogenrath 2017, Schulze 2017, Groth and Schulze 2020), between radio features, audio papers (Groth 2019), and sound poetry or even in sound art, can indeed provide a material artifact that explores, as part of a given research project, the phenomenon of intimacy in its sonic aspects: Writing about sound and writing sound are two different processes. The first maintains the positivist position of subject (writer) and object (sound). The second breaks out of duality to inhabit a multidimensional position as translator between worlds—the writer listening to and translating sound through embodied experience, the body translating the encounter between word and sound, sound translating and transforming both word and author. (Kapchan 2017b: 12)

This radical form of writing and of laying out research results is neither just a presentation of recollections many weeks or years after an actual sonic experience occurs, nor is it just the situated and erratic protocol of one particular sonic experience in the moment, as it happens. It is itself a form of performance; because sonic writing actualizes and manifests, with a given time distance, the sonic experiences that might have been triggered by a particular sonic event or sound environment. It does not erase or camouflage this process, the thoughts and doubts, the insights afterwards, and the previous fears of its author. Sonic writing is not only about documenting or reflecting on sounds—indeed, it performs a sonic experience itself, in sentiments and concepts, in observations, self-reflections and narrations, in words and sounds. In this conflation of experience, reflection, and performativity, the method of sonic writing relies substantially on a refined training, the sensibility and the skills of the second aspect of research practice and method mentioned: the listening body of a researcher.

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The idiosyncratic listening body of a researcher is thus a major instrument in research, even more so concerning methods like acoustemology or human echolocation. A researcher’s participation and her or his intricacy of awareness and reflection in an empirical field situation provides the main access to empirical phenomena. Auditory sensibilities are factual prerequisites for sonic research. (Schulze 2018a: 154)

Whereas the existence of a listening body might be empirically trivial for humanoid aliens like you and me, epistemologically it is ignored almost to a provocative degree: the researcher is also a listener, they not only have but are a listening body. However, most arguments and proofs in academic texts read as if their authors were only really able to read or to count, to interpret texts or to calculate—lacking all other skills and sensibilities. In acknowledging the importance of actual sensing and listening bodies in research, with all their various impairments and specialized refinements transcending the “mythical norm” (Lorde 1984: 116) of the aurotypical and its unreflected claim of a general “audism” (Sterne 2019: 303), a researcher also accepts and includes their abilities and impairments in sensing, in assimilating and reflecting sensory experiences, in listening: I am a listening body and therefore I am also capable or incapable of entering a situation and sensing its manifold aspects, affects, and effects—be it in a framework of ethnographic research, of autoethnographic explorations, or in sonic fiction. With these methods it becomes possible to explore the sensory and sonic aspects of an intimate encounter—and to stress and to analyze, following François Jullien, how such an incredibly personal experience is deeply rooted and interwoven with discourses and traditions of European cultural history between philosophical self-reflection, cathartic confessions, and the development of one’s personality through intense and intimate encounters with friends, lovers, lifelong partners. As Jullien makes unmistakably clear, this experience stands in stark contrast to discourses on friendship, closeness, attachment, and sexuality present, for instance, in the cultural history of China, which he presents as an impressive and convincing counter-example throughout his inquiry (cf. Jullien 2013: passim). This difference, though, requires an analysis of experiences and situations. Salomé Voegelin demonstrates this genuine approach to intimacy in her sonic writing: A bad Skype connection sounds its own failure. Halting sound in a space of time, an echoing hall of nothing, interrupted by crackling anticipation and finally silent defeat. I hope for some drawn out words that have lost their shape to reform and extend themselves to me. Instead I get digital clicking, grating, grazing the listener and the talker in a material of their connection that does not connect to speak but to sense the presence of the medium not connecting. The technology sounds its presence as a thick immutable fog of material filling the space between not with its distance but its present obstruction of proximity. Echoing back what needs to go there, and impeding the there to be here, I hear a presence that is not me and not him but the machine failing to let either speak and either hear. It sounds an empty jam of digital production that is neither his nor mine, but separates us both. (Voegelin 2013b)

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Intimacy’s Function in the Bourgeois Marriage Intimate sounds are still largely taboo. This taboo refers, obviously, to their particular status as intimate in the European cultural tradition. Such sounds represent and embody situations, activities, and encounters that have been qualified by Western cultures as solely to be performed in relationships that bear a particular exclusivity. These exclusive relationships might include, varying over specific regional cultures, historical periods, and individual lifestyles, a very close friendship, within family relations—ideally after a ritual of marriage—in the enforced intimacy of collective housing situations, or those in various situations of barracking, incarceration, or other, mostly temporary, forms of housing together with a larger number of other people of the same gender and often also within the same age cohort. Intimate situations are not at all rare, as this brief list documents. However, they are nevertheless considered to be out of the ordinary and not in keeping with usual lifestyle and norms; in certain cases, they are also related to sexual activity, a sexual relationship, or even a marriage. As already stressed, this focus on certain interactions and relationships is a culturally relative one. It neither qualifies as an anthropological constant, nor as a timeless category. The experience of intimacy is historicized and acculturated. Therefore, sounds that one might consider as intimate these days—be it the relaxed breathing when asleep, various involuntary body sounds, or the vocalizations and sonic expressions while engaging in various sexual practices—might be interpreted and were in part interpreted differently, for instance within a particular social class or in historical eras when it was quite common for a whole family to share one bed. The establishing of a widely recognized concept and experience of intimacy needs thus to be regarded as an effect of the historical development of a bourgeois civilian subjectivity: the persona of the patriarch, the citizen, the salesman, or the businessmen, the persona of a white, male head of a middle-class family based on cisgendered, heterosexual relationships functionalized for procreation and capitalization, this persona, and later on more and more members of such a family, are situated in an environment that allows them to demand a certain formal distance and an area of seclusion exclusively reserved for non-public and maybe also non-commercial activities. In this space of privacy and distance, intimate encounters may then occur. This realm, secured for the bourgeois experience of intimacy, is thus also a major facilitator in personally achieving a role in one of the core institutions of capitalist and bourgeois society: negotiating and signing a marriage contract. Whereas this commercial and almost professional activity must still be regarded as one of the driving forces of capitalist economies—including all its economic and political side-effects and after-effects—it is an activity that is ideally achieved only through a long and often exhausting, if not selfdestructive, performance and experience of a risky love affair and intimate relationship. By performing a series of intimate encounters, which might include confessions, sexual explorations, a number of shared and personal experiences, as well as—last but not

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least—mutual conflagrations of desire, the potential wife and husband move toward the desired goal of negotiating the marriage contract (or allowing their respective patriarchs to engage in negotiating the conditions for such). This passage to contracting is understood and interpreted in Western cultural history as a dangerous one, with numerous challenges, obstacles, and even crucial trials on the way. Intimate encounters and the particular fears, dreams, horrors, obsessions, and pathologies of the partners involved to a large extent constitute this ordeal that seemingly must take place before contracting. Apparently, a romantic, heterosexual relationship, inclined toward a marriage contract, needs to be tested for its feasibility and durability. The imaginary of marriage makes it the one and only pinnacle of one’s biography, so it is apparently necessary to scrutinize the contracting partners involved as to whether they are in any way capable of fulfilling the contract and then making it last for the rest of the partners’ lives. The fact that marriages are statistically in general far more problematic, paradoxical, and culminating in divorce than this imaginary assumes is not relevant here. The imaginary sticks to its fictions of desire and exclusivity. The series of trials that have to be undergone before contracting are modeled to resemble the narrative ideal of catharsis. This model allows a protagonist in a legend, saga, or tale only to reach his (more rarely, her) desired goal by undergoing a series of trials. Michel Serres dismantled this obsessive love of Western culture for this cathartic narration in the following way: The love stories which so astonish our supple, naked bodies, painless and nearly mute, were stories of knowing, long ago. Just as the call of love circulates through the corridors, grilles and vaults of the chateau-body, haunting them, so do sense data pass through the obstacles placed into a kind of statue or automaton with twenty layers of armour, a veritable Carpathian castle, their energy purified as it makes its way through successive filters towards the central cell or instance, soul, understanding, conscience or transcendental I, to which very few gaolers hold the key. (Serres 2008: 144f.)

It is no ill-founded overinterpretation to recognize in this moment of entering the central cell or instance, soul, understanding, conscience, or transcendental I—indeed a situation of deflowering, of a life-changing sexual encounter, the biblical instant when they recognize each other, a fundamentally liberating and mutual intimate experience. All preliminary intimate encounters therefore need to lead to one life-altering sexual act—which will and must then have also a world-changing impact on both partners (and probably also the world as a whole). To put it bluntly: contracting the highest culturally valued form of a sexual relationship is achieved and elevated only through a series of strenuous, dangerous, backbreaking trials. If it is too simple, it cannot be valid. If no one risks anything, it might not be worth it. Intimacy functions here as the desired and the volatile, the potentially failing aspect in the course of these trials. It is the major test for both partners. The concept of intimacy therefore provides a slippery double function in bourgeois culture: it is on the one side enacted under the aegis of a patriarch (not for slaves or women or kids—though this has altered over time, largely along the lines of classist segregations)—and it is on the other side the desired goal for any young protagonists in

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bourgeois society, to be achieved after a longer series of tests, by contracting the economic and habitual aspects of a heterosexual marriage. It functions as the main focus of bourgeois desire—something that is only granted after much hard work and a series of trials. It must be almost impossible to achieve in order to retain its value. Apparently, this cathartic and obstacle-ridden structure can frequently be recognized in the construction of research issues: Only something that seems worthy of a major effort and poses extremely difficult but in the end resolvable problems can be regarded as a worthy goal for research. It must be partly impossible to achieve in order for people to start wanting to achieve it. This quest, quite obviously, can also be seen in the very nature of the intimate itself as a phenomenon. In this respect, my research in several aspects follows quite coherently this research tradition and, surely, intends to provide an approach to actually accessing the supposedly inaccessible. Being a researcher indeed means performing this paradoxical activity—hopefully, in a successful and convincing manner.

Extimate Transformations The desire for an intimate encounter and the discourse around its function both in society and as part of a relationship is not an ahistorical one, and it is therefore also not stable nor does it go unaltered in its performativity, its expressions, its cultural forms. Intimate sounds in the early twenty-first century are part of a larger repertoire of sounds that more and more we see opened up, explored, and exposed. The sounds that this contemporary sound culture in Western countries considers to be intimate—often sounds related to sexual encounters and various sexual practices—have already become more often recorded, more widely distributed than probably ever in documented history—be it in movies or in videos, in softcore or hardcore film productions as well as in audioporn productions. Whereas the categorization and selection of sounds as being of an intimate quality already allows a first interpretation of this concept, then it applies even more so to the progressive alteration of its evaluation, distribution, and public discourse around it. However, this expansion of the availability of materially manifested intimate sounds does not necessarily indicate a transformation toward a larger, permissive, hedonistic, and less sexually repressive culture that sanctions the inclusion of intimate sounds in everyday life. On the contrary, it is not improbable that precisely this larger presence of sonic intimacy might even be a symptom of a further exclusion of these sounds in another context, because they are presented and staged, consumed and evaluated in very specific frames and contexts only. They are put, so to speak, onto an extraordinary pedestal, in the anomalous, highly desirable, but often also alienating frame of pornography. This division might then indeed imply: their almost ubiquity in some areas of life and on streaming platforms can indeed foster an even stronger and harsher exclusion from other areas. The phenomenon would then be thoroughly in tune with a cultural trajectory toward a further division of labor and sensibilities, a (re-)distribution of the sensible (Rancière 2004), as well as toward a more clear-cut optimization and separation of sensory experiences and interpersonal

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interactions. A certain professionalization and refinement in intimate encounters—at least in terms of their sexual actualizations—is then a necessary next step. With this successive transformation, the particular quality of moments of intimacy also progresses into yet another zone: the quality of a presence that might last not only seconds or minutes, but over longer periods of time. Intimacy thus transforms into what can only be described through the concept of extimacy. This idea was originally developed in Lacanian psychology; it sheds light on a specific use and experience of intimate moments in a more public situation that goes beyond the Freudian categories of voyeurism and exhibitionism. With the concept of extimacy, the “traditional psychological distinction between exteriority and psychic interiority or intimacy” (Pavón-Cuéllar 2014: 661) is rejected and replaced by a concept that undercuts what might seem to be just a rather simplistic category mistake: personally affecting and transformative experiences that one may tend to call intimate might occur most often in the so-called outside world, on a public and social stage, in intense interpersonal exchange, and, not least, while actively engaging in highly physical moments of performativity together with one or more other persons. To restrict experiences of intimacy to a secluded, isolated, inaccessible, an incommensurably inarticulate area remote from all social bonds and ties appears as a ridiculously flawed and simplistic definition. Here, the concept of extimacy drags these experiences out from the antisocial and into the arenas of the social, the interpersonal, moments of being touched by others, being transformed and regenerated by others—in an existential sense. Actually, it is just this quality of being in public, in the outside world, that makes an extimate experience and an extimate desire substantially meaningful to you or me: “it is intimate to us while being exterior at the same time” (ibid.: 662). This double quality and the oscillation between social situations, relations, activities, and affects is what makes this experience apparently desirable. At the beginning of this chapter, I introduced an extimate moment that took place recently in my life. In deliberately unfolding this experience in this publication environment—and not simply while in conversation with someone—another extimate situation is provided in these very pages. Would it be imaginable that such extimate reflections and evaluations, doubts and sensible explorations would be an intrinsic part of public life? Right now this might seem almost unthinkable, as professional life, capitalist values, and career strategies as well as interpersonal territorial demarcations with a bellicose undertone surely advocate a less self-reflective and a more self-fortifying public presentation as a thoroughly stable if not statuesque persona. However, if you dare to venture with me for a moment into a more utopian and imaginary future, one could envisage certain reversals of received values and habits, of public self-presentations and personal expressions, that indeed might then necessarily include if not demand an extimate sensibility. A culture and a society favoring such an integrated performativity would probably revolve not around accumulation of capital, territorial usurpation and a deep urge to violently digest all sorts of resources and beings; on the contrary, such a society of extimate sensibilities and sonologies might find its driving force precisely in these rare and peculiar moments, encounters, exchanges, and explorations of mutual extimacies. To some readers, all this might sound like a truly irrational and idealistic utopian dreamworld. However, it might actually provide a far more

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sustainable, inclusive, and thoroughly non-transient cultural formation than the general extraction culture of genocide and incinerating of all planetary necessities of life in, well, under two centuries (Yusoff 2019). The sounds and sensibilities, situated and experienced, corporeally anchored and idiosyncratically if not occlusively articulated—they all constitute one of the bonds, one of the interpenetrations taking place between sonic and sensory personae. Hence, extimacies (understood as a more complex interpretation of intimacies) could indeed lead the way into another understanding of the social, the cultural, the economic, and the political. Again, such an outline of future social transformations can sound truly utopian and alien to hardcore pragmatists, nihilists, and dystopian minds. However, social and cultural transformations are a core element of definitions of any social or cultural nexus. One cannot think them without their intrinsic dialectics and inclinations toward certain revisions, reformations, ruptures, and transformations. As a researcher one starts right here and right now—with one’s existing sensibility and one’s body— building from this point a novel kind of constellation of figures of thought, concepts, and explicating models, of epistemological trajectories circulating around these experiences you have made. Any assumed linearity, stability, or long-lasting existence of any cultural phenomenon is a futile wish. Structures and tendencies, traditions, dispositive frameworks, and also habits might well by transmitted into an unforeseeable future (cf. Debray 2000); however, the detailed, material, and temporalized presence of all these entities will surely transform—in the very next second, already tomorrow, by next year all of this will surely be thoroughly different.

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8 The Dance Inger Damsholt

Figure 8.1  Self-portrait while dancing.

A Naked A Capella Dance Practice Copenhagen, Denmark, autumn 1995. I am just out of the shower. My body is energized to the max by the massive amounts of boiling hot water that I love to cover myself in. Walking from the bathroom, my blood is pumping through my veins and I feel extremely alive. I am hot. Too Hot ta Trot. There is nothing like this feeling—when the heat has finally reached what

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feels like the very center of my body and self. Except there is. Entering my private room in the 1830s building of Collegium Mediceum, I walk straight to the windows and close the interior shutters, creating an absolute darkness. As I loose my cotton robe, I hit the “play” button on the CD player and crank up the volume: I am in the soundscape of “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion”—the eighth track of the album Handel’s Messiah: A Soulful Celebration released in 1992. Or more precisely: I am in the soundscape of Stevie Wonder and Take 6 singing their a capella gospel version of this particular air for alto and chorus from Handel’s oratorio from 1741. Or am I? I am covering myself with sound yet at the same time it feels as if these naked voices enter and move my nude body in an improvised swinging choreography. The music is not inside me in the way it feels when I am listening via my headphones, thus there is a sensation of the presence of the music surrounding my body and yet at the same time sounding within me. Am I also singing? Maybe. I am an experienced a capella singer as well as dancer and I know this eighth track of the album SO well. But whether sounds are coming out of my mouth or not, I am participating. It is a participatory event. This music is inside me, sounding the flesh of my body while dancing with some of my favorite artists. The CD player is programmed to repeat the track over and over again and I dance until I drop—completely out of breath from the heat of it all. I am in love with this music, and I just can’t get enough. I am aware that some of my music teacher colleagues, at the Gymnasium (Danish High School) where I teach, are bothered by this pop-soul-gospel version of Handel’s sacred music. Personally, however, I do not really know Handel’s Messiah very well—except for “Every valley” and the Hallelujah chorus—so the music is not “ruined for me.” Neither do I mind that half of the sacred text has been replaced by lyrics such as “Gotta shout about it,” “Gotta get a hold on myself,” and “Tell a neighbor, tell a friend, tell anyone that can comprehend.” For all I care, my improvised choreography can be characterized as postmodern dance and as such there is no right or wrong in any possible choreomusical relationship—the relationship between music and dance. I am participating—not visualizing the music. It is a participatory event and I certainly do NOT intend to produce a form of “music visualization” in the style of early twentieth-century choreographers such as Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968), or Ted Shawn (1891–1972). I am contracting and releasing, stretching and bending, twisting and turning, falling and recovering while navigating within the soundscape of the music. Just as I please. Yet one of the books I have recently read keeps popping into my mind while I am swinging and swaying my body to the gospel version of Handel’s 6/8-time music. The book in question is Ear Training for the Body: A Dancer’s Guide to Music, in which the American accompanist Katherine Teck explains that meter changes the physicality and energy of the dancer’s body and that the music an accompanist plays for big jumps has to “have a 6/8 [beat] because dancers have to get off the floor for that moment of breath in the air” (Teck 1994: 44). But hey … I am not being accompanied—I am participating. As a postmodern participatory event, my dancing entails the self-reflexive recognition of different choreomusical aesthetics characteristic of Euro-American choreographers across centuries. Because of the gospel music, my dancing connects itself to the works of Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) who fused modern dance, ballet, jazz, and vernacular dancing, expressing African American experience through dance. But stylistically it also connects itself to the works of Paul Taylor (1930–2018)—particularly his iconic work Aureole (1962) in which he

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combined his loping antelope style of movement with music by Handel. I am perhaps dancing somewhat in the style of Ailey’s iconic work Revelations (1960), set to African American spirituals. Not gyrating my pelvis in a jazz style reminiscent of the final “Rocka my soul,” but maybe reminiscent of the style in the solo “I wanna be ready,” which I in fact performed live accompanied by an a capella choir in the autumn of 1994 (Damsholt 1998: 29). But as opposed to my performance of “I wanna be ready,” which builds on floor exercises derived from the modern dance technique of Ailey’s mentor Lester Horton (1906–1953), I am now creating a rich polyrhythmic step-pattern within the potential hemiola options that the 6/8 meter offers. Rather like the choreomusical style of choreographer Mark Morris (b.1956)—renowned for his L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988) set to Handel’s music of the same name. However, like Morris, I am very familiar with the choreomusical aesthetic of choreographer Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) who, with his partner John Cage (1912–1992), developed procedures to generate avant-garde musical and choreographic material for works in which dance and music were not intentionally coordinated with one another. I am also familiar with choreographer Yvonne Rainer (b.1934), who in her early minimalist works often juxtaposed sounds and movements in arbitrary combinations (inspired by Cage and Cunningham) or even commented on the un-necessity of music. One section of Rainer’s work Performance Demonstration (1968) was accompanied by a tape of her own voice arguing against music—a monologue that included the statement that “the only remaining meaningful role for muzeek in relation to dance is to be totally absent or to mock itself ” (Rainer 1974: 111–112). In the words of modern dance scholar Sally Banes, I know that I can choose to dance with/to/before/ on/in/over/after/against/away from or without the music—just as I please (Banes 1994). Two-thirds of the way into the track (2:20), the singers embark on an extended gospel vamp-groove, providing a rhythmic foundation by snapping their fingers and gradually repeating the call “Get thee up” in a somewhat opposing call-and-response manner; the choir (Take 6 minus the bass) is singing a set phrase, with the lead singer (Stevie) repeating it straight after in a free improvised manner. Or more precisely, Stevie and I are both responding to the calls provided by the choir. As the musical tension gradually increases, I increase the tension of the bodily dynamics of my movement. Stevie’s phrasings grow longer, moving from a comfortable pitch to the maximum height of the vocal range that his well-supported breath and nasal vocal technique allows. Making joyful noises unto the Lord! The melodic phrases of the choir gradually move upwards—higher and higher within the harmonic planes of the scale and the build-up intensity reaches a climactic point (3:38) with a short pause in the singing and a single finger snap! At the moment of this pause I feel as if time has stopped and all the energy of the room resides within my body for a brief second—and then I explode with the pent up energy as Stevie bursts out the distorted vocal phrase “Can’t say no more about it.” This is a corporeally anchored sonic experience of musical tension and release, an extension of the notions of “interruption,” “suspension,” “repetition,” and “continuation” that I am familiar with in many situations of my everyday life—in phenomenological terms my experience of the “Lebenswelt.” And yet although my experience is about the kinesthetic sensations—the bodily connection between my own naked dancing and the a capella singing and finger snapping—a sentence from the book Feminine Endings by the new musicologist Susan McClary keeps echoing in

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the back of my mind: “[When] sound waves are assembled in such a way as to resemble physical gestures, we as listeners are able to read or make sense of them, largely by means of our lifelong experiences as embodied creatures” (McClary 1991: 24).

With/To/Before/On/In/Over/After/Against/ Away From or Without the Music Why am I focusing on this naked-a capella-dance-practice of my youth? The reason is twofold: on the one hand, the case represents my primary research area of choreomusicology, that has to do with “the relationship between dance and music,” and on the other hand it represents the idiosyncratic, erratic practice of dancing alone by oneself as a participatory sonic event. I want to underline that there must be a reason why I remember this naked-a capella-dance-practice of my youth so vividly as some of the most intense sensory experiences of my life. My initial thesis is that the practice contributed to the development of many different kinds of choreomusical reflections which were about to become an important part of my research. I was not a researcher per se in 1995, but I was applying for a PhD scholarship connected with the program in Dance Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where I was teaching a course entitled “The Music in the Dance.” My MA thesis from 1993 was entitled “The Relationship between Dance and Music in Theatrical Dance.” (Historically speaking, “theatrical dance” and “social dance” are the two functional categories by means of which dancing has traditionally been understood within the academic tradition of Dance Studies (Damsholt 2018a: 102).) Prior to my university education in Musicology and Dance Studies, I had participated in many more or less organized dance and music activities as a child and adolescent. I took several exams in music at A-level and had been trained in the “theatrical” dance genres of jazz and modern dance. The point is, however, that after I graduated from the Gymnasium, I realized that my experience of the dance world and the music world were of two very different and in many ways incompatible cultures. In my understanding, dancers often did not grasp musical structures and musicians did not understand the many different ways music could function in the context of theatrical dance. This all became clear to me when in 1984/85 I spent a year as an exchange student at Marlboro College, Vermont, United States. Although I had been introduced to modern dance in Copenhagen in the early 1980s, it was in the States that I became familiar with the more avant-garde choreomusical aesthetics of Cunningham and Rainer and the freedom to dance with/to/before/on/in/over/after/ against/away from or without the music in any which way a choreographer decided. Back in Copenhagen, I had the intense feeling that I knew exactly what I wanted to do in my professional life: become an expert on the relationship between music and dance! When I enrolled as a musicology student at the University of Copenhagen, I quickly found out that the academic specialist on choreomusical matters in Denmark was musicologist Ole Nørlyng, who had written about the music of August Bournonville’s

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ballets. Having never before been particularly interested in ballet, my curiosity was aroused when I read some of Nørlyng’s articles, but in hindsight the passion for ballet I ended up developing in the late 1980s seems almost coeval with my infatuation with Danish ballet dancer Nikolaj Hübbe. On my request, Nørlyng was hired to teach courses on “Ballet Music” at the university, and at around the same time, Nørlyng and I became involved in the development of the new Dance Studies program, of which dance historian Erik Aschengreen was in charge. Because both Nørlyng and Aschengreen had contacts at the Royal Danish Ballet, I had the opportunity to observe and occasionally teach music and rhythm classes to the children at the Royal Danish Ballet School from 1988 onwards and I also got the chance to sit in on several stagings of interesting ballets. Most importantly, in 1987 Nørlyng introduced me to a book by American ballet accompanist Elizabeth Sawyer entitled Dance with the Music: The World of the Ballet Musician (Sawyer 1985). Finally, I thought! Here was a book which sought to describe some of the themes I had been pondering for so long. In the following years, Sawyer’s book became a primary point of reference for several exam papers in which I analyzed the relationship between dance and music in ballets staged in Copenhagen between 1987 and 1989. These included Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev/Neumeier), Das Lied von der Erde (Mahler/Patsales), and Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin/Lubovitch). Among the tools I found useful in Sawyer’s book was a classification of works that categorized ballets according to their choreomusical techniques: synchronization, opposition, and assimilation. At first sight these techniques seemed to provide a more complex categorization than the standard “does the dance fit the music or not,” but it was primarily Sawyer’s many detailed observations from her experience as an accompanist that opened my eyes to the complexity of the matter. My knowledge of the relationship between dance and music was further pushed when, in 1990–1991, I spent a year as a postgraduate student in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside in California. Here I had the pleasure of studying dance accompaniment with tap dancer Fred Strickler and music director Ray McNamara, and I had the chance to take a specific course named “Music for Dancers” taught by Luretta McRay at UCLA. In retrospect my experiences with dancers and musicians in California as well with the Royal Ballet in Denmark enhanced my ambition to teach music to dancers—in other words, to make sure that dancers counting a phrase out loud as “one, two, three, four, five, six, se-,ven” did not confuse this with a musical phrase with seven beats to the bar. My ambition was documented when in the fall of 1990 I was interviewed by the local university paper in Los Angeles: Damsholt said that rather than becoming a professor or researcher of dance history, she plans to forge another field of study in the dance world … Her new field will seek to more fully integrate dancers with music. While an undergraduate at the University of Copenhagen, Damsholt had already begun to tie together two of her most passionate interests—the study of music and the study of dance. She began developing different ways of teaching music to dancers at the Royal Danish Ballet and at college summer school sessions. (Carter 1990: A7)

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By 1995 I was limiting the topic of my course on “The Music in the Dance” to the relationship between music and Euro-American theatrical dance—a demarcation I would retain as I embarked upon the journey toward my final PhD dissertation, entitled Choreomusical Discourse (Damsholt 1999). However, during my year in California, I became more interested in the complexities of the relationship between music and dance in “social dance,” which was a part of the empirical field of inquiry at the Dance Department of UC Riverside—as opposed to Copenhagen. I was particularly intrigued by the rhythmic complexities of the lindy hop and of the courtly baroque dance taught to me by dance scholars Linda Tomko and Wendy Hilton. My prior experience with social dance was primarily freestyle clubbing or salsa dance movements, which all fit symmetrically with the accompanying 4/4 music. Having never been trained in dance sport as a child, I did not know how to dance the foxtrot or jive, and thus the fact that the basic step of the lindy hop took up six beats—or one and a half bars—of the accompanying 4/4 music felt very new to me. Likewise, I was intrigued by the characteristic choreomusical hemiola of the minuet step which took up six beats—or two bars—of the accompanying 3/4 music, but which marked the first and third beat of the first bar and the second beat of the second bar rather than the first beat of every bar. As I became more familiar with the hypermetrical choreomusical relationships of many more Euro-American social dances across the century characteristic of the “slow—slow—quick-quick” pattern, it almost felt like an epiphany. And as my interest in social dance has gradually increased since the early 1990s, the focus of my research in choreomusical matters has moved toward the relationship between dance in music in various kinds of social dance (Damsholt 2007, 2009). But apart from the fact that the naked-a capella-dance-practice of my youth contributed to many different kinds of choreomusical reflections which were about to become an important part of my research, what is the pertinence of this case to this particular context of an anthropology of sound? As mentioned earlier, I propose that these experiences represent the idiosyncratic, erratic practice of dancing alone by oneself as a participatory sonic event and, as such, a promising object of research as specific corporeally anchored sonic experiences of everyday life. More precisely, the object of research in this case is the experience of a single sonic bodily persona dancing alone with the sound of music. My naked-a capella-dance-practice is not a typical example of either theatrical dance or social dance. In some ways, it belongs to the category of theatrical dancing in my reference to the choreomusical aesthetics of iconic modern dance choreographers including Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, and Mark Morris. But due to the lack of an (expected) audience the practice fails to function as theatrical dancing. And while this lack of an audience automatically places it in “the other” category, the practice of dancing alone by oneself fails to function as social dancing due to the lack of other dancers. Therefore, cutting across standard categories of theatrical and social dancing, researching the personal experience of dancing alone with music represents a daring issue for dance studies as well as for research in choreomusical relations—and possibly an equally promising and daring issue for an anthropology of sound. While my case proposes an alternative mode of proprioception dominated by the acoustic and kinesthetic rather than the visual sense apparatus, it also foregrounds the dance as a practice that is available for

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everyone in everyday life—and perhaps as common as the practice of singing along with the stereo in the car. As Andrew Ward highlights, in modern industrial societies dance is paradoxically “‘everywhere and nowhere’, ‘ubiquitous’ yet ‘elusive’” (Ward 1997: 3–4). But as opposed to Anahid Kassabian’s notion of “ubiquitous listening” or “ubiquitous musics” that we do not always hear (Kassabian 2013), my sonic bodily persona dancing with the sound of music underlines dancing as an intensely engaged auditory and kinesthetic experience, as a participatory event. An exciting part of my naked-a capella-dance-practice has to do with the notion of “space”—or more precisely with the relationship between notions of a visually experienced space, a kinesthetically experienced space, and an auditorily experienced space. Hence, in my experience of dancing in the dark with the sound of the music, the dimension of visual space was not relevant. I was participating in the music, sensing it through my bodily movements and my listening sense. In research on so-called screen dance, it has been highlighted that because “video dance explores certain camera perspectives to create spatial possibilities that could not be conceived on stage” (Dodds 2001: 71), live choreography adapted from music videos to an empty dance stage often looks very restricted in its use of physical space. However, while the experience of watching someone perform a five-minute choreography in the confined space of a couple of square meters might seem boring or limited, there is something definitively less limited about the kinesthetic experience of dancing to music in the space of a few square meters in one’s own room. My point is that in the experience of the naked-a capella-dance-practice, it seems as though the auditory space somehow made up for the lack of physical space in which I was able to move. In this way, the case somehow changes the understanding of dance as “visual movement in space” to dance as “a corporeally anchored sonic experience.”

Choreomusical Analysis, Dance Form Analysis, and Beyond What methodologies might we choose from when researching practices of dancing with the sound of music in everyday life? As stated earlier, at the time of my naked-a capelladance-practice, I was teaching a course entitled “The Music in the Dance” at the University of Copenhagen. One of the themes that I brought up in the course was the notion of music visualization characteristic of the discourse on modern dance and its music—particularly from the writings of the music pedagogue Émile Jacques-Dalcroze. In a chapter on “Rhythm Music and Education,” Jacques-Dalcroze describes “the elements common to music and moving plastic”: Music Moving Plastic Pitch Position and direction of gestures in space Intensity of sound Muscular dynamics Timbre Diversity in corporal forms (the sexes) Duration Duration Time   Time Rhythm Rhythm

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Rests Pauses Melody Continuous succession of isolated movements Counterpoint Opposition of movements Chords  Arresting of associated gestures (or gestures in groups) Harmonic successions Succession of associated movements (or of gestures in groups) Phrasing Phrasing Construction (form) Distribution of movements in space and time Orchestration (timbre) Opposition and combination of divers corporeal forms (the sexes) (Jacques-Dalcroze 1919 in Jacques-Dalcroze 1967: 150)

By the mid-1990s, the list of parallel parameters above also functioned as an explicit frame of reference in the book on Relationships Between Score and Choreography in TwentiethCentury Dance: Music, Movement, and Metaphor, in which American composer and accompanist Paul Hodgins presents a theoretical framework that he terms “A Paradigm for Choreomusical Analysis” (Hodgins 1992: 23–29). Hodgins’s framework defines two broad categories of so-called intrinsic relationships that “emanate from the realms of musical and kinaesthetic gesture” and extrinsic relationships that “depend largely upon narrative context” (Hodgins 1992: 23, 28). The intrinsic relationships fall into six categories of rhythmic, dynamic, textural, structural, qualitative, and mimetic, as well as subcategories such as “Instrumental vs. choreographic forces” and “Homophonic/polyphonic affinities.” The extrinsic relationships are divided into three—archetypal, emotional/psychological, and narrative—and Hodgins underlines that any choreomusical relationship may be presented in one of three temporal alignments: Direct: musical and choreographic elements are presented simultaneously; Foreshadowing: either musical or choreographic element is introduces separately, followed by direct presentation; Reminiscence: either musical or choreographic element is reiterated alone after direct presentation”. (Hodgins 1992: 28)

In 1997, I had become aware of the British dance and music scholar Stephanie Jordan, and as she had agreed to act as my primary PhD supervisor, I moved to London. Jordan published an article in 2011 in which she stated that “the term ‘choreomusical’ seems to be gaining currency, first used to my knowledge, by Paul Hodgins (1992), later by Inger Damsholt (1999, 2007) and myself (2007)” (Jordan 2011: 60, fn.2). Jordan primarily described choreomusical analysis as formal analysis performed by “scholars who borrow from musical methodologies” in their examination of “a variety of twentieth-century choreography” (Jordan 2011: 46). However, in that same article Jordan underlined that there is “a considerable body of work in dance ethnography that has developed sophisticated methodologies appropriate for structural analysis (their term) of the dances of specific cultures” (ibid.). She was referring to the method of Dance Form Analysis proposed by the ICTM (International Council for Traditional Music) Study Group on Ethnochoreology, which was founded in 1962. Members of the original group have recently published an updated and revised description of the method in an article entitled “Theory and Method of Dance Form Analysis” (Giurchescu and Kröschlová 2007). In this article, it is made clear that one of the aims of the method is to investigate the “Relationship between the

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Choreographic Form and the Musical Form.” This relationship is analyzed in terms of the dimension of the constituent form-units, of their coincidence, their conjunction, and their inner organization. Similar to Sawyer’s categories of synchronization and opposition, in the ethnochoreologist’s method the relationship between dance and dance-music may be termed either congruent or non-congruent. But more importantly, the scholars do not solely “borrow from musical methodologies” in their formal analysis of dance form; thus, many of the members of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology were specialists in the theories of Austro-Hungarian dance artist and theorist Rudolf von Laban (1879–1958), whose work laid the foundations for many varieties of so-called Laban movement study. An example of Laban’s theory is the concept of the kinesphere, which he defined as “the sphere around the body whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot” (Laban 1966[2011]: 10). Laban’s dynamosphere is defined by the intent or effort with which the body can move, and it composes the four effort factors of weight, space, time, and flow—each of which has two opposite polarities. From an outsider perspective, the material of the naked-a capella-dance might in itself point in the direction of research referred to as choreomusical analysis. But what given methods did I actually choose and apply? Although the case in some ways belongs to the category of theatrical dancing in my reference to the choreomusical aesthetics of iconic modern dance choreographers—my naked-a capella-dance-practice is not a typical example of “theatrical dance.” More importantly, my approach is not a typical example of formal analysis. In order to enhance the element of formal analysis, I might in fact have used the terminology of Laban-based formal analysis in the description of my naked-a capella-dance-practice in the following manner: Within the soundscape of Stevie and Take 6, I twist and turn my torso from the center of gravity of my body—the middle of the kinesphere where the perpendicular axes cross. While the harmonic progression of the vocal arrangement confirms or disrupts hierarchies between degrees of the tonal scale and the harmonies that they support, I stretch and bend my torso and limbs, sensing the spatial pulls between the polar ends of the Vertical, the Horizontal and the Sagittal dimensions. And as the modes of the melodic minor scale are evoked in the vocal harmonies of the singers, Laban’s choreutic scales are evoked by me as I sculpt an imperfect icosahedron through transverse and peripheral movement. As it happens, I decided to leave out the more specialized Laban terminology of the introductory description of my naked-a capella-dance-practice. Thus, my chosen methodology might seem more similar to the approach to cultural analysis in the social sciences that has been defined as autoethnography: Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience. This approach challenges canonical ways of doing research and representing others and treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act. A researcher uses tenets of autobiography and ethnography to do and write autoethnography. Thus, as a method, autoethnography is both process and product. (Ellis, Adams, and Buchner 2011: Abstract)

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At this point of my chapter, I might as well admit that I do not have much experience with the sort of personal sonic narration that my naked-a capella-dance-practice case represents. In my attempt to present an inquiry into dance based on a situated empiricism and sensualism, I am inspired by dance scholars such as Hilde Rustad, who gives voice to the dancing body in her autobiographic dance narratives concerning her involvement with the dance genre known as contact improvisation, or CI: I use the term autoethnography to share the experience of the writer—in this case a CI dancer, teacher and researcher—and thereby encourage appreciation and understanding of lived CI experience, which may resonate with experiences that readers of this article have had in other environments. As Max van Manen (1990, p. 54) has observed, “in drawing up personal descriptions of lived experiences, the phenomenologist knows that one’s own experiences are also the possible experiences of others.” (Rustad 2019: 30)

However, contact improvisation—a specific kind of postmodern dance practice initiated by Steve Paxton in 1972, involving dancers in a certain type of tactile activity—is usually not accompanied by music. But other scholars have attempted to describe the experience of listening and dancing to music as an intense bodily activity. In Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (2011), Julian Henriques describes the dancehall session as “a unique living laboratory—an auditory Galapagos— outside the usual dominance of vision”: This is the visceral experience of audition, immersed in auditory volumes, swimming in a sea of sound, between cliffs of speakers towering almost to the sky, sound stacked upon sound—tweeters on top of horns, on top of mid, on top of bass, on top of walk-in sub-bass bins … There is no escape, not even thinking about it, just being there alive, in and as the excess of sound. Trouser legs flap to the bass line and internal organs resonate to the finely tuned frequencies, as the vibrations of the music excite every cell in your body. This is what I call sonic dominance. (Henriques 2011: xv, emphasis in original)

Highlighting the social dimension of dancehall, Henriques defines the sonic bodies as “the flesh and blood of sound system crew and ‘crowd,’ as the dancehall audience is known” (Henriques 2011: xv). In comparison, my naked-a capella-dance-practice did not include a crew or a “crowd.” I was in charge of my own sound system in my private 12 meter squared room, which consisted of a stereo rack with a CD player, an amplifier, and two loudspeakers placed on top of my bookcases, 2 meters above the floor and 2 meters apart from each other. I was the crew and I was the dancer. Yet there were other voices or sonic bodies in the room—I was dancing with Stevie Wonder and Take 6. In the context of sound studies, many artists and scholars have described themselves as sonic thinkers, observing the world from a hearing perspective. Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger stated: The overwhelming visual nature of our economy and culture is undeniable. However, we have felt the need to immunize ourselves against visuals as a source of truth because of their overwhelming repetition and unquestioning marriage to the economy. (Odland and Auinger 2009: 63)

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Highlighting that listening is a bodily activity, in The Sonic Persona (2018) Holger Schulze argues that sonic thinking is always a form of corporeal thinking that awards “the sensory” an a priori status. Introducing the concept of thick listening, he explains how a humanoid “trained in more specific and refined ways to thoroughly approach its or her or his environment by means of a hearing perspective” can be characterized as a sonic persona (Schulze 2018a: 124). The intention is that thick listening will lead to personal sonic narrations that put their “primary emphasis on tiny fractions of an idiosyncratic listening or sensory experience” (ibid.: 126). Schulze’s work is rooted in the research ideals inherited from the Interdisciplinary Center for Historical Anthropology, founded in the 1980s at Freie Universität in Berlin, and as such the concept of thick listening is clearly derived from Clifford Geertz’s concept of thick description (Geertz 1973). Schulze describes thick listening as a materialist anthropological approach “immersed in the substance and the historical as well as sensational, fictional, and obsessive layers coating and entwining any sonic experience” (Schulze 2018a: 156). But while it seems clear that the tradition of historical anthropology applies methodologies and objectives from anthropology to the study of historical societies, it is difficult to characterize sonic thinking and thick listening in terms of historiography as an academic endeavor in the traditional sense. At this point, it might be useful to point out that historical anthropology is understood in different ways by different scholars, and to some may be synonymous with the notion of microhistory or the microhistorical approach, representing small-scale investigations of small units in society (Iggers 2005). From my perspective, my description of the naked-a capella-dance-practice of my youth does indeed represent a small-scale investigation. But in what way may it be described as a historical study? As methodologies through which dance may be researched, anthropology and history suggest rather contrasting spheres of space and time. As Theresa J. Buckland explains: For the dance ethnographer, her or his usual territory is that of the field, where source materials are created through the researcher’s systematic description of the transient actions and words of people dancing in the present. For the dance historian, the familiar realm is the archive, where extant sources, often fragmentary and sparse, have been created by people other than the researcher, who now employs their surviving artifacts as testimony to the dancing of the past. (Buckland 2006: 3)

Although, as Buckland underlines, such a strict demarcation between anthropology and history was never wholly operative in dance research, the difference between these two traditional approaches to the study of dance and other events in time, points to the fact that my case is neither one nor the other. It is a description made in 2017 of my memory of a series of corporeal sonic experiences I had in 1995 and thus, in terms of the relationship between present and past, it is neither ethnography nor history. But what about the concept of “oral history”? This term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events told by the people who experienced them (Iggers 2005). However, in this context it ought to be highlighted that the professional approach to oral history is all about conducting interviews with people other than oneself. So, the professional oral historian conducts (ethnographic) interviews with people who

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participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. The description of my naked-a capella-dance-practice is an approach that moves beyond the formalist framework of Elisabeth Sawyer, Paul Hodgins, and the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology. It is an attempt to propose an unconventional and experiential perspective focusing on a specific corporeally anchored sonic experience in which the flesh of a body is sounding while dancing. Yet my narrative does not evoke any form of that third tongue, language, and/or mouth that Michel Serres and Schulze seem to be searching for (Schulze 2018a: 64). In fact, although I leave out the specialized Laban terminology, I make use of highly specialized terminologies and concepts of traditional music analysis. Yet the point is that I am not just applying these in order to describe a sensory experience of the past, because the intellectual reflections were a part of these intense bodily experiences of joy and pleasure in the past. At least that is how I remember it. As the sound of music was a defining element of the practice, so were the ideals of Taylor, Ailey, Cunningham, Rainer, and Morris as well as the very rarefied ideas of Teck, Sawyer, Jacques-Dalcroze, and Hodgins. These ideas were imbedded in my listening, dancing, and singing; thus, how could I—or would I—avoid these ideas in my sensory description? This question of “what to do about the ongoing intellectual reflections while dancing” is in some ways an obstacle that I have encountered in my attempt to adopt this approach. But while my narrative aims at the academic recognition of the “whatever it is that affects us” and the need for taking bodily experiences more seriously in their intrinsic forms of knowledge, it also attempts to highlight the cultural and historical specificity of my own personal bodily experiences.

Between Academic Research and Artistic Practice When in 1990–1991 I spent a year as a postgraduate student at UC Riverside in California, I had the privilege of studying with dance historian Susan Leigh Foster—my primary mentor in dance history and theory. Foster’s book Reading Dancing (1986) was my initial introduction to the works of Michel Foucault and of Hayden White who had acted as Foster’s own PhD supervisor. When I embarked upon my journey toward my final PhD dissertation in 1996, I gradually began to narrow in on the following question: How are we able to perceive, think of, and talk about the relationship between music and dance? My understanding of history was further pushed as I began to study the thoughts of Foucault and White more deeply and, constructing an “archeology of knowledge,” I entitled the first part of my dissertation “A History of Choreomusical Relations.” The third part was called “The Conditions of Discourse” and consisted of an analysis of Mark Morris’s piece Gloria (1984)—danced to Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria in D (RV 589). Emphasizing the constructionist perspective, my overall claim was that Morris’s Gloria presents an artistic manifestation of Foucault’s rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses (Damsholt, 1999: 156–157). In other

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words, that the piece offers an exposition of the conditions of choreomusical discourse— “what can be thought” about choreomusical relations—reinforcing the discourse, yet at the same time “undermining it, rendering it fragile and making it possible to thwart it” (Foucault 1978: 101). By the time I finished my dissertation in 1999, few academic debates were more intense than the one between social constructionism and essentialism. And the mere title of my dissertation—Choreomusical Discourse—clearly pointed in the direction of a constructionist perspective that rejected the notion that there is a reality “which precedes discourse and reveals its face to a prediscursive perception” (White in Sturrock 1979: 86). Yet, like other students at that time, I was enticed by the way in which the American socalled cognitive semantics introduced by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson highlighted that the very structures of our thoughts are products of bodily experience (Lakoff and Johnson 1981). Underlining the European heritage of their endeavor, Frederik Stjernfelt described the idea of “the body in the mind” as “a ‘Lebenswelt’ concept in the best phenomenological tradition—even if the cognitive current does not itself make use of this notion” (Stjernfelt 1995: 127). Foucault’s perspective seemed to reject a tradition of phenomenology, which gave absolute priority to the observing subject. So what was I going to do? Finishing my dissertation, I settled at the standpoint that discourse analysis and cognitive semantics were compatible to the extent that these approaches examined very basic forms and structures in the relationship between words and things: Foucault, Lakoff and Johnson are connected in the sense that their theories somehow seem to focus precisely on the same level of ontology. For the cognitive semanticists, the embodied image schemata constitute a pre-linguistic basis for the later development of language. Similar to this ontological level it has been argued that Foucault recognizes a level of ‘“murmur’ of a pre-verbal ‘agitation of things’.” Nevertheless, whether discourse is an underlying condition of the body or embodied structures constitute the basis of meaning, my point is that choreomusical discourse and choreomusical perception are intertwined. In other words ‘what can be thought about choreomusical relations’ is inevitably linked with ‘what can be perceived’ visually, audibly and kinesthetically. (Damsholt 1999: 9)

In a later development of material from my PhD, I connect Lakoff ’s and Johnson’s ideas of metaphorical transfer with Foucault by adopting the notion of the metaphor-dispositif as introduced by Danish philosophers. However, at this point my focus on the bodily basis of thoughts had been exchanged for an interest in the macrolevel of an emerging dispositif in the realm of modern dance. In my article “Troublesome Relationships: Gendered Metaphors in Modern Dance and its Music” (2012), I propose that the understanding of the dance/music relationship in modern dance is predisposed to articulate certain power relations inherent in the realm of gender and sexuality. The point is that “to understand something by means of something else is also an interference with it or an organization of it” (Damsholt 2012: 74). In this case, the source domain (gender and sexuality) is politically formatted and therefore also formats the target (the choreomusical relationship) in terms of politics.

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In any case, in my analysis of Morris’s Gloria from 1999, I noted that the presence of the human voice figured as an important bodily connection between dance and music. Echoing Susan McClary’s statement in the quotation that ended my case in the beginning of this chapter, I stated that when we hear someone sing, we make sense of this singing largely by means of our lifelong experiences as people with human voices. At the time of my dissertation, several scholars had pointed to the fact that Morris was generally interested in exposing the vulnerability of the human body: In Gloria we see the emotional eloquence of Morris’s simple style—his vulnerable bodies, his blunt steps … If he had given the dancer smooth, streamlined steps—high jumps, long stretches—the effect would have been entirely different. The dancer would have been divine. Instead we get a Breughelesque image: weight, bulk, mass, something distant from the divine and therefore, in its reach for the divine, truly moving … In contrast with the pomp of the music … the dancers look extremely plain: ten little people in street clothes. (Acocella 1993: 120)

Here Acocella suggests a contrast in the relationship between the plain-looking little (vulnerable) people and “the pomp of the music” emerging from the music of Vivaldi— presumably including the invulnerability of the highly skilled vocalists. As already mentioned, I did not experience any contrast between my naked dancing and the gospel music—partly due to my knowledge of Alvin Ailey and Revelations. But more importantly, in my PhD I extended Acocella’s concept of Morris’s “vulnerable bodies.” More specifically, I stated that Vivaldi’s vocal music—“the presence of the human voice”— was an important aspect of the overall feeling of bodily vulnerability that emerges from Gloria. In retrospect, it would seem that my own naked-a capella-dance-practice may have felt somewhat reminiscent of this scenario: my own naked vulnerable body contrasting the invulnerability of the highly skilled soul and gospel vocalists. And yet “the presence of the human voice” figured as an important bodily connection between the music and my dancing as a participatory activity. In the aftermath of my PhD studies, Stephanie Jordan invited me to be on the advisory board of an international conference on dance and music that she and Simon Morrison were organizing at the Centre for Dance Research, Roehampton University (UK). This event, titled “Sound Moves,” took place on November 5–6, 2005, and brought together artists and scholars from Europe and North America for a series of academic panels, roundtable discussions, lecture-demonstrations, and performances. Introducing a collection of essays in which the conference resulted, Morrison and Jordan later remarked: “Sound Moves” sought to inspire new thinking about the possibilities within choreomusicology … To different degrees, the events at Roehampton focused on the following questions: what types of dance-music relationships exist in the balletic and nonballetic repertoire, and how can one assess them? What do choreographers look for in music, and composers in choreography? How do dancers embody sound and musicians reflect movement in their performances? Finally, how similar or dissimilar are physical (kinetic) and aural (acoustic) gestures? (Morrison and Jordan 2007: 3)

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In 2015 both Jordan and I were invited to a conference in Venice entitled Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse and Practice. The conference was convened by Gianmario Borio, Patrizia Veroli, and Gianfranco Vinay, who later edited a book of the same name as the conference. In my contribution to this volume, a chapter entitled “Identifying ‘Choreomusical Research’” (2018b), I examine definitions of “choreomusical research” located in particular discursive statements. Departing from the “Paradigm for Choreomusical Analysis” presented by Hodgins in 1992, I move on to more contemporary definitions of “choreomusical research” and/or “choreomusicology” presented by Jordan in “Choreomusical Conversations: Facing a Double Challenge” (2011) and by the Australian anthropologist and creative artist Paul H. Mason in “Music, Dance and the Total Art Work: Choreomusicology in Theory and Practice” (2012). Departing from these three texts, my identification of this branch of research highlights the epistemological implications or consequences of definitions of “choreomusical research” and/or “choreomusicology” as performative actions, partly intended to update research criteria for academic scholarship in the study of choreomusical relationships. In summary, my identification of choreomusical research highlights tensions between academic research and artistic practice, as well as tensions between an art studies tradition and an ethnographic tradition. The first type is seen in the different ways in which the three texts are embedded in actual hands-on artistic practices and thus more or less implicitly refer to the notion of artistic research. Highlighting tensions between the art studies tradition and the ethnographic tradition, I contend that Mason overemphasizes research in EuroAmerican theatre dance and I suggest that a definition of choreomusicology equally ought to encompass a body of choreomusical work in the ethnographic tradition, particularly highlighting its virtue in terms of its contribution to formal analysis. In the final section of the chapter, I focus on the notion of “choreomusical research” as a core discipline, in contrast to a more inclusive definition of the field as a multifaceted area in which a plurality of disciplines and methodologies are interconnected. Rather than praising cross- and interdisciplinary approaches at any cost, I posit that interdisciplinary involvement with some of these more established international research areas might be counterproductive in terms of gaining some common ground—a body of knowledge—in which choreomusical research is based. Paraphrasing Gay Morris, I suggest that choreomusicology needs “to establish its own turf with a strong disciplinary bent,” so that more established fields will not “colonize what until recently has been marginalized terrain, and use it opportunistically” (Morris 1996: 2). Personally I conceive of choreomusicology as a field of study in which a) practice-based research experience in both music and dance is central, b) frameworks for choreomusical analysis inherent in the ethnographic tradition are acknowledged, and c) research is carried out by scholars with a “bilingual competence” backgrounds in and across both musicology and dance studies who are familiar with canonic products of choreomusical research. As McMains and Thomas state: “There is, in fact, a fledgling body of literature on choreomusical analysis, a term proposed by musicologist Paul Hodgins in 1992, that has since been adopted by dance scholars such as Stephanie Jordan and Inger Damsholt” (McMains and Thomas 2013: 2).

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So how might choreomusicology as a field of study be relevant when researching practices of dancing with the sound of music in everyday life? From my perspective, choreomusicology is a field of study in which practice-based research experience in both music and dance is central—bordering on inevitable and indispensable—which makes it relevant when researching practices of dancing with the sound of music. Initially, choreomusicology also seems to align itself with the idea that listening is a bodily activity and that sonic thinking is always a form of corporeal thinking. However, an enquiry into the crucial, and often intimate, self-transforming experiences of dancing with the sound of music in everyday life as practices of joy and pleasure, which is based on a situated empiricism and sensualism, moves beyond choreomusicology as described above. Rather than providing personal sonic narrations that put their primary emphasis on the sensory experience and its cultural analysis in a historical perspective, the tradition of choreomusicology primarily represents research that might be characterized as formal analysis and which is carried out by scholars with a bilingual competence in more or less Schenkerian music theory as well as Laban-based dance theory.

Running as a Form of Waltzing? By the means of description and discussion of my naked-a capella-dance-practice, the purpose of this chapter has been to inspire and provoke further research endeavors in the area of autoethnographical sensory descriptions of dancing to music and/or choreomusical experiences. Whether or not future enquiries of dancing with the sound of music in everyday life will be classified as choreomusicology, I encourage the production of more personal narrations that focus on these self-transforming experiences. In her book Music in Everyday Life, musicologist Tia DeNora has underlined how music is an integral part of daily life, acting as “a technology of the self ” by contributing to the way in which individuals react to and understand their world (DeNora 2000). What interests me in particular as a researcher is the concept of dancing as listening in everyday life, or more precisely dancing as musical participation. Many of my own experiences with music, or what others might describe as sonic experiences, are primarily experiences of bodily participation—more specifically of “musiceren” (making music). Sometimes sounds are produced when I move my body more or less intentionally. Obviously, this happens when I clap my hands, slap my thighs, and stomp my feet. It also happens when I manipulate my vocal chords in highly specific ways, such as when I harmonize to the melodic line of a favorite tune played on the radio by singing in parallel thirds, and so forth. Yet even when the movements of my body do not produce sound, I deliberately participate in anticipated musical structures. This practice obviously requires a prior familiarity with the musical material in which I am participating or to which I am contributing. The situation might be compared to a singalong, in the sense that the criteria for being able to sing along with a tune require that you actually know the melody (or that you can read music and are provided with a score). The naked-a capella-dance-practice of my youth

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is an example of such an intimate personal example of “making music” or of dancing as musical participation in everyday life, and this kind of participation is a very valuable aspect of my life that characterizes other situations too. Whether the source of music comes from my earpods or from a more or less distant loudspeaker or live performance, I personally often participate by coordinating my body movements quite deliberately with music that I hear or listen to. When walking my dog, I may not necessarily be taking walking steps coordinated with the beat of some music, but I often time my arm, head, or shoulder movements in specific ways, marking elements of a rhythmic pattern on different hypermetrical levels. The same thing often goes on when I am doing the dishes or making copies of texts at the copy machine while listening to music. A small jerk of the neck, a tiny roll of the head, a little lift of my chin coordinated with the sound—a sort of small everyday dance in miniature. When I go running in the neighborhood, my training is a form of musical participation in the sense that I only really enjoy running by myself if I am engaged with my iPod. In other words, “I dance” in the sense that my running is coordinated with the tempo of the accompanying music. Thus, my training is pre-planned by a self-made playlist that is created within a framework of intervals of walking, jogging, running, and so on, in which the planned pace of my leg movements are coordinated with the number of beats per minute that characterize the chosen tracks. An example of one of my favorite jogging tracks is Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing” (1993) indicating a simple 6/8 time signature with triplets translating into a duple hyper meter with two beats per bar. Correspondingly, my jogging steps are equivalent to the triplets that divide the bar into smaller units, and the two-bar hyper meter is marked in alternation by my right foot as well as my left. Right, left, right, Left, right, left etc. This jogging-WhitneyHouston-waltz of mine is a very intimate and personal experience and—although probably a somewhat nerdy experience of a choreomusicologist—a valuable aspect of my everyday life. There are many such valuable experiences of bodily musical participation as practices of joy and pleasure that that ought to be highlighted by researchers in the future.

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There is something mysterious about sensory experiences. Reading the chapters in this section, this mysteriousness shows up several times: in the way, for instance, that sound, tissue, and muscles enter into an organic, colorful dance in the interior soundworld of Ramirez in Sowodniok’s chapter on the voice. In the way Damsholt’s sense of space is altered, as the “auditory space … made up for the lack of physical space” (Damsholt 2020: 169) in which she was able to move, dancing naked in the dark. And in the way these experiences of noticing and following the minuscule sensory impulses experienced can be accompanied by a sense of liberation, of an unlimited self, again in Sowodniok’s chapter. I come to think of a certain branch of philosophical pedagogics inspired by what German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called Wahrheitserfahrung: literally, an experience of truth. In the words of Danish philosopher Finn Thorbjørn Hansen, this Wahrheitserfahrung is an experience of receiving a “deeper understanding of the meaningful in the world” (Hansen 2012A: 272) based on an “embeddedness in the universe” of our Dasein (Hansen 2012B: 212). It is an experience that escapes the epistemological, intentional relation to the world, and rather rests on an openness and a willingness to follow the impulses received in experiencing being grasped by something (Hansen 2012A: 273). The sensory apprehension is probably related, perhaps even a gateway, to this openness, this willingness to follow a sense of truth, which grasps the one who is experiencing. In researching the voice body, when floating through sound and light, or when the sensory body switches to receiving—in the sonic experience of Sowodniok and her coauthors—the voice of an aria singer, thus letting itself suffused with a sense of comfort. This sensory openness affords a mode of being in the world of not-knowing, as “sensory precision” (Schulze 2018a) takes charge: we do not know where we might end up. Nonetheless, this precision that turns up in a somehow mysterious sensory experience—in dancing intensely, floating freely in the water, or listening to an aria—seemingly holds the potential to access new depths, insights, ideas, revelations. As the American philosopher Eugene Gendlin notes, “our body implies to us steps in the right direction” (1992: 203). I would add that our body implies these steps in a most mysterious, yet simultaneously very material, way:

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The intentionality was fleshly, as if my tissues awaited the touch of sound in wonderment, furthermore, in anticipation and acceptance. While sounding, the slackened or stiffened, withdrawn and inanimate tissues turn toward this vocal invitation. (Sowodniok 2020: 113, quoting Ramirez, in this handbook)

What could possibly grow to be perceived, in the future, if we were to tune into this openended yet precise, mysterious aspect of our sensory experience? If we deliberately follow the impulses of, and explore, this fleshy intentionality, this sensory precision, as a practice of research, then what organic, colorful, holistic modes of thinking could appear? Despite this mysterious aspect of sensory experience, there is nonetheless also something deeply familiar at work. While I read the voices of Damsholt, van Drie, Sowodniok, and Schulze, their experiences all resonate. They create in me the sensation that despite the different professional directions and diverging life experiences of these authors and myself, when it comes down to it, we humanoid so-called aliens (Schulze 2018: 5–9) are still traveling in the same sensory boat—enjoying ourselves, shivering, resting, and being transformed by experiences apprehended in the same mysterious sensory way. Yet these four chapters strike me with one other commonality: none of the sensory experiences explicitly take this familiarity to a particular, maybe radical, consequence. This is the case despite suggestions that the sensory, including sound and voice, is associated with therapeutic, liberating qualities—such as screaming in the forest, feeling connected to an aria singer, or exploring the body voice as part of professional training. But humanoids like us are, irrevocably, beings-in-the-world, and the social is fundamental to being human, ontologically and epistemologically (Dall’alba 2007: 681). What would happen if we used these mysterious aspects of sensory experiences, not as— albeit pleasant, intense, transformative but nonetheless—individual experiences, but with the aim of exploring the relational? If exploring the body voice is a way to the liberation of the singer, then what could that liberation look like if directed not only at performing professionally but at exploring connecting in that mysterious, holistic, meaningful way of a Wahrheitserfahrung? What kind of sensory listening—a thick sensing?—could be developed, and what would it mean to experience being, deliberately, exploratively, “doubly naked” (Sowodniok) in our relations to other “aliens”? I feel a kind of disappointment. A being left alone … Suddenly I feel wide and upright again. Something in me feels recognized. I feel wrapped up, cared for and comforted. (Sowodniok 2020: 115, quoting Duschek, in this handbook)

Researching the deeply relational potential of the mysterious aspect of sensory experience would be a daring task—maybe even a scary, an overly risky one? Personally, this would certainly be the case, as it would require the courage to cast oneself into the realms of not-knowing in the otherwise often controlled, rulebound arena of contact with other human beings—just as it would require an openness to noticing, and following in an unlimited way, the minuscule impulses of sensory precision. Academically, this would be a major risk, in that speaking of, and even more, deliberately exploring and following the mysterious qualities of a sensory experience, pushes at the boundaries of what might be

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thought reasonable research practice. Maybe one would transcend research then, leaving the narrow precincts of academia? Or perhaps not. Indeed, the mysterious might evoke associations with religion, rather than research. What concept might be adequate for speaking of the mysterious elements of sensory experience in a way that does not allow it to be overshadowed by religious or even anti-scientific connotations? And how could we research and describe the relational potential of the mysterious in sensory experience? Which non-verbal and yet still verbal, perhaps poetic, joint practices and methods could further be (and need further to be?) developed? Investigation of these issues, perhaps with a disciplinary side-view to philosophical pedagogics and certainly to the methods of an art-based research, could be further encouragement for the next steps in the direction of exploring the sounding flesh.

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Dwelling in Sound: What happens when we question contemporary cities, everyday spaces, and situated experiences with sound, according to and from a sonic perspective? Our bearings and our models of intelligibility are no longer exactly the same. Porosity tends to replace limits, soft envelopes take precedence over strict lines, rhythms and tones regain importance compared to face to face and distancing. Assuredly, resonance is a key feature of sonic experience. Hence, Sam Auinger and Dietmar Offenhuber perfectly demonstrate how the plaza is a place of resonance, giving voice to a great diversity of social activities as well as various acoustic infrastructures of transportation. From this perspective, the plaza—for instance, the Alexanderplatz in Berlin—is a perfect place to listen to the complexity, richness, and dynamics of such a social form of life. In a way, such resonances blur the separation between the subject and its immediate surroundings, since “resonance is both the resonance of a sonic body for its own sake and the resonance of the sound in a listening body, which resonates itself as it listens” (Nancy 1991: 77). With sound, we are not only immersed in a space. We are permeated by a medium, both inside and out, imbued with the current situation and penetrated with its atmospheric content. Therefore, our ways of thinking habitation are bound to move and to transform. Our very idea of dwelling has to be reconsidered. We must then give voice to diffuse, vibratory, molecular, and transitory phenomena. And still, it is our sensitivity itself that is put to the test. Are we not bound to become more attentive to ordinary and unnoticed ambiances? Are we not led to give special attention to the enigma of attunement? Do we not have to take seriously our capacity to be affected by our surroundings and to act upon them in return? Such questions emerge as one seeks to understand our sonic ways of dwelling in the world. In other words, sound has the ability to set the tone of lived spaces and to install common moods. One of the challenges is thus to describe how a space acquires an atmospheric charge and manages to resonate with a specific Stimmung. Perhaps this is one of the lessons that can be drawn from Andi Schoon’s discussion of workspaces. As is rightly noted: “Because there is no siren to signal the end of work, work itself is diffused into the everyday. The employee of a service provider has no more leisure time because he has to identify with his work. The capitalist principle becomes fluid—in Deleuze it even assumes gaseous form, thereby occupying private spaces.” Thus, a new field of research

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opens, questioning the way in which ambiances and affective atmospheres are embedded in the ongoing process of the emergence of a control society. One can wonder then how sound embodies the diffuse quality and the affective tonality of a situation. Whether related to domestic spaces, urban squares, street life, or workplaces, sound is closely intertwined with ordinary gestures, bodily affects, social interactions, and background practices. It is always embedded in “the whole hurly-burly of human actions” (Wittgenstein 1981: n°567). It can help to test our sense of home or to highlight the features of a public space, to reveal the affordances of a place, or to explore the resources of a company. But new ways of listening have to be explored as well. For instance, one can rely on sensobiographic walks inspired by new materialism—as Juhana Venäläinen, Sonja Pöllänen, and Rajko Muršič do—or on resonance chambers to think with our ears, following Auinger and Offenhuber. One can mobilize a tapestry of sonic ritual to highlight a realistic home like Jacqueline Waldock, or the spirit of a whole company inspired by the fabbrica diffusa as Schoon proposes. These various approaches constitute original propositions that enable us to make explicit the role of sound in our habitual modes of dwelling. They help to better understand how sound adjusts to a place and configures it at the same time, accommodates to it while activating it, how it is both perceived and produced. In other words, sound is not only spatialized but also spatializing. But also, as proposed by Venäläinen, Pöllänen, and Muršič, we must bear in mind that sound is not only a social feature of the lived world. It also involves fundamentally a material dimension. Analyzing the streets of Turku and Ljubljana, they enable us “to make sense of the materialities of sound”: “By working with these resonances, we seek to develop an open and playful way of dealing with the textual– aural nexus and linking materialities of the street sounds to the materialities of street life more generally.” Beyond the extreme variety of contexts, conditions, and social forms of life, sound has the power to hold together the heterogeneous components of a situation. As Erwin Straus has perfectly shown: “space filled with tone and homogenized by a single pervading movement—and in this the homogeneity of the acoustic mode of the space differs from that of empty metrical space—has itself a presentic character” (Straus 1966: 35). We are dealing here with the capacity of sound to give consistency to an overall situation, to unify in a single diffuse quality the numerous features of a situation. It is of course possible to discriminate and distinguish the sounds of an environment, to identify them one by one, to find out what each of them relates to. No doubt sound involves a cognitive activity that makes it possible to face problems of a practical and functional nature. To live in a place, one must be able to identify the sounds that compose it and to act in accordance, to be able to orient oneself in the everyday sonic environment. But sound also has a power of atmosphericization and homogenization—a power of coalescence—which endows each situation with a singular pervasive quality (cf. Dewey 1931: 93–116, 1985). When we enter a new space or discover a new city, we are immediately caught up in its ambiance. We are not only led to perceive and interpret a sonic environment, but also to immediately feel and sense a particular atmosphere. A first overall impression emerges, which solicits the whole body and suggests qualities of movement. Before being oriented, our sense of hearing is floating, peripheral, and defocused. Let us not forget that if an acoustic signal

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may transform into a piece of information in referring to its source, it is first and foremost a medium in itself, constitutive of an ambient milieu. The experience of sound consists as much in feeling the overall tone of a given place as hearing a set of distinct sounds. It is not just about identifying the various sound signals, but also letting oneself be traversed and transported by a whole acoustic environment. To dwell in sound requires as much to immerse oneself in the situation and to resonate with the surrounding environment as to seek to understand and interpret what is going on. In addition to the power of atmosphericization of sound previously mentioned, we also have to consider its power of tonalization (cf. Bachelard 1994). This means that sound is not reducible to its cognitive dimension. It opens up to the pathic and affective feature of sensory experience. But if this is the case, it is because sound imposes on us and takes possession of us, overwhelms us, constantly insists and persists. No doubt that is why sound makes it possible to wonder what it means to feel at home. By asking this question, Jacqueline Waldock manages to give a very thorough account of what sound can teach us in this matter: “The case study challenges the idea that home is constructed from positive sonic, sensory experiences and suggests that both nurturing and damaging experiences are a reality of home.” Finally, regardless of the spaces considered and the activities at stake, we cannot help but vibrate in unison with the world, to reverberate alongside and to attune to the surroundings in which we are immersed. We are inevitably ensounded (Ingold 2011).

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9 The Plaza Sam Auinger and Dietmar Offenhuber

Figure 9.1  Map of Alexanderplatz and its immediate surroundings. Source: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. https:// www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

The Five Conditions of Alexanderplatz We arrive at Alexanderplatz on the subway train of the U2 line coming from the direction of Pankow. We step down onto the platform. An assertive signal announces the closing of the train’s doors. It is afternoon, around 3:00 p.m. on a hot Wednesday in early June. The many people waiting on the platform and another train arriving on the opposite track

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dominate the sound of the scene. We pause for a while, waiting for the crowds to dissipate. After the trains have departed and the screeching noise of their wheels fades away down into the tunnel, a pair of buskers playing on their accordions takes over our auditory space. The musicians have placed themselves at the end of the platform toward the exit stairs. Their choice of location might have been motivated by acoustic reasons, because the architectural configuration of this place enhances and amplifies their music. The space has a rectangular section with parallel walls, a low ceiling, and an asphalt floor. All surfaces, including the tiled walls, are flat, even, and use hard materials—this increases the sonic reflections and therefore the loudness of the music. Only the soft bodies of pedestrians break these reflections and act as dampening diffusers that reduce the loudness and take the harsh edge off the sound. As we walk toward the exit stairs, a person next to us shouts into his phone, competing with the music, the voices in various different languages, and the clattering noises of luggage. As we ascend the stairs, the ambience of the Alex—as it’s commonly called—begins to shape our auditory space, replacing the jarring sonic environment of the subway. Almost anything we hear now is related to the various activities taking place on the Alex. We see skateboarders practicing their skills on the sweeping, shallow stairs and edges that graduate the topography of the plaza. Shoppers chatting as they walk toward the S-Bahn. A tourist guide advertises his tours and assembles a group of tourists. Standing at the top of the stairs, we are fully immersed in this environment. In our immediate proximity—in the near field, to introduce a technical term—we hear voices and noises from rolling trolley cases all blending into a soup of sounds that are hard to differentiate. Walking across the plaza toward the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft—or, the Fountain of Friendship between Peoples, created by artist Walter Womacka—an exuberant architectural structure from the communist era, begins to dominate what we hear. The soothing, but nevertheless quite loud noise of falling water makes other sounds almost disappear. We have to concentrate to identify the sounds of two concurrent musical performances, the arrival and departure of S-Bahn trains in the adjacent S-Bahn station, as well as the sound of trams crossing the square. In the distance—in our far field—we see people involved in various activities, but we cannot hear them. We feel like we are watching actors in a silent movie, which can make one feel slightly disoriented. Activities closer to us are audible. A preacher is yelling at us, pointing at a bible. But even his elevated voice gets drowned out in the diffuse sound mixture that does not allow us to judge the direction or distance of sounds. The siren of a distant police car pierces the auditory fog and makes itself known. We instinctively turn our heads in its direction. We can also hear the occasional ambulance or other emergency vehicle traveling along the traffic arteries surrounding the square. Their sounds bounce between the buildings and surfaces of the plaza, maintaining only a minimal directional information for the listener. We hear them far away from us, but we cannot precisely locate them. These distant sounds of the city increase the auditory space— Alexanderplatz not only looks, but also sounds like a pretty big space. Continuing our walk across the plaza, we encounter a series of overlapping and intersecting acoustic spaces that can be characterized by their function and by the

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activities that are involved in these functions. We distinguish five major conditions: First, Alexanderplatz is a vast space of consumption. Almost all buildings that face inwards to the plaza contain shopping centers, cafés, or stores. Human voices, footsteps, sounds of bags, and trolleys define the cantus—the highest voice in the choral of the plaza. Numerous speakers project music into the plaza. They are used to demarcate the outdoor seating areas of cafés and restaurants or the catchment areas of shops with music spilling out from inside through the wide entrances. Each sound event is further amplified by reflections from the vertical facades. We hear how the sound of footsteps changes as they move away from the facades and shop windows with their smooth glass surfaces that perfectly reflect every sound. On all passages that connect the square with its immediate surroundings and the large building housing the S-Bahn station, we pass beggars and street vendors advertising their wares. The rhythm of their speech and announcements, addressed at pedestrians, becomes a recognizable pattern in space. Second, Alexanderplatz is one of Berlin’s principal public transport hubs. Entrances and exits for subway and S-Bahn lines as well as tram stops can be found all over the plaza. Navigating the complex maze of underpasses and subway platforms, only experienced commuters can anticipate where on the plaza they will emerge. During rush hours (the afternoon rush hour is just about to begin), the sounds of trains and crowds alternate in rapid succession, creating a complex polyrhythm. Each subway or tram line has its own timetable and spills a crowd of commuters across the plaza at different intervals. During such moments, the noise of the trains makes all other activities inaudible, followed by a new group of people walking at various speeds. Third, among all of these hectic activities, we are still able to find areas that are used for waiting, meeting, and gathering. The area around the Fountain of Friendship between Peoples, with the rim of its wide round basin, offers a popular place for sitting and lingering. The sound of the fountain creates an excellent space for private conversations: The sound drowns out voices in the near field and therefore makes words incomprehensible from a few meters distance. As we walk around its circular perimeter, we encounter about fifty people sitting on the rim speaking in at least eight different languages. The site also contains four small groups of trees. One of these groups is part of a restaurant seating area, while the others have public seating around and between them. The sound of a sparrow reminds us that we can hear surprisingly few birds on the square, other than pigeons. This is most likely due to the prevalence of hard, sealed surfaces as opposed to the few areas of vegetation. Fourth, the open areas of Alexanderplatz provide areas where groups of tourists gather. We pass different groups speaking in various languages, studying maps to orient themselves, or gathering around particular locations. A tour guide talking to a group of Asian tourists amplifies his voice with the help of a portable speaker system. He explains the history of the plaza and directs his group how to find the right spot to photograph the famous landmarks, first of all the TV tower. As a fifth category, Alexanderplatz is also a place of play. The ample open space invites young people and tourists to roam around with their Segways and e-scooters. From our position, they are only audible as a humming sound as they drive past. Some carry a

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bluetooth speaker in their backpack playing loud music. They cause palpable tension; we overhear comments and aggressive shouts from other people who feel irritated. This first leisurely walk across the plaza introduces us to the various main actors and the spatial arrangement of the stage. The Alex is a substantial public space that at first appears oddly amorphous—it does not have a clearly defined border or a legible architectural organization, which classic urbanists such as Camillo Sitte deemed so important. Parts of it feel enclosed, others do not. It is a space that is difficult to decode both visually and auditorily. It is a field of superimposed activities and areas of influence, whose balance is constantly shifting. We can only begin to understand its organization by immersing ourselves into its environment. Alexanderplatz presents itself as a pedestrian space surrounded by motorized traffic. We can experience this space by walking in almost any direction we want. There are no prescribed paths—we can traverse and meander. The near field of auditory perception is therefore dominated by human sounds against the backdrop of a large city. Every sound we hear and perceive as vibrations is a direct result of some activity.

A Transversal Resonance Chamber Alexanderplatz is our prototype and case study for investigating the sonic life of urban plazas—social spaces that combine many different practices that are influenced by larger societal processes. The human and non-human actors on the stage of the plaza reflect many aspects of urban life: the economic circumstances, social and political relationships, and ecological conditions. This plaza—and this might or might not apply to other plazas also— provides at the same time (a) a space of consumption, (b) a principal public transportation hub, (c) areas for waiting, meeting, and gathering, (d) areas for groups of tourists, and (e) a place of play. Listening with these five conditions in mind can offer clues and inspiration for addressing current and future challenges. The plaza is a place of resonance. We want to listen. What do we hear? We hear human actors like the tourist, pulling a trolley across the pavement, its clattering sound, with their searching gaze, trying to get oriented; also a group of three middle-aged women studying a map; a family, resting in one of the many coffeeshops. The there is the tourist guide, his voice amplified by a small speaker system while moving in space. Next, the skateboarder, focusing on the subtle topography of the plaza and its steps, the edges to be found in the surface of the plaza, practicing a new move, with the impacts, scratching, and metallic sliding sounds. Now, the busker, competing for places where people gather; four musicians play at the same time in proximity to each other, competing for the same auditory space: a drummer using cans, a didgeridoo player, a guitarist using amplification, and a singer. There is the beggar, an old woman asking for money in countless different languages, probing whether persistent annoyance or seeking empathy is the better strategy for a particular addressee. And the preacher, yelling the gospel to people who ignore him, performing with an incessant voice in rhythmic and melodic patterns. Over there is the

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Figures 9.2a and 9.2b:  360-degree panoramas of the pedestrian area of Alexanderplatz, montage by the authors.

hot-dog merchant, carrying a wearable, mobile hot-dog stand. Always there are various shoppers, leaving or entering or walking toward or coming from different outlets. And always also many, many commuters, vanishing or spilling all over the plaza in periodic waves, according to the timetables of the subway system. Finally, we observe policemen and security guards, often accompanied by the sounds of motors and signals. We also hear the various modes of transport: the tram, a recent addition, crossing the plaza, and its rumpling and squeezing felt as well in our bodies; the S-Bahn is also a visible element, and—if the wind is right—it can be heard as one of Berlin’s signature sounds; the Segway, e-scooters, and rentable bikes provide their individually mechanical or electric

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moving sounds, sounds of accelerating and decelerating as well as the sound of locking and unlocking them; the U-Bahn generates vibrations under the ground, and also the sounds of people emerging from the entrances and escalators. We hear the architectural stage itself: the TV Tower or Fernsehturm, the most prominent element, ironically not on the plaza but besides it; the Urania world clock, a preferred meeting place, with the twentyfour time zones featuring on the sides of the cylinder, powered by the gearbox of an old GDR (German Democratic Republic) Trabant-car; the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft, apparently known as “Hooker’s Brooch” in GDR times; the police station, opened in 2017 to enhance a public awareness of safety and security, a familiar practice sometimes described as security theater; the subway entrances, scattered seemingly random according to the hidden spatial logic of the sprawling subway complex below; the tram station, with its tracks cutting through the plaza; and we hear a diverse set of buildings holding various kinds of businesses that surround the plaza. Finally, and most crucially for the dynamics here, we hear: two large openings, connecting the square to two highly frequented arteries— its other entrances are only indirectly linked to the surrounding urban environment; and we hear two new shopping centers, the conspicuous signs of consumer brands inflicted on this urban precinct. The acoustic and auditory aspects of this plaza are activated by all different these audible agents. Our interest in the plaza focuses on its acoustic and auditory qualities because we believe that listening to cities can reveal many things that would remain hidden to the visual sense. While seeing provides information about the surfaces and crafted shapes of objects and spaces, the experience of listening gives us access to their materials and processes, to physics and dynamics. We distinguish the plaza from other open public areas such as the town square through its larger scale. While a town square can be captured in architectural dimensions, Alexanderplatz and other similar large plazas are better understood as landscapes. While the plaza provides a stable infrastructure for many everyday activities, its uses also change over time, reflecting overarching developments and distorting constraints. The plaza has its own history, stemming from past decisions of urban planning and the local legal and administrative context. All of these aspects inscribe themselves onto a complex acoustic landscape, giving the plaza its own unique auditory signature. Their atmosphere and auditory legibility, in turn, determine to a large part their experiential quality. The shape of the plaza, its architecture, infrastructure, and spatial configuration, transforms and colors each auditory event. Plazas are resonance chambers that capture and amplify a wide range of social, cultural, economic, and environmental processes and make them legible. In style and method, this chapter goes into uncharted territory. Anthropological accounts usually rely on a detailed, thick description of a situation in exhaustive nuance from all perspectives but refrains from judgements about causality. On the other hand, our account of Alexanderplatz is full of assessments, evaluations, reconstructions, and speculations about causal effects. We speculate as to how social, cultural, and economic realities have shaped the soundscape and—to venture further on shaky ground—how the soundscape shapes behavior and urban life in return. We cannot claim to be objective in all our assessments and reconstructions—but our speculations reflect our conviction that the soundscape is not a passive canvas, a mere representation of the world, but an

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active force that shapes human activity in countless ways. We find justification for this view in the increasing amount of research that finds that auditory phenomena have an extraordinary influence on human behavior while we remain largely unaware of their presence and impact. Without attempting to disentangle all the countless factors that shape the city, we try to trace the many ways in which sounds and hearing shape our worlds. In other aspects, our work is more aligned with contemporary anthropological perspectives. We are interested in the particular rather than the general: our space of causal factors is flat—sounds, weather, architecture, human and non-human bodies all act on the same level. As architect Peter Cook commented in 1963: “When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain” (Cook 1973: 20). Since every sound, every vibration is both the result and indicator of some activity that is connected through various relationships to an immersed listener, we can describe the processes on the plaza through the lens of auditory relations. We can direct our attention to human social activities performed on the plaza as well as the behaviors of animals and ask how these activities are shaped by (a) the architectural configuration of the plaza, and (b) the auditory effects and resonances that are generated by this architectural configuration. It is further of interest how major sound sources such as trams and sirens resonate with the surfaces of the plaza and how these resonances inhibit or support certain activities: How do the rhythms of these activities and their resonances determine the schedules of culture, commerce, and mobility? Finally, it is worth paying attention to how the sounds caused by human activities, which are already shaped by the sonic atmosphere, in turn shape the various uses of the plaza. Resonance is a spectral feedback process that depends on many factors. Supported by current research and artistic work, we make the deliberate assumption that people are able to pick up and react to all of these factors, even if they are not able to articulate what they are.

Thinking with Our Ears We describe our research practice as thinking with our ears. Visual cognition is a familiar notion: We may think by observing, by imagining something in our mind, and putting our senses and imaginations in relation to each other. The notion of thinking with our ears, in contrast, sounds rather obscure, if not bizarre: How can one actually think with these earlobes to the left and right of one’s head? To experience the emotional qualities and information embedded in a sound environment, one has to start to listen. Interpreting auditory information requires exercise, time, and attention. It is also important to take some basic facts into account. Therefore, the main practice of this method entails foremost immersing ourselves in an auditory environment and creating experiential accounts based on an active and reflective practice of listening. Foregrounding the bodily experience and one’s individual sensibilities, we use this approach to reflect on the causal relationships between auditory events, the actors, and the built environment.

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This section outlines such an approach in a way that can be exercised by all readers and allow them to develop their active listening skills. As a first prerequisite, it is important to distinguish between acoustic and auditory phenomena: they represent the main difference between how sound is described in the terms and concepts of physics—and how sounds are heard, experienced, and embodied by listeners, passers-by, city dwellers. We speak of acoustics when we describe the physical properties of sound and its propagation in space; these properties can be measured, quantified, and modeled. Auditory phenomena refer to sensory experience of sound by living beings; here, the main focus lies on the qualities of sound events that simply cannot be defined or objectively measured, unambiguously. The personal background of the listener, such as their age, as well as their beliefs and cultural background come into play as well as momentary impulses and moods, transitory affects, and the temporal shift in sensibilities. Most of these aspects change by themselves over time, some quicker than others, some also by the individual acquiring new skills and making new experiences. In our case, we are interested in achieving a better understanding of the causal connections at play here through a particular, more informed practice of listening. How does our auditory, ear-brain system work? Composer Michel Chion, building upon categories developed by Pierre Schaffer, recognized that our sensory system processes auditory input in at least three different modes (Chion 1994: 25). The first two are causal and semantic listening, perceptual modalities that are more or less automatically used on a daily basis. Causal listening means recognizing sonic patterns, which recalls connections and establishes contexts: we understand that this particular sound—whose source we might not see—is created by a car or a bicycle, by an ambulance or a familiar voice. Semantic listening refers to the recognition of familiar codes, as in decoding language or distinguishing the signal of an ambulance from that of the police. The third mode, described by Chion as reduced listening, differs from the previous two in the sense that it has to be learned with some effort. It demands attending to the genuine, material characteristics of a particular sound—and ignoring its meaning. This type of attentive listening was first introduced by Schaeffer, when developing the musical practice of musique concrète. To some extent, we are very familiar with reduced listening in everyday routines, such as when tuning an instrument. Tuning and pitch are basic properties of sound that can be examined independently of their cause and meaning. It is nonetheless important to note that these three modes never occur in pure form in everyday life situations. At this point, we would like to add affective listening as a fourth modality. It attends to the affective and emotional responses evoked by spaces and places. As philosopher Gernot Böhme notes, our sense of place, our feeling for atmosphere and mood are based in this modality (Böhme 2000). Compared to the other three modalities, affective listening is probably the most complicated to gain conscious access to. Because it is not limited to the ear, it includes the whole body, and involves an unstable and dynamic amalgam of all the other three modalities. Since sounds are vibrations, we perceive them not only with our ears but with our entire body. The human body is full of cavities that resonate in specific frequencies. We feel bass in our belly and high frequencies on the crest of our skulls. Our brains are good at filtering out unwanted sounds and noises so

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that we no longer perceive them consciously, but we nevertheless can still notice a bodily reaction. Walking next to a noisy diesel truck, we might become more tense. The mode of affective listening connects us to the now—the situation right here and the presence of activities and agents that we usually perceive unconsciously. Through this affective element and its relationality, such sensory apprehension determines the emotional ties to our living environment. Affective listening is an essential factor that influences how we shape our interactions within a given environment; and it can be practiced. It is a skill that allows us to neutralize a range of stressful everyday situations. This skill lets us quickly recognize whether the atmosphere of a place is conductive, confusing, or inhibiting for our needs or plans. We might, for example, avoid trying to have a serious conversation in a noisy sports bar or a crowded restaurant. We might learn to evaluate the atmosphere of our workplace and become able to articulate our needs for a different auditory environment and offer practical suggestions. These modes of causal, semantic, reduced, and affective listening can now be further differentiated. We refer to distinct systems that are involved in the recognition of sounds, the construction of meaning, and the experience of their aesthetic qualities. These systems are: (a) acoustics, (b) psychoacoustics and physiology, (c) cultural history and (d) personal history and memory. Fundamentally and acoustically, sounds are mechanical oscillations that propagate in an elastic medium. While this includes water or solid material, we hear sound almost exclusively through the medium of air. Most sonic properties that can be experienced depend, first of all, on the speed of sound. In the air, at a temperature of 20 °C, sound travels at a rate of 343 meters per second. For every additional degree of temperature, sound accelerates by 0.6 meters per second; for falling temperatures sound slows down by the same amount. A common way to measure the distance of a thunderstorm is by counting the seconds between lightning and thunder: “… 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, thunder … it is still 2 kilometers away.” A healthy teenager can in general perceive frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz—though already in our twenties the highest audible frequency can quickly drop down to around 17 kHz—and from there it’s all downhill, at least 1 kHz per life decade. Considering the speed of sound at 343 m/sec, these frequencies correspond to wavelengths between 17 meters and 1.7 centimeters. This significant difference in wavelengths has practical implications for how sounds of different frequencies propagate and reflect from solid objects and surfaces. As a rule of thumb, low-frequency sounds behave like water due to their relatively long wavelengths. Almost no object at the human scale reflects them. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, making sound act more similarly to light. Every object and surface become reflective for high-frequency sounds. The material composition further determines how different frequencies are dampened or amplified through multiple reflections, giving rise to phenomenon of resonance. Together, form and materiality determine the audibility, or, as one might say, the auditory color of the space (Blesser and Salter 2009). An acoustic space can have a bright or a dark auditory color; it can be sharp or dull. In more technical terms, audibility refers to the transmission quality of audible information such as speech (Dickreiter et al. 2014).

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The speed of sound and the corresponding wavelengths of different frequencies, in interaction with the spatial configuration and material composition, are the basic factors that define the acoustic and auditory quality—through the way a sound is reflected and resonates. Almost any acoustic effect one can experience in a given environment, from reverberation to the Doppler shift of approaching sirens in the street, can be traced back to the speed of sound. By listening to these interactions consciously, an aural memory as well as an understanding of everyday acoustics can be developed over time, since the laws of physics do not change. Unfortunately, our ability to decode auditory information diminishes with age. As we get older, our audible sound spectrum becomes narrower. Spatial orientation and speech intelligibility become increasingly difficult. Psychoacoustics and physiology become more relevant as the ability to process high frequencies is the first casualty that comes with age or injuries due to loud noise exposure. Spoken language consists of vowels, which have generally lower frequencies, and consonants, which have higher frequencies and therefore shorter wavelengths. Localization in space depends on our ability to detect the reflections of high-frequency sounds, which consequently becomes more difficult for older people. A controversial method to keep children and teenagers away from certain spaces is to play loud sounds at high frequencies that only young people can perceive (Offenhuber and Auinger 2019). As a counter-tactic, some teenagers use smartphone ringtones using high frequencies in order to communicate undetected by adults. Our ears are not microphones—we hear sounds very differently compared to an electroacoustic recording. We hear different frequencies at different loudness in a different spatial and plastic arrangement. Our ears are most sensitive in the range of 2 kHz to 4 kHz: these frequencies require the lowest amplitude, or loudness, to be heard. All higher and lower frequencies require more amplitude in order to be detected (Fletcher and Munson 1933). On top of these basic perceptual qualities, our auditory system uses several tricks, shortcuts, and shields that allow us to navigate complex sound environments. For instance, our hearing always adapts to the average loudness of the environment. Listening to music in a quiet room requires less volume compared to listening on headphones on the bus or subway. Another perceptual trick involves focusing on specific sections of the frequency spectrum; the notorious cocktail party effect is one such example: we have no difficulty focusing our attention on the speech of a particular speaker by disregarding irrelevant information from the surrounding (Augoyard and Torgue 2006). We involuntarily fill in any incomplete auditory information. The virtual pitch effect involves perceiving a tone that does not exist—we hear the fundamental note of a sound rich in overtones, despite its absence from the frequency spectrum. It is impossible to summarize the range of psychoacoustic effects here in full. It should suffice to say that our hearing changes physiologically and psychologically throughout our lives and does not have the linear, identically reproducible structure of an electroacoustic recording. With this in mind, we might then better understand certain auditory situations: the loud environment of a club, for instance, can be experienced as energetic and exciting by young adults who still can hear the full range of frequencies and can decode it

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effortlessly—while older people, who can no longer hear the highest frequencies in general, find the same situation stressful and demanding, because they cannot locate precisely where what sounds come from or what is being said in conversations or music. Besides its acoustic and psychoacoustic properties, the sonic environment is also shaped to large degree by cultural history, its practices, changing interpretations, and habits. The use of a public space, for example, is determined to a significant extent by whether a quiet environment is perceived as respectful or, conversely, as dangerous; whether honking is understood as a sign of aggression or a friendly notification. The physical and psychoacoustic space is nothing but an empty shell as long as there are no living actors participating and partaking in it. They, indeed, turn the physical location into a cultural space. Moreover, these cultural practices and historical frameworks for how people act, interact, perceive, and interpret a given environment are loaded with affects and desires, wishes and dreams, fears and also rejection that listeners might connect to these places. Alexanderplatz in particular is and was in constant transformation since the more fixed interpretation of GDR times, which allowed a only limited set of practices, and is now let loose and opened up for more activities. There is no space unclaimed and unmarked by those practices—as long as a person experiences this place and is involved and entangled in its meshworks of activities, interactions, entities, and perceptions. These experiences stick to people: they are sticky. They cannot just be swapped or exchanged like costumes on a stage or plates at a dinner table. We are greatly constituted by these experiences, and it often takes time to disentangle oneself from learned and acquired experiential routines, preconceptions, and assumptions about a certain place or a sonic experience. On the other hand, people are more often than not seeking precisely such a disentanglement, such a surprising new way of perceiving the world and interacting with it. This is the explosive core of cultural practices: they surely are never finite and should not be understood as fixed, crystallized, stable, and developing in linear progression. This is what makes the influence of cultural history on perceiving sounds and interacting with them so generative and prolific: it never stays the same in detail. It always stirs up new perspectives and urges and introduces different actors, habits, approaches, and lifestyles. And it also adds new bits to our knowledge about all the other aspects mentioned here: new insights into acoustics and psychoacoustics stem from new cultural trends and focuses, while new discoveries about the role of personal history for listening are rooted in our evolving understanding of the close and small world we are living in—in connection to the wider world and all its stories and images, its music and things that come to you and me. Cultural practices constitute the hidden and generative nucleus that pushes forward what can be observed in the arts, in design, in music, and in technology, in the sciences, in economy, and in politics. Its effects are pervasive, and it is affected pervasively by what happens all around us. It is in constant flux. Every action produces a sound. By becoming more familiar with the causal connection between action and sound, and by understanding the roots of our understanding in our personal history, we can develop a skill to recognize and interpret actions based on subtle differences in the sounds they produce. No sound is quite the same. The skateboarders on Alexanderplatz, who practice their tricks in endless repetition and generate considerable

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noise, may annoy some pedestrians. But a listener who has practiced the same tricks before, or who finds their own child practicing on this plaza, will recognize some of these stunts and their skillful performance just by hearing their sound. In other words: a skateboarder can hear structure in what other people may perceive only as noise. This is not a superficial difference; it is a substantial and existential one. Such differences define and constitute as human beings. If we are able to find structure in sounds based on our personal history with the related activities, there is a good chance that we feel less annoyed by them than someone who has no such personal history. People choose different paths and do different things. Some sounds we love, others we hate or we don’t care about—and consequently don’t hear. What we hear as noise or filter out is part of our socialization and influences our taste. This process of filtering out or assigning a negative status performs very audibly our personal filtering out of aspects around us, of other people, of their activities, of their lives. We cannot hear what we cannot bear: our personal hearing and listening documents a process of interpretation, habituation, of entanglement or disentanglement with the world. It is therefore worth probing to reflect on why we like or dislike certain sounds, and whether our preference changes once we learn about the lives and desires of those people performing them—and, consequentially, how to decode and dissect these sounds; how to hear them and how to understand their function, role, effects, and energy. Understood in this context, reduced listening is not about the mere aesthetic recognition and classification of sounds—such as whether we hear a car or a dog, whether we assign this sound to be craft in the tradition of musique concrète or free jazz. It is about recognizing the influence and the properties of a sound over time and space: its rise and its fall, the way it occupies and then releases the environment as it subsides. We can then ask questions such as: does this place have a rhythm? Is it perhaps temporally structured by a traffic light? What kind of atmosphere does it have, what type of mood do I find here? And finally, how do I feel about it (Auinger 2013)? In this way, reduced listening can indeed provide a core method for a deep sonic analysis of a space. The Favourite Sounds Project serves as an ideal example of how the personal dimension of the urban soundscape, perceived by urban dwellers in different spatial settings, can be investigated. Its initiator, Peter Cusack, has worked on this project since 1998 and uses a simple method. He always asks residents of different cities the same question: “What is your favourite sound in this city?” From the transcribed answers, he generates word clouds to identify common themes (Cusack 2017). Exploring these visualizations reveals the differences in how people perceive sounds and how different sounds are significant for different people. Over the years, Cusack’s data reflects the impacts and attitudes of residents toward controversial planning decisions. The London edition of the Favourite Sounds Project, for example, reflects changes in the sensory qualities of the city as a result of the expansion of the Thames shore into a recreational area. In two word clouds, one from 2003 and then another ten years later, each based on several hundred interviews, we can recognize and read the consequences of this urban planning decision very clearly. The 2003 edition contained several references to the sound of the supersonic airplane Concorde, which stopped operating in late 2003, three years after a catastrophic crash in

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Figure 9.3a  Peter Cusack, Favorite Sounds Project London, 2002–3.

Figure 9.3b  Peter Cusack, Favorite Sounds Project London, 2013–15.

Paris. Many people took this particular sound, which could be heard across large parts of London, as a sign of national pride. The map from 2013, on the other hand, contained more references to tube station announcements becoming more performative and personalized in the recent years. Cusack’s work is vital. Not only does it reveal how differently people feel about sound, but it provides a temporal and historical dimension to how sounds are perceived in urban environments. We can only reflect on the atmospheric qualities of the lived environment in relation to personal experience. This reflection requires us to understand hearing as an active

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process—to develop a reference system of sounds and acoustic properties by consciously perceiving auditory space and thinking with our ears. Instead of treating environmental sounds as an emission that can be more or less disruptive, but basically out of our hands and out of our reach, we can develop a vocabulary for the different and distinct qualities of an auditory space and its roots in particular material, bodily, cultural, and personal conditions. The differences between a space that is acoustically transparent and one that is diffuse are not arbitrary: they are rooted in decisions by urban planners, by constraints in the human body, by culturally shaped expectations and disappointments, as well as by our personal experiences with such a space. To summarize, here the six main assumptions and insights behind the practice of thinking with our ears: (1) Sound waves are vibrations. (2) We hear with our whole body. (3) Every space both attenuates and amplifies sound. (4) Every space colors sound. (5) Loudness removes auditory space. (6) Our sense of place is rooted in our hearing.

A Subtle Murmur on a Horizontal Landscape Alexanderplatz, one of the largest public plazas in the world, doesn’t suffer from the excessive traffic loads that plague other open plazas in Berlin. It is mostly used today as a

Figure 9.4  Alexanderplatz in 1969. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1002-0001-016/CCBY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0, Photo: Horst Sturm.

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commercial hub, as a site of seasonal markets, and as one of the main tourist destinations in Berlin. The logic of shopping centers has entirely appropriated its unique structure. It is a commuter hub, used daily by hundreds of thousands of people. It includes the subway and rail stations, tram stops and bus lines, and is limited by the main arterial roads of Berlin. This roughly rectangular space received its name in 1805 after the Russian Tsar Alexander I. In 1960, under the government of the GDR, the plaza was expanded to about eight hectares and converted into a pedestrian zone. The iconic television tower, still Germany’s tallest building, the Fountain of Friendship between Peoples, and the Urania–Weltzeituhr were all prestige projects of the GDR and remain central landmarks of the plaza today. The large open pedestrian area of the Alex is a centrally located tourist destination and is used as the site for large public events and festivals such as the annual Christkindelmarkt (Christmas market). After the fall of the wall in 1989, commercial development started on the plaza and signs of global brands at an architectural scale started to appear, often in close proximity to subway entrances and other prominent landmarks. The redevelopment of the plaza in 1960 followed the global paradigm of highmodernist urban design: a few tall structures surrounded by open space; a strict separation of functions—in this case, motorized traffic and pedestrian areas; an open configuration of adjacent buildings instead of a closed wall of facades surrounding the perimeter of the plaza; and a general preference for a field of diverse elements over strict axial symmetry. Despite the tall structures of the TV tower and the former Intercontinental Hotel, the organization of Alexanderplatz during GDR times and during the decade following unification appears more like a horizontal landscape rather than the more vertically dominated urban centers found in most capitalist countries. The unusual proportions of a few buildings that dominate the view with their very long facades facing the plaza support this impression. Following the direction of motorized traffic on the perimeter of the plaza, their straight lines reinforce the searing perspective of dynamic movement and modernity. The visual sense of openness is also replicated in the auditory perspective. By moving motorized traffic away from the pedestrian area and toward the edges of the plaza, the designers were able to create a legible auditory space with surprising depth. Alexanderplatz is free of vehicles, with the exception of trams, early morning street cleaning, and police activity. The sirens of distant emergency vehicles pierce the auditory environment from time to time. Outside of these noisy episodes, a subtle murmur can be heard everywhere on the plaza; filling its sonic background. A significant part of this hum in multiple frequencies is generated by the public transport system. The screeching sounds of the S-Bahn are widely audible due to the elevated train tracks, which also limit the space toward the southeast. The size and spaciousness of the square, its architectural structure and openings create a variety of sonic places. The plaza is characterized by a daily rhythm determined by the various commercial activities, which subside in the late evening. Toward the end of the day, the auditory space of the plaza opens up and becomes hearable. Ten years after unification, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, incremental changes toward a more commercial and consumption-driven environment for a networked society have begun to reshape the plaza visually, auditorily, and atmospherically. New shopping and entertainment centers were erected within the pedestrian zone, disrupting the spatial

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organization and the network of iconic vistas and lines of sight that invited pedestrians to wander. The facades began to fill with large signs of commercial brands. At the same time, the number of festivals and seasonal markets including Christmas Market, Oktoberfest, Green Week, and so on has vastly increased. Political rallies and events, on the other hand, have decreased. While Alexanderplatz was a major site of public protests during the last weeks of the GDR, the plaza played, for instance, no role at all in the recent climate protests under the banner of “Fridays for the Future.” This is perhaps because no political institution is located on the plaza, which has become depoliticized and commercialized. Nevertheless, demonstrations still take place, organized by right-wing parties such as the NDP (National Democratic Party of Germany) as well as progressive civic groups such as the Wir sind Viele (We Are Many). The slightly awkward juxtaposition of modernist-communist urban design and haphazardly placed monuments of a capitalist consumer society make this space difficult to decode. On Alexanderplatz one can see, hear, and feel no overarching urbanistic idea at work other than the attempt to support commercial interests. In this respect it is a perfect document of contemporary developments of the public sphere: it is structured, nowadays, foremost by business interests—and even the more recent placing of a police station and the recently established new traffic connections and highly individualized means of personal transport (e.g. e-scooters) must be regarded as results of regulating and facilitating all the effects commercial activities. Alexanderplatz is now a battleground of commerce, shopping, and urban self-presentation.

A Place for Discussion, Possibilities, and Hörsamkeit? What will be the future roles and uses of large public spaces such as Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Mexico City’s Zocalo, Jakarta’s Merdeka Square, São Paulo’s Praça do Relógio, or Chicago’s Millennium Park? How will new modes of mobility, different practices of political participation, and mounting environmental changes inscribe themselves into the social life of these plazas? How is it possible for the wide variety of sonic personae (Schulze 2018) to find their places and sounds on these plazas? Despite, or perhaps precisely because of its awkward spatial presence and its contradictory visual impressions, Alexanderplatz has a lot of potential to become something else, something new and unanticipated. A few interventions into its polygonal landscape could redefine the whole plaza and lead to new spaces. To imagine the future of the plaza in general—on which we organize our social and economic interactions in urban settings—we cannot ignore the ongoing global crisis of ecology and climate. How might the plaza reflect these conditions with different functions and usage patterns? We perceive the world in virtual and in physical spaces, digitally mediated and through close, material experience. We believe that an important aspect of our environmental crisis is the widening gap between these worlds and our failure

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Figure 9.5  Protest of a million GDR citizens on Alexanderplatz, November 4, 1989. Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:0000396_representation_364_original.tif. Photographer: Merit Schambach.

to reconcile abstract information with the sensory experience of our surroundings. The decline of biodiversity, global warming, and air quality in urban centers are measured in abstract statistical metrics based on units that are beyond the domain of sensory perception. A chart that shows the rise in average global temperatures might be convincing, yet we often fail to connect it with our perceptions of the concrete physical space we are living in. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why deciphering and digesting abstract information so often fails to be embodied in our lives, and also fails to be translated into personal action. Our proposition, therefore, is to develop a more refined skill for actively perceiving our surroundings and to find ways to connect these experiences to the abstract knowledge in the digital world. In this sense, the first question involves what kind of offer and affordances Alexanderplatz makes to our senses. What kind of features are already there, what could be supported, and what could be redirected or diminished? As a complex assemblage resulting from different historical, geographical, political, and environmental frameworks, each plaza has its own sound signature. Even until the early 2000s, Alexanderplatz provided ample opportunities for assembly and collective political action. This role as a space of discourse has retreated into the background in parallel to its extensive commercial development. But the vast open space is still there, even as its bandwidth of connotations has become very limited, reduced to business, transport, and tourism. To tackle this aspect, steps toward a new program for the plaza would involve expanding its space of possibilities in the citizens’ minds. It seems crucial for Alexanderplatz to once more become a site for public discussions.

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Considering the diminished role of green areas, it would be wise to think about ways to expand these both in terms of quantity and variation. This would bring change on many levels. It would enhance the climatic quality and atmosphere; it would better connect the plaza to the seasons and remind us that nature, however this controversial concept is defined, is part of the mix in urban life. And it will enhance the acoustic quality of the place by articulating distinct auditory spaces. Considering the importance of hearing for the atmospheric quality of space, the concept of Hörsamkeit, describing the audibility of a space in the sense of the way this makes it suitable for specific listening situations, seems most relevant to us. The term was originally coined by German public broadcasting technicians to characterize the overall acoustic qualities of a space for sonic performances—the granularity at which acoustic information can be auditorily perceived and differentiated in a specific space. Each sonic space has its specific Hörsamkeit. Analyzing the vast landscape of Alexanderplatz in terms of its Hörsamkeit, a topography of different acoustic areas appears. In some parts of the plaza, speech can be understood quite well over considerable spatial distance. These areas attract uses that involve verbal communication, such as tourist guides speaking to a larger group. Acoustic spaces that are more limited can be found under the trees or surrounded by plants, which diffuse the intelligibility of speech. These places consequently invite smaller groups to gather. The area around the fountain, finally, is dominated by the white noise of falling water, which permits private conversations and prevents eavesdropping. This variety of acoustic spaces also allows a diversity of sonic personae to live, to exist, and to thrive. To address our current political and environmental situation, we will see that the ideas of the plaza in general and Alexanderplatz in particular are instrumental for assembly and discourse among citizens; they provide common ground for action. The elementary quality of the plaza is such that it provides equal space for everybody present; it is free of motorized traffic noise in the near field and there is the capacity to move in all directions, which qualifies it as an experiential site for learning and inspiration—as an individual or a group. From the perspective of urban planning and policy, it is useful to see the plaza as a whole that can be differentiated into local spatial and atmospheric qualities. All of these qualities can be perceived and consciously experienced with some training. Determining the five conditions of auditory spaces—as a space of consumption and commerce, mobility, waiting and gathering, tourism, and play are a first approach. Going further, this invites us to imagine other possible uses and to pay attention to what is missing or almost not happening. One can draw maps to determine the interference zones where categories overlap and to show focal points of usage. Relating these maps to the actual architectural landscape of the plaza and its particular surfaces and materials uncovers its auditory qualities: we can examine the interdependency between sound propagation and its resulting auditory atmospheres, of occupation and appropriation by people and all sorts of non-human agents. At this point, we have to address the political implications and relationships of power at play on such a plaza. Considering how the built environment interacts with the plaza’s auditory atmosphere, we might then start to think about who owns and operates these buildings that shape the auditory space; who occupies the largest spaces and demarcates

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a territory by auditory means; who invents new tactics to counteract or to exploit the auditory qualities for different purposes? When we scrutinize the given situation by thinking with our ears, we will find many links, connections, and ideas for a rearrangement and for interventions to transform or to enhance atmospheres. As soon as we find and provide more situations for this sonic thinking on a plaza, we also discover how this space can allow an individual sonic persona to develop. This is because a “sonic persona is made out of a sensory corpus struggling with changing auditory dispositives. In these struggles, one negotiates a viable persona” (Schulze 2018: 157, emphasis in the original). Nothing needs to stay how it is. Self-programmable, playful, or exploited, regulated or strictly separated by functions, the plaza is a space for emerging public experiments. A space of learning how collectively to steward needed changes is a question of creativity and the power of public discourse.

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Figure 10.1  Embodied streets, at hand.

The Creaking Stairs in Vauxhall The fourth step down on the staircase in my house creaks; I know, because I hear it every Thursday night when my husband works late and in my sleepy state I listen for his feet. The creak says: I am home, I am safe. I am not the only one who listens for the creak. The same sound was recorded by people in Liverpool, each noting the relief of hearing a child

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or partner arrive home at night. This is part of their ritual, their reassurance, part of their refuge. However, this sound is not universal: it shifts in the tapestry of home, sometimes bright and reassuring, sometimes desperate and dark. Home is often only portrayed within the bounds of domestic bliss. The song “Home, Sweet Home,” written in 1822 by American actor and poet John Howard Payne epitomizes the nostalgic longing for home in the line: “Home, home, sweet, sweet home. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home” (Payne 1881). Here, home is seen as a nostalgic wander into a perfect haven. But it is not just in art and literature that home is portrayed in this way: All types of study have revealed the same recurrent meanings of home as the centre of family life, a place of retreat, safety and relaxation, freedom, independence; self-expression and social status, a place of privacy, continuity and permanence, a financial asset; and a support for work and leisure activities. (Somerville 1997: 227–228)

The difference here is that Somerville goes on to recognize that these concepts of home are divided along lines of gender, class, and tenure. That, for example, “for those who are not owner occupiers home is not a financial asset.” In his book on Acoustic Territories, sound artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle writes: “To come home is to seek refuge, however consciously, from the uncontrollable flows of noise and the harangue of the exterior” (LaBelle 2010: 50). This idealized home is, inside, a closed interior space that is totally constrained and managed by those who live within it. A refuge, a place of safety and peace. It is controlled, where those living in the space are able to command the sounds that exist within its interior. Homes—and particularly sonic constructions of homes—have come to hold warm sentimental ties, projected as stable, ritualized, safe havens, where outside sound should be treated with distain as interrupting the tranquility of place. Perhaps for the privileged few this is true (although I doubt there is a large enough privileged multitude in this world that can create that sonic haven)? For most, this idealized home is a welcomed myth, though the reality of home is somewhat different. The realistic home—as opposed to this idealistic one—encompasses inside and outside, refuge and storm, control and submission, bound together in a tapestry of sonic ritual and embodiment. In a group, in Vauxhall, Liverpool, UK, we listen together to someone’s recording of “the stair that creaks”; many of us chat about the sound as: home, safe and familiar. One person in the room is not speaking; his experience of the sound is overwhelming. To him the creaking stair goes unanswered, it hangs in the air. His eyes are closed, the resonance seeping through him, creeping into his mind and his memories, collecting frail moments as it spreads. He forces himself to breathe, breathe slower, breathe longer. This visceral reaction to the sound has caught him off guard, it is at once familiar and terrifying. It is home but it is not refuge; it is home but it is not safe. The sound is the stairs, and it is the presence of his father returning home. Sonic vibrations are infiltrating his ears, working their way into his body. In his anamnesis (see below), the sonic assault is relived. For him sound is a warning: he is alert to the approaching man, who will take his anger out on the first person he finds. So he lies still under the covers and prays for mercy. Our tendency is not to call this sound home. To LaBelle this sound is “breakdown,” a “neglect” and

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“invasion” of home; “the home is heard as a set of signals whose disruption suggests a breakdown a neglect or invasion” (LaBelle 2010: 50). In some cases, these “disruptions and neglects or invasions” can become part of the ritual; sounds that were disruptive eventually become a sort of home. To our listener this violent nightly creak was the reality of home; it was ritual, it was one of the daily signals of that sonic space. During the same project, I met with some people who had recently moved from their Victorian terraced homes to new council homes. From the outside the houses looked appealing, a neat cul-de-sac of semi-detached brick houses, each with a driveway and a fence leading to a back garden. These are the new sites of home, each house hosting a new developing construction of sonic space, each person adapting what home is, what home should be in this new environment: the second step creaks; the doorbell chimes instead of rings; the toilet (now next to the baby’s room) wakes him up each time someone flushes it in the night. But some sounds are not new: the chatter, the laughs, the crying and sighing, the pen tapping and lip smacking, the kisses, and the buzzes of mobile phones. Mary was one of the residents of the new cul-de-sac; she was still navigating the sonic space in her new home when we met at her house to talk. We sat chatting in her front room, it is the usual chatter: where we grew up, how we ended up living where we live, why I don’t have a Liverpool accent. Our voices are accompanied by the ticking clock. It counts its seconds; the distant hum of the fridge quietly guarding its food. A car pulls into the road and our talking stops; Mary tells me to watch as the car turns into the neighboring driveway. A mother and her children climb out, they are excited talking loudly over one another recounting their day. I go to continue our chit-chat but she tells me to wait, to watch. The mother locks the car and opens the front door. The animated gaggle, laughing and talking, tumble into their home, their front door thuds. The mantle clock continues to count, the fridge hums its song in the kitchen, a quietness settles, the excitement has disappeared: “There right there, that is everything that is wrong here.” Reading the story, we are perhaps inclined to understand it as the classical example of neighbor noise pollution, probably the most radical antithesis of home. This example of sonic otherness, when the outside sound breaks our sonic domestic bubble, we all instinctively understand; and yet we would be wrong. The interruption to our conversation was not to show me how noisy the neighbors’ children are when they come from school, or to highlight the disruption that traffic noise can have on a quiet street. What I was being shown—or rather what I was hearing—was the lack of sound, the quietness that modern housing insulation provides. This was not a positive declaration of, Look how well insulated my house is! No, instead she was remarking that the insulation is “everything that is wrong.” The houses are new and very well insulated, but Mary didn’t use to live in a house that was new and well insulated. She used to live in a house where you could hear your neighbors drive home, where their rituals became your rituals, where if they didn’t hear you turn The Archers radio serial on at 7 p.m. they knew there was something wrong. She lived in a house where isolation was prison and community was home. Mary told me that the sonic segregation of her newbuild house made her feel more isolated from those around her. And she is not the only one. During an interview in 2013 on BBC Radio Merseyside in Hearing Liverpool Change about the sound projects in Liverpool, another

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resident commented: “Some sounds you miss: I miss the sound of my neighbors and kids playing the street.” This affective reaction to quietness rallies against the assumed aesthetic moralism (Waldock 2011) that litters the discourse around so-called noise pollution all too often—also in sound studies. Federico Miyara, an acoustician from Rosario in Argentina with a special focus on noise control, writes: Acoustic violence is just violence exercised by means of sound. Often, such sound will be loud noises, but might also be the neighbour’s music going through the wall or the constant hum of a busy city late in the night while one is trying to sleep. (Miyara 1999)

His examples, although not untrue, iterate the aesthetic judgement that sounds such as hearing your neighbors’ music is inherently bad. To Mary, the thought that her neighbors can’t hear her fills her with dread: “They wouldn’t know if I fell down the stairs, they wouldn’t hear me if I was crying for help.” The bliss of sonic seclusion comes with consequences and leaves the elderly afraid of the silence in their own houses. In the same way, few of us would equate a creaking stair with a violent assault and yet that is the relived experience of our Vauxhall listener. In Enzo Minigione’s edited volume Urban Poverty and the Underclass (1996), Antonio Tosi writes: “The two main poles of current definitions make reference with equal relevance to two fundamental meanings of the word ‘home’: ‘home’ is a ‘there’ and a ‘they’” (Minigione 1996: 83). Home reaches beyond the physical materialism of the house, it is as a much an understanding of who as it is what. The creak of my stairs that I hear when my husband comes in late from work is a sonification of the they—a sounding vibration of his presence in the house, a presence that belongs that is part of my understanding of home. Mary’s story highlights that there is also a sense in which the they may be extended beyond domestic boundaries to the peri-domestic space. Neighbors exist on the edges of a home’s boundary; however, their sounds are still a significant part of the ritual of the sonic space. It is clear that these do not form part of home in the same way as a partner, a family member, or a cohabitant. Perhaps these sounds, and those who perform them, should be considered a peri-they—neither part of the home nor separate from it, a complex mixture of reassuring community and annoying other. In a recent sonic project, a resident used a digital recorder to undertake an investigation. Her apartment was on the middle floor of a large Victorian house that had been divided into three smaller apartments connected by a staircase, one on each floor. One evening she heard a beeping sound. Armed with her recording device, she decided to discover the source of the sound, capturing her journey as she did so, narrating her movements around the apartment. She later shared this recording with me. First, she enters the living room, then guided by her focused listening she traces the sound to her hallway, then to her door. Unlatching the door, she continues to follow the sound to the shared staircase. Here she is met with another sound: that of footsteps approaching. Her neighbor announces himself: “What’s that beeping?” They continue to listen together intensely and to seek out the source of the sound, which of course is a smoke alarm with a low battery.

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What is interesting here is that the space in which the smoke alarms sits is on the staircase: this particular space is not the sole responsibility of any of the neighbors, rather they all share collective responsibility for the communal space with the landlord. Following the discovery of the sound source, all the neighbors became involved in the debate over the smoke alarm: Should they take the batteries out? Would that void insurance? Is it dangerous to not have a smoke alarm overnight? Their discussion was held in the communal space about a communal alarm that was impacting upon their individual and collective sonic spaces. This experience of shared spaces and shared community is a common phenomenon. The idealized view of solitary, segregated, individualistic, family homes (white picket fences and detached spaces) only accounts for a very limited number of domestic environments. Shared spaces are a central part of everyday life—be they courtyards, doorways, rooms, tents, moorings, or other interactive areas. LaBelle writes: The production of home is intimately linked to the bourgeois conception of privacy, interweaving middle-class affluence with a steady withdrawal from the complex and intermixing of everyday experience. (LaBelle 2010: 50)

When approaching the sonic home, one must recognize the breadth of domestic experience beyond the culturally reiterated bourgeois idea of privacy and increasing individualism, taking into account the experiential expertise of those whose very lived presence within that location is what allows it to be seen as home. These complex spaces that are called home require the engagement of these experts to see beyond our assumptions and understand the sonic nuances that sustain their status as such. When considering the story of the participant who hears the creaking step, we are able to comprehend that a home is built upon a multitude of sounds—and that, despite the visceral fear of the creaking stairs, this threatening memory was still one of home. This instant did not shift his wider concept of home, but rather complicated and disrupted it. His there of home was in conflict with his they.

The Peri-Domestic Sounds of Feeling Safe These brief encounters and observations from field research highlight the intricate challenge that a complex space such as home is to research. Unlike public spaces, recording someone’s home is a deeply private experience. As evidenced in the recordings discussed so far, those spaces can open up deep intimate memories of the past, highlight brokenness as well as unity. A sonic understanding of a home can thus challenge wider assumptions around social norms and highlight broader socio-cultural divisions as well. Working in these intimate spaces as a researcher and listening to the sounds of home, there is, as we see in the story of the creaking stairs in Vauxhall, a risk that the significance of a sonic experience may trigger the memory of an emotional trauma. Sound has the ability to conjure reminiscence, from music and nursery rhymes to factory horns and

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bus bells. In their work Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue use the term anamnesis to describe this phenomenon, meaning [a]n effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener’s consciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context. Anamnesis, a semiotic effect, is often involuntary revival of memory caused by listening and the evocative power of sounds. (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 21)

The creaking stairs were not the only example of anamnesis that occurred in my research. Some sounds evoked pleasant memories of family gatherings; however, at times, sounds were too difficult for people to hear. One participant had recorded sounds from her home before she had been forced to move by the landlord because of policies put in place by the local council (Waldock 2016a). The thought of hearing sounds from what she still termed “her home” was highly distressing. It was not the sonic object itself that upset her—but rather the simple anticipation of hearing the sounds. The memory of her home resounded too vividly in the recordings. The connections between sound and emotion, particularly within these innermost domestic spaces, are both insightful and troubling. As researchers, we have a duty of care toward those who we partner with and we must be prepared to find pathways of support for participants when such difficult instances occur. It would be unwise and unethical to underestimate the power contained in these personal sonic spaces: when listening to particular moments, a personal embodiment and an emotional connectivity is surely being evoked. Neighbor noise is regularly quoted as a key noise complaint, particularly in city environments where homes sit in tight proximity to one another. However, such sound is not tied by physical boundaries; it seeps through the fabric of the house into private spaces. These sounds are not separate from the home, yet their very nature defines them by their relationship to the domestic. They do not originate in the home and yet they can be understood as foundational in the everyday lived experience there of. This peri-domestic noise that Mary desired to hear and also to create for the hearing of her neighbors, stems from the lifelong experience of neighbors being a part of one’s domestic space. Hearing her neighbors’ radio or the sound of them closing their door is essential to being part of the community, to her feeling safe in her home. What Mary’s story also highlights is how this acceptance of and desire to have her neighbors as part of her wider sonic home is at odds with the assumed desires of the wider society. Acoustic legislation and planning seek to increase the silence of individualized sonic space, largely disregarding the significance of peri-domestic sounds in the creation of home. The ideal of home as a place of privacy and retreat are, for some, a contrary lived experience, embodied as isolation and loneliness. Ethnographer Tripta Chandola writes of this experience in her study “Listening into Others: Moralising the Soundscapes in Delhi.” Here she walks the boundaries between middle-class apartments and the adjacent slums. Quoting one of her participants in her field notes, she writes:

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When I walk through the apartments [behind the slums], it is always so quiet. Nobody talks to each other; they live in their own worlds, doing what they want to … They have no care systems in place for elders [and] children … They lead isolated lives. (Chandola 2012: 401)

Chandola highlights how two such geographically close communities can experience their sound in differing ways, with their opposing views of silence and solitude. She also addresses his struggle to listen beyond her own middle-class experience: citing Paul Stoller’s reflections on “sensuous scholarship” (Stoller 1997), she seeks both humility and to “mute [her] own listening” in seeking to understand an ulterior understanding of the sonic spaces: “This is not to suggest that my listening was no longer informed by my class background, but even though I could not—and perhaps, did not want to silence it, I became acutely aware of it” (Chandola 2012: 397). She highlights the importance of the residents’ role in opening her ears (ibid.: 398). Home is an important part of our daily lives; from homes with large extended families to hostels, they are intrinsically tied to our identity, our sense of community, and our sense of place. By seeking a better understanding of the lived sonic experience that is the home, we are able to gain insights into the variety of experience and agency of listeners: how are the differences in the makeup of personal sonic experience actually interconnected with social, cultural, and economic patterns?

The Trinitarian Methodology of Recording, Listening, and Critique External sounds have formed a substantial part of Sound Studies research; soundwalking is rarely a home-based activity, and sound maps are dominated by public sounds too. The sound of a home is rarely a feature in these studies, not because it is not possible to record them or to walk within them, but due to the fact that the private nature of personal space makes it is less likely for someone to upload the sound of themselves taking a shower to public sound maps. How then do we access the most private spaces of people’s lives? How do we begin to listen, to record, and to study these spaces without this listening becoming or seeming voyeuristic in its intent? One of the challenges of exploring home is entering into private spaces, asking people to share their lives and sounds with the researcher. How can we be sure that we do not devalue or cheapen the private world? When I speak about this topic, I am often asked how I have gained access to people’s homes. Perhaps they picture me going door to door, soliciting sonic studies much like a door-to-door salesman. Delightful as the idea may be, it is not true. I would often be introduced to residents through a third party—a community, church, or social group. Once I had met with one or two residents, they would often introduce me to others and so the group would grow. When I visited someone’s home for the first time it would rarely be the

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first time I had met them; in most cases we would have met previously as part of a group or at a neighbor’s house. This was important in building relationships with the participants, in order for them to feel comfortable inviting me into their home. Home is a constructed space—therefore, it is essential when investigating home that those who dwell in the space, the experiential experts, are central to producing an understanding of it. It is the particular embodiment of place that moves a building from dwelling to home. The methodology used in this study involved participants as artists, academics, and activists (Back and Bull 2016: 62) in what I term the trinitarian methodology. They recorded, listened to, and critiqued the sounds heard in and around their homes. These critiques occurred both individually and in groups, allowing a broader social context to the sounds. Through the journey of recording, shared listening, and critical review we had the opportunity for what may be referred to as semi-structured interviews (Pitts and Gross 2016: 7), allowing a narrative freedom of the makers of the home to contextualize their understanding of sounds. Unlike some previous sound studies relating to domestic space, the residents could record whenever they wish, the digital recorders were completely under their control. This allowed for sounds to be captured and studied outside of the presence of the researcher. When thinking about home, this is particularly helpful as by its nature the home is a private and continual presence. Such an approach also allows for multiple people to be recording in close proximity to one another, which leads to people recording the same sound but from different spaces. From such recordings we hear the crossing over of sound worlds, the seeping of one person’s presence into another. This process of recording, listening, and analyzing with the participants facilitated insights into a breadth of sound that became part of their everyday listening experience. However, the freedom to record beyond the presence of the researcher can also be problematic. In some circumstances, participants have recorded others without their consent; in other situations, people have recorded vast quantities of sound or have had technological problems with recorders. When several neighbors were recording as part of a project at the same time, it was common that they recorded each other. The most frequent sounds were neighbors, radios, or doors closing, and some recorded hearing their neighbor through the wall. In one particular project, I had met all the neighbors through a community group and they had agreed to take part in the project together. Moreover, they also agreed that they would support each other, both in recording sounds and in listening back as a group. They had consented to be part of the recordings and to be included in their neighbors’ recordings. Being able to capture multiple recordings of the same events and area enabled a greater insight into the way in which sounds traversed space and are understood from different sides of a physical wall. The dilemma occurred when the recorders were used to secretly capture conversations outside of this group—conversations with council representatives who were trying to sway residents to leave their home or landlords using aggressive techniques toward tenants. The participants felt a need to capture and evidence these instances. However, it was problematic in the light of privacy rights, data protection, and ethics, placing me in a restricted and difficult situation. I have utilized this approach in various settings, and each time I have been conflicted around the type of technology to use with the participants. There is a growing number

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of excellent apps that can be downloaded to record sounds; however, there is a still a significant digital divide (Yates et al. 2015) around access to technology, both the economic cost and the confidence to navigate it. There is also the question of the balance between usability and sound quality. In projects that have involved sound recording devices, the easiest ones to use have employed well-recognized media control symbols on buttons rather than touchscreens and have had a built-in microphone. The freedom of the participants to record at any point in time requires the technology to be easy enough to use without any prior knowledge or expertise—though the quality of sound captured by these simple recorders is not as clear as a with a professional sound-capturing system. Another concern is what might be termed “human error,” which has actually occurred far less than anticipated. Recorders were sometimes held upside down, thus muffling the microphone, or, in one case, a participant’s cat took a liking to the digital recorder and sat on it while the resident was trying record a sound. One of the early projects in which I attempted to use this methodology was in Vauxhall, Liverpool in 2010. The area has a complicated history of regeneration that saw homes being demolished and rebuilt decade after decade (Rogers 2010). This was often accompanied by surveys, research, and consultations with the local residents, which had developed into a sense of fatigue. Tom Clarke, in his 2008 paper “‘We’re Over-Researched Here!’ Exploring Accounts of Research Fatigue within Qualitative Research Engagements,” notes that overresearching occurs when there is a lack of perceptible change attributable to engagement, increasing apathy and indifference toward engagement, and practical barriers such as cost, time, and organization. Unless these non-positive mechanisms can be offset by the supporting mechanisms of engagement, research fatigue is likely. (Clarke 2008: 967)

Vauxhall was over-researched and disillusioned. Despite working with community groups and meeting with significant matriarchs in the area who gave their support to the project, the work never gained traction with the local residents. The private nature of home can only be accessed through the expert ears of those who dwell in those habitats; this leaves projects around home in a very delicate position, both reliant upon the residents to open their spaces to study and responsible for approaching those spaces with a care that wards against research fatigue.

How to Be Guided in Research by Participants The methodological practice presented here stands upon a foundation of work that “walked with” participants (Baker 2001, Pink 2007, Järviluoma et al. 2009). In her study “Rock on Baby!: Pre-teen Girls and Popular Music” (2001), Sarah Baker introduces the idea of playing with video and tape recorders. Baker explicitly gave her participants these

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tools to “play with” (Baker 2001: 360). Her notion of “play” allowed for her participants to “record and photograph anything they wanted during this period … they could also record over material, or throw away photographs which they did not wish to keep” (ibid.). Baker’s primary focus was upon the girls’ relationship with popular music, rather than their lived experience of everyday sounds. Baker’s boldness in relinquishing control of the audiovisual tools to her participants and, in turn, the freedom they experienced in playing with them, was a crucial influence for my own development of a sensory approach to home that allowed the participants the agency in how, where, and what they recorded and shared. The mobile methodology of walking with a participant had begun as part of my own practice; however, this mobile methodology excludes spaces such as home as the external nature of walking and moving is not easily transferred into the smaller domestic space of compact urban houses. At first I considered interviewing the residents to understand their relationships with space, but this was also problematic in three different ways: Firstly, the most popular response to me asking people about sounds or asking people to listen was “I don’t hear anything.” Secondly, talking about the sounds but not being able to capture or hear the sounds from the sonic space forced a disjuncture between the description of a sonic event and the sound that formed that event. Thirdly, in three of the research areas (the Welsh Streets, Vauxhall in Liverpool, and Ancoats in Manchester, UK) there was a history of conflict with the council, as well as political tensions around the regeneration process. This was particularly problematic in the Welsh Streets, as residents of this area had been bombarded by press, council consultants, and solicitors all interviewing them and using what they had to say either to support or defeat their fight to keep their homes. Presenting them with a sound recorder and interviewing them about their space replicated these scenarios and in doing so echoed assumed positions of power. To challenge these concerns and better understand the everyday lived experience of home, I gave the residents their own recording devices and the freedom to play with them. The recorders, simply in their purpose to capture sound, enabled those using them to shift from I don’t hear anything to What shall I record? and What sounds did I capture? Allowing the residents to record in their own homes meant that they captured sounds in private moments: a beeping noise in the early hours of the morning, a snoring partner, the morning radio of a neighbor through the wall, the cats coming in for their dinner. These were the everyday sonic rituals of their lives, captured by them. Their commentary upon these sounds brought their experiential expertise to the forefront of this sensory experience, allowing an understanding of their connected histories intertwined with their everyday listening. Their homes and sonic domestic spaces were their own to record, share, and explore as they wished. Sarah Pink’s 2007 work Walking with Video champions the social anthropologist’s idea of “joining in” of “shared corporal experiences” (Pink 2007: 241). In her approach to walking with, Pink explores how documentary filmmakers walk with their subjects to better understand their “experiences and embodied knowledge” (ibid.). What was particularly significant in Pink’s work as a foundation for the development of the trinitarian methodology discussed in this chapter, is the significance that she gives to the

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filmmaking context as a drawing together of people, things, and sensory experience. In much the same the same way, the sound recording and the role of participants as artist draws together people, sensory experience, and place. Helmi Järviluoma also incorporates the idea of walking with in her work Lesconcil, My Home (Järviluoma et al. 2009). Here, Järvilouma explores the idea of “sonic memory walks” (ibid.: 174). Her methodology requests participants to choose a path that has been important to you when you were children. Can you please take me for a walk along that particular path? Can you tell me about the smells and sounds you sensed when you were children? (Ibid.)

Her approach places the participants in the role of guides to their paths and the memories that are connected to them. The participants are seen as offering a form of expertise that she is learning from. Through this walking and remembering, Järviluoma is able to understand place-making: “a place is a space that has become something special through the meanings connected with it” (ibid.: 175). This methodology led to the development the sensory memory walk (Järviluoma 2013, 2016), and further into the sensobiographical methodology (Järviluoma and Murry 2019). Järviluoma’s submission in being guided by her participants and the connections she makes between memory, meaning, and place were influential in initiating the idea of the participant as “academic.” Their understanding of home was tied not simply to the sounds that they hear and record, but in the layers of relationships and memory they have with those sounds. These past studies have incorporated ideas of participation, empowerment, and coproduction. Alongside these Walking with practices, there are, in contrast, communitybased projects in sound studies that have often only produced an illusion of participation in their approaches. Where residents are in the end only observers or at times material contributors to a research process—rather than active and steering participants in understanding their sonic space—there is actually no participation going on. Too often the sonic ethnographic process becomes tokenistic in its engagement, only allowing for restricted agency by those who dwell in the space, rather than drawing upon an indeed co-produced and coauthored methodology that allows participants to guide the researcher through their world. Handing control over to the participants and allowing the researchers’ ears to be opened to their ways of listening (Järviluoma 2009, Chandola 2012) might be the most daring prospect for sound studies researchers.

The Shifting Nature of There and They This chapter challenges the assumption of the idealized home, suggesting that a realized home does not conform to the binaries created through idealization; inside/outside, managed/undisciplined. Instead home is a more complex web of intertwined experiences weaving a path between the opposed ideas encompassing the movable edges of what is percived to be within the realm of home. The removal of the idealized concept of home

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allows for an investigation of how sounds that culturally may be considered unwanted can become a longed-for and embedded part of home-making. If, as Ingold writes “place does not have location but histories. Bound together by the itineraries of their inhabitants” (Ingold 2011: 219), it is these memories—both good and bad—that make home. This also lets us consider how home is deeply personal and often culturally challenging. The case study presented here problematizes the idea that a home is constructed from positive sonic, sensory experiences and suggests that both nurturing and damaging experience are a reality, intertwined in the listening experience of home. As seen in the opening section of this chapter, Somerville highlights the idea of home as “the centre of family life, a place of retreat, safety and relaxation, freedom, independence; self-expression and social status, a place of privacy, continuity and permanence, a financial asset; and a support for work and leisure activities” (Somerville 1997: 227–228). Furthermore, all of these elements are also divided along lines of gender, class, and tenure. How can we begin to understand other formations of home? I remember a friend telling me how he found a homeless man living in his garden shed. My friend was not a keen gardener; his shed was more for the storage of unwanted Christmas presents than for gardening equipment. His garden was very long and narrow and resembled more a rugged nature reserve than a well-ordered space. It came to light that this man had been living in the shed for almost a year completely undisturbed. When my friend confronted him, the man was reluctant to leave his home. In our eyes the man was homeless, but in his own eyes his had a home (the shed). Clearly, our visual assumptions of what make up a legitimate sense of home can be at odds with other people’s understanding of the space. Research in this area, including my own, is often restricted by visual boundaries, even though sound does not abide by these restrictions. As Michael Bull writes: “Sound is no respecter of ‘private’ space as it is multiple and amorphous” (Bull 2007: 74). We see this in Mary’s desire to hear her neighbors through the wall; in the wider study, the physical walls of home remain as an assumed barrier. We need to move beyond these visual and physical boundaries of bricks and mortar. If we cannot study home beyond these, then we cannot begin to investigate how home is produced when physical solid boundaries do not exist: communal squats, refugee camps, homeless shelters, makeshift or temporary homes under railway arches or doorways. We must seek to understand the interweaving of the peri-domestic with the domestic, shifting nature of there and they, when the physical boundaries of a space become transient. In concluding this chapter, I wish to draw your attention to some of the spaces that challenge these boundaries, such as communal or transient spaces. Firstly, consider communal homes: they do not fit the mold as a center for family life, independence, or self-expression; rather they offer a different understanding of personal and communal space. There is a variety of reasons that can lead to people moving from independent living to a communal shared space. It may be that a shift in physical ability due to ill health or an accident has created the need for more supported living circumstances which cannot be catered for within their original home. It may be that rising costs of living and the upkeep of a house have made it economically difficult for them to stay in an independent home. There is also the possibility that the domestic space has become

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dangerous, that the presence of an aggressive family member means that refuge has to be found elsewhere. What is the experience of those who move to or live in communal homes? How can we investigate and understand these amorphous spaces and the experiences of those who reside there? Can the approach outlined here be applied to enable us to understand these spaces? Secondly, consider what may be referred to as temporary homes—although many will live in these spaces for years: these homes challenge the concepts of retreat, privacy, and permanence. Mary’s experience of home and that of my friend’s unexpected shed neighbor highlight the importance of the materiality of space—how the physical makeup of the “there” is part of our experience of home; how thick absorbent walls, double-, triple-glazed windows, or wooden, metal, tiled roofs are … all this significant to our experiences. Is the importance of the materiality of space amplified in temporary accommodation such as refugee camps, where homes are created from tents, transformed shipping containers, and other materials which often diminish the sonic privacy of space? Can these porous spaces be considered home? When and how do the sounds of those new environments become normalized and absorbed as part of the they and there of home. There is a need for sonic anthropologists to investigate the breadth of domestic spaces that exist, to look beyond economically and socially privileged understandings of home to engage with a wider spectrum of what could be considered home environments. Only when we have investigated a proper breadth of domestic habitats will we be able to understand the central acoustical features of home, its variety and its similarities.

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The Street Juhana Venäläinen, Sonja Pöllänen and Rajko Muršič

Figure 11.1  Juhana’s graphic notation from a walk in Ljubljana (excerpt).

Turku, Ljubljana, Brighton There is no strict silence in the street. It is always busy. Life in the streets is fluid. As is the traffic itself. Background noise in streets is often unidentifiable. (Soundnotes, Turku) The ubiquitous hum of engines—sometimes constant and at other times oscillating up and down in tone and amplitude as the cars accelerate and decelerate—constructs a dense aural fabric merged with the wheel noise and the ambient traffic noise coming from further away. (Soundnotes, Ljubljana) In the rare silent moments amidst the fugue of the motors, sometimes even a bit of birdsong can be heard. Perhaps the birdsong might have been there all the time, but it was just hard to notice due to the overwhelming traffic. (Soundnotes, Ljubljana)

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When thinking about the aural architecture of streets, it is often traffic and noise that first come to mind. Nonetheless, the reality is much more varied. Streets are like the veins of a city; they connect different mobile elements—people, bicycles, cars—to different places. The street sound environment is diverse, globally and locally, but it is also transformational and transitory. Even in the same streets, over periods of days, weeks, and a calendar year, sounds come and go. Any empirical survey of street sounds would encounter various human practices: moving, walking, driving, riding, working, talking, playing, drinking, eating, or relaxing. For some of these activities, sound may play a significant or almost indispensable role (think of talking), whereas for others, sound is more or less an accidental and uncoordinated byproduct. Besides humans, many non-human actors contribute to the common soundscape: Wind, obviously. Omnipresent nature in the street. Barely audible. Or strong winds that occupy one’s ears completely. Sounds of birds and seagulls. Background noise is barely audible. But it is still there. (Soundnotes, Turku)

If every movement is vibration, and every vibration makes a sound, then the city is a veritable “sound body” (Kapchan 2015: 34). It spreads its tentacles around in the form of streets, forming a sonic system full of colorful, structured and unstructured sounds, some of them difficult for a human ear to distinguish. In this chapter, we jump into the complexities and subtleties of urban aural rhythms and timbres by walking in the streets and by resounding (cf. Järviluoma 2013) the experience of doing this activity. Walking, one of the quintessential features of the human form of life (Ingold and Vergunst 2008: 1), has been studied from a number of perspectives: from auto-topographic approaches (Arlander 2012) to transmaterialities of walking (Springgay and Truman 2017), and to different multisensorial approaches (Pink 2007, Järviluoma and Vikman 2013). It offers an interface to street life in its various modalities. Why not choose to cycle, drive a car, or sit on a bus? These activities would undoubtedly be potential methodological extensions, but nevertheless, walking—in its relative slowness, vulnerability, and the tangibly tactile connection with the street in concreto—remains an elementary form of urban participatory observation (e.g. Jenks and Neves 2000, Morris 2004, Middleton 2010). By moving around as pedestrians, by lifting our feet and putting them down again, by stepping on the asphalt, gravel, or grass, we not only assume an external perspective from where to contemplate the sensory events as they unfold around us, but, by walking, we take part in the sonic texture of the city—embedding ourselves in it, contributing to it, and experiencing it: The first and the most vital repetition of street sounds are footsteps: their meter may be constant or changing. When walkers walk, they synchronize. But sounds of footsteps are constantly changing, depending on boots and surface. They may be rhythmically constant, accelerated or slowed down. Only when a pedestrian stops does he or she not produce walking sounds. (Soundnotes, Turku)

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As part of the research project SENSOTRA, we walked with our colleagues and local research participants in three medium-sized cities around Europe: Turku (Finland), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Brighton (United Kingdom). During the walks, a pair of local informants, one younger and one older, teamed up with one or more researchers. The informants took turns in leading the group through the city, choosing their preferred route, paying attention to senses and memories, and narrating the sensory experience to the other walker and the accompanying researcher(s). The walks were recorded and analyzed in video and audio formats. Whereas classic ethnographies have been conducted as solo work (Muršič 2011), these sensobiographic walks were conducted by teams in different cities. This method of sensobiographic walking (Järviluoma 2016) highlights the human being as moving through space and focuses on sensory experiences: smelling, touching, hearing, tasting, seeing, and feeling what and how one remembers the places passed. Sensobiographic walking has its roots in the research project Acoustic Environments in Change, which had the aim of mapping the local soundscapes from five European villages (see Järviluoma et al. 2009). The method is also inspired by the commented city walks of Jean-Paul Thibaud (Thibaud 2013), sensory memory walking (Järviluoma and Vikman 2013), soundwalks (Westerkamp 1974), and the notion of topobiography by Pauli Tapani Karjalainen (2018). Our objective in this chapter is to perform and “resound”—that is, to reconstruct and reverberate through a different medium—a version of the urban sound environment as experienced and reimagined through the recordings from these sensobiographic walks. What we construct and analyze is a sort of “imaginary landscape”: a mash-up of two walks in two different cities, Turku and Ljubljana, as interpreted by researchers who were not present on those particular walks, but who only listened to the recordings. By doing this, we aim to challenge the textualizing tendencies in aural ethnography (cf. Howes 2003: 3–28). At first, this goal certainly sounds paradoxical: to question the dominance of “text” in a practice that literally means “writing” (“-graphy,” Gr. graphein). However, even in the sensobiographic walking method, where emphasis is expected to be on multisensory experiences of the environment, the narrative form of telling and writing a story is so strong that it may easily overwrite sensory plurality and ambivalence. Thus, the guiding dilemma is: How can we take seriously and account for the aural diversity and specificity of the street without reducing it to the “model of the text” (Howes 2003: 3)? In the research process portrayed in this chapter, we try to deal with street sounds more straightforwardly, taking the role of aural bricoleurs and giving space to the agency of soundscapes. We experiment with text, visual means, and quantitative analyses not only as interpretations of street sounds but as expressive materials that are already on the verge of developing a life of their own. The processed materials are not mere representations of the street, but resonances of the places with their communalities and peculiarities. By working with these resonances, we seek to develop an open and playful way of coping with the textual–aural nexus and linking materialities of street sounds to the materialities of street life more generally.

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How did we select the sites of our research? Giffinger et al. (2007) note that while the majority of the European population lives in medium-sized cities (with populations of between 100,000 and 500,000), the mainstream of urban research focuses on global metropolises. The rationale for choosing mid-sized cities as research sites in the SENSOTRA research project was to challenge the prevailing narrative that significant socio-cultural transformations can only be traced in the most densely populated areas. On the contrary, the project deliberately selected sites falling outside of the dominant gaze. Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia, with 300,000 inhabitants. It was built around a castle on a hill above the Ljubljanica River, where the majority of the sensobiographic walks were done. The city center is now mostly a traffic-free zone, so the traffic noise is concentrated at city entrance roads and several crossroads. There are some industrial facilities located in some parts of the city, but in general, it is an administrative, educational, and tourist center. The history of Ljubljana begins with the Roman settlement of Emona and continues through the Middle Ages to modernity. Its shape was changed by an earthquake in 1895, through the works of architect Jože Plečnik in the twentieth century, and it became an important regional center after the First World War. Turku is the oldest city in Finland. It was settled in the thirteenth century and functioned as the capital until the early nineteenth century. Today, Turku is the sixth-largest city in Finland, with a population close to 200,000. The geography of Turku is characterized by the Aura River, which goes right through the city center. The riverbank has become very popular for weekend strolls, attracting tourists and locals alike, especially on warm summer days. As the participants for the study were encouraged to choose their routes freely, a large part of the walks took place by the river and the around neighboring areas, such as the Old Great Square, the Lesser Square, and the Market Square. The riverside promenade, of about three kilometers, reaches from the Old Great Square to the harbor area that fifty years ago was dominated by the clanging sounds from the Crichton-Vulcan shipyard, which at the time was the spearhead of the Finnish shipbuilding industry. While marine and metal industries are still import for the region, the service sector and high-tech and knowledgeintensive industries have gained more and more prominence. Regarding street sounds, one of the most dramatic changes in the last century has been the surge of car traffic. Private cars were rare in photographs of Turku from the late 1940s, with the streets mostly populated by pedestrians and cyclists, along with horses and trams. In 1972, the tramway was shut down, as it was considered outdated. The numbers of cyclists in the streets had already diminished rapidly, with the private car becoming a modern mode of transport (Männistö-Funk 2018.) Today, cycling is once again embraced; new cycling lanes are being built and plans are being established for calming traffic. Turku, as well as Ljubljana, have popular bikeshare systems, and today, increasingly often the sound of the car engine is accompanied by the ticking tone of the bicycle freewheel. Sounds of bicycle wheels, mostly silent, are constantly coming and going. Bicycle ball bearings add a specific additional sound of moving. They come close to the ear, closer than walking, and go away in passing. The sounds of bicycles come very close, may become intimate. (Soundnotes, Turku)

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Polisgraphy and the Trap of the Text How to speak about something that cannot be spoken about? This oft-repeated quandary from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus (1961 [1921]) is very pertinent to the field of sound anthropology. Of course, sounds can be spoken about, and they can be written about, as they often are. Numerous academic and popular articles, as well as entire books, have been devoted to the topic: to describing verbally what things sounded like in a certain environment, in a certain time, and from a certain listener’s “listenpoint.” But aurally, in the strict terms of the air pressure that causes a vibration in the eardrum, texts are nearly mute. The only sound directly caused by reading a verbalized derivative of listening is the occasional scraping rustle of turning the page. The problem of representation, however much debated (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986, and the thousands of works citing it), still haunts ethnography: the practice of “writing” (graphein) a “community” (ethnos). In describing, analyzing, and understanding the sonic community of the street—let alone its intermeshing with the broader socio-cultural, socioeconomic, and socio-political contexts—we have to become two sorts of writers: not only sound-writers, or phonographers, but also city-writers, polisgraphers, writing sounds of the city and through the city. Even more importantly, we have to question, time and again, the very foundation of this writing: What is it based on? On the “objective” facts about the blowing car horns and heels clicking on cobblestones, or on our “subjective” experiences of them? Likewise, we have to pay attention to how sound is transferred to a different medium: How does writing capture its non-textual object? How does it translate and transform it? How does it label and categorize entities? What does it include and emphasize, and what does it downplay and undermine? The street is not primarily a space of attentive listening, of attuning one’s ears to sonic events or writing down notes about them. Rather, it is space of action where manifold events take place, some intentionally and some accidentally. To address the street as a space of commons and contestation, we also have to push our ways of “hearing” the city from the perspective of being a passive spectator to taking more seriously our role in conveying and potentially reshaping the urban experience. The process of writing down street sounds and sound-streets is inescapably partial. The streets do not write themselves; we write them as researchers. The researcher has the prerogative and responsibility to act as the mediator of this aural knowledge. At the extreme end, the cautiousness about the researcher’s role could lead to abandoning the whole process of analysis as a deliberate intervention. To write the sounding street as is would require a more literal take on “writing.” Would a serious sound-writer, then, resort to the phonograph—a machine that reproduces and records sound vibrations by debossing a sheet of tinfoil with a stylus (like Thomas Edison’s first models in the 1870s)—to follow the etymological root of writing as “tearing” and “scratching”? Or would we perhaps choose a modern descendant of the same pedigree—say, a portable digital audio recorder capable of encapsulating an almost hyperrealistic audio portrait?

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To substitute words with sound recordings—and to replace the human phonographer with the non-human phonograph—would be an obvious but trivial answer to the dilemma. It would imply a shift from representation (as in saying something about something) to a mere restaging (as in saying something again as faithfully as possible), and similarly, from narration (diegesis) to imitation (mimesis). Anthropologist David Howes debates the problem of writing sensory experience extensively in Sensual Relations (2003). He argues that, in the history of anthropology, the mode of knowledge has shifted from being “multisensory and social” to being “spectacularly stylized and centered on the individual ethnographer” (Howes 2003: 3). Further, he notes that the metaphor of “reading culture” carries two biases: visual (“ocularcentric”) and verbal (“verbocentric”) (ibid.: 19–20). A “reader,” to begin with, is a voyeur, a passive spectator instead of an active participant. This reader who portrays culture through writing tends to assume that the expressions interpreted through reading and writing carry some kind of propositional knowledge. However, “not all knowledge need be verbalized (i.e. take the form of a proposition)” (ibid.: 20). Thus, there are many pitfalls to avoid: the individualist notion of an ethnographer, the distancing of the written accounts from the vivid sensory reality, and the understanding of sensory experiences as a part of an overwhelmingly coherent system of knowledge. A radically different perspective on the problem of representation, or for overturning the concept of representation altogether, has been suggested in the approach known as New Materialism (e.g. Coole and Frost 2010a, Dolphijn and Van der Tuin 2012). In Vibrant Matter (2010), Jane Bennett presents an encapsulation of this onto-political project by asking “[h]ow would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?” (Bennett 2010: viii). The idea is, thus, to push our thought toward recognizing how things matter not only to us but also in themselves. The path taken in this chapter relates to so-called Critical Materialism (Coole and Frost 2010b: 6, 27–32) which sees (hears) the world as both materially and socially/discursively constructed, paying attention to the dialectical intertwining of human and non-human agency, and to the capacities of things to make an impact, and to the diversity of materialities that exists. While Howes seems to suggest that the necessary shift for avoiding the “trap of the text” is to move from “writing” to “making sense” (Howes 2003: 26), the epistemological path inspired by new materialism takes a step further, and in a way, a step backwards. Instead of aiming to make sense of the patterns of sensing within a delimited context, the approach affirms the particularity and non-reducibility of sensory experiences: their “thing-power”—the “efficacy of objects in excess of the human meanings, designs or purposes they express or serve” (Bennett 2010: 20)—and, in a sense, their senselessness. In our experiment, we extracted the street sounds of Turku and Ljubljana from the interview tapes as sounds, momentarily leaving aside the aspect of how the informants contextualized, reflected on, and interpreted them. We listened to the tapes with little contextual information, focusing mostly, if not only, on the sounds that were heard. We chose to ignore the visual cues from the video footage, as they would too easily lead one’s imagination to certain pre-established ways of building a narrative of an urban stroll. By excluding words and sight, as well as proprioception, smell, and touch, the experiment

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opens a specific aural dimension of the street. Certainly, this could be criticized as the worst form of “sensory exclusionism” (Howes 2003: 6), a perspective where only one sense and one way of mediating it is unduly foregrounded. However, we contend that this foregrounding can be harnessed as a tactical “troubling” and “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) in mediating sensory knowledge.

Phonographic Palimpsests of Sensobiographic Walks Texts from walks performed by other people, later randomly selected and listened to by two who were perhaps sitting in a chair … listening to the acousmatics of walks performed, repeating the missing parts, in language they did not understand. Listening to the street through headphones. (Sonja’s research notes)

What do the streets sound like in Turku and Ljubljana? The first answer to this is very straightforward: We might regard the interview tapes as taking on the function of technology-mediated aural evidence of what could have been heard in the streets by the group while doing the sensobiographic walk. For the analysis, two sensobiographic walks were randomly selected from the SENSOTRA project’s dataset, one from Ljubljana and one from Turku. The footage from these walks was recorded with a chest-worn video camera and a handheld audio recorder. Usually, when listening to recordings for the purpose of transcribing them or otherwise learning what was discussed during the walk, we tend to focus on one specific auditory element: the narration of the person who leads the walk, and the dialogue between her/ him and the other participants. This mode of listening develops a certain sensibility, where the priority is to comprehend what is said. In the background of the narration, the urban soundscape is often noisy. For a transcriber, the fact that the walks took place in an uncontrolled urban space might be seen as more of a nuisance than as an area of interest. Background noise occasionally fills a soundscape of the walk and thus makes speakers in dialogue speak louder and louder. Human conversation in the street competes with other traffic noises. The street is a place of contestation. (Soundnotes, Turku)

Just as in trying to get one’s voice heard over the traffic while walking, the act of listening and trying to hear “what is in there” constructs a dichotomy of content and noise: the speech—intelligible, meaningful—as content, and the urban environment—chaotic, unpredictable—as noise. Although our research focuses on the multisensory experiences of a city, the way we attend to these experiences and describe them textually is most often verbally mediated and assumes the “model of the text” (Howes 2003: 3). For the experiment herein, we decided to invert the lens of our hearing: to ignore the semantic content of speech as “noise” and to foreground its environment as “content.”

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The material from Ljubljana was analyzed by a Finnish researcher (with practically no knowledge of Slovenian) and, vice versa, the material from Turku was analyzed by a Slovenian researcher (with no knowledge of Finnish). We employed the language barrier as a research tool, as a form of bracketing so as to challenge established conventions of listening to interview tapes as dialog and, on the contrary, to shift the focus from the humancentric and narration-centric perspectives to what is outside: the urban environment. Thus, instead of focusing on how the walkers describe the aural environment and their memories about it, we harnessed the lack of verbal comprehension as way of letting the environment speak for itself. Ethically, this is a controversial strategy because, by ignoring semantic information as well as many contextual factors, we neglect most of what the informants on these walks would probably have thought of as valuable. What we did is not to denounce the compelling stories and details told by our informants, but to challenge ourselves in the process of interpretation and to seek a path toward an alternative way of describing and redescribing the aural realm. Our method consisted of the following interrelated aspects: ●

●

●

Challenging our established conventions of working with the fieldwork material by bracketing out certain sensory and lingual elements in favor of others. Experimenting with different methods (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, visual, poetic) of producing soundnotes: sort of “imaginary fieldnotes” that resound (but do not simply “reproduce” or “represent”) the aural environment through a different medium. Working with processed materials collectively by circulating, reinterpreting, rewriting, remixing, and recomposing them with the aim of subverting the individualist–subjective propensity and, instead, building common ground between the different interpretations while also leaving space for contradictions.

We began analyzing the street sounds of Turku and Ljubljana through a series of iterative experiments with different ways of playing with the sound material. In the effort of continuously rewriting and overwriting the descriptions of the street sounds, the method could be described as one of “phonographic palimpsests” (cf. Daughtry 2017; Waterman 2017): of interpreting and reinterpreting; of doing and undoing; of writing and erasing; of mixing and separating; of layering and flattening. Instead of having a full methodological plan at the outset, we progressed step by step, inventing new ways of processing the materials on the go. First, we listened individually to the sound recordings and prepared textual reflections of walks that were conducted by other people. We then randomly selected parts of these reflections and listened to recordings again. We listened to the acousmatics of walks, repeating parts but avoiding dialogues, as we did not understand the language. This was, basically, listening to the streets with headphones, displaced from the original scene. We compared the soundnotes from two cities, put relevant observations together, and mixed them anew. Later, we separated structurally or experientially similar aspects of the walks in the streets, organizing them into multiple forms.

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From the Turku material, Rajko wrote a thematically organized summary with sixteen different categories: background sounds, sounds of walking, animal sounds, sounds of traffic, sounds of parks and green areas, the street as a ludic and common space, street life, music on the street, sounds of indoor and outdoor spaces, sounding streets, street sounds and movement, unexpected sounds and sound signals, other kinds of streets and their sounds, silent streets/ streets of silence, sounds of occupation and inhabitation, and sounds of nature. Juhana took a slightly different approach to the Ljubljana interviews, first preparing graphical notation that mapped the sound events to a timeline with intuitively and inductively born categorizations and notations (see Figure 11.1). After that, he wrote the imaginary soundnotes mostly based on the score, then remixing the text into thematic categories comparable to the ones in Rajko’s experiment. Finally, he juxtaposed the two soundnotes from the two research sites into a single mash-up that could possibly reveal some common features—as well as contradictions—of the urban aural settings. After the first phase, Sonja started working with all of the materials produced thus far: the two thematic soundnotes from two cities, the graphic score, and the mash-up. As she did not listen to the audio files from the streets, her experience of the streets in Turku and Ljubljana relied on her memories of both cities. Her deafness to the primary material was a choice she made to distance herself from the aural experience of these two cities. Instead, she worked with the textual-graphical interpretations from the earlier stage of analysis. I am trying to imagine the streets inside my mind, trying to hear the seagulls in Turku, and the footsteps in Ljubljana … The printed papers are messy and wrinkled for I have tried to categorize the papers, draw circles when I find repetitive words, ideas. (Sonja’s research notes)

She experimented with quantitative methods, such as counting frequencies and drawing word clouds, and produced, for example, a sevenfold categorization of the street sounds as portrayed in the textual accounts: machine-like, non-human, human, relational, musical, poetic, and noise (Table 1). She also created various word clouds (see Figure 11.2), working on the materials as a quantitative listener. As she decided not to listen to the walks themselves, there was not much left but to “read” the streets and write down how that felt. While the purpose of our methodological experiment was to question the textualizing tendency of aural ethnography, we ended up working primarily with sounds-as-text. However, this does not imply that the experiment to have been flawed. Instead of “looking at” or reading the street sounds of Turku and Ljubljana as coherently organized narratives, we broke down the sounding streets into heterogeneous elements that can be recombined in multiple ways. This opened a playful approach to street life, an approach that heard

Table 11.1  Sonja’s analysis of the aural categories present in the soundnotes. Human

Non-human Machine-like

Musical

Relational

Noise

Poetic

Turku

14

16

14

6

17

10

4

Ljubljana

11

9

12

11

9

5

1

Total

25

25

26

17

26

15

5

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Figure 11.2  Sonja’s word cloud visualization of the soundnotes.

streets and attended to them as spaces full of potential. In this context, the text as a medium of this process is not confined to the function of a signifier, of carrying a meaning or making sense, but rather the function of providing material that can spur our imagination both about the current and future being of these two cities. This is how the sounds of the streets reveal their political character.

L’Ècoute Restitué If we take the city as a state of mind (Park 1997: 16), streets are its reflection. In the streets, orthogenetic and heterogenetic cultural roles of cities intersect in continuous systematization and reflection, as well as discontinuous original modes of thought and acting (Redfield and Singer 1954: 58). Streets host various sounds of everyday life (work, merchants, traffic, entertainment, and amusement) and regular or occasional festivities and events (army marches, funeral marches, processions, sounds of bells or prayer, noisy carnival). Their rhythms change constantly on different scales: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Streets are places of play, games, and work. Their frame changes through time. Streets still offer silence. Not so much as in the past, but they still offer relaxation, enjoyment of being in a town, and at the same time, in a natural shelter. There are silent parts of the walking path for pedestrians in Turku: especially silent paths in parks, or sideways. Walkers-by greet you with a loud goodbye. But human voices still sink in an ocean of background traffic noise. (Soundnotes, Turku)

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Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2013) reveals cities as places of private, public, and common life. In contrast to museums, historical and memory places, gardens and thematic parks, streets are not heterotopia, neither in Foucault’s (1986[1967]) nor in Lefebvre’s terms, although they are representative, contested, and occasionally inverted. Urban planning typically serves the interests of elites in designing and redesigning cities, but the elites rarely occupy streets. We cannot hear them, but they dramatically affect street life. Through various means and measures, the elites control policy and police (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003: 22). This is why city streets witness memories of occupation and liberation, protest and repression. Streets have always been an arena for the most exposed social, political, and class struggles (Harvey 2012: 66). “The right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996, Harvey 2012) is not given but gained. Even aurally, the street is a place of continuous contestation and opposing power structures. The pedestrian’s way of sensing the city—even when augmenting the experience by walking with headphones filled with music—is quite different from the isolated position of being inside a motorized vehicle. As cultural geographer Don Mitchell suggests, the street is a focal site of political contestation: ultimately, the right to the city depends upon the right to the street (Mitchell 2011). Struggles over the street become visible during protests. Revolutionary noise (Attali 1985) manifests itself in places of confrontation, the unregulated space of class struggle, revolutions, upheavals, violence, fascism, antifascism, or simply street spectacles at sport or cultural events, as well as in the spontaneous activities of street vendors, artists, and drinking, partying, and playfulness. The streets of Ljubljana host street play, street art, graffiti, the annual street theatre festival, Ana Desetnica, and during the night, the Lighting Guerrilla Festival. Turku is also a lively cultural hotspot, and it was the European Capital of Culture for 2011. However, it experienced a carnivalistic “Capital of Counterculture” campaign at the same time (see Lähdesmäki 2013). In the distant past, paths of communication between buildings were roofs, not streets. The narrow streets of the earliest urban settlements were close to nature. Rivers were the essential communication routes of many cities in the past, and this was the case for both Ljubljana and Turku. City squares later became places of worship, politics, and trade. With the first modern metropolises, such as Paris in the nineteenth century, new amorphous crowds of passers-by, the people in the street (Benjamin 1968a: 165), began to dominate both the spatial and aural environments. But this was just the beginning. Small towns soon followed the developments. In the first half of the twentieth century, military dance bands would play marches and waltzes in city parks. During the weekends, Ljubljana citizens would walk from the city center to the Tivoli Park and back (Ovsec 1979, Jerman 2003). Escaping the crowded streets, acoustically, is like stepping into emptiness. Suddenly, the volume of the traffic noise drops, and the acoustic space is transformed. Whereas the previous space felt completely open (unrestricted), it now seems that the surroundings, whatever they are, reflect the sound and emphasize the human voices near the microphone of the recorder. The reverb here is surprisingly spacious: the voice of the speaker now sounds like it is in an amphitheater. (Soundnotes, Ljubljana)

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We understand walking as a historically, spatially, and theoretically situated practice that appears as a purposeful intervention to the prevailing pace of a city. With the relatively noisy and restless appearance of modern motorized cities, walking is a resistant and sticky practice that turns the tables. In addition to being resistant, walking can also be methodical. In Théorie de la dérive (1958), Guy Debord argues that even psychogeographic experiments, however playful and experimental in spirit, should follow a pre-decided and relatively systematic method. Debord criticizes the Surrealists’ conception that freedom would be achieved by aimless wandering. We are so accustomed to our customary ways of using the city, the argument goes, that simply letting go is not enough for breaking away from our habitual patterns and, thus, cannot give us a novel perspective on urban life. Recently, there has been even stronger interest in different walking methodologies (see, e.g., Springgay and Truman 2019; O’Neill and Roberts 2020). One of the roots of this growing interest can be considered to be in soundscape studies of the 1970s and their inventive, dynamic, mobile methodologies (Järviluoma, (in press). The background for the experiment portrayed in this chapter is in the method of sensobiographic walking, originally developed by Helmi Järviluoma and her team. For Järviluoma, the method deals with the elusive attempts to scrutinize the escaping phenomena of sensory remembering (ibid.). The method was a product of years of exhaustive investigation to better understand and illuminate the multilayered event of sensory experience. When applying the “écoute resitueé” that Järviluoma (2009) adapted from Nicholas Tixier’s and CRESSON scholars’ “écoute située” (Tixier 2002), the “re-” is worth emphasizing here: it is not only the memories in situ that matter for us but the activity of memorizing, relistening, and redoing that layers the dynamism of this activity. There is something in walking that makes memories pop out. When asked to think about the urban space with all senses, which we do not normally deliberately do in our everyday lives, memories are easier to reach when we move around in the particular places. However, as Debord (1958) argues, our ways of using the urban space also tend to be rather restrained and follow the same patterns from day to day. Breaking out of our habits requires deliberate experimentation and imagination. The method of using imaginary soundnotes can reveal aspects of the urban aural regimes that would have been concealed in the form of narrated memories. Further, in addition to addressing “what streets sound like,” we should be more concerned about “what we would like streets to sound like.”

White Noise Is Very Pleasant? A street is a space of commons, a place of sharing. But at the same time, it cannot be anything else than only a temporary assemblage. (Soundnotes, Turku)

Music streaming platforms, such as Spotify, have created the possibility for today’s citizen to transform or even to “shut down” one of their senses in a noisy city. Are we actually more used to shutting down our senses when walking in a city as a means of protection and privacy? Jean-Paul Thibaud portrays a Walkman city traveler who tries hard to derealize

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the urban space with the help of a musical dimension plugged into his ears, but never fully achieving this: “We see him fully absorbed, lost in his sonic universe, whereas just one more step, a scream, or a glance is all it takes to bring him back into contact with his surroundings” (Thibaud 2003). Listening to the environment decreases as people partly privatize their city soundscape through headphones. Streets reflect specific metropolitan individualization and “extravagances of self-distantiation” (Simmel 2002: 18). Hiding behind headphones can be seen as escapist, but we can also think of this activity as the augmentation of our urban reality—a creation of a new sonic atmosphere through a musicalization of the environment, a possibility for “perceptual orientation” (ibid.). According to Thibaud, walking listeners use their devices to decode and protect themselves from cities’ sonic aggressions and, moreover, to give meaningfulness to places passed by, actually enhancing the events they experience (Thibaud 2003: 330). Nevertheless, there are people who resist the tendency to take the urban collectiveness of aural architecture as a bag full of unwanted sounds (Kaye 2013), and there are other people who can withstand no more sound and instead look for places of quietness. What if we move beyond the content and representation of unwelcomed sounds, or sounds and their welcomeness and, like Marie Thompson in Beyond Unwanted Sound (2017a), look into what noise—or sounds—do? What kinds of different roles and strategies can we take in while writing about them and their doing? An interesting debate on the sought-for agency of noise has been sparked by the rapid increase in electric vehicles (EVs). In contrast to a combustion engine, an electrically powered engine is nearly silent. While this might be understood as a good opportunity for reducing urban noise pollution, EVs have raised fears about being too silent to signal their presence to people moving without a protective shield—pedestrians, generally, unaccompanied children, or the visually impaired. The future of transport will, obviously, reshape the street and its sounds. The case of electric vehicles highlights the intimate link between sound and power hierarchies; a noisy engine has been an aural manifestation of the dominant role of cars in the urban hierarchy. Now, with this vociferous noise disappearing, certain power structures also become more contestable and negotiable. Is a noiseless car a more modest inhabitant of the city, or is it a silent killer that must be regulated, as observed in European Union legislation that requires EVs sold after July 2019 to be fitted with a device that emits a warning sound? When the sound of a car is detached from the mere technical necessities of the internal combustion engine, it loses its aura (cf. Benjamin 1968b), becomes arbitrary and contingent, but also symbolic. Through sound, cars can be marked as potentially dangerous, but they can be attached other characteristics as well. A “mix of tonal sound and white noise” (Adams 2018) has been accepted as a standard that not only seeks to replace the implied warning signal of the internal combustion engine, but at the same time to do so better. In a news article, Chris Hanson-Abbott, a representative of the safety products distributor Brigade Electronics writes: “White noise is very pleasant. It’s the sound of falling water. It’s a huge improvement on the noise emitted by petrol or diesel vehicles because its sound source is directional” (cited in ibid.). When noise becomes a thoroughly commodified and contingent object that can be modulated and rationed into the urban space at will, one could ask if the concept of noise

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makes sense at all in future cities. Silence and noise are subjective and such labeling can burden a certain sound. The composer Michel Chion claims that we should do without using the word “noise”: “Acoustically as well as aesthetically, it is a word that promotes false ideas” (Chion in Thompson 2017a: 1). Noise itself is a noisy word that can be used to describe almost anything that has no clear structure: “Noise is both obvious and evasive” (ibid.). Sounds have meanings, but they also have functions and they have effects. They have the capability to do things, bring about events, alter the course of events, or suppress events. Still, we cannot, nor even attempt to seek to, escape the responsibility of interpretation. Rather, our experiment was about the conditions on which an interpretation happens, and the processes and conventions that shape that interpretation. We began the chapter by underlining the supposed dominance of traffic sounds and noises when picturing the ordinary street life of a city. Similar to the idea of the “beach under the cobblestones”—a motto of the revolting students in Paris of 1968—there are always innumerable actual and potential aural regimes concealed behind the ubiquitous hum of motors. All sounds and noises are related in total apperception, even if they occur completely randomly and independently. Streets in urban surroundings are usually lined with buildings, but sometimes streets and buildings enmesh, and we do not know where a street (sound) begins and where it ends. Sounds are also always in excess; there are more things to hear than we can possibly concentrate on: Even though the recording has a feeling of space and one can hear the sounds moving on some kind of a multidimensional plane, it is difficult to say and to mentally map where exactly the cars are coming from or where they are going … the sonic representation as transformed by the recording technology and the listener’s limited cognitive capabilities is just too simplified: the sound arrives and then goes away. There is constantly way too much information to pay attention to all the details or to be able to write everything down during the first listening. (Soundnotes, Ljubljana)

Aidan Southall has observed that “the great city still exerts magnetic attraction” (1998: 408). City space, the space of freedom, the space of utopian imagination and dystopian fears, from Plato and Campanella to the Situationist Internationale, Fritz Lang, and William Gibson, is never silent and cannot be deserted. The city with its “social practice of communing,” as David Harvey would have it (2012: 73), defines streets not only as public space, even if the city authorities often assume streets as their property, enclosing them with regulations and licensing, but as the most vital place of commoning (De Angelis 2017) with bodies moving in the common place, producing common sounds. Similarly, Peter Marcuse (cited in Mitchell 2011: 319) argues that what “the right to the city” actually implies is not the right to the current city but to the future one: the right to reshape urban life according to “our hearts’ desires” (ibid.). In this chapter, we have provoked our habits with a radically refocused relistening to interview tapes. Instead of relying primarily on interview-based verbal narratives of and what has been heard on the streets, we approached the recordings of sensobiographic walks as “aural dérives” (cf. Debord 1958): as experimental and playful encounters with

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streets through moving around with a small group of people, with a collective and living sensory research unit, an activity that already transcends the individualist notions of sensory sense-making. We played with different ways of textualizing the sonic aspects of the street, but at the same time, we critically reflected and rethought this very process of converting the aural into the textual. Furthermore, we “troubled” (cf. Haraway 2016) the hero narrative of anthropology by adding a layer of collective transmediation and transcorporeality (Alaimo 2012) to the aural environment by diving into walks in which we did not originally participate and whose language (in the sense of spoken words) we did not understand. This rendered the street sounds a bit less human dependent and a bit more autonomous. When the semantic meaning is missing, the spoken words, screams, whispers, and talk descend to the same level as all the other sounds heard. Sounds of skating are constant, breakable, extremely dynamic, and unpredictable. Bang and weep-like. Not much screaming from skaters. Swearing, perhaps, occasionally. Yelling. Laughing. If you don’t know the context of the laughter, it becomes meaningless. (Soundnotes, Turku)

What paths are for the forest and nature, and roads are for countryside, streets are for cities. The main problem in writing this chapter was not how to transform the experience of street walks into a narrative, but how to translate sonic material into text that excludes the narration of walkers. It is not possible not to place oneself in the recordings and write about sounds and noises objectively. The vocabulary we used in the initial soundscript was deeply personal; it reflected the very being of the listener. Is it indeed possible to completely exclude meaningful conversations as the most typical sounds of human interaction? Does this action open perspectives beyond representation? Perhaps. However, here, at the end of this chapter, we still use words and other symbolic means to communicate. Perhaps we should not aim to textualize less, but to textualize more and in different ways; to let the matter of text intermesh freely with the matter of sound.

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Figure 12.1  University of the Arts Bern, Fellerstrasse 11; 2nd floor. Photographer: Andi Schoon.

Stage Nerves, Quality Management, and Occasional Conspicuousness At 9:30 a.m. I enter the university through the front door because the parking area is currently being renovated. That means the side entrance is inaccessible. Achim waves to me through the window of the canteen. I wave back but don’t stop, because I still owe

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him a text for the study guide. In the broad, main corridor that leads to the Werkstraße, the first door to the left swings open. It’s the main office of the managerial staff. Monika comes out, carrying her open laptop. She bars my way, wanting to know if my digital agenda is completely up to date because there’s an entry in it for the whole of Monday and she doesn’t know what it is (it’s actually intentional on my part). Yes, I tell her, the agenda is up to date; yes, I confirm, the internal flow of information is functioning with regard to the new management and corporate guidelines; yes, I’ll send Annika at Quality Management our quarterly reporting data for the university development plan; and yes, we’ll see each other on Thursday at the meeting of the mission statement working group and on Friday at the hiking trip for heads of department. She rushes off in the direction of the canteen, freeing up my view of the Xerox machine. The student representative for the Conservation and Restoration Division is standing there, dressed in a traditional German costume. She turns round, curtseys, and asks if she can show me a painting and read me a poem sometime. Of course, I say, of course. I turn off to the right and see August exit the doors that lead to the Werkstraße and thence to the Bümpliz Nord train station. My colleague Tom appears, lit up from behind by the rays of the early morning sun. He turns on his heels and makes a symbolic gesture as if firing a gun at me. The TV recording must have gone well. No, he says, it was absolutely atrocious. Under no circumstances should I watch that roundtable discussion. He’s only in a good mood because he can travel to the Canton Valais this afternoon, where he will stay in his cabin for two weeks, lost to the world. Congratulations. On the stairway, we encounter the new head of Human Resources, Martin, Marty, or whatever his name is. He looks away and says nothing. Tom murmurs incomprehensible curses. I don’t even want to know what it’s all about. At the entrance to the upper floor there’s a sign that says: “Quiet please. Semester presentations in art and design communication.” The building used to be a textile factory, and the second-year trainee art teachers are gathered together under its old shed roof. Fifteen girls, plus two men in their mid-thirties who are obviously the outside experts. They are all standing in front of an object that is a bit reminiscent of the Atomium in Brussels, only it’s pink. One of the experts—the one with a long beard—says it’s well developed in its materiality but incomplete in its conceptuality. I wonder about the conceptual completeness of the printed muscle shirt that he’s wearing over the well-developed materiality of his torso. I squeeze past them all quietly. But Tom crashes loudly into a partition wall and everyone turns round. We say hello to them all, apologetically. Everyone smiles. They know us and are used to our occasional conspicuousness. Funny, the office door is open. We go up the last few steps toward our workplaces, and there sits our colleague Arnold, as pale as death. He was at the movies yesterday, he says. It started pretty well, really. The film showed an Ice Age, and it made him feel pretty cold. That was fascinating, because he’s interested in affective techniques of presentation. Half an hour afterwards he lay in the emergency room with a toxic fever. Tom remarks that when we were flying back from Shanghai, we entered turbulence just when the onboard screens were showing the moment in the movie Gravity where Sandra Bullock re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. That was a crass 4D experience. I also remember a similar story, but I keep mum about it—the semester presentation is still happening and this is an open-plan building. You can hear everything people say in the upper offices and so you can easily disturb everyone else. I don’t feel like telling stories

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now anyway. It’s almost 10 a.m. and I feel bad, just like I do before every lecture. I take the adaptor from my desk, along with my papers and my laptop. Tom asks what a single melancholic of my age wants to do at this time of day, but I’m already in the tunnel. Will my stage nerves never get better? Just what is it exactly that I’m scared of? I squeeze along the wall one more time. The Atomium is now being discussed for its potential as an intervention in a public space. Then I turn off toward the auditorium. An installation made of cow dung hovers above me in the foyer. It’s by a student from the Alpine village of Kandersteg who wants to draw attention to scrub encroachment in the Bernese highlands. I’d been asked to mentor the project but recommended a colleague instead. Then I enter the darkened auditorium. It’s a black hole with a large screen in it. My subconscious is constantly telling me: don’t speak. Flee before they notice you. But there’s an object I’m looking forward to. It’s my savior. The microphone. You can hold fast to it; it makes you stronger, takes you out of the everyday. It’s my rod and staff. I proceed stoically through the rows of students—there must be some sixty of them there already. In five minutes it’s probably going to be double that. I get my stuff ready, start my presentation, the beamer’s working, the microphone too. I slowly become calm. The students settle down, still chatting with each other. I greet them and say something or other as a warm-up. They’re not here of their own free will. It’s a compulsory lecture, so you’ve got to offer something to keep them interested. Then it begins. Ladies and gentlemen, acoustic influences come in different forms, with different strategies and goals. Muzak Holdings LLC was regarded for decades as the epitome of background music and light orchestral pieces at the threshold of perception. It was founded as “Wired Radio” in 1934. It benefitted from a study published in 1937 by the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey that said “functional music” at the workplace could improve performance and considerably reduce the number of days lost to illness. In the 1950s, the company invested in its own research department in order to evaluate and optimize the impact of its Muzak arrangements. Comprehensive pilot studies involving music psychologists resulted in the theory of stimulus progression, which proposed a slight increase in tempo toward 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.—in other words, at times when there is a lull in the biorhythms of an average worker. Throughout the day, the pieces of music were subdivided into fifteenminute dramaturgical sessions that each began with a slow piece, after which the tempo was increased slightly, and each session ended with ten seconds of silence. (music starts)

That evening I sit in my comfy chair and listen to Bach partitas, very softly. All the voices and all the speaking reverberate in my head. I’ll still hear them in my dreams. What is it that I was trying to say?

Music while You Work and Songs of the IBM The history of music at the workplace can be told in various ways (cf. Gioia 2006). Let us consider one possibility: “Music While You Work” was the name of a radio program that the BBC broadcast on weekdays from 1940 to 1967. It featured cheery live music that was

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intended to inspire workers in factories and offices to carry out their tasks expediently. The program was subject to strict musical rules: the volume was to remain constant, the tempo too, and it should offer well-known melodies and a happy atmosphere. The ensembles of Cecil Norman and the Rhythm Players accompanied the work of ponderous metal stamping machines in factories and the muted clattering of typewriters in company offices. But what was regarded as an innovative cooperation in sound between industry and the public broadcaster in fact had age-old roots: Thresh ye, O oxen; thresh for yourselves. Thresh straw for your fodder and grain for your masters. (Brunner-Traut 1975: 381ff.)

The Ancient Egyptians had working songs. Whether the purpose was to encourage oxen or to utter invocations for success with a fishing net, these songs expressed the worker’s relationship to their job. They also served to provide a rhythm to monotonous tasks such as mowing, threshing, or rowing, just like with the factory workers in the twentieth century. A sound that emerges naturally out of one’s work can be emphasized through transforming it into song. If the work activity itself proceeds in silence, then such a song can provide a constant rhythm to homogenize the work process. But in Ancient Egypt, the work song was also a form of protest that reflected a sense of community among the suffering workers: Must we carry barley and white spelt all day? The barns are already full and overflowing. (Ibid.)

The pre-industrial work songs on the North American cotton plantations of the nineteenth century functioned in the same way. The spontaneous call-and-response structure of these songs, with a lead singer and chorus, was intended to ease the burden of work and intensify a sense of solidarity. Singing enabled the worker to identify with his or her own class, and the workers participated in the collective by means of their singing voice. Then came steam power and the factories. The new patterns of working life in the age of industrialization brought radical change to the soundscape of the workplace. The sounds of machines now provided the rhythm of work, and “song” resumed its function as an activity practiced outside work time. This was not least because joint singing became a suspicious, potentially revolutionary activity. One spinning mill in Manchester forbade whistling, while in the early Ford factories, the managers even tried to stop the workers from talking. The banning of the work song was the beginning of targeted attempts to control and influence the soundscape of the workplace. These endeavors continued in the United States in the interwar period, when the service industries began to boom. The appliance manufacturer Maytag sent bevvies of washing machine salesmen into the suburbs from 1925 onwards. The problem of how to keep control of workers out in the field was dealt with by means of a song that was intended to help them identify with the company: It’s a great gang that sells the Maytag, it’s a great gang to know;

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They are full of pep and ginger, and their watchword is “Let’s Go!” (Endrissat and Noppeney 2012: 271f.)

This song refers directly to the activities of the sales representatives, so that they know to whom they owe their loyalty, even when far from home. In a Foucauldian sense, such a salesman has internalized his overseer, carrying them around inside himself. Texts of this kind were usually written by the workers themselves, using popular melodies. The Maytag managers awarded prizes to those who penned the best songs. We here find ourselves at the transition from the work song to the company song prescribed by management, and which aims to encapsulate the spirit of the whole company: Who are we? Who are we? The International Family. We are T.J. Watson men. We represent the IBM. (Ibid.: 274)

The legendary volume entitled Songs of the IBM was compiled on the personal initiative of Thomas Watson, CEO of the company. His self-image as a father figure, holding his protective (and occasionally punitive) hand over his corporate “family” is reflected in most of the more than 100 songs in the book. Work ethic, motivation, order, and responsibility are the topics of the lyrics, which were sung to the tunes of well-known folk songs and marching songs. Altogether, these company anthems make audible the company’s culture or “vision.” The singing employee is not part of a bottom-up organization, but is participating in the internal communication system of the employer. The act of identification through song no longer takes place within one’s own class. Instead, one partakes of the creative ideas of management. However, some of these tunes could be assigned very different texts. “Marching through Georgia,” for example, was sung to the following text at IBM: Hurrah! Hurrah! For glorious IBM. Hurrah! Hurrah! We’re T.J. Watson’s men. (E-Sawad and Korczynski 2007: 94)

But the union version ran thus: Hurrah! Hurrah! The Union makes us free. Hurrah! Hurrah! It’s all for you and me. (Ibid.)

Songs of the IBM was first published in 1925, and the album’s contents were widely used until the 1950s. Once pop music became current, the folk origins of the IBM songs gradually made them unusable. Furthermore, collaborative singing had been discredited after being employed by the Nazis. The last editions of the Songs were purportedly burnt in around 1970. Californian fast-food franchise Johnny Rockets, founded in 1986, is an outlier in matters of company hymns. Its restaurants are in the style of the American diners of the postwar period, with bright red seat covers and a jukebox. And at lunchtimes, as can

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be seen in numerous YouTube clips, staff members drop everything to sing and dance to classic pop songs with their customers. The boundaries are blurred here, not just between the servers and the backroom staff, but between the staff and the customers. Songs here fulfil more than self-affirmation within the company, for they also help to establish its public image. The client comes into play, adding a level of complexity to the employee’s self-understanding. This quite familiar tale of the birth of the corporate anthem out of the tradition of workers’ songs might seem perfectly plausible; however, I wish also to provide an alternative take from a slightly different perspective, employing another narrative. This version leads us from alienated work to ambivalent identification, from an institution of confinement to the fabbrica diffusa (Negri and Hardt 2018: 185).

The Sonic Factory How are the Fordist and post-Fordist worlds of work represented sonically in pieces of music, movies, and TV series? The charged relationship between work and leisure time is deeply interwoven in popular culture, not just high art and pop art. It offers surprisingly more substantial information than even its own authors would have suspected. Let us begin with a classic: Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times of 1936. Here we are confronted with assorted institutions of confinement that can be analyzed as in Michel Foucault’s book Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975). These ideas—along with those of Gilles Deleuze’s “society of control”—have since been adopted, utilized, and brought up to date by innumerable other authors. I prefer here to refer to the original sources, namely Foucault and Deleuze: bodies are ordered in a space according to a serial principle and integrated in a fixed time schedule. They have to keep to a set of rules that are implemented and monitored by repressive means. This is how the factory functions; but in an industrial society, this is also how related milieus function, such as schools, army barracks, hospitals, and psychiatric clinics. Chaplin has the protagonists of his film pass swiftly through several of these milieus. I should now like to take a closer look at the factory sequence at the beginning of the film. Accompanied by a mighty fanfare, the first intertitle announces: “A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.” An orchestra plays highly rhythmic music to an associative cut after the manner of Sergei Eisenstein, with a flock of sheep streaming across the screen (including one that’s black), followed by a similar stream of workers emerging from a subway. They make their way to the time clocks in their factory, and thence to the machines. When the factory siren sounds, a foreman strides over to an oversized control panel and sets the conveyor belts and turbines in motion. There is a cut to the door sign of the president of the “Electro Steel Corp.”—at which the noise ceases, because silence reigns up here on the management floor. The president sits in his office, dressed in an elegant three-piece suit, languidly working on a jigsaw puzzle. Then he briefly opens the newspaper, and his secretary brings him a glass of water with a pill, which he

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swallows. The president switches on the monitoring system and turns to the screen behind his desk. On it, we see a film segment of one section of the factory floor, then another. It would seem that the whole factory area is equipped with surveillance cameras, and the president can zap at will from one to another. He rings an alarm bell that calls the foreman back to the control panel, where the president himself now appears on a screen. Through a loudspeaker, he gives an order to accelerate production. The hectic orchestral music begins again. After the camera pans across the factory floor, we see “Charlie” (Chaplin) for the first time. He stands at a conveyor belt with two big spanners, tightening bolts at a swift pace. Beside him, farther along the belt, two other workers hammer in the same bolts. After just a few seconds, Charlie scratches his armpit and immediately loses pace. In order to catch up, he has to follow the conveyor belt up to his two co-workers, whose flow is consequently disrupted. A superior promptly rushes up and insists on Charlie getting back to his original position by simply working faster—at which he succeeds. But Charlie then answers him back and again gets out of synch with the work on the conveyor belt. This motif is repeated in different variations and is intensified, not least through another increase in the pace of the belt. Finally, Charlie is allowed to take a brief break and is relieved by another worker at the moving conveyor belt, which doesn’t stop. But like an automaton, he involuntarily keeps going through his serial bolting actions until he manages to pull himself together and stop. He clocks out and goes to the bathroom to light a cigarette. For a moment, we hear lyrical string music, but after Charlie’s first puff on his cigarette, the president appears on a screen and orders him back to the factory hall. The music now switches again to the rhythmic motion of before. Charlie returns to the conveyor belt. In these few minutes, we have been given a trenchant introduction to the essence of piecework at a conveyor belt, and also to the principle of external surveillance. The control being exerted is almost seamless, but also always presents itself thus. Furthermore, two fundamentally different forms of work are demonstrated. In the factory hall, we witness a Fordist manner of industrial production, while the office work of the president already displays characteristics of post-Fordism. Up to the point where he switches on the monitoring system, his office could almost be that of an art director at an advertising agency. The music—composed by Chaplin himself—functions up to here mostly as a kind of “Mickey Mousing”: it underlines the main emotion of each scene in question and includes several imitations of factory noises. The subsequent scene brings a new element that is an ironic commentary on the phenomenon of the talking film. The engineer of a mechanical feeding machine enters the president’s office, accompanied by two of his employees. Instead of praising the new machine with his own words, the visitor plays a gramophone record with pre-produced explanations from a narrator. The engineer and his employees complement the narration in pantomimic fashion. The machine is intended to mechanize the lunch break and make it more efficient. But while it functions well at the office demonstration, the subsequent trial feeding process in the factory hall turns into chaos. Charlie is the guinea pig, and he is brutally mauled by the machine—it’s actually a harrowing scene that only manages to remain humorous thanks to Chaplin’s comedic gifts and the mimicking of “funny” mechanical noises and electrostatic discharges and cheerful string arpeggios.

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The same applies to the repeated sexual harassment we observe: psychologically and physically damaged as he is by his activity at the conveyor belt, Charlie sets to work with his spanners on everything that looks vaguely like bolt heads, including the buttons on a woman’s dress. The famous moment in which Charlie is swallowed up in the machine and flows through its gears also comes across as humorous. When he reappears, his madness becomes properly manifest, recognizable in his altered body language. Charlie prances delightedly through the factory hall, but in doing so resorts to violence: accompanied again by cheerful, accelerating music, he injures his colleagues, then sets about the boss’s secretary, who flees outside. Charlie follows her out, then runs after a woman passer-by who begs a policeman to help her. Charlie runs away from him, but clocks out one last time as he does so. In a delicate dance, he makes the clocking-out machine explode— though not with any revolutionary intentions. It occurs simply because he has lost his mind by engaging in industrial piecework (the ensuing intertitle offers the diagnosis: “nervous breakdown”). The working situation depicted here is not just alienated—for it remains unclear what the factory is actually producing—but also ruins workers in a short space of time, both mentally and physically. Language functions through medial transmission; in other words, only those who possess the technological means can resort to words. Charlie is taken from the factory to a mental hospital, and after being released he is sent to prison for being the supposed ringleader of a demonstration by the unemployed. So the film does not just thematize the problems extant within the institution of confinement, but also those that come about by being excluded from it. Dziga Vertov’s movie Enthusiasm (1931), made just a few years before Modern Times, has a very different relationship to the world of work. Chaplin himself spoke about its soundtrack as follows: Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician. (Quoted in Smirnov 2013: 167)

And indeed, Vertov gave his film the subtitle The Symphony of Donbass (in the original: Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa). It was a landmark in the history of experimental sound film, though its political implications are complicated. As the head of the film collective Kinok, Vertov wanted to document the implementation of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, one of whose main aims was the further industrialization of eastern Ukraine. The crucial importance of coal for heavy industry was the film’s leitmotif. For the soundtrack, which was recorded separately, an audio system developed by Alexander Shorin was used that enabled concrete sounds to be recorded and processed. On the one hand, Vertov wanted to avoid the usual mimicking of real sounds in the studio and instead achieve a proximity to the real sources of the sounds; but on the other hand, he also intended to use the soundtrack not just as a mere illustration of his images, but as an autonomous element. It was his bold realization of this idea that made the film famous and inspired many followers—from Alexander Kluge to David Lynch. However, Vertov did not succeed in achieving his desired

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aims—at least from today’s perspective—because this first ever Soviet sound film shows something very different from what he actually wanted to communicate. After an introductory sequence in which religion and alcohol are depicted as obsolete vices of the Soviet Union and are contrasted with technological and industrial development, the film switches to the Donbass region. As workers go across a bridge to their factory, a long siren-like droning is heard that is subsequently rhythmized. It is probably the hooter of a locomotive engine that is used here as a musical element, functioning as a kind of factory horn to mark the beginning of this section of the film. Vertov shows different stages in the production of coal. First it is hewn in the mineshaft, then loaded up and heated in furnaces. The work scenes are continually interrupted by statements from experts, by seemingly choreographed elements and impressions of industrial landscapes. The soundtrack constantly brings a counterpoint to the images. In the mineshaft we hear train noises, at the furnace a socialist hymn is sung, then in the midst of heavy work there is a sudden silence before a fade-to-black is accompanied by an industrial clatter. The score reaches its highpoint in a sound collage of a pulsating series of taps, cries of “hurrah” from an enthusiastic crowd, the broadcast voices of a presenter, and marching music. The workers are meanwhile busy with incandescent molten metal, at top speed, and without any protective clothing. The last third of the film is primarily about the distribution of coal and metal in rural regions. Here, too, mechanical equipment is now in use, though the work is still very different from in the factory. The workers in the fields sing, and after work they dance. The soundtrack now runs more or less synchronously with what is obviously prescribed cheerfulness on the part of those depicted. Vertov later wrote in his diary about his difficulties in editing the film while Ukraine was undergoing collectivization and a process of violent dispossession (see MacKay 2005: 23). This seems to be the crux of the film: what is supposed to function as documentation is overlaid by the concealment of the facts—namely that the revolution had already ventured beyond its heroic phase and had mutated into Stalin’s Terror. The thrust of the film is questionable not just in the rural scenes, but also in the factory: Vertov here utilizes associative montage (already a tried-and-trusted stylistic feature of Russian film) and complements it with an innovative soundtrack. But we are compelled to ask whether all this is merely in order to distract our attention from the adverse working conditions. Vertov certainly feels it necessary to point constantly to the meaning and purpose of work, namely its ideological background, in order to depict it as future-oriented in filmic terms. With this tactic, he creates what would become a defining aesthetic style of propaganda newsreels. To come back to Chaplin: his euphoric reaction to Vertov’s film does not refer to the work situations depicted in it, but to its innovative sound composition that was one of the precursors to musique concrète. Enthusiasm certainly has documentary content, just not in the manner originally intended by its director. The work he shows is harsh, onerous, and dangerous, and not even the asynchronous soundtrack can mitigate this. We find echoes of the formal innovations of Enthusiasm in many subsequent movies. I would like to offer two such examples here that draw on it in more than just their content.

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The film Blue Collar by Paul Schrader (1978) depicts a car factory in Detroit. During the title sequence, Donald Vliet alias Captain Beefheart performs Jack Nitzsche’s “Hard Workin’ Man.” This heavy blues song takes up the blows of the hammer as a rhythmic element: Got a two-ton hammer, got beat by the pound I’m a hard workin’ driver man, Six feet solid from the ground. (Schrader 1978, cf. https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/blue-collar/)

Here we find a defiant sense of identification in the midst of alienated circumstance. Unfortunately, the union too is complicit. The motive of subverted solidarity within the working class comes across here like a wicked commentary on Vertov. In Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), Selma—played by Björk—is engaged in alienating work in a metal factory, but dreams she is in a musical world. The scene is transformed, and the sounds of stamping metal gradually acquire rhythmic patterns. When Selma starts singing, the workers begin to dance—it is a fantasy of liberation that is reminiscent of Chaplin’s delusional dance in Modern Times, not least because the elaborate choreography of the sequence slowly mutates into a pastiche of Hollywood.

Post-Fordist Ambient Sounds The clever teacher winds up a gramophone, to whose sounds the schoolgirls have to type. When they hear cheerful military marches, it’s all the easier to type in time. Gradually, the speed of the record increases, and without the girls noticing, they type faster and faster. (Kracauer 1971: 30)

In his study of 1930 entitled Die Angestellten (“The employees”), journalist and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer embarked on an “expedition into the terra incognita of salesgirls and shorthand typists, about whose lives we know less than about primitive tribes” (ibid.: 11). Just like Adorno and Horkheimer after him, Kracauer assumed that the new world of work with its department stores and offices was part of a comprehensive system intended to produce conformity in society, “with the aid of film, radio, the press, literature, clubs and political parties” (ibid.: 65). If the victory march of the service-based economy already began to be revealed in the interwar years, the economic upswing after the Second World War helped it to achieve its breakthrough in the Western world. It also changed the soundscape of the workplace and its depiction in film and music. The dominant concrete sonic images of progressive work were the telephone and the typewriter. The latter enjoyed its most popular film appearance in the comedy Who’s Minding the Store? of 1963 (Tashlin 1963). Jerry Lewis here gives a pantomimic performance of the typewriter in Leroy Anderson’s popular orchestral piece The Typewriter (Anderson 1953). Along with Lewis’s mimicry and his superb timing, it’s the stereotypical manner of its use here that makes the office a setting for genuinely comic, even absurd actions.

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The typewriter acquired a well-nigh futuristic status not long afterwards in Les Echanges, a composition for 156 “office machines” that Rolf Liebermann created for the 1964 World Expo in Lausanne. This sound installation used typewriters, calculators, accounting and punching machines, telephones, and cash registers. We can read Liebermann’s work as a symbol of a measured world after the manner of Kracauer, but its contemporary reception was dominated by the sensational character of a music whose performance clearly no longer needed the input of any human beings. The path from the Fordist to the post-Fordist sphere, from the sonic factory to a sounding office, so to speak, has also found expression in numerous pop songs. While the work siren is often thematized and leisure time is staged as heaven on Earth, we find increasingly complex figurations during the emergence of the service-based economy. In 1965, the US vocal group The Vogues released their song “Five o’Clock World.” Its lyrics run thus: “I live for the end of the day, because there’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows and no one owns a piece of my time.” The end of the shift frees the worker from their duty of work, at which all kinds of pleasures await them, such as a “longhaired girl that waits to ease my troubled mind.” In a TV performance of this song from that time, the four male band members stand at their microphones while young girls busy themselves with mock industrial equipment. Inverted gender modes also emerge as a motif in pop music in the 1960s and are featured just as often as are the tensions between work and leisure time. In 1968, the West Coast songwriter Harry Nilsson sang of a completely transformed understanding of work. In the song “Good Old Desk,” he describes his office desk as if it were a person he loves. He even compares it implicitly with his wife: “I’ve never once heard it cry, I’ve never seen it tease, it’s always there to please me,” and then: “We never say a word, but it’s perfectly alright with me.” In the last verse, Nilsson reaches into his desk drawer and finds a photo of himself at the same desk—we here find a form of identification that is both confusing and almost contemporary in its impact. The motif of an amorous involvement with the pure materiality of the office recurs in 1980 in the famous German Schlager-song by Katja Ebstein: “Well, marry your office, you love it in any case.” In 1967, Jacques Tati’s film Playtime investigated this new world of life and work, and its soundtrack is unparalleled to this day. It has several parallels to Chaplin’s Modern Times, because in turning the horrific into comedy, Tati too presents language as having failed. For this film, a gigantic set was constructed (dubbed “Tativille”) that simulates a fictitious, modernist suburb of Paris. The giant steel and glass façades of the high-rise buildings were placed on rails in order to be able to generate surreal effects on set. In the midst of this futuristic cityscape, Monsieur Hulot wanders aimlessly (he is more or less Tati’s pendant to Chaplin’s Tramp). He is initially looking for a certain Monsieur Girard. Hulot wanders through a clinically clean labyrinth of foyers, waiting rooms, offices, and trades fair halls, gradually losing sight of his original aim. He becomes a plaything of the glass doors, intercoms, chrome lifts, and all the contemporary rituals in which people here partake: they hold meetings, discuss graphs, negotiate contracts, and have sales discussions, of which, however, we perceive only fragments. These parallel happenings are linked by a general hum of discrete murmurings—a largely incomprehensible collage of speech. Rudimentary

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phrases are deeply embedded in the subtle background noise of office machines, but not even these come across properly. No conversation takes place, there is no verbal exchange, but instead empty clichés are counterpointed with lift music, electronic carpets of sound, and pneumatic processes. The filmic leitmotif here is the camera’s perspective from outside, through the glass façade. We hear the street noises while the pantomimic action occurs inside—a symbol of a communication that fails to engage. Monsieur Hulot himself says barely a word for long stretches (only in the final sequence does he use a map to explain to a drunk man how to make his way to real Paris). People here are merely the perpetrators of disconcerting, involuntary ambient noise— such as when they walk, sit down, or close a door. But this problem, too, is one for which solutions are being designed. An information booth advertises doors that can be slammed shut noiselessly thanks to an innovative development in their material: “Slam your doors in golden silence.” Probably the most famous scene in the film (at the twenty-second minute) is a depiction of an “institution of confinement” à la Foucault, shown from an elevated monitoring perspective: Hulot stands one level above an office floor, looking through a large panorama window onto a grid-like arrangement of cubicles with swing doors. Here, also, the world of work comes across as a theatre of the absurd. Agreements are made, papers sorted and deposited, people’s names are called out, and exact account statements requested. But it remains unclear just what exactly this is all about. Hulot is confronted with a Kafkaesque system of obfuscated procedures and responsibilities. Here, no one could be brought to account because it is impossible to get to the heart of anything. Everything seems to be peripheral, part of the background, and a form of cyclical diversion. This post-Fordian confusion is reflected in the film by the absence of any main narrative. It does not exist, because Hulot fails to achieve any action at all. He is initially a foreign body who stands out because he hesitates, turns around, frantically quickens his pace or stumbles. Gradually, however, he learns to utilize the permanent distractions by giving in to them, simply letting himself be caught up in it all. He mingles among a faceless arsenal of figures that could almost be taken from Siegfried Kracauer’s study of employees— hostesses, secretaries, and telephone operators alongside doormen, policemen, salesmen, and waiters. They are joined intermittently by tourists and travel groups who seek (and find) the same things all over the world. Time and again, Tati lets us understand that it’s an international style being celebrated here, one that has its origins in the American way of life: “Look how modern it is. They even have American stuff,” says one tourist, for example, when entering the trades fair. The United States seems to be the role model here when selling is the driving force of every action. Now the question arises as to whether this continuous hustle and bustle might in fact just be a gigantic diversionary tactic in which something is indeed being concealed from us, as we find in Kracauer: “The summit of the hierarchy is lost in the dark heaven of financial capital” (Kracauer 1971: 30). In Playtime, at any rate, Tati offers a revolutionary shift that bears anti-capitalist traits. The opening of a barely finished restaurant (with a wild bebop dance band) turns chaotic when ceiling fittings begin to come unstuck. It’s only now that conviviality emerges. French

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chansons are sung, people drink, laugh, and have fun. The backdrop has to fall in order for human beings to emerge properly. The principle of the circumstances depicted in Playtime is that of exchangeability. Tati shows that the fundamentals of Western modernism, its architecture and its ways of life, speech, and work are all transferable. The critics might deplore yet another cliché-ridden depiction of Paris (Artists! Accordions! Wine!), but Playtime retains a clear-sighted perspective, in the truest sense of the word.

We Want to Be Sedated At this point of the chapter, we can surely take a thoroughly pragmatic view of the background noise found in an open-plan office: How can it be designed so that the employees don’t disturb each other? And lo and behold: Tati’s symphony of ambient noise is today created artificially in order to increase speech privacy. Contemporary building acoustics recommend a sound pressure level of 45 dB and a mixture of noises from building service installations and an acoustic masking system that creates a noise signal with a spectrum similar to that of speech (Pieren 2011: 8). Whether in the original or as something artificially generated, we can hear these voices devoid of information content in “Allsafe,” a cybersecurity agency that employs the protagonist of the American TV series Mr Robot. Elliot Elderson, played by Remi Malik, is a highly gifted computer programmer who suffers from a severe identity disorder that involves hallucinations and amnesia. The plot of the series is correspondingly convoluted. From the perspective of an office situation, the first series of Mr Robot (2015) offers two very different settings. The Allsafe office symbolizes digital corporate culture. The light is pale, almost like in an operating room. We can hear quiet conversations going on, digital ringtones, there’s wall-to-wall carpeting, and we see cubicles and sound-absorbing elements in the ceiling. “We want to be sedated,” thinks Elliott in the first episode, but doesn’t say it out loud. Everything in the room seems muted and obfuscated, as does the tone of voice that people use. The same even applies to their inner lives and to the actual purpose of their work. (Kracauer describes the dissimulation of employees during their work as having a “morally pink skin,” [1971: 24].) Elliott wears headphones. We can’t hear what he’s listening to, but he tells us what he’s thinking: “That’s the only way to protect myself: Never show them my source code. Close myself off. Create my cold perfect maze where no one can ever find me” (Episode 1, 15:40). His real self operates in another place. It’s important to realize that Elliot is leading a dual life—one in Manhattan, the other in Rockaway Beach. He’s a member of the anarchist hacker collective fsociety, which has the self-appointed task of bringing down the multinational E Corp by means of a cyberattack—the same conglomerate for whose security Elliot’s employer Allsafe is responsible; in Kracauer’s terms, it represents that “dark heaven of financial capital.” The guerrilla hideout of fsociety is a former casino by the beach. Here, everything is out in the open, from the cables to the task at hand, which is being constantly discussed. Even the name of this “secret society” is resplendent in big lettering on the former casino: fun

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society, though with the “un” missing. Here in their headquarters, the obfuscation we perceive elsewhere is annulled. One of them says: “Our encryption is the real world” (Episode 1, 39:12). Their manners are rough but honest. There’s no small talk; instead, they’re busy getting on with their project. They’re concentrated on the business at hand instead of on in-house dynamics; they’re more concerned with piracy than corporate design. In the background, we hear the jingling of long-abandoned slot machines and early computer games. Even a popcorn machine is running. The funfair serves as a subversive backdrop and as a symbol of the great, divergent game that’s being played there. Mr Robot is full of pop culture references. When, for example, a potential ally enters the fsociety headquarters, he says: “How long has this been going on?”—probably a reference to a lyric by the band Ace from 1974, while the song “Where is My Mind” by the Pixies is running in the background (Ace 1975, Pixies 1988). The soundtrack is characterized by electronic soundscapes and pulsating beats in line with the aesthetic of an analogue 808 drum synthesizer. It sounds like a sonic realization of nerve fibers, heartbeats, and the circulation of the blood—but also of data highways. The score thematizes the inner life of machines and people. In Deleuze’s concept of the control society we find the idea that post-Fordist companies might have a soul, but the Fordist factory had a body (Deleuze 1990: 260). In Mr Robot we can actually hear the synthesized soul of the company. In applying Deleuze’s concept, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2017) have described how the contemporary service industry functions as a fabbrica diffusa: Because there is no siren to signal the end of work, work itself is diffused into the everyday. The employee of a service provider has no more leisure time because they have to identify with their work. The capitalist principle becomes fluid—in Deleuze it even assumes gaseous form, thereby occupying private spaces. This is all the more true when there is no actual employment relationship, but when someone instead has the status of a creative worker acting on their own account (this is one of the interesting paradoxes of Mr Robot). The anarchical freedom fight of fsociety is reminiscent of the habitual self-exploitation of a freelancer in a co-working space (at least as far as the office situation is concerned). Even the exposure of collective deception after the manner of a capitalist simulacrum seems to require a late capitalist act of self-control in order to reach its goal: Have I already worked enough today for the abolition of the system? Am I even sufficiently qualified for this task? Not everything that unsettles us about the series Mr Robot is a symptom of Elliot’s mental disposition, his schizophrenic perception, or his antagonistic insinuations. Some of it is a collective experience of late modern humanity: the voices become confused within us and often we can barely perceive what sounds have actually been in the room with us. We do not perceive our soundscape objectively but interpret it selectively. The acoustic impulse encounters an inner configuration. And you don’t have to suffer from a psychosis in order to ask yourself occasionally: What would happen if everything turned out to be based on an illusion? What if our subjective experience had no factual link to our environment, but was the result of imperceptible manipulation such as already occurs in advertising—in other words, by sonic means?

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On the other hand, not everything is deception and bedazzlement in this new world of work. Even the open-plan office is not exclusively a means of control. Today, iterative processes are ubiquitous that necessitate a permanent exchange among employees, such as in the field of agile software development. This undoubtedly has a point: instead of stoically implementing what has been decided, whether the original task has perhaps itself changed is constantly monitored. The process is thus being permanently readjusted—not exclusively in a top-down manner, but taking the needs of the working situation as its starting point. In companies with agile processes, it is no longer just a matter of what’s being sold (whether it’s hotel bookings, concert tickets, or streaming), but how one works—at least for the employees. The managers are naturally paid to keep an eye on turnover and profits, independently of the product and of working methods. So what should we advise an employee in a post-Fordist company? In order to get wise to the babel of voices in the professional sphere, we need to maintain our concentration in the midst of events. It seems to me that this is only possible with a degree of equanimity and with the necessary theoretical skills (a good pair of headphones wouldn’t do any harm, either). Whoever is able to deconstruct a situation in real time stands above it. But such a lofty person is also shielding themselves off. What it also needs, besides general consciousnessraising, is a high degree of permeability—the kind that an actor has in order to sense a situation properly. This is how things could function: we should perceive our environment as a drama in which we ourselves are playing. A future method might be a performance analysis of the everyday. And this is getting rather urgent, because things develop quickly. In 2015, composer and performer Felix Kubin from Hamburg transcribed several passages from Rolf Liebermann’s Les Echanges for acoustic instruments, complemented by “frenetic typing on keyboards, Brian Eno’s start-up melody for Windows 95, iPhone ringtones and the noises of modem initialisations” (Gansing 2015). But however delightful this nod to Liebermann might be—accompanied as it is by historical film recordings—it could also do with an update pretty soon.

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Coda Marcel Cobussen

Home. Street. Plaza. Office. Four habitats. Four spaces where people spend their lives. Four spaces where people interact with their environment, with human as well as non-human agents. Four spaces where people are in and with sounds, in and with a sonic atmosphere. Four spaces where inside and outside are porous. The one invades the other; their sonic borders do not coincide with their spatial borders. Home. Street. Plaza. Office. Four spaces, each of them with a specific sonosphere, shaping the disposition of the one who is situated in that space by intervening directly into their bodily economy (Böhme 2017: 127). Its sonic character determines the way we experience, feel, and assess a space. We are always already immersed in an acoustic environment; we always already find ourselves in a sonic world. In that sense, sound is not the object but the medium of one’s perception; it is a phenomenon of our experience. We hear in sound, just as we do not see light but see in it (Ingold 2007). In an extensive and seminal essay, “Wo sind wir, wenn wir Musik hören?” (Where are we, when we listen to music?), Peter Sloterdijk presents a hearing ontology that is quite radically opposed to Western metaphysics, which he described as (essentially) an ontology of the eye. Whereas the latter cannot exist without – and therefore presupposes – a spatial distance between subject and object, the ear has no opposite: to hear means to be-in-sound, and the hearing subject is always amidst the acoustic event. Here Sloterdijk recognizes a shift from “Vorstellen von Gegenständen” (imagining or thinking things, but literally a laying out before oneself) to “Einwohnen in Medien” (inhabiting a medium) (Sloterdijk 1993: 319–320). So, we exist in sound, and because of that, interventions in the sonic atmosphere immediately affect our being, either positively or negatively. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether sonic interventions are positive or negative. What at first seems positive, for example designing a sonic space in which people like to be and might stay longer, can receive rather negative connotations when this intervention is meant to increase consumerism, as with shops, shopping malls, bars, etc. LRADs (Long Range Acoustic Devices) and other so-called sonic weapons can be used to keep spaces safe and protected, but – apart

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from their capacity for destabilizing organisms’ cerebral functions – simultaneously exclude certain groups or individuals from having their voices heard. Acoustic control immediately brings in socio-political and ethical issues: who is able and allowed to sonically occupy a space? However, while hearing, we are also oriented toward the outside; we are outside ourselves, in relation with something that is—at least partly—external to ourselves. We resonate— that is, move back and forth—in and with the spaces we inhabit. In this respect, Sloterdijk speaks about a (human) being as a medium percussum: living, thinking, and acting take place in a sphere that cannot not resonate with others and otherness (Sloterdijk 1993: 339). As such, our being in a sonic environment is never solely passive and without consequences: being in always also means contributing to the sonic atmosphere of a specific space, (re) appropriating and (re)writing it. By being at home, walking a street, traversing a plaza, or working in an office, the sonic environment is created and recreated, formed and transformed, experienced and composed. “The soundscape moves with the sentients as they move through the environment, and it continually changes with our behavioral interactions” (Rodaway 1994: 87). Our own sounds spread through the spaces we inhabit or traverse. Hence, a sonic environment is never stable: perpetually changing, various kinds of resonances, vibrations, and reflections act on it. However, our ontological condition cannot be understood completely by stating that we are always already in sound, in an environment that is actuated, pervaded, and even saturated by sounds. Our existence is also marked by a living with, a living with sounds, a living in relation with the sonic, and this living with should be understood as a mutual engagement, the one affecting the other. As Peter Sloterdijk writes in Foams, the third part of his trilogy Spheres, we live in a plural spherology or permanently entwined isolation, a conglomerate of microspheres—home, office, plaza, street—adjacent to one another without being accessible for or effectively separated from each other. Not dealt with as such by Sloterdijk, one could state that each of these microspheres has its own—albeit porous—sonic atmosphere: it is a phonotopic cell. We should keep in mind that this sonic atmosphere is not necessarily homogeneous. For example, homes, plazas, streets, and offices all have different areas where different sounds can be heard or where a particular sound is more dominant. This plurality of sonic atmospheres is of course also affected by the time of the day, the time of the year, weather conditions, the number of human as well as non-human agents occupying the space, etc. Said differently: where Sloterdijk defines these spheres and their relationality mainly from an anthropological position, I’d rather rethink them through posthuman ideas in which human and non-human agents determine, define, enact, interact, and engage with one another. It is in this sense that I also understand this being with—a concept thought through

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by, among others, Jean-Luc Nancy—primarily from an anthropological perspective: the one who is with others is a human being, and so are these others. As for me, Nancy’s idea of being-in-community should not be restricted to inter- or intra-human relationships; this ontological condition, this fundamental connectedness is applicable to every being. However, and here I do follow Nancy, the concept of community should be regarded as a proximity that cannot be usurped or appropriated; it is a multiplicity without a fusion of agents or identities. Detached from its anthropocentric connotations, this multiplicity might therefore be considered as a Deleuzian assemblage in which heterogeneous forces and agents form temporary, ad-hoc, and ever-changing connections. Being in this sense means being open to the world—an onto-ouverture—a being in the world and not in opposition to the world; being is always and first of all a being with, not preceded by individual beings but constituting them. In Meeting the Universe Halfway Karen Barad outlines this relationalist perspective as intraaction. Through this concept, Barad questions the existence of discrete beings with inherent characteristics; intra-action constitutes reality and defines both subjects and objects. We are with sounds, and sounds are with us; we are constituted by the sonic, and the sonic is constituted in and through our existence; it is in this interplay that both come into being. With Sloterdijk, this could be called a resonance community. At home, on the street, in a plaza, and in our workspace, we are in a sonic atmosphere and we live together with sounds. However, one could maintain that, most often, this being in and living with goes unnoticed, not (only) because we are bad listeners, but primarily because we are simply not able to hear so many sounds that surround us. Ultraand infrasounds, sounds below 20hZ or above 20KhZ, are inaudible to the human ear. So, although our minds or bodies can register some vibrations, resonances, frequencies, or changes in air pressure that fall outside of our hearing range, we have to realize that (probably) most of our sonic environment escapes our perceptual abilities, even though it will still affect our Stimmung, our mood, our desires, our feelings. Sounds are no longer to be considered as “passive receptacles for human mental or social categories” (Harman 2016: 6). They exist without the involvement of human beings; they exist beyond their relations with humans, even though we cannot know exactly what this surplus is. Glimpses of this can, for example, be caught in an article by Itzhak Khait et al., “Plants Emit Informative Airborne Sounds Under Stress,” which states that we can gain more information on plants through sound, and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees in which the author claims that trees communicate via electrical impulses. This leads to the rather paradoxical conclusion that, through studying an anthropology of sound, the human aspect and input is displaced from the center and replaced by a noncentric ontology of the sonic.

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Part IV Sonic Desires

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Pulse Marie Thompson

Sonic worlds are shot through with desire. Wants, wishes, yearnings, longings, appetites, and cravings are audio-affective forces that serve to structure auditory cultures and their technologies, listening practices, norms, and ideals. Yet what does it mean to talk of sonic desires? It could refer to the sonic articulation of desires—aural signifiers that express something of the relations and orientations of bodies, environments, and imaginaries. In this regard, sonic desires might be manifest in flirtatious giggles, breathy vocals, and anguished cries. Alternatively, sonic desires could pertain to the desire to experience certain sounds or soundscapes—our longing to hear home, loved ones, leisure time—or, rather, to not experience them—our wanting to escape the hum of work, to break out of lonely silence, or, as Tore Tvarnø Lind illustrates, to be (relatively) free from noise. Sonic desires might refer to what sound-makers and listeners hope that sound will do, facilitate, or maintain; or it might refer to the promissory framing of different sonic media and sound technologies. The alignment of the telephone with expressions of romantic desire, for example, can be heard throughout popular music: from Blondie’s “Call Me!” to Erykah Badu’s “But You Caint Use My Phone” mixtape, the telephone is positioned as a technology of sonic desire (Weheliye 2002, McNamara 2015). Meanwhile, various advertising campaigns aim to direct the listener-as-consumer’s desire toward particular technological solutions: from the opportunities for privacy offered by noise-canceling headphones to the personalized opportunities for rest and relaxation offered by sleep apps, playlists, and podcasts (Kassabian 2013a, Hagood 2019). Conversely, we might turn to sound in order to facilitate our desire to move beyond the self—to connect with others, lose oneself, transcend (self-) consciousness, and encounter exstasis. As Macon Holt demonstrates, the music festival is one site in which these sonic aspirations are often attached. It is also a site through which such desires for sound can be unpacked, interrogated, situated, and questioned. Desire can often seem deeply personal, or even pre-personal, inasmuch as it may appear to escape rational thought and intentionality. Yet desire is also irreducibly social, bound up with disciplinary norms, expectations, and prohibitions. In her writing on lesbian desire, Sara Ahmed notes how desire may involve not just the (re)orientation of one’s relations

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toward sexual others “but also to a world that has already ‘decided’ how bodies should be orientated in the first place” (Ahmed 2006: 101). In other words, desire, as a mode of orientation, is something that occurs within a wider social context, resulting in questions about whose and what desires are acceptable, and whose and what desires enact “social and familial injury” (ibid.: 102). To desire not only involves taking up a position in relation to that which is desired but also in relation to the lines that constitute norms of desire. In this regard, to think of musical guilty pleasure as a mode of sonic desire is instructive. Of course, to talk of guilty pleasures in the context of purported poptimism and aesthetic omnivorism might seem anachronistic (Peterson 1996, Barna 2019). Nonetheless, it is predicated on the disjuncture between what the listener is drawn to and socially mediated conventions of taste. The musical guilty pleasure arises from the space between what is and what should be desired. In his chapter on admiration, Marcus S. Kleiner discusses the decidedly guiltless pleasure taken in the music of the The Smiths—a band that is, for many, synonymous with good taste. Yet Kleiner’s account also gestures toward the ways in which desire—sonic desire included—is co-constituted with, through, and alongside gender, as well as other social categories and identities. He describes the voice of his cousin—the person whom Kleiner credits with his introduction to popular culture and the music of The Smiths—as simultaneously fascinating and irritating. Kleiner’s cousin is both a source of admiration but also, in making audible her own admirations, a source of irritation. On the one hand, Kleiner admires his cousin for some aspects of her difference—her involvement in subcultural scenes and her knowledge about music, concerts, fashion, venues, and films— but finds her affected voice exhausting to listen to. On a trip to London, his cousin sings along to lo-fi tapes of The Smiths’s music in a voice of unbearable, “hysterical enthusiasm.” The term “hysterical” in this context is striking, inasmuch as hysteria pertains to a feminized condition of emotional excess. Indeed, desire, pleasure, and enjoyment are often policed and admonished in relation to formations of gender, race, and class. Sonic desires, it would seem, are no different. Although desire can lead elsewhere—it may be associated with a breaking out of the frame—it is often a reactionary force. Likewise, although it is often tempting to think of sonic desire in positive terms—as liberatory or even emancipatory—sound’s intersection with desire can also be predicated upon conservative foundations, serving to reinforce the uneven distributions and formations of social life. There are, of course, overt expressions of reactionary sonic desires—for example, the archetypal xenophobic and racist desire for everyone to speak English in shared social spaces; or the use of sound as a force of dominance—of auditory shock and awe—in colonial, imperial, and militarized contexts. Yet the social, political, and environmental implications of seemingly benign sonic desires are often not immediately apparent: we might think here, for instance, of how the sonic desires invoked by contemporary digital streaming services—for mobility, for accessibility, for (comparative) immediacy—carry with them geopolitical and ecological implications insofar as they rely upon contemporary computing technologies and informational infrastructures. Similarly, seemingly benign sonic tropes and figurations may be indebted

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to politically regressive proclivities: acoustic ecology’s notion of the soundscape, for example, is often underscored a conservative desire for balance, harmony, order, beauty, and control (Thompson 2017a). To think about sonic desire presents a number of challenges for researchers. There is the question of how to recognize desire as it operates and circulates in different auditory cultures: what, for example, are the convergences and divergences in how sonic desires manifest within and amongst the Global North and the Global South? How do sonic desires relate to differing social and historical notions of privacy, sociality, love, and pleasure? A consideration of sonic desire also requires scholars to attend to their own desires as (epistemologically situated) researchers. Roshanak Kheshti has exemplified how the listening ear is not only a sensory organ but also a desiring machine. The desire to hear racialized and cultural difference, meanwhile, has served as a structuring force within the histories and archives of ethnomusicological fieldwork and the global music industry (Kheshti 2015). Thus, as Annemette Kirkegaard’s chapter on the sonic composition of Stone Town, Zanzibar suggests, the perennial anthropological problem of how to speak of the lives of others remains pertinent for the nascent field of sound studies, and for researchers attempting to understand sound in context: how do our desires (as recordists, researchers, observers, outsiders) shape our perceptions of auditory cultures and the desires of others? In addressing the problematics of sonic desire, the following chapters illustrate the diversity of its manifestations and the complexity of its identification. Taken collectively, they attest to the different methodological and disciplinary resonances sonic desire might hold; and they gesture to how it might serve to formulate connections between different historical and geographic auditory cultures.

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13 The Admiration Marcus S. Kleiner

Figure 13.1  The Dual 701 record player and a polaroid picture of the author as a young boy.

The Smiths, Brixton Academy London, December 1986 My passion for pop culture and pop music, my admiration for pop stars and pop cultural styles, my life in pop cultural scenes and sound communities, began in December 1986 at a concert by British indie rock band The Smiths in the Brixton Academy in London. I was thirteen years old and until then had not had any significant connection to pop

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culture and pop music. It all started on December 11 of that year with a journey during which something significant happened for me. The journey to London and the time there immediately changed my attitude toward the world and to myself. Since then, pop culture has become an essential area of experience for me: by “experiences we make,” I understand, together with Martin Seel (1985: 79, translated by MSK), “changes that happen to us by making them happen” (“Veränderungen, die uns geschehen, indem wir sie vollziehen”). My concert experience illustrates that, from the perspective of the pop culture recipient, the performativity and individuality of his or her pop culture is decisive, involving the powerful appropriation and/or modification of pop culture frames of reference, which are determined, among other things, by taste preferences, personal experience, individual attitude to life, or emotional ties to pop culture realities. This leads, as in my case, to a pop cultural self-empowerment and to the development of techniques of self-cultivation, from which a pop cultural ethos of lifestyle emerges through the identification with pop culture as a stubborn cultural (experiential and educational) reality. My cousin, who is nine years older, had been socialized into subcultures, especially in punk rock. She seduced me to attend this concert with her and regularly played music to me even beforehand, and also told me about scenes from her own life. Both things fascinated and irritated me at the same time. I secretly admired her otherness, even though I found her often ecstatic voice, with which she told me about music, concerts, clubs, fashion, books, movies, and much more, rather exhausting to listen to. The first sound of admiration for pop culture and pop music, of that which I consciously felt as such, was this raucous voice of my cousin, who celebrated every bit of music she loved not only with excessive enthusiasm but with ecstatic vocalizations. Despite my best efforts, this vocal sound of hers initiated and inspired enthusiasm in me as well. And somehow I still feel that way today. I only want to talk about pop culture and pop music with excessively enthusiastic or outraged people. I want to feel their love for the cause in the sound of their voices, in the brightness of their eyes, and in the loving restlessness of their stories. Every musical recording my cousin played to me, I experienced at the time mostly as a barely distinguishable, uniform noise. Her enthusiasm excited me—but the actual source of her enthusiasm definitely did not. This also applied to the music we listened to on our journey from the Ruhrgebiet, a major mining and steel-producing area in deep Western Germany to London: this journey took place without my parents’ knowledge because they were in the United States at the time and my cousin was supposed to be looking after me. In the pre-digital era, the desires and affects of the private world were barely controllable. Music as such didn’t play a particularly important role for my parents. It didn’t sound at home. So, my first real musical socialization happened through this cousin. I attended the municipal music school, not a noteworthy example of early musical education, for a short time only—and this still represents a thoroughly negative encounter with music in my life. To this day, all I can remember is a mishmash of voices, flutes, and xylophones. There is no clear and distinct memory, no distinctly shaped experience of sound. A similarly negative experience of music occurred to me three years later during some rehearsals with my first

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band: in 1989 I played drums in the rockabilly outfit The Flaming Cowboys, in a very amateurish way and only briefly. Apparently, I had no sensibility and no ear to express my love for music as a musician. On the way to London—a journey that for me was equal parts spectacular and frightening—we listened to Smiths albums on very poor quality audio cassettes the whole time. I can’t remember a single song though. This first encounter with the band I would admire for years and decades after, the first band I ever admired, was a mixture of hiss, machine noise, cinematic imaginations in my mind, and an overly excited, heavily beating heart. My cousin sang along to all the songs—assimilating and performing this music with the same hysterical enthusiasm I had come to know earlier and that wouldn’t let me rest. Carried along by her excitement, she would also tell me stories about all the songs—and not only about the songs: about the band, about what the songs meant to her, where she had heard them, who she had kissed when listening, and much, much more. Again, for me at the time this was largely a murky and somewhat confusing but exciting mishmash of words and noises and energy and intensity. When we arrived in London, the first thing we heard was the urban sounds of the city; and, ongoing, the increasingly exalted voice of my cousin. This grew even more heightened when we stopped in front of a friend’s house where we could stay overnight. The meeting of my cousin and her friend was—as I remember it—actually a moment, performed in a language that seemed to be more than just the English I had learned in school. It was full of the sound of affectionate enthusiasm and a wholehearted anticipation of the concert experience ahead. Whenever they pronounced the names of singer Morrissey or guitarist Johnny Marr, their voices peaked in pitch and volume. On top of that, a strong radiance emanated from their faces and a hot blush throbbed in their cheeks. Their excitement pushed the needle of affect volume into the red, into the zone of visceral distortion. I can still recall the intense feelings of that experience when at concerts I observe fans who appear to actually lose their personal identity in the moment. They seem to merge completely, joyfully, and in excitement with this particular concert situation and sonic experience. Recording this sound of fandom, these screaming fan responses could maybe represent in the best way possible the excited materiality of such an event. These is not just a vocal mimesis or mirroring—it is a collaborative, collective performance. In London, the big city’s ambient noise merged with the sound of our journey: the ecstatic fan voices from my cousin and her friend, subway sounds, the sound of heightened activity, traffic, and tension as in any metropolis. This amalgamated sound accompanied us until we finally stood in front of the concert hall—and even more so, when we arrived inside, at this holy grail. Our concert experience commenced with a cinematic sequence of beautiful, subculturally styled people who populated the space; it was one great jumble of voices and moods. Only when the lights went down in the concert hall could I focus on the stage— which was hardly visible from my seat. The hall was filled with a sea of heads and smoke, populated with hands and cups—and I could finally dive into this sonic environment that immediately engaged me. Precisely then, the magic of the concert experience had me. My cousin and her friends were pushing all the way to the front of the stage. I was completely

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overwhelmed by the whole situation. And Morrissey—this is at least how I responded to it—seemed to address me specifically, maybe only me, with the first song of the evening, singing for me and asking me, like a good friend: Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you From doing all the things in life you’d like to So, if there’s something you’d like to try, if there’s something you’d like to try Ask me, I won’t say no, how could I? (The Smiths 1986a)

This evening as a whole I can only remember now as a very fragmented picture story. But at the same time I can also remember an intense and distinctly perceptible atmosphere, an impressive sonic experience. The two songs I remember most clearly, besides “Ask,” are “Panic” and “Cemetry Gates” (The Smiths 1986a, 1986b, 1986c, track 5)—the titles of the songs I learned only later from my cousin. I remember Morrissey’s words and sentences, the murmuring and the cheering reactions of the concert visitors; and I recall particularly the vocal tone with which Morrissey started those last two songs and the sound of us all singing along—even me, with no knowledge of the lyrics at all. It is still this vocal tone in pop music that immediately excites or deters me; it can trigger admiration or abort any interest in me—everything else comes much, much later. Morrissey’s voice matched so perfectly with my adolescent self: insecure, snotty, tender, vulnerable, casting about, searching for identity and identification. But always failing, like Morrissey’s erupting, close-to-queer voice. This first sonic experience was formative for many years. But actually, I experienced that same feeling again with every subsequent concert visit, experiencing the music and sound, the styles and the people, the culture and the life exactly the same way as in this December of 1986. Or, with historical distance, it seems more accurate to say: I wanted to experience again and again the sound, style, and culture at every gig—maybe to preserve, perhaps even infinitely recycle, this somewhat innocent and immediate intensity of the first time. The sound of admiration should not, it could not, change in this way: I was joyfully locked up in my own memory and backdrop of desire and affect. As a consequence, the more concerts I attended, the more I got the feeling that I had this situation under control: I knew how good concerts should sound or what kind of sound should come through the microphones and out of the speakers. Only a few later shows managed to free me from this strong early impression: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds on July 22, 1998 at the Museumsplatz in Bonn; Tom Waits at the Metropol-Theater in Berlin on July 17, 1999; or The Sleaford Mods, who played in my hometown of Duisburg at the indie club DJäzz on May 13, 2014. Again, the voices of Cave und Waits, their style and aura could open me up anew for their performances—and so did the energetic madness of Sleaford Mods’s singer Jason Williamson, the sound of his anger, his broad Nottingham accent, the rebarbarizing sensuality he exuded, and the thoroughly sonic traces of his tics and tricks. And on June 29, 1990 I attended the Bizarre Festival at the Loreley Rock in Bornich St. Goarshausen. The acts playing there were The The, The Ramones, Phillip Boa & The Voodooclub, Fields of the Nephilim, and Ride, among others. At this festival the sound of the 20,000 fans

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harmonized with the resonant space of enveloping nature. It brought me back to that earliest experience of sonic admiration in Brixton Academy 1986. The quality of audio reproduction and sound systems at the time, thirty years ago or so, meant that the music boomed and wobbled, squeaked and shrieked; it was never clearly present and ultimately quite inaudible. The sound was terribly limited, probably as in many multifunctional halls and clubs where I have seen concerts. Venues for popular music can be horrible places to actually listen to music—if you intend to listen like a passionate audiophile, you simply have to know the songs of the bands very well in order to sing along. The smells of the joints, beer, and sweat are tangible, as well as the closeness and friction of other bodies, the looks of the other festival-goers, the many conversations, and also the sounds of traffic or nature outside. It is an experience of intensity and admiration, not of a sonic extravaganza or audiophile excitement. However, that particular sonic expression of admiration I experienced at the Smiths concert has now turned completely silent in my memory. The traces of this admiration are still tangible in my research and thinking about and love of popular culture. I still feel propelled, driven, and energized by this early experience. Yet the sound of the music itself did not achieve this—rather, the sound of admiration did.

Co-Performing with Vocal Personae So, my affective introduction into popular culture began on that evening in 1986: with music, fashion, subcultures, clubs, films, television, books, fanzines, magazines, art, and oh so much more. Based on this gig experience, popular culture managed to transform me over the years and decades, it altered my expressive and stylistic practices in a lasting way. I performed, unknowingly, being that young boy, a movement from one cultural field to another. Since then, popular culture in general, but also a particular selection of practices, protagonists, and artifacts has turned into the most crucial form of culture and aid to self-transformation and—for me— education: an ever-changing soundtrack to my life and experience, as it surely still is for countless other aficionados, listeners, dancers, and concert-goers. Later, this passion turned into a profession, a happy academic existence that allows me to waste time on the things that inspire me and that I admire or make me angry and skeptical. Over three decades later, while writing down my memories of those first sonic experiences of admiration and my subsequent introduction into popular culture, I ask myself: How did my experience and my interpretation of these sounds, this music and its artists change? While writing this chapter, I am putting on my completely worn out and scratched Smiths records. Can they guide me back into a nostalgic frenzy of memory? Spinning on my Dual 701 (first sold in 1973, the year when I was born) is their second studio album Meat is Murder from 1985 and the song “How Soon is Now?”: “When you say ‘It’s gonna happen, now’ / When exactly do you mean?” The voice on record touches me at a spot where I am also touched by memories of the excited voice of my cousin. However, this chapter will not present a theory of the voice

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in popular culture. Rather, it will discuss how transformations are instigated by such sonic and vocal experiences, by situated and material affects in popular cultures. Unlike a rationalized concept of education, I refer here to a more affective and personal concept of self-education, of self-confrontation, of desires and personal growth that seems to me to be characteristic of popular cultures. How can a particular voice or sound or situation be the main source of wholehearted admiration, and as such start a process of transformation? The performative production of popular music as an experiential and tangible reality does not take place primarily in and through the lyrics of the song, but rather through the singer’s performance, as John Storey stresses: When we say popular music, we mostly have in mind songs. And if we ask the question, “What does this song mean?” too often we respond by referring to the content of the lyrics. But the meaning of a song cannot be reduced to the words on the page. As Greil Marcus puts it, “[W]ords are sounds we can feel before they are statements to understand” … Lyrics are written to be performed. “They only really come to life in the performance of a singer […]”. (Storey 2010: 131)

A perspective of admiration starts with the vocal and performative charisma of a given singer—at least it does so in the case I used to begin this chapter, regarding The Smiths, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Sleaford Mods. With the reciprocal sound of admiration by and in the voices of fans, aficionados, and parasocial peers a non-harmonious tangle of emotions corresponds with and relates materially to the performers: the skillfully imperfect voices of the singers often mingle and fuse with the even more imperfect and even more excited and affected voices of the fans. The audience becomes a major co-performer of the pop persona on stage. As there is not one particular narrow set of ideal vocals to be found in popular music, there is room for diverse expectations without a center. One might still expect, for example, that vocals in a hard rock song will sound not too far from a mix between Lemmy Kilmister from Motörhead and Brian Johnson from AC/DC; however, the individual approach to singing embodied in the singer’s particular affect and performance angle is decisive. There is also a long tradition of excessively high male voices in popular music, connecting to a tradition of bright, androgynous voices that began at least with Buddy Holly: “Weaknesses that become audible are not necessarily perceived as weaknesses, but by being amplified, they are also strengthened” (Diederichsen 2014: 283; translated by MSK). The apparent weakness in the voice, and even in the performance, actually might lead quite, paradoxically, to a strength in the musical persona (Auslander 2006) as well as in the pop persona (Schulze 2013b). It is an effect of self-aggrandizement and self-empowerment that can transform someone into a super-charismatic, fascinating, attractive if not glamourous persona on stage. When personae such as Morrissey, Nick Cave, even Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen sing, they are not so much practicing a profession, as showing an idiosyncratic way to be through sonic and vocal expression—seemingly freed from any external norms that might be forced upon them. They embody a sort of liberation and freedom in their vocal sound (Sowodniok 2013), their vocal persona. Bob Dylan, for example, is a great singer by any measure—in terms

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of expression, surprise, feeling, structure, humor, scale of his concerns. However, his vocal performance is characterized by a narrative voice while at the same time he is a master of singing compositions into bits and pieces—for example in “Blowin’ in the Wind.” No simple text, no propositional content might ever fully reflect what this joyfully destructive vocal performance expresses and means for many of his fans. Dylan’s and Morrissey’s voices perform a liberation from restraints, an energetic unchaining from social and political restrictions that their fans respond to in co-performing at concert venues and around turntables. Their singing, however strange and quirky, sore, feeble, or self-harming it might sound, establishes this connection of co-performance with their listeners, their sonic peers. In this sense, their fans not only enter a parasocial relation, as is often discussed in research (Horton and Wohl 1956, Sanderson 2009, Marwick and Boyd 2011), but an intensely and materially sonic relation, a vocal bond to their admired artists and performers. Through this material bond of admiration, of imitation and embodying, popular culture and its protagonists become major factors in the self-education of their fans. In this way, the “fleeting event of the unrecorded voice” (Kolesch and Krämer 2006: 7; translated by MSK) especially serves as the starting point for a deep personal transformation of these listeners and co-performers.

Performative Cultures of Education The personal and even biographical sound stories I used to start this chapter can illustrate three approaches to the exploration of popular cultures and popular music that are anchored in idiosyncratic and sensory experiences: performativity, education through style, and storytelling. The sound of admiration cannot possibly be reconstructed in an abstract and generalized way: it must start with an idiosyncratic experience of one particular person, one humanoid alien (Schulze 2018a). These approaches make such research possible. The main focus of my research practice is therefore a strong focus on performativity in order to understand how music, sound and lyrics, social encounters, and concert experiences operate in popular music and culture: They’re formin’ in a straight line They’re goin’ through a tight wind The kids are losing their minds: The Blitzkrieg Bop (The Ramones 1976, track 1)

At concerts by The Ramones, the call of “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” constitutes a speech act, a performance, and an execution at the same time—a place where speaking and acting coincide. The origin of the concept of performativity most relevant here goes back to J.L. Austin’s speech act theory (Austin 1962). This theory is based on the assumption that speaking a language means rule-guided behavior on the one hand and that the execution of a speech act itself is the basic unit of linguistic communication—not the word or the sentence. For Japanese pop-punk band Shonen Knife, who are avowed Ramones fans, this becomes “Iko, iko everybody let’s go” on their song “Riding On The Rocket” (on Let’s Knife,

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1992, Virgin). Because it is recognized by the audience as a Ramones quote, when shouted at a Shonen Knife live show this transformed call sign transfers elements of the specific performativity of The Ramones and their live presentation into the Japanese band’s own context. This indicates another quality of pop culture in terms of its performativity: the importance of citation, or quote-pop. For Austin, on the other hand, performative acts are not repeatable; repetition in the form of citation is parasitic and non-serious. Thus, judging the exclamation “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” as true or false is impossible and pointless. So, performative statements are neither descriptions nor statements of fact, that is, they have no referential function. They are neither true nor false, but acquire their meaning through the actions performed with them. Performative statements can only succeed or fail depending on the situation, the context, the co-performers, and the community of actors and co-actors. These performative practices in popular culture thus constitute an education through style that takes place within such experiences. Such processes of transformation are formative when they cause a major change in the fundamental elements of someone’s predetermined world and self-concept (cf. Kokemohr 2007). Popular cultures are contingent, elective communities that include and center around such social and cultural processes; they materialize and medialize them, they perform them as text, image, sound, stage show— and they present social and cultural experiences in this context that can be appropriated and transferred into one’s life-world. They can potentially open up performative spaces of self-education: the spaces of scenes and their specific styles, haircuts, fashion, dance styles, or aesthetic traits of communication, such as through vinyl artwork, posters, band t-shirts, texts, stage productions, and more. This is a secure community that educates one for life in a wider, maybe less secure community, where the “idea of education does not level the singularity in its relation to an outside world … which does not just mediate a subject to a general concept and abolishes it as a singularity—but brings it into relation to the other and thus to the demand for justice” (Wimmer 1996: 137; translated by MSK). Hence, pop cultures show, perform and explain, make visible and audible, connect and create communities of difference. They set things in motion, allow communication and interaction to take place and help knowledge, ideas, or ideologies to circulate. They are themselves stages, spaces, and frames for dealing with the world and the self—ultimately, they are self-education agencies in which the subject becomes a project (cf. Flusser 1998). This education initiates or contributes to permanent processes of transformation. Such education in popular cultures proceeds mainly narratively and performatively through storytelling, and takes place in a field of tension between reality and fiction. Popular cultures fictionalize socio-cultural realities and are at the same time dependent on the realities to which they refer. Being cultures centered around storytellers or telling stories, they trigger multimedia and multi-perspective narratives with an educational effect. To educate here means a process of co-constructing people and media as well as recursive connections between mass media and everyday communications and realities, defined by the performance of media cultures. Their oral histories allow particular popular memory cultures to emerge, and which constitute a community. Therefore, the sovereign role of one narrator or the sole authority of an author increasingly disperses into a wider

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and almost untraceable network of references. The personal and idiosyncratic mixture of memories, experiences, sounds, and concepts constitutes an education through popular cultures and its styles. The long-distance transmission of narratives and of conversational experiences creates opportunities for this personal narration and conversation in everyday life—despite physical distance. The performativity of popular culture and its memory cultures is determined by an idiosyncratic approach to storytelling (like mine earlier). The stories told are thus both educational and performative. The text itself also becomes a performance—of style cultures and processes of self-education. This individual participation in a performative educational process addresses the reader’s memory or their own experiences of strangeness, of surprise, of self-discovery while reading. This self-discovery connects the performativenarrative process of education to more recent autoethnographic approaches, cherishing and respecting an author’s and researcher’s personal affect and entanglement with her or his research subject.

In Praise of Entanglement Entanglement and personal affect are all too often still regarded as elements hostile to research and preventative of any meaningful insight. In the case of a deeply experiential research field like popular culture, such a perspective has never proven helpful. From the early cultural studies examining fandom, investigations of youth cultures, and the more recent approaches involving following protagonists of contemporary popular culture scenes in mobile ethnographies—all of these approaches have made efforts to shift the locus of authority in the research: from the researcher and his (more rarely, her) expertise, definitions, structural models, and finely crafted positionings in a research field to the protagonists of one particular scene, their performativity, their storytelling, their processes of education through style. In this sense, the perspective of the fans, the listeners, the consumers, also the admirers and the excited audience could easily be ignored—and it had been overlooked in a way that respected their existence but condescendingly assigned it a minor place. But why was the affect of admiration so often condescendingly ignored or even shamed? Why did it seem so much more interesting, exciting, and relevant to write and research on the genius artists, producers, instrumentalists, singers, and performers on stage instead of those who perform in the moshpit, in their adolescent bedroom, or on a street corner? With this goal in mind, the sociological, psychological, and later media and communications-oriented research on fan cultures and the excited users, consumers, and prosumers surely provided a starting point, out of the traditional reversal of interest as performed since early cultural studies, Birmingham-style (cf. McRobbie 1991, Baym 1997, Hills 2002, Duffett 2013, Duits, Reijnders, and Zwaan 2014). However, in these cases the researcher seems still in a comfortable and unaffected outside position: she or he watches and observes and models the movements of his research objects from above and afar—even

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if ethnographic research is included. Most of the time researchers in these cases still prefer to perform the habitus of the unmoved observer, analyzing and interpreting in a Kantian manner of disinterested pleasure (interesselosem Wohlgefallen). I do not believe this is a valid, an actually existing, or even fruitful and meaningful method of research. For me, such approaches may go in the right direction—but only halfway. They intend to give room and analytical respect to all those who admire, follow, and praise public personae, but these admiring individuals themselves are subtly misjudged by interpreting them as mainly just examples of larger cultural trends, phenomena, and tendencies. They are not respected as performers and protagonists in their own right and with their own genuine and impactful agency. In my understanding of these fan culture protagonists, they in fact co-create the very culture of which they are a fan. Most pop personae themselves seem to understand this when they reach a certain level of celebrity and recognition—at least a commonly used phrase at award shows and in public statements performs this: I would be nothing without your support and encouragement! Research on admiration and excitement in popular culture, as two of the main driving forces of this culture and its manifold sub-, side-, and paracultures, cannot be performed in radical distance, disinterest, and stale ignorance of the affects that characterize and substantiate these cultures. Even more, a substantial amount of research in this area seems to me only possible when including affect theory in the equation (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, Biddle and Thompson 2013); this seems to me the very substance and not just a sidephenomenon of the experience of being a fan, an aficionado, an admirer, an excited person. What I explore under the concept of popular media cultures—or in German: populäre Medienkulturen—refers precisely to this experiential, intensified, and pervasive cultural practice in close connection to mediated artifacts and practices as well as to personal, biographically anchored, and idiosyncratic processes of education and transformation. Popular media cultures are agents of these transformations: they constitute a widely disseminated ethnographic field that cannot be researched from a distance, as part of a kind of armchair ethnography. It is this specific research field, consisting mainly of fans and performers, practitioners and aficionados itself, that demands the personal involvement and participation of the researcher. The affective relation, the entanglement, and the personal involvement are in this case not an obstacle to thorough academic investigation, but the very means by which this strand of research proceeds. Admiration can be, in this respect, a major catalyst for academic research. However, it cannot be this as an unreflected form of praise and of speechless bewilderment or surprise, but as a research object for which a researcher might her- or himself also be included in the research object. Although it is part of a tradition of Westernized research to focus solely on expressions in language form, it is clear that affects and objects, relations, and situations are also a focus of research for ethnography, sociology, for anthropology and for cultural research in general. The three aspects mentioned in the previous section all then contribute to this: the performativity that is the substance of an affectively experienced situation; the process of education that can be observed and experienced in this situated research too; and the storytelling that is instigated by an experiential situation. The researcher acknowledges, therefore, her or his own entanglement in the situation being researched—and starting

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from this, the substantial co-performance between an artist and their fans is expanded by a comparable co-performance from the protagonists of a scene or situation and the single researcher researching it. Admiration becomes in both of these cases a driving force: for an epistemological process consisting of situated storytelling, an analysis of co-performances, and the interpretation of educational processes.

Expanded Fan Fictions? In the twenty-first century, there have developed more and more platforms, genres, and media formats that give opportunities to perform the experience of admiration and entanglement in a popular media culture. This started with the long-lasting, often overlooked corpus of fan fiction in analog or online publication formats, evolving into weblog and videoblogging culture in the 2000s, and recently even expanding into the mediated co-performance and appropriation of popular culture on social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, or Snapchat. The history of fan fiction is already an area in research (e.g. McCardle 2003, Thomas 2006, Black 2008, Ng 2008, Hellekson and Busse 2014, Jenkins et al. 2015, Fathallah 2018), but its prolific and ongoing production demands a continuous and rapid expansion of this research field; moreover, in the co-performance of this field one can find an energetic core out of which a lot of other phenomena in fan culture can be understood. The forms of imagination, the practices and tricks of appropriation, and all the wider variety of starting points for this shared performativity—all of it takes place here. It is thus a prime example of how deeply intertwined and entangled popular cultures are: it can seem increasingly useless to analyze the performativity of one artist, one genre, one set of artifacts when not also including all the fan fictions and fan imaginations that circulate around and gravitate toward it. Fan fiction represents the subjectivities, the projections, obsessions, and fantasies that actually make a protagonist of popular media culture a truly desired object and a pop persona. This tendency was expanded in the first influential and internationally impactful examples of user-generated reading-and-writing platforms such as blogs, online communities, and interest groups that often later expanded into video-blogging and microblogging platforms. Within these platforms the energy of fan fictions, their imaginations, their excitement, and admiration found new formats to attach to. This wide and large online discourse, obviously, cannot be reduced to just a continuation of fan fiction; but as soon as one begins to explore and interpret the enunciations and performances on these platforms and blogs, one discovers the richness of fans’ engagement, affects, thinking, and living with their admired celebrities, performers, musicians. Writing about pop personae does not end with formats tied strongly to fictional or academic genres—it expands creatively and energetically when explored on an open plane of these platforms. Writers, inventors, fans, and admirers let loose here and are encouraged to extrapolate on all their weird dreams and obsessions, practices and ideas, wishes and fears around pop personae. These platforms are the habitat of manifest admiration and entanglement within

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a parasocial relationship. In my understanding, these idiosyncratic translations of media experiences into the erratic life-worlds of fan fiction substantially increase an intensity of experience in two areas: within the actual everyday life of the fans as well as within their abilities to reflect upon these. They do not necessarily contribute to escapism or a life consisting only of parasocial interactions, because—as with popular media cultures in general—they represent and perform options for communication that instigate further processes of reflection and activity. However, these processes can be evaluated ethically: popular cultures and popular media cultures do not teach or educate in themselves, but they potentially represent a gateway to more freedom or even into emancipation, which one must choose for oneself and which one must actively realize. The confrontation with the other, the alien, and the strange is here a crucial experience as well as part of the discovery of the familiar and the homely in the other. One of the most recent and undoubtedly most prolific examples of this sort of expanded fan fiction can be observed on the comparably younger video and social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat but also on older and more established ones like YouTube or Vimeo (Vernallis 2013, Höfer 2019). There needs to be more research on how the performers, commenters, editors, prosumers, and fans on these platforms actually appropriate, assimilate, and embody the pop personae they perform. Especially the drive of excitement, entanglement, of presuming and collaboratively co-performing is very fully developed in these examples. On these platforms the formerly niche culture that once crafted its daring, often strangely twisted, and not infrequently also weirdly sexualized fan fictions almost in hiding, is now in full bloom as a sort of new mainstream culture. How the users of such platforms perform with and against their admired pop personae, how they inhabit their dancing and singing styles, their signature looks and moves, their branded environments and their relationship, can all be enjoyed and digested in a thoroughly transformed and translated, appropriated and assimilated form. On these platforms and—probably even more so—in future media environments that might allow for much more embodiment and appropriation of looks, styles, and media production techniques, one can recognize how, in my understanding, a popular media culture actually comes into being: The big productions and big stage appearances by major pop personae are not sufficient to understand the richness and the wide variety of expressions and experiences that characterize this culture. It is precisely the many often unknown co-performers, all of these fans and aficionados, who let this culture live and thrive. Processes of self-education in these popular media cultures basically require an incredibly high level of activity as well as an idiosyncratic and prolific inventiveness regarding the “practice of everyday life” (de Certeau 1988), so as to allow these processes of sense-making through performance to become generative and transformative. Even more so, from the beginning of such a process of activity and transformation it might not be clear what can actually be achieved, what will really happen, and where this process will ultimately lead its protagonists. However, if they succeed, these popular media cultures are then indeed very efficacious and impactful self-educational cultures. Popular media cultures as a whole are these co-performers: their incessant, cross-platform performances of appropriation, excitement, and performative pleasure.

14 The Entertainment Macon Holt

Figure 14.1  A personal artifact commemorating the rite of passage of attending a largescale sonic entertainment event (Glastonbury Festival) in the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century.

Way Out West There is chaos missing from this festival. Or if not missing, the chaos has been contained. Little pens enclose yuppie elder millennials—a class I’d readily be a part of if someone would agree to pay me accordingly—younger Gen Xers and a smattering of baby boomers. In these pens, they drink overpriced beer from small plastic bottles. They drink wine and

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weak cocktails from small plastic glasses. It’s all very polite with its picnic tables. There is the tantalizing possibility of just about viewing the main stages from this vantage point, far enough away that the volume has been attenuated but close enough that everything still sounds clear. It’s not a bad spot for lunch either. Meanwhile the serious—by which I mean purposeful and dedicated—intoxication—by which I mean both substance assisted and via internally produced sensations of excitement—takes place just outside the festival perimeter, where those in their early 20s (younger millennials) and those in their late teens (for whom the derisory label is still under debate by their elders) sit or dance or chat or chant or flirt or laugh or sing in circles, waiting for the prestige acts to finish playing so the party can begin. This is the Way Out West or just WOW festival 2018 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The festival takes place in a large park, the perimeter of which is mostly surrounded by the city with what remains surrounded by the run out into the outskirts. In some ways, this is great. I feel incredibly comfortable and safe here. This arrangement has produced a space for each of these communities to get whatever they were after while not afflicting the others with whatever they were not. And after all, I am here to see some of the prestige acts. I reckon St. Vincent is one of the most interesting artists of the last few years to achieve mainstream success. I think the euphoria infused in the bombastic jazz of Kamasi Washington is a wonder to behold. I have fond memories of listening to the Arcade Fire in my teens that persist despite their unrelenting preachiness. I am definitely here for the fascination I find among the crowd toward the harder edged queer dance-pop of Fever Ray, which even brings a few of the seriously intoxicated inside the arena area. Later, the influx continues and the crowd stretches back so far that the people at its rear can only just to peek into the performance arena and are barely able to glimpse the screens as they are obscured by distance. This is exactly the scale of crowd that Kendrick Lamar should draw. But there was plastic under my feet: high-quality flexible hardwearing interlocking tiles with a textured surface to assist your grip even in the event of rain while also protecting the grass beneath. There were two stages located at opposite ends of the main performance enclosure, which meant that the time spent without music as the artists removed their gear from the stage and the next act set their own up could be kept to a minimum because performances alternate between the stages. Were they to be used simultaneously, the sound of the performances would be utterly cacophonous. This may seem an obvious point, but a great many professionally run festivals seem incapable of grappling with the fact that sound has no regard in its travel as to the arbitrary labels given to different areas to designate them as stages. This frequent and unforgivable obliviousness can result in instances where low-key artists are allocated stages so proximate to other larger stages and at time-slots that collide with the performance of louder acts. This can mean that more subdued performances are almost entirely drowned out. When such collisions happen from the start of set, it is irritating but it can be adapted to. However, when such a clash happens part way through a set or a song it is destructively dispiriting for all involved. In addition to the well-thought through layout and scheduling, the sound at WOW seemed to have been controlled with scientific precision. The mix was clear. The bass was strong. The vocals were crisp. It sounded like the record. Or the record with a little more

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bass and a little more echo. And, now that I think about it, not once, no matter how close to the stage I stood, did I get that familiar ringing in the ears that dogged the aftermath of most concerts I’d attended as a teen. Each morning, I’d wake up in my hotel room (the festival did not have camping, a restriction for which I was both glad and ashamed of my happiness) with my aural faculties utterly unaffected by the previous day’s listening. It was as if they had solved some riddle of equalization that allows the music to be heard by all in attendance but to not be harmful. To be crisp and clear and impactful at the moment of performance, yes. But not to inflict injury upon the body. A wonderful achievement, of course but also, perhaps, one wonders if it has rendered this music somehow unaffecting. This is a tricky needle thread—or at least it is for me. The intensity of festival experiences is often more the draw for people than the particular acts performing. For older participants, the prestige performances and their attendant nostalgias seem to play a larger role in their reasons for attending such an event. However, for those dedicated to the pursuit of the myriad forms of intoxication on offer, these specifics become a way to discursively circumnavigate what you’re really after—that being a kind of destructive enjoyment in which your self can be lost, if only for a time, and when it returns it is in some way transformed. To many, a proposition such as the latter would seem silly, hippyish, vague, and irrational. Something that, were you to declare a desire to spend money on it, would raise eyebrows and concerns in the same way as merrily declaring plans to join a cult. This is not to suggest that such desires are delusional. The experience of a need for some kind of transcendence or transgression is real, even if it is ill defined by standards of a polite society. But, for the sake of fitting in, it is often better to say you just want to see your favorite band and place it in the reductive terms of purchasing a commodity. This could be said to be putting it in economically rational terms—to transform a nebulous desire into a concrete event to which access can be sold. As such it could then be criticized in the academy as yet another example of the infectious logic of Homo economicus spreading further into the enjoyment of music (Fink 2005: 91). But this is to misunderstand a couple of things. First, it takes at face value the claim all this person wants is to see the concert, which, as has been argued, is an intentional obfuscation. Second, it sells short the capacities of capitalism to amplify—within behaviors which appear as so-called economic rationality—those tendencies toward deterritorialization even as it simultaneously seems to capture evermore areas of experience. This is the difficulty of threading the needle of this chapter about sonic entertainment: to critique the polite bourgeois facilitation of capital accumulation that festivals have become at the expense of the kind of chaotic transcendence that they are believed by some to have previously provided, while recognizing that in this chaos is not in itself a romantic escape from the totalitarian violence at play in the production of bourgeois capitalism. Indeed, between the flows of global finance and the gated neighborhoods which protect individualized wealth, we are reminded that capital can neither be entirely enclosed and nor can it exist as such without enclosure. Fortunately, as we consider the anthropology of sonic entertainments, we have a chance to examine this problem at play through a medium that so very closely resembles this metastable capacity of capital. Case in point: I had had those festival experiences that I describe above in dangerously romantic terms, and—as

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exhilarating as they were—they also can take a toll. As they liberate you from the humdrum and the confines of the pseudo-static reality, which we are so often required to inhabit, they also take you away from yourself which is to say from an identity that is in some way defined by these confines. As you watch the sun rise over a field of dilapidated tents with your ears still ringing from the pained scream of that voice in the dark that touched you so deeply the night before and the edge of some hangover is beginning to creep in, there is an ecstatic feeling of having come to understand a little more of what a body can do. At the same time, however, there is also a fear that creeps in as previous investments and commitments now appear trivial when compared to the rush of sensation made available on the makeshift dance floor of the post-post-headliner rave among the tents.

The Year of Oatly, the Original Oat Drink with Carbon Dioxide Equivalents Why should the festival—this specific becoming archaic form of sonic entertainment in its particularly commercial manifestation—be the subject of this chapter? Are not the streams of data by which we are aurally entertained the future of this area of this fledgling discipline? This is a valid point, but what such a focus would miss were it to be the aim of this chapter would be the tensions with which we are living at this time. The conveniences and pleasure of our subjective extensions into digital networks (Kassabian 2013b: xxv–xxvi) are always conflicted by some ill-defined desire for something real or authentic (Moore 2002); or at least, those forms by which these notions have been represented to us. Sounds and music have long lived in a hinterland when it comes to authentic reproduction, with many really incredible concert experiences requiring no more skill to preform than pressing the space bar. When such music is performed in a setting that is saturated with branding with integrated social media connectivity, the constant documentation and distribution of musical experience, the infrastructure of both capital and the state, it would seem that the music festival is a good place to navigate the dynamics of sound and contemporary entertainment. But first, I want to dig into an esoteric consideration of what is at stake in the academic consideration of entertainment. Whenever I read the definite formulation as is used in the title of this chapter, “The Entertainment,” I am reminded of the euphemism used as the eponymous film/potential weapon of mass destruction in the novel Infinite Jest (Wallace 2007). “The Entertainment” is both the film’s coded designation for official purposes and also a way of avoiding the invocation of its name as if doing so would help to prevent the actualization of something horrible. Instead of achieving this later point, however, “The Entertainment” serves as a cover rich in ambivalence. It points both to something often regarded as trivial allowing the speaker to distance themselves from the serious potential of which they speak while hinting at the source of this destructive force. “Infinite Jest,” the film in the novel, is so devastatingly pleasurable, so utterly engrossing, and so damn entertaining that all those who watch it will continue to do so on a loop at the expense of all other activities. They enter a state of waking catatonia, in which they will no longer feed themselves, maintain

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their hydration, use the bathroom, or sleep and will instead watch the film until they die of dehydration, exhaustion, or starvation. If they are denied the film, this does not break the spell, as they will then become violent in order to be able to access the film again. In the novel, this device does a number of things. There is a compelling case from the literary theorist Marshall Boswell, who argues that film should be read as a critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its focus on the idea that subjectivity is irrevocably split as we as infants come to be able to recognize ourselves in the mirror and then enter the world of linguistic communication which apparently alienates us from our desires and causes neurosis (Boswell 2005: 129). Here, the film serves as a demonstration of logical pitfalls of this position as it presents the way by which the split subject could be resolved as being akin to a kind of infantilization. But more interesting for our purposes here is the ambivalent cultural critique it offers. There are a great many surface readings of the novel (for example Sayers 2014) that consider the film to be a denouncement of the destructive effects of the kind of entertainment produced in line with the totalizing logic described in Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay on the culture industry (1997), in which we find the following critique of the inexorability of infantilization through the products of the culture industry. The same babies grin endlessly from magazines, and endlessly the jazz machine pounds. Despite all the progress in’ the techniques of representation, all the rules and specialties, all the gesticulating bustle, the bread on which the culture industry feeds humanity, remains the stone of stereotype. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 148)

This critique is present to an extent in Infinite Jest, but it operates more reflectively and goes deeper into certain ambiguities. Beyond the critique of the consumption of culture industry produced entertainment, the novel spends a considerable amount of time exploring what this entertainment offers to people; what needs it fills, the circumstances from which the need for such entertainment arises and the inadequacy of offering a political analysis of entertainment based on antiquated aesthetic theories developed for the benefit of the aristocracy. On this last point, one could argue that the political basis of these analyses themselves are in need of criticism, as they seemingly undermine the very possibility of political subjectivity itself. This problematic of claiming the damaging effects of entertainment are such that they render political struggle impossible is most clearly encapsulated, in the novel, by a series of discourses that take place between two spies: one a spy for the former United States and the other a duplicitous Quebecois separatist. In the following remark, the separatist notes how the ideological insistence on a liberal individualistic and consumerist form of social organization has made the population of the former US particularly unable to resist the pleasures of “the entertainment.” “Again passing over the important. This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose—this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only. Do you not see? … The exact time of death and way of death, this no longer matters. Not for your peoples. You wish to protect them? But you can only delay. Not save. The Entertainment exists. … It is there, existing. The choice for death of the head by pleasure now exists, and your authorities know, or you would not be now trying to stop the pleasure.” (Wallace 2007: 320)

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This may seem like the Adornian position. But its articulation, while similar, is significantly different. Aside from clearly being a satire of the convoluted writing of Francophone poststructuralist theory, which was gaining popularity in American academies at the time the novel was published, this text has a far more ambivalent relationship to pleasure than Adorno. In Adorno and Horkheimer’s writing, pleasure must be treated with suspicion. It is, after all, a tool deployed by the ruling class to maintain the status quo. In this quote from the novel, it is instead the charge that the state is trying to restrict access to a certain form of pleasure to save civilization. This is an important complexity which we will explore more thoroughly later. However, in both cases the inability of people to act in ways that do not conform with the behavior set by the paradigm in which they live is taken for granted. For Adorno, this is the conclusion of his materialism, whereas for the separatist, it is the stereotype by which he understands the imperialist neighboring nation. While this is the serious position of the former it is expressed in the later with a degree of irony. This expression does not disregard or dismiss this analysis, but introduces a skepticism to these concerns as to how such an analysis would allow for the possibility of escape. If we are only able to act in accordance with the environment that produced us, where would the resources for a new world come from? And who was I walking around the advertisement-drenched WOW festival, to feel this ironic distance growing between me and what surrounded me? As those serious about their intoxication danced outside the Oatly Oat Milk marquee to songs released by the Spice Girls in the approximate year of their birth, who am I to arrogate myself the position to tell them there is something problematic in the sonic entertainment they imbibe? I am led to think of that other miserable twentieth-century thinker, whose work can easily be read into Infinite Jest: Jean Baudrillard. After all, the notion in the novel that time can be subsidized by the corporate sponsorship of years—for example The Year of The Whopper (Wallace 2007: 223)—is such a perfect illustration of Baudrillard’s notion of “third order simulacra” (Baudrillard 2019: 21), as the abstract representation of the phenomenon of time becomes something presented to us by a commercial and legal entity. But to analyze this scene—the youth lining up to jump into corporate VR experience, while the new young professionals drink in a sponsored little pen, while the older folks stand on temporary plastic tiles in a park to watch a band whose t-shirt they already own—in such a way would be to appraise it on external standards, sober academic standards that define the authenticity of experience through a well-referenced discourse and conceptual sparring, and in contradistinction to what many people consider to be their authentic lives. To an extent, anthropologists have spent more than a century trying to address this inevitable problem of observation. As we engage in the anthropology of sound, we must follow this lead. Slavoj Žižek has pointed to the idea that we enjoy capitalism (Žižek 2008: 106) as if it were the missing piece of a puzzle that allows his closed reality system function. And to an extent, he is correct. We enjoy the sponsored selfie frame even as we enjoy mocking those using it instead of consuming the discursively sanctioned commodity of the concert itself. But where this falls apart is in the reading of this as the production of an enclosure— as the production of an oppressive prison of purely personal affect management. If we want to explore the sonic entertainments of our current depths of capitalism, we need a

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method that moves past such sober systems and instead shares with its subject of analysis a serious dedication to destructive intoxication.

Liminoid Experiences and Libidinal Economics Anthropologists seem to have the theoretical frame for the music festival settled in the notion of the liminoid. While this frame is contested for its outdated essentialism (St. John 2001: 48) and a certain lack of scientifically empirical verification (Luckman 2014: 19), festivals are frequently appraised, to greater and lesser extents, as spaces of liminoid experience (Turner 1974). Such spaces serve as a threshold and facilitate a socially recognized transformative experience. But the theory goes that these liminoid experiences, unlike liminal experiences, which Victor Turner’s original theory would have as belonging to an earlier paradigm, are able to be entered into voluntarily. Liminoid experiences are not seen as necessary for one’s participation in the society, though they carry some kind of the caché. Nor are they necessarily a point of resolution. Instead, liminoid experiences allow one to enter a new phase of life as socially construed in societies that have a more overdetermined notion of individual agency and autonomy. There is certainly something to this. We can read an account of intoxication here. I remember coming back from Leeds Festival in 2007 and standing on the high street of my hometown. While it had always been a somewhat sleepy place, it seemed then eerily still. The murmurs of quotidian commerce seemed far away and utterly banal, as if muffled by an invisible wall. There was still the clamor speech and footsteps, doors and cash registers, traffic and the sea behind me but it all seemed entirely pro forma. No more impactful than using a feather as a wrecking ball. This feeling of disassociation was certainly exacerbated by the sleep deprivation and a brain state that was almost certainly burnt out from days of rushing on dopamine and adrenaline. All the same, my perspective had shifted, and it was as if the normality before me was nothing but a façade. It seemed to me then that there was something more real and more intense behind it all. I had felt it resonate through my body as I stood at the back of a darkened tent listening to the pained noise of Brand New, as kick drums had interpolated themselves into my heartbeat as the raves continued into the night, as the crackling fires of burning tents and exploding gas canisters marked the end of what had been an escape on that final morning. Even now, as I cringe at the teenage pretension of this anecdote, and even as the gulf between before and after this formative moment has diminished, echoes of it remain. But in addition to the essentialism at play here and the temptation to universalize from a personal perspective on an inner experience, the liminoid frame is limited in what it can offer the anthropology of sound. Indeed, the teenage narration of this experience is entirely fitting in that a certain solipsism pervades the idea of transition and transformation at play here. Even if we were to extend the view to better take into account the others who were in attendance at this festival, this conceptual frame still cordons off this experience of sonic

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entertainment, intense though it can be, from the world/cultural systems in which it not only makes sense but that also provide the material foundation from which it emerges. To illustrate this idea, I would claim that the kind of liminoid experiences on offer at the contemporary commercial music festival—even if they contain similar or the same physical and chemical intoxicants—are not the same as those liminoid experiences that were, in the UK, curtailed by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. The legislation specifically describes the illicit music as being characterized by “repetitive beats” and was brought in by parliament to specifically target the unsanctioned warehouse rave and party drug scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The liminoid experiences were something of a transgression of not only a stage of life but also the system that defined it as one passed through, a threshold to a space that was in some sense beyond socially sanctioned enjoyment. At a contemporary commercial music festival, however, such experiences are firmly situated within what could be called the libidinal economy (Lyotard 2015) of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009). WOW festival was an example of this par excellence. The Adornian point of view would hold that the thresholds of such festivals are little more than commodities of the culture industry. And while the liminoid anthropologist would rightfully contest this point as ideologically reductive of a wealth of human experience, what is revealed in the anthropology of sound is that far from being contradictory; rather, these perspectives comprise a continuous flow. The design of the WOW festival was intended to channel the flows of people, as efficiently as possible, into the concert arena and commercial spaces while at the same time halting the distribution of elicit substances—be they illegal or merely unaffiliated. The rumble of rhythmic bass across the hills and dells of the park, along with the fading light of the evening sun rendered the atmosphere a little uncanny. The way the air was shaking disrupted the reality system within which the park usually sits: The rites of morning runs, afternoon strolls, weekend picnics and games. Though the youth were still seeking out quieter corners in which to fumble, the spaces for dancing must have made these encounters easier to initiate. But the same mechanisms that disrupted this space are what allow so many people to flow into it. The contraband kept out was only that which had not yet been ingested. This space needed the chaos such intoxication brings to become what it promised to be in the marketing material. However, while it would admit the already intoxicated, it would not assume the liability of becoming the site of ingestion of any substances that might assist in self-destructive intoxication beyond those most socially sanctioned and with marketing arrangements in place. It also drew a line as to what levels of intoxication were admissible. But this space thrived on channeling the kind of intoxication which would be impossible to produce with the supplies it had on site, especially at the prices that had been set. To bridge this, the sonic equipment was set up so as to make reality shake and, like a piper, draw participants near. The festival carefully arranged its openings and enclosures, its vibrations and its points of stasis so as to minimize its liability for that edge of chaos it both inspired and on which it was valorized. Way Out West can perhaps best be understood in terms of the “libidinal economy” of Jean-François Lyotard (2015). Unlike Freud’s theory of sublimation, or Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s perspectives on entertainment, Lyotard’s work does not reify the

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pseudo-stability of the bourgeois subject through a suspicion of enjoyment (Gilbert and Pearson 1999: 42). But unlike the theory of flows to which it is a response—Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013a)—and to a certain extent the celebrations of pop culture’s emancipatory potential that we find in works that have emerged since the New Left wrestled both scholarship and the political movement from its conservatism (Frith 1981, Small 2011a, Hesmondhalgh 2013), it recognizes that dangers of casting this identity aside. The problematics of the first portion have been discussed above and have been well documented elsewhere for a long time. Indeed, Lyotard, at least in Libidinal Economy, seems to operate from the assumption that desire for a kind of individual sobriety in the praxis of appraising the world is both not desirable and no longer even tenable. While it goes without saying that, rather than those who shun entertainment and enjoyment, the more interesting perspective on the flows of sonic entertainment at Way Out West can be found in the unrestrained celebrations of pop culture-consumption as inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal position: Libidinal Economy engages with both the pleasures and their problems more deeply. In short, Lyotard has two major points of contention with the anti-Oedipal liberation of schizophrenic desire. The first he finds by rearranging the conceptual schema to suggest that following your desire away from the limitations of Oedipal subjectivity—or a sense of self defined by the socially sanctioned familial gender roles in relation to aspirational bourgeois capitalism—is all well and good, but at a certain point the agential elements—who desires what—of the concept of desire itself begin to fall apart (Lyotard 2015: 42–43). While we may long for escape from the humdrum life we are expected to conform to, at a certain point it becomes unclear who or what desires this escape. In a certain sense, this is a kind of death not unlike the one on offer from “Infinite Jest.” One can see Deleuze and Guattari working with this concern in response to this critique, albeit indirectly, throughout A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013b: 189). Lyotard’s second point of objection, and the one which is more interesting for us, is to the assertion in Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari 2013a: 432–433) and related countercultural movements, that capitalism is incompatible with this kind of schizophrenic subjectivity that dissolves into non-Oedipal desire. This is demonstrably not the case, as under certain conditions such enjoyable dissolution can indeed serve capital. In this infamous passage, Lyotard describes this form of capitalist desire in no uncertain terms: The English unemployed did not have to become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolutions of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in morning and evening. (Lyotard 2015: 111)

This position may bare some superficial similarity to Žižek’s formulation that we enjoy capitalism. However, this sentiment doesn’t quite capture it. The analysis implicit in the notion that we enjoy capitalism refers only to the enjoyment of those pleasures made

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available through this form of exploitation. It refers to the sustaining fantasy of eventually accessing these pleasures that facilitates the reproduction of exploitation. Lyotard on the other hand, with similar bombast, makes the point that what we enjoy is more abstract. For Lyotard, we enjoy the proximity to the capacity for excess and destruction facilitated by capitalism. Even if we do not directly consume the products of this excess or indulge in the act of destruction, and even if we find ourselves suffering deprivation or destruction, Lyotard claims, there is a paradoxical pleasure to be found here. This is a paradox in that such experiences can lead to the utter dissolution of the self, which seems to serve as a way in which to affirm it. One should be careful with this, however, as it risks becoming a kind of perverse romanticism of suffering. There is an absurdity in Lyotard’s own example that indicates the political limitations of this analysis. But if one can disentangle this idea from its iconoclastic articulation, we can perhaps see that under the conditions of rapid industrialization there were likely some who experienced the threshold between individualized agency and subjective/communal dissolution as exhilarating: the liminal space of capitalism’s libidinal economy. However, were this threshold to be crossed, suffering would still be experienced as suffering. Today we might look to the efficacy of advertising campaigns like that of the gig/job platform Fivver, which deployed a series of moody black-and-white portraits with copy including “You eat a coffee for lunch. You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer” (Iovine 2007). There was political outcry from some quarters, but the target of these adds were those on the threshold of the capitalist libidinal economy. For them there is no contradiction in the necessity of the dissolution of the self to become a more effective valorizer of capital and pleasure. Libidinal economics allow us to think of the force of excess in all of its paradoxical intricacies and thus better understand the agony and ecstasy of sonic entertainment at a music festival. On the one hand, we have the more familiar notion of becoming so lost in the music you can forget who you are. As if through sound you can plug into forces and subjectivities far in excess of what is accessible through identity. And on the other hand, in that same space we find examples of asceticism, such as those who attend Glastonbury festival in the UK each year but attend none of the myriad of excessive musical performances, parties, or theatrical happenings, partake of no intoxicating substances, and instead spend their time in the peace and relative quiet of the healing fields (Hunt 2019). There is something decadent about going to such a site of “currupt[ion]” (ibid.) and eschewing as much of what is going as possible. It is as if the silence they sit in only becomes valuable to them in its proximity to a force of libidinized capital intent on disrupting it. The framework of libidinal economics allows for the flows of a music festival to be understood as having something like a thermodynamic telos. There is a move toward an eventual disintegration of all those engaged in this producing the event/identity. The direction of this flow is set and intensified on a multitude of levels, from the demands of capital, to the desires of those who live under it, to the politics of representation and questions and repressions of which bodies are entitled to freely explore this sonic entertainment. Lyotard developed libidinal economics at the same moment in which the prototype for the contemporary music festival emerged. This theory was an attempt to capture the delirium

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that saturated that moment in the development of global capitalism so as to be able to understand it on its own, intoxicated terms. Likewise, the speaker stacks constructed to meet the requirements of forms of performance which emerged, having been manufactured by mass media spectacles—to amplify live music for tens of thousands—were charging the air with something potent enough to reshape the desiring subjects of the world to come.

Three Days of Peace and Music There is a plethora of histories of the festival; although in its modern incarnation, a certain narrative has become dominant which would point to the thrilling chaos of Woodstock in 1969 and the horrifying violence of Altamont later that same year as establishing the festival paradigm to be emulated in more profitable forms—in harsh contradiction of the famous words on one Woodstock poster: “Three Days of Peace and Music.” But the sources of these narratives are almost too far away, or rather too saturated in myth to be appraised with a sufficient degree of accuracy. There are the historical facts of these events that can readily be accessed, but the accounts these facts provide do not entirely correspond to the myths that have saturated and function in the world. While this poses a challenge for history, this very saturation makes them perfect for a libidinal economy of the festival as sonic entertainment. Rather than the actualities of what occurred at these events, it’s worth considering what these fantasies produced through their images of fields full of hippies and how the soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix’s feedback-drenched improvisatory version of the “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been folded into the material production of the actual contemporary festival. There was a virality to this form of sonic entertainment that long preceded the digital networks that transformed this concept into a meme. Free love and free festivals seemed to be the wave of the future. Or at least this is one conclusion that can be drawn from the drive to hold the Pilton Pop Blues and Folk Festival in the UK in 1970 the day after Hendrix’s death (BBC 2019) and four years before the publication of Économie Libidinale. The following year it was renamed as the Glastonbury Free Festival. In 2011, having purchased a discounted ticket through some scheme, I attended this same festival, though the word “free” was no longer in its name. That said, what struck me about Glastonbury was that, despite its price tag, it did feel freer than those festivals sponsored by British or Danish or British-pretending-to-beAustralian beer companies that I had previously attended. By simply having no barrier— staffed by volunteers who would search you under the watchful eye of private security contractors—between performance arena and the camping area, it felt as if this space before me was mine to explore rather than a system to be negotiated wherein my presence was merely tolerated. In those other festivals, the sonic shimmer (Holt 2019: 64) that emanated from the arena was bittersweet. The power of its rumbling affects was alluring but the knowledge that you were to enter a space of disciplinary power, through a body search and the confiscation of contraband, was more reminiscent of school than it was proper to a festival. At Glastonbury, however, one was able to inhabit a space of continuity, as between

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the sound that drew you from your tent and the Pyramid Stage from which it emanated there was nothing but a little distance. Nonetheless, I think I only saw one act on that main stage the entire time I was there. Most of that weekend was instead spent wandering the seemingly endless fields filled with thousands of people, following the murmurs and rumors of secret concerts on those stages that did not make it to the TV coverage. A picture I took of Radiohead, seemingly learning to play the songs from their album The King of Limbs (Radiohead 2011) on the relatively tiny Park Stage, still shines at me from the background of my phone. As does the bored face of a security guard in front of the stage whose bright yellow earplugs protrude prominently from his head. I’d paid for this transcendent hearing damage as entertainment and he had to tolerate it get paid. I am cautious about relating this experience here. There is a romanticism about this festival that has suffused British culture to such an extent and in such a way that one tends to fall into one of two camps: the majority who tend to uncritically celebrate this event as being the high point of cultural production in Britain, or the minority who see it as little more than a moment for the establishment to celebrate mainstream mediocrity. Mark Fisher was a member of this latter group, and posted “The By Now Traditional Glasto Rant” (2018: 267) on his blog in 2007: These reflections have been prompted by Glastonbury, naturally, which is now nearly officially the end-of-college-year prom for Britain’s student (and graduate) population … [Delibidinization is] the secret purpose of this now unopposed embourgeoisement of rock culture UK. What is positively sinister about Glastonbury is that it is not just accidentally crap, it’s systematically crap—the hidden message screams out: it’s all finished, roll up, roll up, for the necrophiliac spectacle, it’s all over. ABANDON ALL CULTURAL VITALITY ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. (Fisher 2018: 267–268)

Some of this is unfair. Though the end-of-college-year prom was exactly why I was there, so I’m willing to concede there is more than a little truth to what Fisher argues here. There is something oddly self-congratulatory about Glastonbury Festival. From its ability to incorporate the most accessible versions of new musical forms into some dedicated corner or another, to its non-threatening hippies, to it eschewing of regular sponsorship in favor of placards for Oxfam and WaterAid, the festival seems to serve an ideological purpose by allowing some fantasy version of Britain to present its best face to itself. This is particularly insufferable from Fisher’s vantage point, the BBC coverage. The same coverage, with its excruciating hosts and poorly mixed sound, that I regarded as an authentic source of possibility when I watched it as a teenager in a small northern seaside town. This may have been authentic once—but time, experience, and repetition cannot help but sour this artifact. While this coverage may have aspirations of providing greater access to the festival as a major cultural event, the result is more like the end of a process of interpolation that has brought the festival completely into establishment-sanctioned modes of desiringproduction. On the television, the cacophony of bodies, the intensity of bass, the liveness of each moment is bundled up into media packets of reduced bandwidth and copyright compliance, perfect for broadcast and the proliferation of simulacra. This is not to claim that the real experience was in the fields and that you-had-to-be-there. Rather this is to

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claim that the there-in-person experience is now entangled with the mediated broadcast. When you’re there, it feels like you are there at the pleasure of the BBC. Where I will take issue with Fisher’s claim is that all this is somehow delibidinizing as such—as if there was a time when festivals were properly libidinizing and now they have lost this capacity. Or as if libidinization as such were always emancipatory. I contend that the libidinal intensity Fisher is after may well be a precondition for emancipation but it does not necessitate emancipation. The libidinal economics at play in Glastonbury are those of an uneasy alliance between neoliberal capitalism and the metastable identity group known—through the frames set up by Westphalian sovereignty—as the British. In his admittedly short and informal piece, Fisher makes the same mistake as Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus: he places some notion of desire above capitalism and so misses desire’s entanglement with all kinds of violence, exploitation, and oppression. And just as this hides the problematic circumstances for desire, so too is it the case for the primary means of desiring-production at the festival: the music. Earlier in this chapter, I somewhat uncritically celebrated the notion of intoxication as means to escape the oppressive structures of daily life. In addition to the chemical assistance in which one may partake, in the site of sonic entertainment that is the music festival, the air itself becomes charged with intoxicants, as the intensity and pervasiveness of its vibration threatens to shake loose the structure of normalcy. But this is only a good thing if in the absence of these structures there are affirmative egalitarian ethics that exceed them—if one does not simply use the capacity of vibration to deconstruct the barriers of the bourgeois individual as an excuse to impose individual will upon others in order to exploit them and inflict suffering upon them. The prevalence of violations, or perhaps merely the absence of such ethics, is widely acknowledged. Hannah Bows, a researcher into violence against women, wrote an article for the BBC, the institution that simultaneously reproduces the festival idea, based on her ongoing research into sexual harassment and assault at music festivals. She cites that “22% of 1,188 festival attendees [report] some form of unwanted sexual behaviour. This rose to 30% for women” (Bows 2019). In that same article, Bows gives the example of Bravalla festival in Sweden being shut down after a number of sexual assaults occurred there in 2016 and 2017. Such is the often-disavowed nature of these spaces. When the intensive sonics of such festivals combine with other forms of intoxication to literally shake off the normative structures of behavior, the result is not simply freedom and equality. But in the same way that it has been a mistake to idealize the power of the music festival to help us escape oppression, it would be an error to blame the festival or the music itself. The imbalances of power and privilege that exist outside the festival ground come in with the attendees. Indeed, following from the work of Shulamith Firestone (2015), the very forces of patriarchal capitalism that have taken up the festival and converted it into a commodity were present from the emergence and in construction of this form of sonic entertainment. As is made evident when the crowd manages to rush the fence, the boundaries of the festival are not firm but porous. As the force of sonic entertainment is allowed to seep out into the surrounding environment, it is more than just ticketholders that enter the grounds: a mode of desiring-production formed by the world as it is enters as well. Fisher’s

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critique of Glastonbury was not directed at the “tired Oedipal merry-go-round” (2018: 268) but rather the collapse of aesthetic possibilities and the new that has occurred as a result of the festival’s utter interpolation into the establishment. But the libidinal economy of the festival is saturated with the petulant, possessive Oedipal subjects that Deleuze and Guattari described. What Lyotard recognized was that even the desire of such subjects to escape this condition could itself be used to maintain the status quo (Lyotard 2015: 28). When one considers the libidinal economy of the festival, one is confronted with a great deal of uncomfortable and disconcerting facets of an experience that appears to have so much in the way of liberatory potential. In outrunning the shadow of the Frankfurt school, the anthropologist of sound may be inclined to revel along with the other festivalgoers in the sonic shimmer that shakes loose the confines of the self. But this would be to listen only to what the organizers want you to hear. In addition to the music, the cacophony of laughter, and chants of the crowd, and even in addition to the crackling of burning tents, one must also listen to accounts that challenge the smooth and easy narrative of collective enjoyment and emancipation. One must recognize that enjoyment within the structures of sonic entertainment and under the conditions of white supremacist patriarchal neoliberal capitalism (James 2015: 12) does not provide a place for emancipation for everyone equally.

Now Things Can Start Happening Whatever problems have been exacerbated by their commodification and commercialization, it must be clearly stated that the forms of resistance or possibility offered by the earliest examples of the modern music festival were not without problems. Indeed, if one were to consider them from the point of view of any number of representational schemata (economic class, the patriarchal construction of gender, the radicalization of bodies, etc.), the persistence of structures of oppression proper to the ideological apparatus of capitalism remained endemic even if the position of money capital was in some way temporarily challenged. The way that the intensity of sound in these spaces works alongside other modes of intoxication does allow for the temporary liberation from certain modes of restriction and oppression—but it is not a universal liberation. As with all other forms of contemporary entertainment, sonic entertainment was formed under the atmospheric pressures of the world as it is and so cannot fully escape them, nor offer an unproblematic route to doing so. But such critique, while correct and echoed in a number of analyses, is not sufficient for the anthropology of sonic entertainment. This subsection of the discipline needs not only to catalogue what is wrong with the pleasures of sonic entertainment but also to gesture toward other possibilities that may yet emerge. Sound, and the experience of it, is in an odd position: it is both very obviously excessive of the systems of knowledge used to represent it and the experiences it produces but also inexorably entangled in them. As noted by Marie Thompson, the temptation to theorize sound as somehow unconcerned with representational strata contains within it unexamined values proper to a particular representational stratum (Thompson 2017b).

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This mistake must not be made in the anthropology of sonic entertainment, as even the very conceptualization of sound as entertainment implies someone (or at a stretch something) with the faculty to be entertained. As such, claims about sound in this regard must be particular to and contingent upon some arrangement of those elements of both the aforementioned and a myriad of other representational schemata through which a given instance is able to be understood as sonic entertainment. Put simply: those assemblages of sonic and other corporeal experiences that you find entertaining, compelling, and indeed may even appear to you as sublime, are not reducible to but inescapably entangled in your tastes. And the value of taste has long been understood to be highly contingent rather than absolute (Bourdieu 1984). As I have argued elsewhere, the way in which we engage with sonic entertainment cannot be as if sound or music provides some missing piece that either increases ethical potential or expands political possibility (Holt 2019: 224). It is rather only through the emergent relationship of sound with some combination drawing from all that we are that any kind of new potentiality emerges. Holger Schulze calls this the “generativity of sound” (2018: 212). Schulze proposes this concept as a means to open up the potentials of sonic experience by calling attention to the intensive immanence of these instances. The sensuous thus infuses the representational with a physicality, which is also already understood representationally. This aggregation is productive of a virtual and malleable sonic persona. Generativity is what constitutes a sonic persona. The tension between hegemonic auditory dispositives and idiosyncrasies of a specific sensory corpus unravels in sonic traces. (Ibid.: 231)

So, we might say that only through the severity of the critique that sonic entertainment has undergone so far in concert with the empirical experience of the aural and corporal pleasures it provides are we able to generate a virtual image of what it may become. With this in mind, I want to close by focusing on an element of festival soundscapes that seems persistent even as it becomes an ever more enclosed locus of capital and simulacra: the emphasis on bass. The power of these frequencies to make sonic bodies shake in such a way as to make identity more supple, the inability of these frequencies to ever fully become semantic, and the deployment of these frequencies to reorganize and maintain time are what gives them at once their appeal as commodities and their uncontainable instability in that form. For Steve Goodman, it is in bass frequencies that we find the political potential of sound. There are moments where this position can verge into the kind of sonic exceptionalism that Thompson criticized. However, if deployed precisely, there may be something of an opening in bass materialism: when sonic articulations resistant to becoming semantic instead become tactile. “We do not yet know what a sonic body can do” (2009: 191) Goodman claims. This notion certainly seemed to ring true for the crowd as Fever Ray performed at WOW: the stage drenched in dark neon and stalked by performers whose identities were unstable, oscillating between particularities and archetypes, with Fever Ray xemself providing both a bridge to the audience and the most intimidating but compelling rictus. All the while, the careful yet thrillingly excessive deployment of bass broke down

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the certainty of who we all were in that moment. The pulse of the kick in song after song seemed to challenge my heartbeat for control of my body. As stated, at this point really anything can happen. This was an opening up to a different kind of eros to that explored by the male critical theorists of the twentieth century. Vibration was central here as the basis of a kind of empathy rather than domination. Despite being able to momentarily escape our individualized confines, we would at some point return to them but in a subtly different form. How would they be different? This was the question: “We do not yet know what a sonic body can do.” While in this state it was Fever Ray who would guide and reform us: “Oh, I’m done looking / Now things can start happening” (Fever Ray 2018). Sound and sonic entertainments offer us the opportunity to produce difference in a Deleuzian sense (Deleuze 2011: 330). However, for creatures that will always to some extent inhabit particular identities and particular positions, this production of difference is perhaps better conceptualized as the generativity of sound. This capacity is not unique to sound, but as a culturally entangled set of practices and customs, there are certain tendencies in the production of difference that sonic entertainment lends itself to especially readily. So while being mindful and taking account of the problematics of each instantiation, I would like to close with some suggestions of where one might find generativity in sonic entertainment. This by no means exhaustive and is in need of development. But these are simply some of the questions I have asked myself in assembling this chapter: What kind of group(s) is (are) listening to this specific sonic entertainment? How are they and who is included? How are they connected? What are they doing? How are semantics and representations displaced by sound? How do semantics and representation return? How is amplitude deployed? Is it a means of dominance? Is it a means of escape? Are these sounds intoxicating? What else might be affecting these and our own sonic bodies? How is the acoustic territory (Labelle 2010) produced? What force has been deployed? Who is deploying it and why? What can you do with these sounds that you couldn’t/wouldn’t have done before? Do you enjoy how it sounds? And why? What does this enjoyment invest in?

15 The Consonance Annemette Kirkegaard

Figure 15.1  Stamp from Zanzibar—showing the religious houses of Stone Town.

Stone Town, Zanzibar, a Musical City My case will take a point of departure in a soundwalk in Stone Town, Zanzibar, based on aural images, which I have drafted through interpretations of the nexus between the sound and the music that I have experienced on location during around twenty years of fieldwork. The sonic desires here, as titles this section of the handbook, are obviously of great relevance

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to my account as the colonial and orientalist longing is dense in the history of the location, reinvented through the independence process and continued in the nostalgia of the present tourism industry, which is the primary basis of the economy of the city. Thinking back, I ask myself: What do I hear or remember to hear when I think of Stone Town? Sea, people, voices, music, and song come first to mind. But maybe more significantly is the dense presence of sonorities, which relate to religious practices. And in Stone Town all the world religions are present in an alleged cosmopolitan illustration (Figure 15.1). The Ngambo—the former African quarters—at the other side of a large creek were in the past visually and audibly separated from the posh city, and here the sounds of so called traditional or indigenous faiths dominated. Today they are all present, but they overlap and fuse in accordance with the social and political changes, which filled the creek and brought down Arab social dominance. The sounds that I am remembering here are all testimony to the hours and hours that I have spent walking the narrow streets and squares of the old five-storied Muslim city of Stone Town on the Western coast of the Island of Zanzibar—an island rich in historical imagination. As early as 1498, Vasco da Gama reported of an island called jangibar, which was peopled by the Moors. This indicates the longtime presence of Muslim political and religious culture, but it is also documented that the presence of Arab merchants and sailors go back much longer. Zanzibar has for centuries been a place of junctions, as it sits on the monsoon drifts and Stone Town has, since the advent of the Omani rulers in the nineteenth century, been a harbor and entrepôt for trade and commerce in the region (Sheriff 2010). For centuries Zanzibar has served as a haven for travelers, journalists, and scholars from Europe, the Middle East and Asia who visited the mighty Sultan’s court before and after entering the so-called dark continent of Africa, on their expeditions for ivory, trophies, slaves, and rivers. It was from this port in Stone Town David Livingston set out to trace the sources of the Nile in 1866. The goods have shifted from the historical trade in slaves, ivory, and spices to being today totally dominated by products related to tourism. But throughout time and despite the shifting items offered for sale, culture and literacy, song, dance, and worship have dominated the urban scene and have come to create a soundscape rich in cultural markers, symbols, and signs: a soundscape that nevertheless continuously questions “the order of things” and which remains an amplification of the significance of continued cultural encounters and change. In order to reveal more about these thoughts, I will embark on an imagined and remembered walk through the Stone Town soundscape as a way of learning and later knowing through sound, and as a bridge to the past: my own and that of the local citizens. To illustrate the elements of this sound knowledge, I divide the experiences into three sonic processes which inform my interpretations: sound localizes, sound organizes, and sound fuses.

Sound Localizes First, I recall the sounds of the multiple religious and spiritual orientations in Stone Town. The city holds three large nineteenth-century mosques of Sunni, Shia, and Ismaili

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orientation plus numerous smaller buildings, three Christian cathedrals—a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran, and an Anglican, also all erected in the nineteenth century—and one Hindi temple. Accordingly, ritual and sacred sounds dominate the entire day. As in other parts of the world, the faiths are audible through bells, chant, and human voices and through their close vicinity they sound out a cosmopolitan atmosphere, which supports the urban ideal of the location. Between the houses of faith and religion, everyday life is audible at food markets like the Forodhani Gardens at the sea front outside the legendary Beit al Ajaib, the House of Wonders, where the flow of international and local voices is broken by the shouts in Kiswahili and English advertising the goods through loudspeakers. The sounds of cooking and frying are interrupted at regular intervals by the Qasidas, evening songs, emanating from the nearby Jami Mosque. Beneath it all, as a deep drone, the accompaniment of the waves splashing against the impressive colonial pier on the coastline localizes the city as the harbor of past and present power. From these piers the slave trade and the ivory commerce, on which the early eighteenth-century traveling cultures were totally dependent, departed toward the East on warships and impressive vessels or dhows. Altogether, the audible environment gives a unique sonic image of exactly this location, the mythical Stone Town.

Sound Fuses From the balcony of the Old Customs House—now home to the Dhow Countries Music Academy, where young students are trained in the unique Zanzibari tradition of taarab— the music is fused with the sound of the Indian Ocean. The cars in the street and the music of Queen constantly steaming out from the neighboring Mercury’s Restaurant, a shrine to the partly accepted son of the city, Freddie Mercury, who was born and raised in Stone Town under the name Farroukh Bulsara. An ambiguous idol for the local citizens due to his sexuality, Freddie is today an asset in the tourism industry, which is crucial to the survival of the communities, and his voice has in mysterious ways returned to the location in which he was previously silenced. The tourists are loud and their presence affects the soundscape as the voices of the tour guides and the English-Italian-German languages are fused with the summing of children’s occasional songs and games—and not least the street vendors loudly advertising Prison Island Tours and CDs with the ubiquitous “Jambo, Jambo” songs, which are simultaneously loved and hated by most people. Walking toward the Kisiwandui area, I find my way to the Tausi Women’s Taarab daily rehearsal room by following—over the sounds of cars and children’s voices in the Jamhuri Gardens—the quite particular sound streaming out of the open windows: prominently the accordion with violins and drums. This is in itself a specific musical soundscape, which is known from the taarab style of old, but in this particular setting also reaches a new sonority. Even if taarab has been closely related to the Middle Eastern world and the presence of the Omani rulers for centuries, it is also a style deeply informed by its African ancestry and the impact of women’s presence in music. Tausi taarab sounds this duplicity with a very clear reminder of so-called local style of the waswahili—the people of the coast. Following the

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ambiguity of the Swahili category system, the voice of lead singer Topsy is very “black,” as opposed to the “white” sound of singers with Middle Eastern ancestry. In the rehearsal room a bundle of cell phones lying on the floor all connected to one extension testifies to the importance and dominance of the mobile technology—both as a means of communication in very loud and audible voices, but equally so as a music device, which as perhaps the only available platform works as playlists for young people; computers are usually not affordable and the tape recorders completely outdated. The discrepancies of the location are further revealed to me through the impact of the very audible sound of languages. Kiswahili, English, and a mishmash of numerous languages used by tourist guides, creates the peculiar murmur of unintelligible meanings.

Sound Organizes While walking the narrow streets of Stone Town, the pedestrians’ voices are interrupted by the loud motor sounds of the piki-pikis, the small motorbikes and their honking horns. The sound is annoying but at the same time necessary in order to organize the passing of the many souls in the traffic turmoil. In the central parts of town, recorded music in food shops and dukas is interrupted by talking and shouts in Kiswahili and woven into the fabric of all the other noises of bikes and bells—sometimes with the sirens of polisi cars on top, which signals hatari, danger, designed to avoid further problems. All over town the sound of children in the madrassas chanting the Qur’an and singing the Qasidas organizes the daily agenda as it drifts through the windows, which are always open due to the heat. Above all, daily life in Stone Town is structured through the adhan calls streaming out from the huge minarets and all the smaller mosques five times a day, often amplified by large speakers and the occasional introductory sirens summoning the citizens to payer. The ambiguity of the reception of the adhan divides the composite audiences and structures their interpretation as song, speech, or something in between. When on Fridays the Khutbas—prayers—are read in the central mosques, the streets are cut off for tourists and in some places even for women. The Khutbas are still audible, but the limited admission to the surrounding streets marks the sounded distance, as the sermons are not intended for pagan ears. So strong is the organizing power of the adhan that during the Sauti za Busara festival in 2010, the performance of Malik Pathé Sow—a well-known Senegalese star—was stopped abruptly by the festival organizers in order to make space for the seven o’clock prayer. It meant that the concert was shortened due to this break. The Senegalese musicians did not show any annoyance, whereas audiences—mostly Western—were somewhat put out about the necessary reorganizing of the program. And yet, despite the dominance of Muslim religious sounds, the Christian churches also ring their bells over the corrugated roofs of Stone Town before mass.

Sound Localizes, Fuses, and Organizes Lives A particularly significant event, which took place during a conversation with composer and female activist Mariam Hamdani in her home in Kisiwandui to the backdrop of the

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urban sounds surrounding our talk, demonstrates how the different layers of music and sound merge in my analysis. During the interview we were interrupted by a phone call. Revisiting the recording some seven years later, I hear the sound of Mariam on the phone in Kiswahili, while suddenly the air is filled with the sound of three competing muezzins who voice the adhan—the call to prayer—from their nearby mosques, on top of the sound of the bikes and their bells, which are in constant used, the motor noise of the piki-pikis and their honking horns, male voices discussing daily problems while enjoying tea at the nearby duka, and children’s chatter and laughter from the street. All these sounds are affected by the very strong wind blowing loudly through the windows, which are always open to fight the heat of midday, and some occasional banging of the windows due to the gusts. These sounds form a distinctive locational mix and to me are heard as unique to Stone Town. They do not only work in separation; rather, they contribute to the localization by way of their “consonance.” This is my way of knowing through sound; my kind of acoustemology. My aim for the following will be to demonstrate how these sounds could be understood as a kind of consonance which simultaneously creates the uniqueness of the connection between place and sound—as opposed to a more traditional ethnomusicological reading, which seeks to separate the sounds and music in order to trace origin, history, and development.

Humanly Organized Sound [F]or centuries residents of Swahili towns and villages have used sound to distinguish their settlements from a surrounding wilderness. (Eisenberg 2013: 195)

The problems of how to study such structures of sound in an environment, which can be called “foreign,” are many. Notably, the fetishization of the label “world music” in the 1980s created conflicting interests, but also the reification of tradition, identity, and locality as seen in a more general ethnomusicological writing presents a risk. Still, it is important to be attentive to its meaning by way of contextualization and historical understanding—I would even dare to say that such concerns are overriding in the cultural situation of the twenty-first century, where globalization and migration increasingly demand human communication and exchange instead of ignorance. In line with Steven Feld’s critique of traces in ethnomusicology, which seem to essentialize the sounds of the world and “aided imperialism and domination of people, species, and places” (Feld 2017: 94) and his call for a post-ethnomusicological reflection, I will question the process of separating sounds and tracing particularities to often dubious agendas of the “ethnomusicology” dogma of significant and essential elements or traces in the music. Instead of a separation of sounds, I want to demonstrate that the partial “reading” of elements of sound/soundscapes—just like the very idea of world music—is unsuitable at the present time and instead, with Feld, call for a cosmopolitan approach to studies of sound. Thus my reflections here address how dialogue with musicians and

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“inhabitants” can overcome the new agenda of essentializing sounds: Yes, I could in fact add that it is precisely the ethnomusicological agenda which results in the backward movement of meaning, here understood as a strongly conservative and increasingly essentialized demand on musicians, artists, and singers. Based on some of the errors that I myself—and with me many other guests and researchers—have made, the following discusses some of the particular risks of working with music and sound. One point in question is that by discussing the soundscape as I do here, I speak of other people’s lives and risk offending or misrepresenting their culture. This is a perennial anthropological problem, but whereas music studies per se, that is, ethnomusicology, have over time developed some methods and practices to deal with the question, opening up the field of the experimental and open-ended discipline of sound studies raises new issues. Fieldwork in such light needs new consideration too. Let me revisit some of my own errors, which relate to the difficulty of understanding sound in context. My first visit to Stone Town, Zanzibar was in 1981. I recall the harbor area, the many small dukas selling tea, fruit, and spices and I remember the sea, the landscape of rich green trees and vegetation, and the strong smell of cloves, which was noticeable even before the ferry was anchored in the port. I also remember vividly the strange sounds of the taarab music, which I had never heard before and for which I was totally unprepared. I strongly remember the feeling of being dislocated as the sound of female and male voices in the Arabic- and Indian-influenced taarab songs streaming from transistor radios was incompatible with my immediate expectations for a possible soundscape in the isles. Coming from almost three months in Dar es Salaam, where I had worked on traditional and popular dance music, I did not connect with the sounds of taarab. In fact, I did not understand it at all. Fast-forward to 1998, when for several weeks I lived in Mkunazini Street in the inner quarters of Stone Town where the streets are narrow and houses five-storied. Due to the relentless heat, all rooms in my hotel, the Stone Town Coffee House—a restored building from 1885—were highly permeable. Everything could be heard, and I was constantly listening to the sounds of the people in the narrow streets, the transistors, and loudspeakers from CD shops and the adhan, the Khutbas, and the readings in the nearby madrassas. This soundscape soon became an important way of localizing my own presence in the city. However, my newly gained understanding of the soundscape in the city was interrupted by the surprising sound of Congolese dance music and Christian Gospel coming from the house opposite me. After some days I ventured into the building and met with a group of Ugandan students who attended a Finnish supported AIDS awareness project, which included music. I became their drum teacher for some days and gradually learned their story. My initial “error,” and accordingly the risk at that time, was that I mistook or misunderstood the sound and the developments of the discourses among the musicians to be modern, Western pop. In continuation of the above experiences in a permeable cityscape, researching sound and music in Zanzibar carries another dimension from the European cities in that it is so very open. The idea of hiding a piece of music or of avoiding sound pouring out into the public sphere is completely absent. Whether intended or casual, this means that it requires

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of its listeners that they know of the appropriate divisions and behave accordingly on their own account—really, that they are able to stop listening! Having presented my “errors” I will now proceed to a key theoretical point: An anthropology of sound, such as that presented here, is not open to just any sort of interpretation—it is not, in other words, an interpretation based on the sounds alone. One cannot just listen and come up with a unique interpretation. Contextualization and fieldwork-based interpretation of the experiences (Cooley and Barz 2008) are a necessity— otherwise, the exercise is irrelevant to academic knowledge. From the perspective of the Stone Town citizens, a difference between sound and music exists, and from the experience of the mistakes I made by just listening, this insight is crucial to an understanding of the way in which sound localizes, organizes, and structures people’s lives. To the informants or insiders, the sounds of music carry special investment and content. And maybe more specifically to the informants and insiders, there is a clear attitude to what is—significantly—not a musical sound: This is not to say that sound scholars, who are generally more dedicated to the “art” concept of sound and perhaps composition, are wrong, but rather that this approach would not solve the problems that arise when opening discourse over the soundscape in the likes of Stone Town. Such an interpretation might not be accepted by the “informants” and, as such, it would not comply with the process of dialogic editing (Feld 2012). But this is to say that the intention for ethnomusicologists is to learn about the human perception and making-meaning of the sounds, rather than about their taxonomy. In his study on the Islamic soundscape in Mombasa, Andrew Eisenberg addresses some of the questions mentioned above. Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya and a location historically related to Zanzibar, shares many elements with the Stone Town experiences. Mombasa Old Town is every day awash with electrically amplified male voices delivering devotional and mortal texts in Arabic and Swahili. Five times a day a polyphony of cantillated Arabic calls to prayer emanates from the rooftop loudspeakers of dozens of neighbourhood mosques, its “soaring yet mournful, almost languid harmonic webs”. (Eisenberg 2013: 190, quoting Hirschkind 2006: 124)

Eisenberg’s example contributes by contextualizing some of the issue that I address—for instance why some sounds are more offensive or pleasing than others and why some are even potentially dangerous. And on the Islamic urbanity similar to that of Stone Town, Eisenberg states: “The most important unifying factor for Mombasa Old Town Muslims, however, is place” (Eisenberg 2013: 189). But contrary to what I have argued, Eisenberg develops his analysis into a confirmation of the way in which sound and music establish borders and differences: Between these periodic sonic events, a random assemblage of radios and computer speakers in local shops homes supply the neighbourhood’s private and semi-private spaces with layers of Qur’anic recitations, sermons in Arabic, Swahili and sometimes English, and religious songs in Swahili and Arabic (Swa. Kaswida; ar. Qasida) producing a continuous emerging of vocal performances that I refer to as an Islamic soundscape. (Ibid.: 190)

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As a consequence, Eisenberg argues that the Khutbas in the Old Town are deeply political because of the ways in which they resound in the neighborhood’s multiaccentual public spaces. He also points to the fact that “[t]he words of the Friday Khutba are not meant for a non-Muslim’s ear” (ibid.: 199) and in doing so he traces or even highlights a “social choreography whereby Muslims and non-Muslims with conflicting acoustemological commitments respond to the Islamic soundscape according to a shared set of normative behavioural expectations” (ibid.: 201).

Acoustemology: Knowing the World through Sound The idea of acoustemology means to animate deeper connections between cultural studies of music and the broader arena of sound studies, itself a convergence of conversations from musical humanities and media, science and technology studies. (Feld 2017: 94)

From an anthropological point of view, the work on soundscapes is necessarily closely tied to the particular events and experiences, but also at the same time interpretive and extremely complex. My short text here is heavily inspired and informed by the work of Steven Feld in, for instance, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years and the recorded soundscape of “Waking up in Nima” (2010) both based on the theory and method of acoustemology. From Feld’s Jazz cosmopolitanism I pick up “diasporic dialogue,” as this concept in many ways matches the discourse on Zanzibari culture. It follows that fieldwork—for me—as a signifier for anthropological studies of sounds and music is critical to the impact of the research. Steven Feld has initiated an expanded method for fieldwork related to music and anthropology, which is called acoustemology—that is, “knowing through sound.” Feld’s work addresses and includes a very broad and multi-sited understanding of the relation between human reception and sound, and his perception of the term “music” extends beyond traditional definitions. Beginning his studies with attention to the close relation between birdsong and human voices among the Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, his research has included “bells of the world” and Por Por funeral horns in Accra. Feld started out within the Blacking (1973) take of “Humanly organized sounds” and Merriam’s “Anthropology of Music”, in which music is never a technical/genre-specific entity but regulated through human agency and perception. Anything is potentially music—an idea also informed by Cage and his contemporaries, the avant-garde, and jazz musicians like John Zorn and other electronic music composers. Feld’s openness to the art world is documented in The Castaways Project (2007), in his jazz performances, and in his interest in and knowledge of sound art from very early on. In order to live up to this ambition and to substantiate “the knowing” inaugurated by the various sounds of the material studied, the work is constantly and consistently rooted/founded in meticulous investigation of the stories and

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events to which the musical sounds themselves are related and contextualized. In practice, this means, to me, that acoustemology is knowing about the world through sound, but that this form of analysis that started through the acquaintance with the acoustic elements in fieldwork only becomes knowledge when it is informed and discussed by history, music theory, recording techniques, and theoretical perspectives. It results in rich contextualization, in which every little detail is provided. This transparency affords the reader the possibility of adding parts of their own experiences to the interpretation. As a response to the risk/danger of separating the various sounds as the singling out of the individual parts will de-locate the meaning and weaken the interpretation, I aim to document how the combined elements of the Stone Town soundscape locate the moment in this particular place and its shared histories. Accordingly, I apply an acoustemological approach to my listening story of Stone Town, in which I investigate the Zanzibari musical location by opening up the sounds, and the stories that they hold, through contextualization. The sort of anthropology I practice here is one of music—to me understood not as a conservative, stubborn reinitiation of the classical work-oriented concept of music, which only repeats the unwise divisions into categories of the Western understanding of music as critiqued by Marcello Sorce Keller (2011), but rather through an open and inclusive interpretation which relates to the values and experiences that people have with the sound. The rejection of categories leads me to the necessary inclusion of a broadly political reading. Like Feld above, Veit Erlmann has throughout his work applied critical readings of the use and agency of music in his analysis of world music, cultural appropriation, and the esthetics of popular music at large. In “The Invention of the Listener” (Erlmann 2016), he contends that “the Western aural self is deeply caught up with the history and politics of difference” (ibid.: 164). The first section of this sentence suggests that the construction of the “invention” rests on a hidden foundation, one in which “the figure of the modern listener is crafted from a narrative of difference and otherness” (ibid.: 165): In relation to my discussion, these words can easily apply, as the interpretations of the Zanzibari location and its peoples often rest on a pronounced orientalist take. As Erlmann states: “The emergence of the (modern) listener is one of the key topics in sound studies” (ibid.: 164) and is closely tied to the technological developments of recording and travel. The basic tools of early ethnomusicology and its “roots of the racialization of the senses” built on a “fascination with the physical and sensory properties of the colonial Other” and are “deeply interwoven with the othering of the senses within the larger project of Western colonial domination” (ibid.: 166, 167). The othering of the senses has been addressed through the “bodily turn” in ethnomusicology, which is continued in the work of Deborah Kapchan (2017a). According to Erlmann, the colonial legacy of the sonification of race endures even under the growing acceptance of postcolonial critiques: “And it survives in ethnomusicology and anthropology’s (and in part in cultural history and popular music scholars’) sustained investment in constructions of the ‘sensuous’ listening practices and esthetic choices of Africans, Asians, and African Americans as fundamentally ‘different’ from those of the racially unmarked ‘listener’” (2016: 168). In Stone Town, the varying interpretations of

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rhythm inform this insight and it is significant that “Africanness” is more related to the music based on drumming and bodily movements and accordingly a “racialization of difference” (ibid.). The local race categories of black and white in Stone Town do not relate to European versus African, but instead mark the difference between Africans and IndianArab citizens. This differentiation is audible in the soundscape and in the contemporary musical choices of performers. In other words, it signifies a bodily relation/connection which has long been under-theorized. The above opens the discussion onto the term “sound knowledge,” recently introduced by Deborah Kapchan. Her work advocates the inescapable presence of a bodily reality in listening and sensing sound, and addresses the conspicuous omissions of such reflection in most studies on sound and listening as well as in anthropologies of music. Kapchan defines sound knowledge as “a nondiscursive form of affective transmission resulting from acts of listening” (Kapchan 2017b: 1–2). She continues that when the sound touches the flesh “the body becomes a magnet for memories” (ibid.) and she highlights how the touch of sound on the eardrum combines vibration with emotion and emphasizes how this informs theorizing “by pushing into what is usually withdrawn but always present in theory: namely method” (ibid.: 4). In my interpretation, it is obvious that the people in Stone Town—the ordinary citizen, an important word in relation to the defining qualities of urbanity in this city—apply this kind of method in their daily lives, when they let themselves be located, fused, and structured through the soundscape. Kapchan emphasizes that this is a method of practice. There are musical methods—ways of moving breathing, reading, listening—that take us along the path not only to playing the instruments, but to becoming one with the instrument … and there is yet another method, and that is technique of the body … Here method is practice, one that skews subject and object much like spirit possession does. (Ibid.)

Both of these methods are needed in order to make sense of the soundscape of somewhere like Stone Town, and they confound the ethnographer “in the paradox of being with and being apart from the social field of listening” (ibid.). “Music and sound more broadly have a particular status in this regard. Music colonizes, creating space through the channeling of vibration and the appropriation of space” (ibid.: 7). This is also of relevance, as sounds that I work with indeed appropriate the space and to a certain extent also colonize the place. Kapchan continues: “But music also blows place apart, dissipating energy, unravelling lines of tension and force, and travelling faster than any other medium” (ibid.).

Cosmopolitanisms and Pastness My point of departure for this discussion of past approaches was that research within the soundscapes of the highly complex sounds of a city like Stone Town have very often tried to single out the individual sounds and either compare their “message” or “origin,”

The Consonance

or focus on a single important or even defining source of music, talk, or noise. This approach is often done to spot differentiations or divides and to—in this particular case the Zanzibari environment—repeat or even reconfirm colonial and racialized histories. In Feld’s thinking, this results in the risk of reification of tradition, identity, and location and complicity to a banalization of musical difference (Feld 2017: 94, 83). A closer look at the term “cosmopolitanism” might enlighten our understanding of the role of sound that I apply in relation to Stone Town culture. The particular culture of Stone Town has for more than a hundred years been related to that mysterious term, cosmopolitanism. Thus, it is embedded in Zanzibari history and has been part of postcolonial/colonial discourses over power structures and racial conflicts since the 1850s (Sheriff 2010). As travelers and explorers hosted by the affluent sultan have described in detail, the lives of the ruling Arab-Omani elite were luxurious and carried the air of a nostalgic orientalist longing. This nostalgia also resounds as sonic desires in the contemporary branding of the tourist destination “Zanzibar” and, to a certain extent, it dominates traditional definitions/memories of the Stone Town soundscape. I challenge this interpretation by exploring the musical soundscape of the city from the perspective of the term “vernacular cosmopolitism,” which has been coined by Pnina Werbner and Stuart Hall among others (Werbner 2008). Understanding cosmopolitanism as principally an idea or even a utopian approach, the work of Werbner is strongly connected to modern understandings of globalization, in which conditions include the transnational movements of refugees, economic migrants, and diasporic cultures (ibid.: 345, 346). Contained in this is the legacy of slavery as seen in the division between black and white citizens, which is still active in the contemporary sound and music. In Stuart Hall’s words, the “Cosmo from above” associated with the elitist affluence and described in the previous chapters—is seen as markedly opposed to the “Cosmo from below,” where it becomes a means of survival and invokes the condition of living in translation, thus vernacular cosmopolitanism (ibid.: 347). The modern fantasy of the cosmopolitan life as offered through tourism, cultural products, and digital media carries the faulty impression/understanding that individuals can be “whoever you’d like to be.” Hall does not approve of this: “Identity is always tied to history and place, to time, to narratives, to memory and ideologies.” Still Hall states that “identity” is on the other hand not inscribed, forever, in or transmitted by, the genes. “It is socially, historically, culturally constructed” (ibid.). Here, a closing line might be that precisely the urban soundscape of Stone Town figuratively affords the “place,” where this negotiation can take place and make a strong argument for an anthropology of sound based on fieldwork and contextualization. However, the classical cosmopolitan aspiration of the co-existence of the three big religions in the location is today challenged by the fact that the unwanted sounds of bornagain Christians from the mainland working in the tourism sector are banned from central Stone Town (Field Work Diary 2013). Referring back to Erlmann’s political reading of the racialized listener mentioned above, Hall’s contemporary, political take on the issue of identity is clear: “if we don’t move towards a more open horizon pioneered by ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ we will find

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ourselves either driven to homogenization from above or to the retreat to the bunker and the war of all against all” (Werbner 2008: 348). And for me this statement points again to the emphasis on practice and method as well as to the dream that culture—understood as a way of living, not art as such—holds the solution to peace. This is very close to the dream/ ambition of the Zanzibari agenda, disregarding that this same peace is constantly under siege. The present political unrest—probably initiated by the advent of the Al-Shabab movement—is only the latest in a long line of violent clashes between citizens of different religious or racial orientations. Let me exemplify these thoughts through the importance/understanding of the musical genre known as taarab. Martin Stokes makes use of the combined thoughts of Thomas Turino and Alex Perullo. With Turino Stokes finds that “local forms of pop and rock like chimurenga are embedded in thoroughly cosmopolitan histories” (Stokes 2007: 6) and further Stokes interprets Alex Perullo as he defines the cosmopolitan in African cities as reflective of people who are using sound as “a way of showing their separation from the villages and towns they had left by appropriating sounds and ideas from other parts of the world” (Stokes 2007: 39). Taarab is an urban musical style closely related to upper-class and aristocratic cultural life. The definition and the placement of taarab must be discussed both in relation to research and performance in the past and the present. I suggest this in order to remodel or perhaps even reject past understandings of the style, both in a theoretical and a practical/ performative way as an identity-maker. Taarab is traditionally described as a feeling or emotion and even as a sort of bodily experience. However, research under such conditions is complicated and even unclear. I argue accordingly that past methods of examining taarab—in its musical texts, styles, and structures—have tried to analyze and categorize the music, which in its broadest sense includes instrumental music, voice/song, choir, movement, and exchange with audiences, following Western categories. More than anything else, the search for the unique/authentic signifiers of Zanzibari taarab as related to nationalism, racial categories, and class—and world music—have been disruptive to an attempt at seeing similarities or even shared connotations in the music itself. Only recently have new ways of knowing through sounds come to the fore. By including in my study the bodily aspects from Kapchan’s theorizing and through the combined impact of the various sounds—musical or other—which compose the aural environment of the city of Stone Town, the possibilities of researching taarab as an inclusive and flexible style can be explored. This is only intelligible though an anthropological understanding of sound and with reference to vernacular cosmopolitanism. In replacing the concept of globalization with the concept of cosmopolitanism, Martin Stokes brings into the discourse the importance of history and pastness—even in the form of nostalgia—and opens his examination to the important idea of imagination in culture studies (Stokes 2007: 6). Taarab and Stone Town qualify for both of these ideas. Accordingly, a cosmopolitan identity is dependent on other people securing the diversity. Appiah notes: “People are different, so the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences” (Appiah 2006: xiii). Already in his work from the

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1990s, Ulf Hannerz noted that value for the cosmopolitans was dependent on diversity and that this again demanded that other people could cultivate their individual or socially constructed niches. It led Hannerz to state that “there can be no cosmopolitans without locals” (Hannerz 1990: 250). In relation to the particular sounds of taarab, it is important to note that while the style is truly and historically linked to the Egyptian music form of Thakt and earlier IndianArab forms, today it differs in significant ways from these models. Historically, one of the major differences in sound is provided by the rhythm structures in which percussion and drums from African traditions of very many kinds are included. Moreover, the rhythmic structures are different from Arab or Middle Eastern structures, iqat, and are generally more “African” in their implicit polyrhythmic forms. Furthermore, the sonority and the texture of the sound is strongly affected by the presence of the accordion—probably from the relation to seamen’s musical forms and the harbor musicians—which creates a unique aural mix with the qanun, the oud, and the violin, plus the electric instruments. In his analysis of the popular cassette sermons and their role as a social element of strong impact in Muslim cultures, Charles Hirschkind finds that “[t]he style of use that characterizes this media form also bears the imprint of popular entertainment media” (Hirschkind 2006: 5). This leads me on to one last important identification of the taarab style informed by the aural presence of the turntable, the radio, and later various forms of music-playing devices and mobile phones. As explained above these add to the significant presence of hybridity in the sense supplied by Stuart Hall. Hirschkind develops the concept of taarab, which is strongly related to Middle Eastern popular and secular music culture (ibid.: 36), and his descriptions clearly relate to the bodily impression or can perhaps even be interpreted as a sign of embodiment—following Kapchan—stressing that taarab over time has been a sound in competition with the religious adhans and kaswidas of the Islamic faith. Thus we see the sacred versus the secular. This understanding, which also permeates Feld’s work on acoustemology, can add to the theorization of the concept of cosmopolitanism as it addresses the opposite of the stereotyping immanent in the process of othering and the orgy of differences, which according to Erlmann (drawing on Baudrillard) is found in the term ‘World Music’ (Erlmann 1993: 8). Through the acknowledgement of human agency and the process of knowing through sound, a shared cosmopolitan understanding might emerge—one in which James Clifford’s assumption that music and other expressive art forms can provide us with a special knowledge of the processes of history and change. What impact does all this have on our use of the travel metaphor and cosmopolitanism? On cosmopolitanism, Eisenberg states that “what makes the Mombasa Islamic soundscape a coherent entity is not its intertextuality, but rather its inter-practicality: the ways in which the sounding and listening practices relate to each other and to the originary Islamic ‘recitation’ of the Qur’an” (Eisenberg 2013: 190). This statement leads on to the cosmopolitan ideal or maybe ideas about the role of sound. Finally, the key term of practice, which I introduced above, is crucial to the contemporary understanding of identity—as in, something we practice and which is not confined to

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genes or upbringing. Taarab is something that is primarily performed as a social event: while the old recordings are still cherished, the central meaning of the style is related to the live stages, for instance at weddings and public events.

Prolonged Presence, Embodiment, and Difference In closing, I will reflect on how the engagement with an extended and re-reflected concept of sound and music, involving the bodily aspects and a meticulous attention to ethnographic detail, can augment the understanding of a vernacular cosmopolitanism as a feasible method in an anthropology of sound. Is it researchable at all or rather too daring to embark along such new paths? The complexity of these issues, which I have examined in the previous sections of this chapter, leaves me with many new questions for future methodology. First, it requires consideration on behalf of the listener and visitor as to how the sounds can be recorded— both literally and figuratively. The listening strategy might or might not require the outsider’s perspective in the sense that the attempt at decontextualized listening might initially be most open to the unknowing visitor. On the other hand—since no one is really an outsider anymore or ever was—the analysis would need or even rely totally on knowledge of the various sounds; or, put differently, on a very particular and intense contextualization, one bridging the divide between conscious and/or unconscious listening. In my view, fieldwork methods are uniquely appropriate for this kind of study. Only through prolonged presence at the location in question can the complexity of the place be conceived and made useful for anthropological interpretation. But significantly, these methods need new approaches as, for instance, in Kapchan’s suggestion of including the embodiment of listening as a practice. Another critically important task will be to clarify the relations and obligations to the informants/friends in the field: How to write and work on these issues so that they are or become understandable or useful to the people in Stone Town or elsewhere? I have argued above for an understanding of music as something perhaps not in direct contradiction to or in conflict with other sounds, but as a particular esthetic form, which in the ears of its locals, that is, the people—insiders as well as outsiders—who have an affective relation to the art form of taarab, msondo, or Bach, is interpreted as something distinguishing itself from street noise. Such reflections relate to the specific difficulties resulting from differences between a local perspective and an outsider’s making sense of sounds and how they will deal with the interpretation of the music-sound-noise dilemma. To the people in Stone Town, radios and mobile phones definitely transmit music. So indeed do the concerts and the performances, disregarding the intended audiences, tourists, wedding guests, or concert-goers. However, the car noises, the honks, bicycle bells, and sirens do not qualify

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for the esthetic term of music (taarab or wimbo) and certainly the adhan, the Khutbas, and the madrassa readings are significantly exempted from the secular realm of the term music. An in-depth realization of this complexity is inescapable from a musical anthropological perspective as part of the necessary interpretation based in the detailed contextualization and the reliance on the voice given to informants during the process of dialogic editing. Moreover, the discourse is still open and calls for increased reflection at a time in which culture increasingly figures as the alleged, assumed, or supposed background to conflict, violations of human rights, and war. This brings me back to the initial organization of my interpretations of the Stone Town aural environment into sound localizes, sound organizes, and sound fuses—meaning that this organization addresses the reactions to the sounds and the further agencies they create. But still I am left with troubling thoughts. To me all these concerns and questions become visible, audible, and striking when I make a sound walk through Stone Town as I have tried to illustrate above—and in fact, in most other places too, as this is not as just an issue confined to exotic and conspicuously “foreign” cities. I am left with the uncanny questionto-self of how to trust my own ears, how to cope with a long tradition in ethnomusicology and perhaps also sound studies in such a way as to be able to work in a scholarly fashion with music and sound. Is it still necessary to reflect on these issues or have we now crossed a line that secures a consensus on a problem solved? In conclusion, the conflict between interpreting sounds as either music or non-music that as I have tried to show, is at the heart of anthropological framings of embodied listening, and the promise of a vernacular cosmopolitanism of a totality of the soundscape, which in the daily lives of Stone Town citizens in closely related habitats secures peace and togetherness—even without necessarily esthetic acceptance of the sounds and music themselves—is a challenge to music studies. So, I am back to the cosmopolitan thought and strategies for listening: Difference—in sound as well as in interpretation and understanding—is a fundamental and tolerance for it is more vital now than ever. If not overcome, the conflicts we see might develop into the sort indicated by the words of Stuart Hall cited above: “if we don’t move towards a more open horizon pioneered by ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ we will find ourselves either driven to homogenisation from above or to the retreat to the bunker and the war of all against all.” (Hall and Werbner 2008: 348).

Postscript Anecdote Prior to my fieldwork for my festival project in Stone Town in February 2010, twelve years after my last visit, alarming news reached me that Zanzibar was suffering from a power shortage and that there was no electricity in the isles. Apart from wondering how a study on an amplified music festival could proceed, I thought that this was perhaps just the usual on-and-offness of power, which I have experienced in all my visits to Zanzibar/ Tanzania. But I was soon to learn that this was more fundamental: the main cable from the mainland had been cut—this meant no electricity at all and that the isles had been

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powered by generators since before Christmas. However, I quickly adapted to the situation of no radio or ubiquitous music in the streets and soon the generators became part of my soundscape for almost one and a half months. Two days before my departure, I walked down Shangani Street to meet friends and suddenly realized that my senses—my eardrums and my eyes—felt a change. There was something strange in the air and the homeliness of the place had completely altered. Gradually, it dawned on me that the lightbulbs in Shangani Street were on and the noise from the generators, which had begun to inform my image of the “normal” and familiar feeling of the city, were missing. The sudden silence was novel and the knowledge and the knowing only disclosed itself gradually after the physical feeling: electricity was back, and the generators had stopped. It was in many ways a nonevent, of a missing soundscape. Once again, I—and many of my friends and relatives in Stone Town—were surprised at the ability of sound to clothe and control the familiarity/ normativity of the location for new sensibilities.

16 The Quietude Tore Tvarnø Lind

Figure 16.1  One of my fellow students, Heidi von Wettstein, made this drawing for me one evening in Athens, after having listened to my tales of silent monks on mules on cobbled paths in the mist. I had just returned from fieldwork at Mount Athos in 1997.

Hesychasm on Mount Athos In a short piece called “Silence over Athos,” Gerald Palmer, a British pilgrim on Mount Athos, Northern Greece, writes: It was mid-day on the sixth of August, 1968, that the motorboat from Daphni stopped … I started climbing alone up the steep path as the motorboat went on down the coast … I sat down in the shade and looked out across the sea, listening to the silence. All was still. Immediately, I felt that now at last I was back on the Holy Mountain, and thanked God for once again giving me this immense privilege. All was still.

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This stillness – this silence – is everywhere, pervades all, is the very essence of the Holy Mountain. The distant sound of a motor-boat serves only to punctuate the intensity of the quietness; a lizard’s sudden rustling among dry leaves, a frog flopping into a fountain are loud and startling sounds, but merely emphasize the immense stillness … Even in the monastery churches, where the silence is, as it were, made more profound by the darkness, by the beauty, and by the sacred quality of the place, it seems that the reading and chanting of priests and monks in the endless rhythm of their daily and nightly ritual is no more than a thin fringe of a limitless ocean of silence. But this stillness, this silence, is far more than a mere absence of sound. I has a positive quality, a quality of fullness, of plenitude, of the eternal Peace which is there reflected in the Veil of the Mother of God, enshrouding and protecting Her Holy Mountain, offering inner silence, peace of heart, to those who dwell there and to those who come with openness of heart to seek this blessing. May many be blessed to guard there this peace or the bear it away as a lasting gift of grace. (Ware 1994: 28 and Ware 2008b: 150–151).1

I complement this meditation on silence with another, taken from my field diary, which I kept while doing fieldwork at the monastery of Vatopédi at Mount Athos in 2000–2001 (for more details on my fieldwork, see Lind 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2016). I reflect on the experience of quietude during a service along with my attempt to record this quietude experience and the Greek Orthodox chanting: There are creaking sounds from the old, wooden stalls and the wooden parts of the floor of the chapel. The sound is caused by monks and pilgrims kneeling down. Some monks are bending over their knees, which are resting on the floor. The experience of silence is thick. Nobody makes a sound but the creaking wood and the clothes that cover the moving bodies. Silent bodies. (Lind 2012a: 193).

In this silent moment, I was struggling hard not to make any noise, or to disturb the microphone, as I participated in the genuflection exercises on the floor. When listening back to the recording, I was surprised to learn how no one around me was silent in any simple auditory sense. Somebody’s down jacket made intruding noises, not to mention my own Gore-Tex jacket, which was a terrible nuisance. I learned that for practical reasons it matters what you are wearing when recording silence, and ever since I changed to wearing soundless fabrics such as wool or fleece. The point is not so much that of reducing the noises that are an inextricable part of most experiences of silence. Rather, the idea is to understand how silences, as part of social, religious, and musical practices, are understood and valuated as “silent” and why and how silence is desired. My own preconceptions of Greek Orthodox quietude had been forged by my early experiences of hiking, of bird watching, and the ways I enjoy nature’s sounds and stillness. Today, I see how the writings of pilgrims such as Gerald Palmer influenced my pre-understanding of Athonite pilgrimage. I return to the pilgrims below together with other silence-seekers to illustrate how the desire for silence is not confined to monastic quietude but is part of modern ways of realizing oneself, and very much a privilege for those who have the means to escape the noisy crowd and retreat to bubbles or glamping with a

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canoe. The following passage from my field notes in June 2000 reveals the engagement of the bodily senses at a particular moment during a hike between monasteries, but it also shows how at the time I would ascribe noise to the presence of human beings (the monastery crowd): It is warm and humid. I am heading for the monastery of Iviron. Here the path is rocky, dusty and dry from the early summer sun; there it bends and turns into cool shade and soft soil under the trees. The smell of wet mold, rotten bark, and pine. As I stop to pause, lower my pulse, and take a sip of water, I realize how silent it is here on the path. The insects’ buzzing and the birds’ twitter are drowned only by the sound of my throat as I drink. Then I hear the faint sound of a distant chainsaw. The monastery can’t be far away (Lind 2012a: 173).

In Greek Orthodox Christianity the term Hesychía refers to spiritual silence; a common translation is quietude. Quietude is both a concept and a practice; it is a mode of relating to God and reflecting on the relation between life and death. Quietude differs from stillness, yet it is related to taciturnity and absence of anthropogenic noise, and poetic references to undisturbed natural surroundings and the desert suggest metaphorical and practical resemblances with nature’s peace and quiet. Quietude is a way of approaching the Christian deity known as God, a practice, something that monks living in solitude do. The ways in which quietude relates to Greek Orthodox chanting, or Byzantine music, is telling of the dynamic relationship between sound and quietude. In the years between 1997 and 2013, I visited the Greek Orthodox monks at the Holy Mountain, also known as Mount Athos, in Northern Greece, for ethnomusicological fieldwork. The aim was to study the Athonite chant tradition, which resulted in prolonged stays at mainly two monasteries, the Great and Holy Monasteries of Ivíron and Vatopédi, where I also experienced the practice of hesychía. In this chapter, I discuss how quietude is conceptualized, practiced, and related to the musical tradition at Mount Athos. Below, I also bring in different pilgrims’ experiences. Quietude denotes a special attitude toward God. In the words of the abbot of Ivíron, Father Vasileios, quietude “is the ‘mental quietude’ or ‘inner tranquility’ of the Orthodox spiritual tradition, the ‘solitude of silence’ of the heart when thoughts (logismoí) do not trouble it … Not simply ‘silence’ but an attitude of listening to God, and of openness to him” (Vasileios 1996: 7, n2). Quietude is related to many common understandings of silence, although in this specific case, the two terms are not the same: Silence is the absence of spoken words; quietude describes a condition undisturbed by anthropogenic sound, an inner stillness marked by the absence of physical sound (see Lind 2012a: 173–198). In practice, monks would honor this principle in a practical manner by not speaking, by not producing any vocal sounds. Some monks practice quietude together in small groups, but most famously, the hermits practice quietude individually in remote areas. The southern tip of the Athonite peninsula is known as the érimos, the desert. Living in quietude means living alone in solitude, embraced by nature’s multiple sounds. The hermits live in simple caves or huts, suspended on the steep cliffs of the mountain. Food and drink— delivered in a suspended basket—is brought to the hermits by brethren from the monastery they adhere to. Otherwise, there is no contact with the surrounding world, no machinery,

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no electricity. The hermits are typically spiritually adept monks with experience of living a monk’s life in a coenobium (koinóvion, i.e. the monks follow a shared daily routine), but as hermits they are released from their duties that communal life demands. Quietude “thus involves immediate separation from social groups, and societal and communicative sound” (Lind 2012a: 180). Nevertheless, the embodied, “non-verbal behavior” (Jenkins 2004: 153) associated with the practice of quietude is a socially contingent practice which consolidates specific ideas of how it is at all possible to know God. Quietude is an internal state in which the monk examines himself in front of God, alone and wordless, “fighting his passions more deeply and purifying his heart more fully, as to be found worthy of beholding God” (Mantzaridis 1997a: 42). In quietude, therefore, silence is both intended and desired. Athonite monks use the phrase “in the world” (ston kósmo) when talking about the world outside of the Athonite borders, denoting the Holy Mountain as otherworldly, as a place beyond the world. In his work on remoteness, anthropologist Edwin Ardener notes that although remote areas are topographically real, located in a limited and specific place, they are also imaginary, “defined within a topological space whose features are expressed in a cultural vocabulary” (Ardener 2007: 214; see also Lind 2012a: 132–133, Lind 2014: 193). There is a name for a layman, kosmikós, that is, a man from the (worldly) world. Conversely, Greek pilgrims often describe the journey to Mount Athos in terms of “leaving the world” (páme éxo, in the plural). In this way, Mount Athos is discursively maintained and imagined as a remote place. As a consequence, the monks who live “outside” easily come to be viewed as remote others. The monk’s way of chanting, by extension, becomes the sound of “the remote.” In the process of globalization, old meanings of the Athonite heritage are stretched to serve new ends, and the “definitional space is transformed accordingly” (Hastrup 1995: 156). Understanding Mount Athos as remote, or even marginal, in globalized modernity, becomes a way of creating a new symbolic resource (cf. ibid.: 156). Yet in ecclesiastical and spiritual, and even in musical, matters, the Athonite, or the hagiorite (i.e. “from the Holy Mountain”) monasteries simultaneously define the very center of Greek Orthodox and Pan-Orthodox Christianity. This is a “dominant zone” (Ardener 2007: 222–223). After all, it is the Holy Mountain. It is hard to miss the paradoxical character of Mount Athos as simultaneously dominant and remote: “both center and margin add to the musical style an air of exclusiveness and authenticity” (Lind 2012a: 133), which inextricably becomes part of how Athonite chanting, and even the Athonite practice of quietude, is appreciated. Characterizations of Mount Athos as an alternative to modern urban lifestyle, pictures of unique flora and undisturbed streams, and notions of the monks’ incessant praying only add to the place’s symbolic resource—not to forget the silence to be found there. This dynamic is easily transferable to other remote places in the world and other cultural settings and practices: yoga retreats in Big Sur, California, trekking in the highlands of north eastern Sweden, and alternative living in “the fringes” of Danish society (Udkantsdanmark, for example, on the west coast or the islands since 2010). These areas are marked by increased low-density population; they are relatively remote, yet accessible, and they offer unique experiences of wild nature, spiritual journeys, relaxation and bodily

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exercise, and the opportunity of listening to silence. However, unlike a place such as Mount Athos (a dominant zone at the very periphery) these peripheries are typically “not properly linked to dominant zones. They are perceptions from the dominant zone” (Ardener 2007: 222–223): as the remoteness of the places—and the silence they offer—is increasingly emphasized as a virtue, the more obvious it is that they are the product of urban desires. Silence, in most of its reifications in real life, is combined with absence of people, of spoken words, of anthropogenic sounds. In literary studies, “the mere absence of sound or utterance” is called “direct silence” (Henriksen 2016: 3). Terms that often surface to describe particular silences are absence, remoteness, solitude, retreat. All these have a social bearing: the negation of sociality. In his article on music and everyday life, Simon Frith draws on the widely shared experience of circumambient “musical pollution” (Frith 2012: 150) and undesirable sounds. Frith argues that silence is so rare that it has become, in itself, increasingly valuable. We live now not just with the permanent sense of traffic roar, the routine interruption of sirens and car alarms and mobile phones, but also with the ongoing electric hum of the refrigerator … Silence has become the indicator of an unusual intensity of feeling. (Ibid.)

Studying Silence How does one study quietude or silence, and what does the “material” consist of? As silences are many things, they call for multiple approaches. Silence in music, literature, theatre, religion, psychology, and so on are not necessarily to be approached in the same way. Danish psychologist Peter Elsass describes in his introduction to Buddhist psychology the importance of solitude and isolation in the practice of Tibetan Buddhist meditation (Elsass 2011: 235–251). Going to a remote place in a so-called retreat (a wished-for pulling away of one’s self from the company of others), is one of the ways to approach Buddha. Far from anthropogenic sounds and everyday action and communication, Buddhists cultivate with enhanced enthusiasm their compassion, patience, and empathy with others. This is an example that shows how a psychologist takes pleasure in learning from participating and studying the cultivation of silence in a specific spiritual practice. Crossovers between thoughts from existential philosophy, psychology, and religion are plenty. Take, for example, the teachings of Indian Jiddu Krishnamurti, who speaks of the “meditation of a mind that is utterly silent” as the “benediction that man is ever seeking” (Krishnamurti 1970: 30) and the need for global, inter-human compassion, as well as communion between humans and the environment. The object of a sonic desire can be silence. Yet it is important to emphasize that silence is always axiological, never wertfrei, always situated and determined by its social, cultural, and historical context. The silent and wordless practice of quietude in Greek Orthodox monasticism is a way of relating to God. Quietude is a specific way of being, a practice that is spiritual, and bound to the theology and doxology of Orthodox Christianity. It has

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also strong ties to the practice of Orthodox chanting in the melismatic part of the vast Byzantine musical repertoire, known also as teretísmata, not least in the wordless jubilation of what I have coined “meaning-free syllables,” as an alternative to the widespread term “nonsense syllables” (Lind 2012a: 182–189). The latter registers that the syllables do not make any sense on a semantic level (indeed, they are complete nonsense as anóites syllavés, as the monks themselves call them, “meaningless syllables”); however, it ignores the possible meanings of the syllables beyond semantics. As structural units, the syllables “create fantastical polysyllabic words” (ibid.: 183) by repeating syllables from the poetic text without any lexical significance. However, when understood in the spiritual context of quietude, the wordlessness of these syllables makes profound sense. As Frater Christóphoros of the monastery of Ivíron explained to me: Humans communicate with words. When we pray, and use our voice to praise the Lord, we have taken the first step toward reunion with him. However, the next step is to let the prayers, the word of the Lord, dwell in your heart permanently. The you “speak” to God without words. Words are not important. And the teretísmata in the music symbolize precisely that kind of wordless communication. When you experience divine light, it is so beautiful that you do not know what to say. Words become insignificant. This is the second step on the ascension toward the reunion with God. As for the third step, well … man has not reached so far yet. (Lind 2012a: 183)

The teretísmata are ways of sounding spiritual meaning, proffering an angelic imitativeness where monks, mimicking the angels and cherubs, strive for perfection—the “terere” refers to “the angels who chant with wordless sounds” (Touliatos 1989: 240). It is a “mimetic silence,” as literary scholar Anni Haahr Henriksen has it, which “imitates the absence of sound and therefore cannot be verbally represented” (Henriksen 2016: 24). As Alexander Lingas shows, melismatic chant relates to hesychasm “in the artistic, liturgical, and even spiritual freedom presupposed by the music” (Lingas 1996: 168). According to Lingas, chant in fourteenth-century Byzantium was considered a monastic virtue allowing for true contemplation, “provided that it was practiced with the mind and heart set on God” (ibid.: 167), as the practice of quietude also implies. Hesychía, as it is practiced at Mount Athos, is related to particular ways of presencing God in the icons and the Jesus Prayer; it is related to Byzantine chant as well. Quietude, therefore, is related to a particular musical soundscape, that of Greek Orthodox chanting. Hesychasm is the Greek word for “practicing quietude,” and hesychasts are those who follow this practice. A dominant devotional movement in the fourteenth-century Greek Orthodox Church, the “practice of contemplation of God in hesychasm was intimately linked to the icon: while disciplining the human faculty of hearing, it emphasized the complementary importance of sight, dwelling on the truths which icons embodied, and the spiritual light which shone through them” (MacCulloch 2013: 111). Practicing quietude, by following particular ascetic ways of living and breathing, became a way for the Orthodox of knowing God. The little Jesus Prayer is related to hesychasm. All newcomers and monks repeat this single devotional phrase: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner” (cf. Lind 2012a: 109, 119 n40).

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At first, the prayer is repeated continuously, then silently, until reaching the point where each breath (defined as an inhale and an exhale) becomes a prayer: the oxygen carrying the spiritual (ideally unspoken) words are turned into somatic energy through the alveolus in the lungs and via the veins to the heart: Every heartbeat becomes a prayer. A peculiar askésis (the Greek word for exercise; related to asceticism), of control over the flesh; a system of spiritual focus (silent contemplation) merging with human anatomy and metabolism, leading to divine love and true knowledge of God. It is not mere metaphor; the practice of quietude is a bodily exercise. Following sound phenomenologist Don Ihde, the Christian deity wishes not to be seen; vision is obscured, which lends primacy to words. He sees the essentially invisible presence of God in the holy word and holy voice in Western Christian theology as a “dominantly auditory presence” (Ihde 2007: 174, italics in original). This is also true for Eastern Christian theology, and it is important to bear in mind that the spiritual practice of hesychía is not a late modern, liberal invention, but bound to the virtues of obeying and listening to elders, even though it aims beyond voice and words. “In the drama of the liturgy the god is experienced in the presence of voice. But the listening which no longer hears in voice the sounding of the god cannot at will draw speech from the silence. The god is the ultimate extreme of otherness that nevertheless belongs to the same possibilities as sameness in the presence of words” (ibid.: 174–175). Put differently, hesychía is desired, but “the bearers of this silence,” in the words of Philip Peek, “are awaiting to be fulfilled with God’s voice, to become one with the Holy Ghost … Vows of silence are punishments, attempts to sacrifice human sound to demonstrate piety” (Peek 1999: 30). At some Athonite monasteries, services take place in the monastery’s small chapels (parekklésia). At Vatopédi, nineteen chapels are built into the many wings and walls, variously placed around at the monastic building complex. Several services will be taking place simultaneously in selected chapels. This is out of the ordinary, as most services happen in the katholikón, the monastery’s main church. The multi-service situation demands that the choir split up into smaller groups of only one or two leading voices (protopsáltes) and one or two other voices (isokrátes) to keep the drone (íson). As the social body of the choir shrinks, the performance is simpler and the sound volume consequently decreases. Quietude is central to the Holy Eucharist and related to the Christian virtue of humbleness. On one occasion during fieldwork, I was allowed to record this service in its entirety. The result was an attempt to capture in sound recording the shared experience of silence and attitudes of humility in the Divine Liturgy. Usually, non-Orthodox persons would be kindly asked to leave the service at this point; however, the monks could see no harm in me participating—after all, it was “only a minor service in a humble chapel.” The Cherubic Hymn is followed by a thanksgiving in the shape “We Praise Thee” (Se ymnoúmen), a rather simple hymn performed during the Holy Eucharist, in the second part of the Divine Liturgy. The Holy Eucharist is consummated by an extensive prayer, known as the Eucharist or Thanksgiving Prayer, part of which is read aloud by the priest. In this particular service, the incantation was performed by the abbot (who is also a priest), Father Ephraim, who, rather than reading, was chanting with a soft voice, and the thanksgiving hymn by a soloist monk (far from all monks are priests). As the ritual came to the moment

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of consummation, Father Ephraim intoned: “Take, eat, this is my Body, which is broken for you, for the remission of sins … Drink all of you, this is my Blood of the New Testament, Which is shed for you and for many, for the remission of sins.” He then lifted up the gifts—the bread and the cup, both covered by decorated pieces of red and gold cloth—and made the sign of the cross, which signifies that the sacrifice (the gifts) of the altar is the sacrifice of the cross: “Thine own of thine own we offer to Thee, in all [time] and for all [kindness to us].” This part in the ritual of the Divine Liturgy— the consummation of the Holy Eucharist—is a moment marked by solemnity, as those present are invited to participate in the remembrance, the anamnesis, of the sufferings of Christ on the cross. In terms of the chronotope of religious time, the rituals are conceived as reification and confirmation of past events—participants are witnessing Christ being crucified; time is cyclical. The moment just before the priest invokes the Holy Spirit to come upon him to bless the bread and the chalice, the hymn is performed: “We praise Thee, we bless Thee, We give thanks to Thee, O Lord, And we pray to Thee, O our God.” When performing this hymn, the monks at Vatopédi lower their voices, altering the otherwise habitual full-bodied vocal performance in the katholikón. In the chapel, the physical dimensions of the room are smaller, people present are physically close to one another, and the chanting seems more intimate. Performing the hymn sotto voce must be understood as a relatively recent practice, the pious quality of which seems out of tune with traditional attitudes toward Byzantine chanting in Greece. However, it is prescribed in, for example, Nicholas M. Elias’s Divine Liturgy Explained, an official edition in English. Here, the reader is instructed to perform the Thanksgiving Hymn in a “melodic and reverent tone” (Elias 2000: 165). Monks at Vatopédi find the practice beautiful and sincere in the way it portrays spiritual sensitivity and matches vocally the humble attitude that the moment requires. I noted the experience in my field diary, relating it to what I recorded (see the opening of this chapter). The silent quality of the recorded moment, the experience of being in the midst of the Holy Eucharist on that day in November 2001, can be understood as a “radical leveling” (Lind 2012a: 193). Monks cover their long hair by wearing a black cowl during services, and the only time they take it off is at this point during the Eucharist when they let it rest on their shoulders as they perform the prostrations and venerations. A covered head distinguishes monks from everybody else (laymen would take off their hat, cap, etc. when inside the church); however, at this silent moment, we are all equal: the bareheaded monks, laymen, pilgrims, all positioned down on the floor witnessing and contemplating Christ on the cross, his death, and ultimately, his resurrection. We are all partaking in the disciplinary practices through which the Christian virtues of humility and obedience are appropriated, proffered by a delicate balance between trained vocalization and quietude. The beauty of God and divine truth is admitted to the devout participant through the disciplinary, bodily practices of quietude and vocalization within the liturgical, doxological, and theological context of the soteriology of Greek Orthodoxy. Participant observation in moments of quietude or silent situations taken together with religious, historical, and cultural analyses (not a conclusive list) amounts to a multiple ethnomusicological approach to studying silence and produces polymorphous

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silence-material. As the example above illustrates, applying the use of sound recordings of experienced quietude as one of these material forms—of people being silent, behaving and acting silently, and performing silence and hymnody in various dynamic ways—is indeed a meaningful endeavor: A sound recording of any real, experienced, shared, and lived silence, is never soundless.

An Anthropology of Silence? In this chapter, I argue that silence is socially constituted. Even when the absence of other people is wanted, silence is socially contingent. In a sense, studying silence is to get to know ways of being, as it is often expressive, communicative, and performative. That nothing is said in moments of silence does not mean that all understanding ceases (cf. Hastrup 1990: 51). There is much to be understood from contexts in which nothing is said, in moments with no immediate textual meaning. Philosopher Martin Buber’s silent dialog speaks of the social contingency of being quiet: “Dialogue can be silence … We could sit together, or rather walk together in silence and that would be a dialogue” (1965: 165). One way of approaching silence is similar to that of the anthropology of music, that is, by way of participation in the social world of silence, stillness, quietude, and so forth. As is customary in anthropological fieldwork, the musical anthropologist would seek to position themselves in the immediate social context of the musical performance. Silences are performative in the sense that performers lower their voices, alter their bodily gestures, and people change behavior when trying to be silent and move silently. The monks chant meaning-free syllables, the meaning of which lies beyond semantics. Participation in silence and events involving silent moments allows the fieldworker to experience silence in the particular situation. Silence is made meaningful in the context where it is lived, where it is performed, where it is desired. In relation to the study of music and sounds, silence is often most telling in relation to the surrounding sounds, and the performative, musical context. In the introduction to their Resounding Transition anthology, ethnomusicologists Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Engelhardt reflect on Vedic chant in the Hindu tradition: The dynamic quality of moving between silence and sound in order to resound what the Rg Veda’s hymnodists articulate is fundamental to the understanding of the relation to music of religion … The emptiness of the om in Buddhist ontologies of religion and music, therefore, is a space of perception and experience, not of silence and absence. The om is filled with emptiness. (Bohlman and Engelhardt 2016: 2)

If there is a need to develop a distinct anthropology of silence—I am not so sure, but if there is—it would be an interdisciplinary, interpretative approach focusing on silence’s relational, social, and communicative aspects, though without leaving out the physics of sound and silence. Rewriting Bruno Nettl’s credo for an ethnomusicology (Nettl 2005: 12–13), which could already be said to include the world’s silences as far as they are part of

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the musical fabric, an anthropology of silence would be the study of silence in culture. As with music, silences “must be understood as part of culture, as a product of human society” (ibid.: 12). The musical anthropologist is interested in various communities’ ideas about what silence does, how silences are performed, sought, and outlived, changed over time (for example in relation to societies’ noise production), and also in how one understanding of silence might influence another. Therefore, studying silences is implicitly comparative, while maintaining the aim of studying each silence on its own terms, as a given group of people understands it. Silence is not necessarily exceptional for the individual, yet individual experiences of silence are of crucial importance to understanding why and how silence matters. By way of fieldwork, we can participate in silences (as well as in music) together with (a small number of) people who “conceive of, produce, and consume” silence (ibid.: 13). In line with Timothy Cooley and Gregory Barz’s outline of the “new fieldwork,” I suggest avoiding prescriptive recommendations concerning what one should and should not do in the field, what questions one should ask, how one should participate, and definitions of what silence is and what it is not (see Cooley and Barz 2008: 22). Ideally, the study of silence would be of benefit for the people from whom we learn. In producing situated and nuanced knowledge about silence, we hope to generate increased understanding for silence complexities around the world, and we might, when relevant, even help people who are silenced by way of voicing and advocacy (such as silenced musicians, or victims of abuse). However, this is not at all new to ethnomusicology, or to other activist ways of engaging music censorship for that matter. Musical anthropology is interested in all kinds of music, as Nettl (2005: 13) has it, and there is no reason not to include all manifestations of silence as well—quietude being one of them. As Philip Peek (1999) illustrates, silence has many different roles and meanings in various Asian, African, and European cultures. Silences differ, and different (ideas about) silences might exist simultaneously, be contradicting and overlapping: Silence might be part of (or in opposition to) musical performance, an art form, and a way of oppressing others (silencing) or the self (refusing to speak). Silence is an attitude of listening (keeping silent, being attentive, showing interest or obedience). It may be psychic violence (refusing to speak to others) and a torture instrument (muting the other’s capacity to listen is an effective way to disorient). Silence is a metaphor for inner peace of mind; for keeping order in society, authority in place, and loud children at a distance. Apropos the poetics of musical silences, musicologist Thomas Clifton notes how silence may interact with musical tension in various ways. In a close reading of musical scores (of European art music) and listening to recordings of the works studied, Clifton “contextualized silences as phenomena in direct relation to what they emerged from and what emerged from them” (Sutton 2007: 171), separating musical silence into temporal, spatial, and gestural modalities (Clifton 1976: 164), such as “moving silences” (ibid.: 178). Silences in music are overtly dramatic, and like theatre, meant to be attended to, participated in, and “not read by the audience” (Henriksen 2016: 39). In music, silence is “not nothingness,” but rather “an experienced musical quality which can be pulsed or

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unpulsed in musical time, attached or detached to the edges of a musical spatial body, and finally, which can often be experienced as being in motion in different dimensions of the musical space-time manifold” (Clifton 1976: 181). Clifton engages the phenomenal world of music as humanly meaningful, and experiences, for instance, the gradual instrumental “drop off ” in the last measures of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite as a process of disengagement (ibid.: 175). In the final movement of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the “gaps take on a very human significance”: Giving way to the silences, the composition becomes a sign not only of Mahler’s foreknowledge of his own death, but of “the essence of dying, rather than just the metaphor of dying” (ibid.: 176). Other studies of silence in music exist (including Edgar 1997, Littlefield 1998, Peek 1999, Losseff and Doctor 2007), bearing witness to the growing interest in the field. Yet the number of studies is still relatively small, speaking of the subject field as somewhat embryonic. Jenny Doctor (2007) notes that even in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music (2001) there is no article on silence (status unchanged). Inspired by Asian aesthetics, Hindu theories, and Zen Buddhism, post-Second World War avant-garde composer John Cage developed his aesthetic of silence, and “took to heart the purpose of music as expressed by his friend Gita Sarabhai [an Indian musician]: ‘to quiet and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.’ His goal became not just to evoke stillness, but to practice it” (Prichett, Kuhn, and Garrett 2012). Cage played with the idea that no music (silence) could fill up musical time-based structures just like “uneventful music” could, hence his famous good four and a half minutes of uninterrupted silence (4’33’’), also referred to as “Silent Prayer” (ibid.). Quietude as a spiritual practice in Christianity is one thing. Diarmaid MacCulloch (2014) has written a historiography of Christianity framed around different ways of understanding silence. Holy silences; silence as survival and protest, as shame and purposeful forgetting, as concealing clerical abuse of children. This polyphony of silences is of course a way of framing the highly complex history of one of the world’s most powerful religious institutions. The different silences need different definitions. Some designate allegories and metaphors, others point to spiritual practices and disciplining, or ways of knowing or concealing. Most silences are, as in the case of the practice of quietude, interlinked with a range of other concepts, local idiosyncrasies, and bodily practices. As MacCulloch shows, there is a lot to be grasped from what is not being told, especially in cases where silences ought to be broken to give voice to those silenced by ecclesiastical power, or any other authority. Silences are not necessarily musically dependent. The field of music, however, as far as the silencing of voices (and musical sounds) is concerned, is rich in examples of silencing in relation to power, manipulation, or control. As the chapters in Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia edited by ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin testify, “music is quixotic in its ability to serve both dominant power positions and ideologies and at the same time give voice to those disempowered by them” (Nooshin 2016: 30). So, music is also often a means of voicing political resistance and minority concerns, and of lending power to those voices. From this volume, then, we learn how political, religious, and other authorities attempt “to manipulate, control and even

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silence music … Indeed, perhaps the strongest statement and acknowledgement of music’s power is that it invokes such intense reactions” (ibid.). For the study of silence, reflection on context and the positioning of those engaged with it lends important meaning: Who silences? Who fills or breaks the silence? Who uses or seeks silence? Nooshin reminds us that silence is part of the fabric of music, not its opposite, not its absence. “We need to look beyond the well-worn binaries of domination and resistance, victimiser and victimised, voice and silence, which are simply too unwieldy to engage with the complexity of lived musical experiences where sound and silence coexist and intertwine with one another” (ibid.: 31).

Five Centuries of Silence-Seekers Silence-seekers are human beings who search for silence. The following examples illustrate silence encounters in monasteries, in the wilderness, in psychotherapy, even in technology. Gerald Palmer—whose meditation on silence opened this chapter—is remembered as a “seeker” (Gothóni and Speake 2008: 17), and Sherrard identified himself a “spiritual seeker” (Sherrard 1977: 101–102, quoted in Toti 2008: 119). I address other pilgrims by that term—pilgrims who during their stay at Mount Athos felt touched by Greek Orthodox quietude in different ways. In his book, Mount Athos: A Journey of Self-Discovery, Brazilian business manager and consultant Luiz Rocha set off toward Mount Athos “completely stressed,” feeling that his “speed was so high” that he “was missing the whole meaning of life” (Rocha 2009: 4). Rocha does not mention when he visited Mount Athos, and describes the length of his stay only vaguely as a “short-term rupture of my present and my past as a way of realigning myself ” (ibid.). The story of Rocha’s self-discovery tends to borrow the language of selfhelp manuals packed with good advice. Rocha speaks directly from the center of fellow stressed-out people using the first-person plural (we, our), as he defines his answer as a “search of the path that will lead us to ourselves once again” and “a journey, to leave the surface of our lives and descend into our interior” (ibid.: 14, 4; emphases mine). By extension, Rocha uses business management phrasing, as when he describes Mount Athos as “the kind of place where introspection and self-evaluation are facilitated” (ibid.: 16). However, in the course of a few days, he seems to be changing. A monk he meets at Ivíron monastery advises him to bring himself into a place “where the human heart is in a state of aloneness, in a state to meditate, to pray, to fast, to reflect upon one’s inner existence and one’s relationship to the ultimate reality, God” (ibid.: 37). A hermit in the Athos desert then assures him that the journey toward the within starts by learning to be silent: “You must learn to be still … Pay attention to your breath and try to calm it down, inhaling and exhaling slowly. Stillness is the preparatory step to prayer. It’s your own effort to be still that gives rise to prayer. The resulting fruits and benefits are an internal and external change, for the better, of yourself ” (ibid.: 68). Having experienced “inner silence” (ibid.: 74) in front of icons and alone in a cave-like hut, Rocha returns home a changed man.

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German multi-instrumentalist and new age composer Stephan Micus’s album Athos: A Journey to the Holy Mountain (1994) was produced after a number of journeys to the peninsula in 1988, at a time where cars were considerably less in number than today. In the CD booklet, Micus writes that in “this secluded place [i.e. Mount Athos] the Orthodox teachings and way of life have been preserved almost unchanged” (Micus 1994: n.p.), thus emphasizing Athonite remoteness and wisdom as markers of a journey into some mystical truth. On silence, which concludes the introduction in the booklet, Micus states: In spite of dramatic changes in recent years, Mount Athos continues to be a place of silence: the silence of its ancient monasteries and the silence of its nature. I offer this work in gratitude to all those who took part in creating it and in keeping it alive. (Ibid.: n.p.).

A grandiose salute to the fathers and founders of Athonite quietude, Stephan Micus’s work expresses his experience of silence by way of a plethora of musical instruments and sounds. The album consists of eight pieces centering on contrasting vocal “night pieces” (thought to mirror the services in the monastic churches) with instrumental pieces for the days of walking (between monasteries). Micus chose a vocal setting because the music at the monasteries is strictly vocal, yet his “22 voices” sound very different from the Greek Orthodox voices at the monasteries; the musical material is not that of Byzantine music. The style and vocal use sound rather like Micus’s own personal musical style. The “day” pieces are performed on various musical instruments from around the world, including “Bavarian zither,” a sataer (a Uyghur long-necked bowed lute), a Japanese shakuhachi flute, a suling (a reed flute from Bali), flowerpots tuned with water, and a nay (defined as the “ancient Egyptian reed flute”). The instrumentation places the work in line with Micus’s many other albums, released on ECM Records for the alternative music market. Artists such as Jan Garbarek, the Hilliard Ensemble, Giya Kancheli, and Arvo Pärt have also released contemplative, minimalistic music in a similar vein on ECM. Athos: A Journey to the Holy Mountain is Micus’s own inner journey in musical form. Much like Luiz Rocha’s Mount Athos: A Journey of Self-Discovery, it is concerned with a “return” to or a “realignment” with self, rather than a Christian Orthodox God, which position these responses within heterodox, new age spirituality. The silence that Micus and Rocha feel aligned with, so I contend, is a multi-spiritual self-therapeutic, conception— one distinct from the ascetic and disciplined Orthodox Christian quietude, namely of the “individualistic ‘mysticism’” in the West, as British pilgrim Philip Sherrard (1998: 252), would phrase it. The silence Micus and Rocha experienced at the monasteries, alongside their encounters with monks, have arguably made a profound impression, and this shines out of their work. Clearly, silence to them is also a resource for recharging bodily and mental batteries, as well as for artistic inspiration, conceptions, and practices that point outwards to the individualistic world and worldly life beyond Mount Athos, rather than to an alignment with, or a homecoming to, the deity of monotheist Greek Orthodoxy. It could be said that they claim an inner change, similar, yet not alike, to the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, which lies at the heart of pilgrimage, meaning “change of the nous” (Toti 2008: 110).

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For the devout Greek Orthodox Christian pilgrim, the spiritual center is not found within; the spiritual center is Mount Athos (Gothóni and Speake 2008: 16, Toti 2008: 109). If there is an inner spring “that nurtures the life of Orthodox Christians,” it is related to the Jesus Prayer, which becomes one with every breath and heartbeat of the individual through practicing quietude (Speake 2008: 123). In the fifteenth century, hesychasm came to Russia and manifested, for example, in the hagiography (icons) of Andrei Rublev. The practice of quietude rose to new heights at the dawn of the eighteenth century with a collection of ascetic, mystical texts, known as the Philokalia, translated from the Greek via Slavonic to Russian. Later, the two British Byzantinists, Gerald Palmer and Philip Sherrard, together with Bishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware of Diokleia, a titular metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Great Britain, all of them converts to the Greek Orthodox Church and eager Athonite pilgrims, initiated an English translation. An “influential classic of Orthodox spirituality” (Gothóni and Speake 2008: 14), the anonymous The Way of a Pilgrim (Anon. 2001) is a document written by an unknown Russian sometime in the nineteenth century and published in Russia in 1865. It was translated from Russian into European languages, German (1925), French (1928), English (1930). Here was a book, which was not the Bible, that explained step by step the stages of the mysterious spiritual journey of the pilgrim. The Way of a Pilgrim brought to the attention of Western readers the way of hesychast life, together with the practice of the Jesus Prayer “which lies at its core” (Sherrard 1998: 251). In the original Greek understanding, hesychía is a spiritual practice (quietude), and although the natural surroundings and the remoteness they offer are not foreign to hesychía, they play a secondary role. By way of contrast, for Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, walking in nature is crucial for an inner spiritual change, as Palmer’s “Silence over Athos”—quoted in the opening of this chapter—witnesses. Sherrard frequently traveled to Mount Athos too; a clear sense of respect and affection shines through his writings on Mount Athos and Greek Orthodoxy, as for example in the last chapter, entitled “Contemplative Life,” of his The Mountain of Silence, where he describes the “way of silence.” When reissued in 1982, the book had a new and more conventional (alas, also a less telling) title, Athos: The Holy Mountain (Sherrard 1982), yet he also gave the chapter a new (and more telling) title, “The Way of Stillness.” Although Sherrard was an experienced and affected pilgrim himself, he claims in the foreword a distanced position in the attempt to “present certain aspects of the life of Athos and of its monks as objectively as possible” (Sherrard 1960: n.p.). However, when Sherrard complained about the “improper” modernization of Mount Athos, he claimed no objectivity. He engaged rather passionately, and spoke in 1977 of how the noise of motor vehicles was “murdering the silence” (Sherrard 1977: 100, Ware 2008b: 151–152). This was a quarter of a century after his first visit to Mount Athos, the echo of Palmer’s refrain, All was still, slowly dying out. This lamentation for the eroding stillness was coupled with a concern for the “growing neglect of the cobbled mule-paths” (Ware 2008b: 152), which were already overgrown in the 1930s, as English scholar R.M. Dawkins reports (Dawkins 1936: 189). Sherrard expressed his dismay, stating that “the paths of Athos—those venerable paths over which the feet of countless monks and pilgrims have walked for a thousand years and more—are disappearing” (Sherrard 1977: 101, quoted

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in Toti 2008: 119). Here, silence appears the very moment that the frame of it is about to change and, as another excerpt illustrates, silence, pilgrimage, and ancient paths constitute a completeness which had so far remained undisturbed: [T]he sense, the possibility itself, of the pilgrimage is undermined, if not destroyed. There is a whole psychology, even a whole doctrine, of pilgrimage … a pilgrimage is not simply a matter of getting to a particular shrine or holy place. It is a deliberate sundering and surrender of one’s habitual conditions of comfort, routine, safety, convenience … the pilgrim sets out on a quest which is inward as much as outward, and is, in varying degrees, into the unknown. In this sense, he becomes the image of the spiritual seeker … Of this spiritual exploration, inward and outward, walking is an essential part. His feet tread the earth from which he is made and from which he is usually so cut off, especially in the more or less totally urbanized conditions of modern life … The crucial point in all this is that a pilgrimage is a process which must not be hurried. (Sherrard 1977: 101–102, quoted in Toti 2008: 119)

What is more, Sherrard hits out at the thousands of pilgrims on Mount Athos who prefer motorized transport instead of walking the ancient paths: it must be said quite categorically that at least ninety per cent and possibly an even higher percentage of the visitors to Athos today are not pilgrims. They are tourists …. They do not walk the long, steep, often relentless paths, and so that inner change, to the production of which walking is an essential element, cannot take place in them. (Sherrard 1977: 102, Speake 2008: 125)

By emphasizing the practice of walking in the pristine natural environment of Mount Athos, enjoying the physical stillness, Palmer and Sherrard insist that their understanding of Athonite pilgrimage and Greek Orthodox quietude is more authentic than the Greek Orthodox way of doing a pilgrimage. However, Sherrard ignores the difference between the Roman Catholic understanding of the pilgrim, the peregrinus, the wanderer to whom walking is essential; and the Greek Orthodox proskynitís (the one who kneels), which focuses on worshiping in front of the icons in the monasteries (Gothóni 2002, Gothóni 1993: 120)—how you got there is not really important. The same Sherrard, though, knew well the spiritual stillness offered by hesychía, which in his own words involves a “recollection of God,” a kind of meditating on God. Not only did he study it, he was personally devoted, too. It is a “participation in an immanent divine principle … in which the mind is free from distracting thoughts and is present to God as God is present in it, has been lost, or obscured, as a consequence of the ‘fall’” (Sherrard 1998: 247). Nonetheless, the northwest European way of coupling pilgrimage with celebrating pristine nature’s stillness assigns to Athonite pilgrimage a particular “poetics of silence” (Herzfeld 1991: 90), which has influenced the society Friends of Mount Athos (based in Britain) and its endeavor to clear the ancient paths, a work in which members of the British royal family participate. Palmer and Sherrard are early partakers in what can be defined as a Western, late modern rediscovery of Athonite pilgrimage, where “the distinction between tourist and pilgrim is particularly hard to sustain” (Lind 2012a: 126, italics in original). To the joy of

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pilgrims who prefer a motorized solution, winding dirt roads have been opened; to the joy of pilgrims who still share the pleasure of walking (and monks who still have a mule to ride), the Friends of Mount Athos continue to maintain the remaining paths. So, as for the silence-seekers who wish to escape the urbanization at Mount Athos, what ought they to do? Bishop Kallistos Ware, who is also president of the Friends of Mount Athos, shares the approach of his two late fellow pilgrims—only he is a bit more pragmatic: “Escaping from the ‘groans and clankings’ of motorized transport, traversing the forests and the remote upland areas, we rediscover the healing stillness that was so precious to Gerald Palmer and Philip Sherrard” (Ware 2008b: 157). Even on Mount Athos, so it would seem, some areas are more remote than are others. The same Bishop Ware notes in passing that “from 1967 and onwards an unexpected renewal [of Mount Athos pilgrimage and hesychasm] took place. A fresh generation of remarkable ‘elders’ emerged, some dwelling in the eremitic ‘desert’ … becoming abbots in the main monasteries” (Ware 2008b: 153). With MacCulloch’s reflections on the Church and its power to silence in mind (see above), I am interested here in what Ware does not say about 1967. Is it “purposeful forgetting,” a contribution to the neglect of mention of the troubled relations between the fascist Greek military junta (1967–1974) and the Greek Orthodox Church? Some old abbots who resisted the fascist regime were replaced. Ware’s “fresh generation of remarkable ‘elders’” is a reference to these newcomers (Ware 2008b: 153), but most were in fact not that old at the time of the Greek military junta: Other than Fr. Païsios (1924–1994), Ware mentions Fr. Vasileios, who became abbot of the monastery of Stavronikita in 1968, and later at Ivíron monastery in 1990. He was born in 1936 (Ware himself was born in 1934 and converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1958), so he was appointed abbot at the age of only thirty-two. It is well known that the Greek gendarmerie headed by the civil governor at Mount Athos raided Stavronikita in 1968, defaming the then brotherhood who were forced to move (Fr. Maximos 1990: 7–8; see also Palairet 2015: 278–280). In other words, these newcomers were either plainly ignorant, or forced or willing to take the lead of monasteries. The silence they practiced was threefold: first, they mastered the practice of hesychía. Second, they also knew how to keep their mouths shut in order to gain power. Third, they have subsequently participated in muting the voices of the victims of “the regime of the colonels,” as it is common knowledge that the politicized Church was “largely obedient to the quasi-religious ideology (“a Greece of Christian Greeks”) introduced by the Colonels’ dictatorship” (Stavrakakis 2002: 35). Why do scholars, clergy, pilgrims, and monks alike not speak more openly about this part of the history of Mount Athos, why keep it in the dark? Regardless of the answer, Ware’s “unexpected renewal” cannot but be related to the brutality of powerful institutions (church, state, military); what Ware is not saying is masked by another utterance (replacing the unsaid), similar to what literary studies would identify as an “implied silence” (Henriksen 2016: 4). Discursively, it is power play, an act of silencing. With Laudan Nooshin’s argument on the complexities of silence (2016: 30) in mind, quietude and Byzantine chant at today’s Mount Athos serve both the dominant power

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position and ideology of the politicized Church, and at the same time provide comfort and inner calm for pilgrims, whether Greek Orthodox born, British converts, or other silence-seekers. These are but a few important aspects of the complexity of lived experience involving silence at Mount Athos. Patrick Leigh Fermor enjoyed the quiet—or simple—life at Mount Athos decades earlier than his compatriots and long before the military junta. He makes frequent mention to what he is eating on his journey to Mount Athos in early 1935—borscht, sausages, beans. He was young at the time, and obviously, it worried him what and if he would eat. Yet he also enjoyed the “unimaginable quietness and serenity” of the place (Fermor 2013: 312). He listens to “the waves breaking with a crash then sucking backwards with a rasp of pebbles,” all while reflecting on when he will return to this “quiet and happy life” (ibid.: 349). A Time to Keep Silence (written in 1957) is an account of Fermor’s continued pursuit of “the silent monastic life” (Fermor 2004: 7), primarily in France. Being silent, such as in silent meals or “silent meditation” (ibid.: 59), is a practice also observed in the (Catholic) West, and the author struggles to “grasp its staggering difference from the ordinary life that we lead” (ibid.: 27). Entering silence is, to Fermor, a transition: My first feelings in the monastery changed: I lost the sensation of circumambient and impending death, of being by mistake locked up in a catacomb. I think the alteration must have taken about four days. The mood of dereliction persisted some time, a feeling of loneliness and flatness that always accompanies the transition from urban excess to a life in rustic solitude. (2004: 27)

Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis spent forty days on Mount Athos in 1914, and some of his experiences found their way into his novel Report to Greco (1973), believed to be more or less autobiographical. The protagonist of the novel seeks new meaning in life. Consulting Nietzsche, Bergson, Buddha, Lenin, Christ, and Homer for guidance, he does not necessarily find the person he was hoping to find. Most pilgrim tales speak of returning a new man, as in Luiz Rocha’s tale. Many a silence-seeker has internalized our society’s faith in inner change and unleashed potential. Reading Kazantzakis’s report, however, is a reminder that if silence is where we are, so too, is noise. As mentioned earlier, the presence of others appears in the faint sound of a distant chainsaw. Quite a few passages in Kazantzakis’s chapter on Mount Athos speak of silence (rather than quietude). Walking the cobbled paths, the two friends (in the novel) approach the monastery of Vatopédi, which then appears in the voices of monks: A blackbird landed in the middle of the road and looked at us, the dew still upon its wings. But as though it were not a blackbird, but instead a kindly spirit which recognized us, it neither grew frightened nor moved out of our way. A tiny little owl perched on a rock had already grown giddy from the light; it remained peaceful and motionless, waiting for darkness to return. We did not speak. Both of us felt that the human voice, no matter how sweet and hushed, would reverberate shrill and discordant here, and that all the magic veil which enveloped us would be torn apart. Our faces and hands sprinkled with morning dewdrops as we pushed aside the low-hanging pine branches, we proceeded on our way.

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My happiness was choking me. Turning to my friend, I was about to open my mouth to exclaim, What joy this is! But I did not dare. I knew that as soon as I spoke, the sorcery would be dispelled. … Suddenly we heard talking and laughter; we had finally reached the monastery. Two wellnourished monks were sitting on a stone bench in front of the outer door, joking with the doorkeeper. As though we had seen a snake, we halted abruptly. My friend looked at me. “It was a dream,” he said, shaking his head. “For an instant we believed that people did not exist.” “What a shame,” I answered. “That was the true paradise, far, far superior, to the other … And now, look, we’ve been expelled – not by an angel who came running with a scimitar, but by a human being armed with a voice.” (Kazantzakis 1973: 203–204)

Despite shifting apprehensions and moving across time, silence is a part of what the pilgrims are all seeking, whether or not they are looking for spiritual guidance too. The desire for silence’s own history can be told in many ways, and one is by way of focusing on Mount Athos pilgrimage. And in no way does it exhaust what there is to say about silence.

Bubbles of Quietude In the early twenty-first century, glamping, psychotherapy, and active noise control remind us that silence practices vary immensely. In an article in the Danish outdoor equipment retailer Spejder Sport’s 2019 Spring/Summer catalogue Udstyr til eventyr (“equipment for adventure”), glamping guru and psychotherapist Natalina Henriete Knudsen (2019; quoted with permission) introduces the pleasures of “canoe-glamping.” Spejder Sport (literally “scout sports”) is a Danish retailer and producer of outdoor equipment, such as clothing, tents, sleeping bags, and so forth. The company was established as early as 1945, just after the Second World War, as a manufacturer of scout uniforms using parachutes left over from the war. With the increased popularity of outdoor leisure activities, other retailers have entered the Danish market, such as Fjeld og Fritid (“mountain and leisure,” established 1979), Friluftsland (“outdoor-land,” established 1980, now taken over by the global/Swedish company Fenix Outdoor), Eventyrsport (“adventure sports,” established 1996), and others. Backcountry silence, the absence of anthropogenic sound, is considered a valuable part of the growing outdoor industry. Furthermore, glamping is a new way into the joys of backcountry life. Glamping combines glamor and camping—camping with luxury and style—and is a leisure activity that offers outdoor experiences in comfort. On glamping in a canoe, Knudsen writes: Is there anything more luxurious than waking up on a tiny rocky island, pulling the duvet [dyne, in Danish] aside, and maneuvering out of your tent? No houses in sight, no car sounds, just you! Silence, plenty of space to be yourself, nature, clean air, that is luxury

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and canoe vacationing in a nutshell. A canoe trip might even resound with comfort, because the era where living in nature necessarily had to be tough and primitive is over. (Knudsen 2019: 68, translation by TTL)

Luxury, comfort, and nature in combination with a plenitude of silence and space. Nature is remote, the only access is via the water, and population density is next to zero as nobody else is out there—although it depends on location and high seasons, even for Sweden, Knudsen’s favorite destination. As a contrast to the “traditional, primitive” perceptions of outdoor living, Knudsen’s luxury includes, for example, champagne, high-quality food, and simple routines (“no waiting for your male companion to catch a fish”), and a duvet rather than the usual all-too-tight sleeping bag. Glamping with a canoe means that constant and strenuous canoeing is off the cards; instead, you slow down, easy paddling only, and settle for a retreat and let nature cleanse the noise in your head. A further beneficial aspect of such activity is summarized by what in Danish is known as at gå i stilhed (ibid.: 74), which points to a double understanding: First, it translates “to walk in silence,” that is, walking together without talking, much like Buber’s silent dialogue, although here, the trekkers keep a distance of 10–20 meters from one another. A second meaning is that of “entering (into) silence,” in the sense of stepping into a silent condition, coupled, in Knudsen’s article, with a meditative mode and mindset, with the cell phone turned off, and where one “listens to the water” and “feels the bark of an old fir” (ibid.). Here, among rocks and trees far from the Athonite peninsula, Knudsen nonetheless shares pilgrim Sherrard’s strong idea of nature as a part of the human being, rather than an external and separate world. Each person “must experience nature as part and parcel of his own body, to feel mountains, rivers, trees, flowers, as part and parcel of his own personal life,” Sherrard once remarked (Ware 2008a: 13, quoting an unpublished talk by Sherrard). Both feel the presence and importance of trees, but Knudsen, rather than sacrificing “one’s habitual conditions of comfort,” as Sherrard had it, insists that comfort is not a contrast to either silence or the outdoor life. Silence also plays an important part in psychotherapy and related fields. Obviously, an account of the multiple ways in which silence is present in today’s practices of psychotherapy is beyond the scope here (and beyond my competences), save for a brief example. In relation to the subjective past, the experience of what psychotherapist Daniel Stern (2004) calls “the present moment” is involved in re-envisioning, reinterpreting, or rewriting past memories (such as those related to trauma), resulting in the possibility of multiple parallel memories of the past. “The past, for Stern, influences the present but typically in a silent way. Its influence operates from knowledge that is implicit and not only from repressed and conflicted memories” (Emde 2004: 1532). The “present experience,” for Stern, “is largely “determined by the silent past,” yet the past may psychotherapeutically become an “alive past” (Stern 2004: 203, 205) in present moments, creating the possibility of change during the prolonged intersubjective encounter between client and therapist. Silence is here invariably intersubjective, interpersonal; the “silent past” comes alive in interpersonal space. Also in clinical psychotherapy, the fundamental social constitution of silence is evident.

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There are other strategies than pilgrimage and canoeing for reducing our noise levels, such as technological ones. So-called active noise control (ANC) is gaining momentum in the new and emerging silence industry, as for example in noise-canceling headphones, such as Sennheiser’s NoiseGard or the Bose QuietComfort. Other solutions, such as the “Quiet Bubble” by the company Silentium, go beyond headphones and create a sphere or bubble of silence around the head of the individual; or it makes “a new level of quietness” in the cabin of the Ford Motor Company’s “designing silence” automobile models (Ford 2015). A noise cancellation app produced by Krisp uses the microphone and loudspeaker already installed in the smartphone or laptop to reduce background noise during calls. Quietness here is thus a privilege for those who can afford it. Meanwhile, quietude at Mount Athos is a gendered privilege, an experience barred to female pilgrims. Fighting noise pollution by means of technology has been taking place for decades, starting in the 1930s, and taking momentum from the field of aviation (reducing noise in the cockpit so as to enable pilots to communicate), such as at the American Air Force Research Laboratory and in the German sound industry (Bazoyan 2019). Unsurprisingly, the development of active noise cancellation relates to the evolution of the earplug and the circumaural earmuff, both of them passive hearing protection technologies. Noisecanceling headphones have gained wide popularity since the turn of the millennium and help commuters to listen undisturbed to music or the radio. Such headphone sets are equipped with technology that incudes ANC to reduce unwanted ambient noise— that is, background noise that intrudes (destructively interferes) on music listening and moments of peace and quiet. However, ANC also has its downsides. For instance, low frequencies are not as successfully reduced as high frequencies (Morrison 2019), and the hiss of the noise-canceling technology itself, the so-called “noise floor,” has been found to be disturbing (Garfinkel 2003). Numerous posts on user platforms on the internet witness that this hiss is a concern, such as for users on the online Bose community (Steve 2017). On the American social news aggregator, reddit.com, a user compares the white noise hissing with a “distant waterfall” (uPointDeVie 2019). In the comments following this post, a fellow user (“sjokosaus”) suggests disabling the ANC while listening to music; while another (“1arghavan”) has experienced that in a noisy environment, “the white noise is much preferred to the actual noise”! Noise-reducing technology adds a paradox to today’s silence seeking, namely the attempt to create silence and optimal listening conditions in noisy places by means of feeding further noise into the human ear.

Note 1

Originally, Palmer published his piece on silence anonymously in the journal called Orthodox Life (1968, issue 14, p.33), a source that is hard to come by today. It is in the reprints by Ware that the author is identified.

Coda Jordan Lacey

As a white man of European descent, I am a stranger in Australia. This country, populated by first nations people for at least 60,000 years, thrived under the sensitive relationship that people and land shared—a sensitivity expressed thorough the practices of deep listening. This is not the deep listening of Pauline Oliveros (Oliveros 2005), but one more ancient and integrated into daily practice. It is a “quiet, still listening” (Tooth 2009) between self, land, and others, which underpins “a way of learning, working, and togetherness” (Brearly 2015: 91) that remains familiar to today’s indigenous people. The elder, MiriamRose Ungunmerr (Ngan’gityemerri woman), from the North of Australia, teaches us the word dadirri: it means “inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.” And artist Vicki Couzens (Gunditjmara Keerray Woorroong woman), from the South of Australia tells us that listening to country is a meditation that brings us into connection with the spirit of the land (Browning 2012). From these two distant places we find expressed a common wisdom of Australia’s first peoples. However, I have no personal desire to become yet another white European male extolling the virtues of indigeneity (as if they were mine to understand). Like many, I have been profoundly influenced by Steven Feld’s concept of “acoustemology”—a knowing through listening—as developed through his field-recording experiences with the Bosavi (Feld 1996). I have read with wonder Edmund Carpenter’s articulations of the Inuits’s diverse descriptions for snow and their awareness of acoustic space (Carpenter et al. 1959). And of course, I have been enchanted by Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, describing Central Australian indigenous “mappings” of land as expressed through orally inherited singings (Chatwin 1988). But in all cases, a white man appropriates knowledge that does not belong to him—no matter how freely it was given. These texts are no doubt better known than any direct articulations by the very people under analysis. This is not to criticize these works, insofar as they have played their role in perpetuating wisdoms of first peoples, but simply to acknowledge that it is the voice of white European men, the very same social group that near extinguished the first nations, whom are permitted to take on the role of compassionate supporter—a type of final insult. I choose to express my own knowledge through two liminal experiences, in which my own consciousness followed lines of flight toward unfamiliar perceptual possibilities. Both

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were chance encounters, uninvited and unexpected. They required a perceptibility that my commodity-drenched life could never apprehend; the indubitable demand of capitalism to exchange life potential for quotidian enslavement will not allow it. Both experiences took place in Arnhem Land, in the deep north of Australia, where I was a “homelands teacher” in Maningrida (Pugh 1993). It was my job to drive a truck deep into the bush to help implement the government’s demand that all children under eighteen years of age must be educated. And so, I arrived at some rudimentary buildings—ranging from basic classrooms to small wall-less sheds—in the middle of the bush, the only white person within hundreds of kilometers. It was a rare, privileged position. Immersed in another world, another place—I never felt like I was in Australia at these times. And on two occasions, I became other. On the first occasion, I arrive in my truck. The old people tell me: No school today, there’s a funeral. It seems I’m driving them there. I say OK. They ask if they can use the paints in the school—I don’t understand, but I say OK. Off we go. We arrive at a small outstation, but there are hundreds of people here. From everywhere. I alight from the truck with my guides. They ask me to sit on the ground. I find myself in the middle of a large group of men and boys. Someone starts playing a didgeridoo—which is native to this region—and the men slowly remove their clothing and begin applying paint to one another’s bodies. Didgeridoo. I think, impatiently, that this could go on forever. I’m a white man after all, used to the instant gratification of a commodified universe. The didgeridoo continues—one dirge, over and over. Eventually, I stop struggling and give in to the sound. I am drifting. A threshold is crossed when the didgeridoo stops. I look around and I see that all the men are mostly naked and covered in paint. I’ve crossed over. I’m somewhere else I can’t explain. I’m then walked through groups of clapping men. I see an old man—the father—completely painted white, charging through quiet crowds, wailing, and motioning toward some spears. In the background I see women in a circle of smoke, bathing each other with smoldering leaves. I’m in another place that has to do with death, and spirits, and goodbyes. It was the deep mantra of this earthly object—its dirge—that transformed my listening body, and brought me here. We go home. Another time, I’m asked to drive far away, much further than usual. I can’t remember the name of this place. It’s on a river and I see the outlines of crocodiles floating. The school is small and I’m alone. No one comes. I eat and fall asleep, protected by a small mosquito net. I’m awoken deep in the night by singing. These voices are disembodied— they float above the ground. They are aware of me, and pay some attention, but not much. (I distinctly remember not feeling scared. And not being able to understand why I didn’t feel afraid.) I am alone, so far from anything I know. I have never heard such sounds, or this language. But they don’t threaten me. They are timeless and they are knowing. Chants that drift, and leave me alone. I go back to sleep, instantly. The next morning children arrive. We share knowledge. I return home. I felt these voices were spirits; but someone suggests I had heard a corrobboree.1 It doesn’t matter, because either way, what I heard are voices, floating purposefully above the ground—atemporal flows of desire—an accumulation of ancient practices resonating with a responsive Earth. My consciousness was but one part of an assemblage brought into a strange modulation—strange for me, that is.

Coda

My deep listening experiences revealed a boundless interweaving of perception, land, and knowledge, whereby direct access to the desiring-machine named Earth manifested experiences and revealed new worlds. In such moments there is no disconnection between place and sound. Nothing for me to observe or report on. There is no anthropological story to tell, here, from this white man. There is no separation, no objectification. It is a transformative experience, one that charges my becoming. It would be impossible to experience these moments within the homogenized landscapes of the contemporary city; such connections are severed by an immutable layer of noise in which flows of desire are harnessed to fulfil the endless everyday tasks of capitalist production. However, in lands unconquered by the capitalist machine, quietude still exists. Not the quietude of nature, but an opening in which to listen. I’m reminded that beneath the concreted lands of Australia’s cities, the ancient songs linger on—I wonder if we can say the same for all first nations criss-crossing the desiring-machine Earth, that their songs might still be heard by those who listen, deeply.

Note 1

The ‘corroboree’ term entered the British colonist’s language soon after occupation in the late 1800s. The term comes “from the Dharuk language of the people who lived west of Sydney (and) refferred to an open performance of song and dance” (Cahir and Clark 2010: 412). The term can refer to gatherings related to ceremonial or ritualistic purposes; however, as early as the 1830s coorobbores have also been staged for non-indigenous audiences (ibid.: 413).

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Part V The Listening Machines

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Listening, not only in contemporary music and sound cultures, is most often organized as a process in which instruments, media technologies, and even machines are involved. This stretches from the musical instruments that train the ear—think of, for instance, the modern piano in classical training (Rehding 2018)—to instruments of nineteenth-century physiological research such as Hermann von Helmholtz’s famous resonators in the 1850s (Kursell 2018), from early sonic media technologies such as the (ear-)phonautograph (Siegert 1990) to contemporary forms of “algorithmic listening” (Klotz 2015). Certainly, listening is organized in different ways if records or tapes, CDs or soundfiles are involved, and if, for instance, the record spins in a 1950s jukebox in a bar or on an audiophile’s HiFi system in a middle-class living room, if the sounds are from a mixtape used in 1980s New York hip hop culture or a rock concept album from around 1970. Listening is trained in different ways, if it is informed by fingerboard and score or by a phonograph (Scherer 1989 and 1994, Haffke 2019), by the sonic environment of a rainforest (Feld 2012b [1982]) or in interaction with the visualizations of a DAW (digital audio workstation). This section of the handbook deals with multiple and diverse listening technologies, instruments, and machines. Reaching from the monitor speakers in the environment of a recording studio in Havana, Cuba in Toby Seay’s chapter, to the “3D” sound system in a university recording studio in England about which Matthew Barnard writes, from old reproduction media such as CDs, vinyl, and cassettes that play an immense role in Anders Bach’s text, to a field recorder and a small PA system employed in Carla Jana Maier’s chapter as a part of an art installation at a public square in Copenhagen. All four chapters analyze how technologies are involved in the co-organization of listening. That is, they discuss how selected technologies not only reproduce and transmit, amplify and store sound. Moreover, the chapters ask, on the one hand, how these technologies are involved in creating and producing new sounds and, on the other hand, how they are involved in organizing listening in new ways. Thus, they are not listening machines in the sense of Jonathan Sterne’s “machines to hear for them” (Sterne 2003: 31–86), that is, machines to which a certain form of listening has been delegated and which are listening instead of a culturally and historically specific human listener. Schulze emphatically understands

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Sterne’s hearing machines that primarily “hear for them” (ibid.: 31, my italics) as “machines to hear for us” (Schulze 2018a: 155, my italics ). Instead of also analyzing objectified forms of listening modeled by a machine that “hears for them,” all the contributions in this section focus on rather personal or—to use two important keywords of this handbook in general—“intimate” and “idiosyncratic” forms of listening. Hence, the four chapters are zoom in on an emphatic “I” or “us,” rather than on a distancing “you” or “them.” They consider hearing machines as machines “I” am using or “I” am dealing with. Or, to put it even more precisely, they explicitly describe the listening subjects—in other words, the authors—that emerge as forms of “distributed subjectivities” (Kassabian 2013b) that include collaborations between machinic and human agency. Thus, this chapter’s listening machines all include co-present forms of human agency. Seay shows in his ethnographically based description of two recording sessions in Abdala Studios in Havana that different sets of monitor speakers made him listen and mix differently. Barnard identifies the “16.4 periphonic ambisonic studio” of his home university as a “listening machine … which can provide a forensic interpretation of sonic materials which is typically never experienced by the listener of the final compositional artefact.” Maier demonstrates in her postcolonial analysis of a small PA system employed in the context of Inuit Nutaat, a light art installation by the artist collective SIIKU in Copenhagen in February 2019, how the sound of the public space where the installation was located (the so-called “Greenlandic Square, in reference to the Greenlandic sculpture situated there”) is listened to in changing ways that, again, constitute the “Greenlandic” heterogeneously. Bach analyzes the “musical qualities and specific medial and sonic representations” of old media such as cassette tapes and the modes of listening that correlate with them. After reading the contributions to this section, we will probably find ourselves problematizing the concept of listening following the more acute realization that it can be an explicitly mechanical faculty. Physiologists and neurophysiologists have analyzed listening as a human faculty, biologists and psychologists as a form of human behavior, and maybe also of animals. Meanwhile, cultural studies scholars have examined it as a cultural practice, musicologists as a musical practice, media and communication studies as an audile technique (Sterne 2003), as a cultural technique (Siegert 1990), or as part of an active listening device (Papenburg forthcoming). The chapters here make the case for an analysis of listening as a personal, intimate, and idiosyncratic practice that is not merely “subjective” but that relies on media and machines. With such an approach to idiosyncratic or intimate listening, it might become possible to think of listening as a complexly integrated phenomenon that includes historically anchored media technologies, cultural techniques, and idiosyncratic practices alike.

17 The Recording Toby Seay

Figure 17.1  Abdala Estudio Trés.

Abdala Estudio Havana, Cuba, 5:00 p.m. A traditional Cuban quintet—piano, bass, congas, timbales, and guiro—set on stage with the piano as the centerpiece. The percussion surrounds the piano with intricate rhythmic details, while the bass provides a comforting low-end warmth. The sound reverberates in the space, filling the gaps between notes, but never covering up the details or drawing the listener’s attention away from the performance. You hear this music all over Havana in bars and cafés, usually enveloped by the din of people talking, car horns, buses, and taxi driver touts. This is different. This is a fine concert hall, quiet except for the sounds that are given to us by the performers. However, this is not a concert hall. This is a recording studio. Each musician is in a separate room with controlled acoustics. The concert hall one hears is a performance in and of itself.

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I enter Abdala studios in Havana, Cuba at 5:00 p.m. I’ve never worked in this studio before and I enter not knowing who my musicians are or what instrumentation the ensemble will provide. I’m greeted with the familiar recording studio air conditioning, one of many comforting circumstances that makes me feel “at home.” My two research assistants, whom I will introduce later, immediately start a whirlwind of introductions, the studio engineers, the bandleader, and most importantly, the studio manager. Here is where the least enjoyable part of the session begins but must be done: business. Taking my passport, the studio manager has me fill out many government forms with my name and address and signature. All must be completed in order for the recording session to take place. The bureaucracy must be fed. Once this is out of the way, I am now anxious. There are many details to grasp and my personal impatience needs to be calmed. My assistants assure me, “everything, no problem.” This recording session was a research project aimed at studying recording engineering practice between two engineers. In this case, I was one engineer and the studio provided Dayana Rodríguez Hernández, the other engineer. While I’ll describe the project in more detail later, the intent was for there to be two sessions with the same ensemble, one with each engineer. In order to not influence each other, I was not present for Dayana’s session. Dayana is a young, confident, and capable recording engineer. She knows this studio inside and out. When presented with the ensemble, she jumps into action, beginning to place instruments and microphones in what appears to be an unconsidered manner. This is not the case. She has simply done this many times before. She knows what to do. I immediately leave in order to not see too much. After the first session, it is my turn at engineering Emilio Morales y Los Nuevos Amigos. I enter Estudio Trés to find a studio completely struck of any sign of the first session. I now have four hours to reset the studio and make a recording. From this point on, I am in Cuba’s premier studio with world-class musicians. The pressure is on. My frantic energy wants to make quick decisions. However, I am presented with a puzzle. I have five musicians, an unfamiliar recording environment, and a large selection of microphones. My decisions need to slow down and be considered and intentional. Since this is a research project, the recording assistant waits for instructions, while my research assistants watch and photograph everything I do. This is not normal. I don’t want to censor myself, but I feel like I am also performing. The piano is in the big room, Studio Area 3 (see Figure 17.1). It is not practical to move it to another space. I would risk the integrity of its tuning and there is a distinct possibility that the smaller spaces would compromise the sound of, in this case, the primary instrument of the ensemble. So, I quickly decide to leave it where it is. There are two isolation booths—Iso 1 and Iso 2—and an open space adjacent to the big room (Open Cabin) that provides some sonic isolation from the big room. The concern here is keeping loud instruments, in this case conga, timbale, and guiro, from overwhelming the microphones for the piano. After much consideration, I placed the congas in Iso 1 and the timbales in Iso 2. This leaves the guiro. I would like the guiro to be sonically associated with the other percussion. In reality, I would love to have all of the percussion in the same room to sonically act as one, but

The Recording

there are no rooms big enough to do this. I consider placing the guiro in the room with the timbales; however, the room is much too small for both players, their instruments, and microphones. Therefore, the guiro goes to the Open Cabin. With these decisions made, I begin to choose and place microphones. I have to rely on my knowledge of specific mics and my awareness of microphone principles in case I need to use an unfamiliar microphone. Luckily, Abdala is well equipped with myriad choices of industry standard microphones. While I certainly have my favorites that are not present, I am happy to have familiar options that will provide known results. With the piano being the primary instrument in this ensemble and as it is residing in the studio’s largest space, it is vital that I make sure a solid piano “picture” is taken. I have always preferred large diaphragm condenser microphones in ORTF stereo for piano. Having recorded many pianos before, I see there being three good options—a pair of AKG C414 B-ULS microphones, a pair of Neumann U87 microphones, or a pair of Neumann TLM170 microphones. Considering the other instruments, I want to use the C414s on percussion. They are bright and clean and do well with fast, transient instruments. That leaves the Neumanns. Both sound big, but the TLM170s have more detail. I like detail, so I chose these for the piano. Placement is of concern. If a piano is part of a big ensemble, one might place the microphones closer to the hammers for more detail and sonic “cut.” If the piano is solo, one might move the microphones further back to get a bigger, more natural picture. Imagine your camera. If you get close to the subject, do you see all of it, or just part of it? This is why I am a fan of ORTF. It has a wide stereo image—at a 110-degree angle—that encompasses a large area while allowing one to place the mics slightly closer for both detail and naturalness. How does one know this? It is part physics and experience. Setting the piano microphones presents my first obstacle. While Abdala is the country’s premier studio, it is not without its challenges. The studio is slightly dated. Not terribly so, but it is like walking into 2003. ORTF is often accomplished with a stereo bar, a microphone holder that places both microphones on one stand. However, the two TLM170 microphones provide way too much weight for a well-worn stand to hold out over the piano. So, I must change to two stands. That requires me to try multiple stands until I find two that will hold both mics in place and not move. Much has been written about the agency of recording equipment. However, the effect that a simple microphone stand has on placement decisions is not insignificant. I use two AKG C414 microphones set close to the congas. As mentioned, the brightness will hopefully capture the detail of the player’s hands striking the drums. Similarly, I use two AKG C214 microphones set close to the timbales. These microphones are similar to the C414 and are used for the same reason. However, the timbales are struck with sticks and are much louder. I set these microphones to pad the output by 10 dB to compensate. The timbale player also has some cowbells. These can be a bit sonically abrasive, so instead of micing them closely, I simply place another ORTF pair of small diaphragm Neumann KM184 microphones over the timbale player’s head. With the low ceiling, this could cause boundary interference as sound reflects off of the ceiling. In this room, though, the

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ceiling is absorptive, so I think this will work. Lastly, I place a Neumann U87 on the guiro. The guiro can also be a bit bright and abrasive, so the warmth of the Neumann U87 will hopefully tame it. There are gobos (movable isolation panels) sitting in front of the Open Cabin room. I leave them where they were, since everyone is in a separate room. In hindsight, this served to further isolate the guiro from the piano. However, this was not considered on my part, simply a lucky coincidence. Once the instruments and microphones are placed, I move to the control room. Here, I need to determine how I am going to record the session and set up the control room equipment. The control room is equipped with a Solid State Logic 4000 G+ Console (SSL). Truth be told, I really don’t like this console very much. However, it is an industry standard, so I am well acquainted with it and it relieves me of another thing to learn in a new environment. Additionally, the studio is equipped with Genelec 1032 nearfield speakers (close to the listener) and some very large Genelec 1035A soffit-mounted far-field speakers. Again, the 1032s were once industry standard (now discontinued), so it offers another level of comfort for me as I am well acquainted with how they sound. This setting does push me in a direction that I soon discover is conceptually strange for the staff at Abdala. Basically, I want to use the console only for the microphone preamps and equalizers. I plan to create my monitor mix and headphone mix entirely in the computer. My inclination to do it this way stems from my dislike of the SSL console and my desire to use as little of it as possible. That is when I am informed that the studio is equipped with Pro Tools version 8. Not a problem, I hope, but the current version of Pro Tools is 12. I haven’t seen version 8 in many years and hope it is up to the task. After a little debate on how this approach seems odd to the staff, I have the assistant patch Pro Tools into the monitoring and headphone systems and proceed. I then set up Pro Tools to provide a recording track for each microphone, plus a headphone mix and a reverb processor to provide artificial ambience that will emulate a performance space. Since I am multitracking this recording, mixing the final product comes later. However, the monitoring environment can greatly affect a musician’s performance, and also alter sonic decisions. So, creating an artificial performance space is necessary now, even though this environment will be finely crafted in the mix later. I have all of the microphones patched into the console in an order that makes sense to me. There are no rules here, just preference. The only signal that I do not use the console for is the bass. Since I have to use a direct box (which allows for plugging the instrument directly into a recording system without a microphone), the studio has a fine Avalon 737 channel strip with instrument input. Because I want control of this, I have the bass player sit in the control room with me so I can tweak his sound. Therefore, the bass player will be listening to my speakers rather than headphones. While this can be desirable, he will have to be able to perform while listening to my mix and my volume. If that is not comfortable for him, other options would need to be explored. Luckily, this situation presents no problems. Probably because I like to listen loudly, which usually feels good to bass players. I then have on the console the congas on channels 2 and 3, the timbales on 4 and 5, the timbale overheads on 6 and 7, the guiro on 8, and the piano on 9 and 10. There are no

The Recording

other outboard microphone preamps, so I must use the console channels for all of these microphones. I am using nothing but condenser microphones, so I must engage 48-volt phantom power on every preamp to charge the microphone capsules. When engaged, I immediately see signal from the microphones picking up noise in the room. At this point, I have the musicians take their places so that I can start setting record levels, getting sounds, and crafting a monitor mix. I suddenly realize that other than the bandleader, I have yet to meet the musicians. Such is my frantic energy. However, they don’t seem to mind as they were eager to take their places and perform. I go one by one, setting levels with the preamp, making sure that the signal does not peak or distort, but still has a solidly loud signal level. I start with the bass. The player plays pretty consistently, so I set the level and add a slight amount of compression, just to keep the low-end from changing in volume too much. I add a little mid-range around 1 KHz on the equalizer to accentuate the attack of each note. The bass player asks if I can add more bass frequencies. That is when I realize that I am listening to the smaller Genelec 1032 monitors. I am worried that adding any low-end would be detrimental to the recording. So, I switch to the larger monitors, which certainly have more low-end. He is happy, but now I  am listening on unfamiliar speakers and I am a bit concerned. I then move to the congas, set their level, and apply a small amount of equalization. I add a bit of upper mid-range around 7 KHz to enhance the attack and remove a bit of lower mid-range around 300 Hz to remove some boxy-ness that is inherent in closely mic’d drums. I add a little reverb to the mix and move on to the timbales. The timbales present a similar situation. Add some attack around 4.5 KHz and remove some boxy-ness around 1 KHz. Different frequencies to the congas, but the same principle. However, the timbales have the additional overhead mics. I simply set the levels and blend them with the close mics. The concern here is that the polarity of the overhead mics won’t match the polarity of the close mics. I check this by flipping the 180-degree polarity switch on the console. Simply by listening, I can tell that the overheads will work fine with the close mics without reversing the polarity. If it were a problem, the low-end would destroy itself and the resulting sound would be thin. This could be easily fixed by either moving the mics or reversing the polarity. Neither is needed in this case. I move to the guiro, set the level, and remove a little mid-range around 1.5 KHz with the equalizer to minimize some of the instrument’s harshness, also adding some brightness around 8 KHz to make it more present. However, it is important not to remove too much harshness. The guiro sounds like it does for a reason; I don’t want to lose its character. Meanwhile, when I am adjusting the guiro, the corner of my eye sees that there is no signal on the piano mics. I already know I will need to trace the signal and see where it got lost. In this case, it was a simple mis-patch. Once I fix the patch, the piano is up. I set the levels of the piano quickly, as the bandleader is already playing. With a good balanced pair of microphones, I adjust the signal level for both to be equal. This provides a nice solid piano picture. I do not use any equalization. The picture is big and detailed. I do not want to do any harm to what I am hearing. I quickly create a monitor mix with a little reverb on each instrument except the bass. I copy my monitor mix to the headphones as a starting point. The band quickly starts playing.

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I make a few small adjustments now that they are playing together. Some recording levels need adjusting and the monitor mix needs small refinements. It is at this point that the sonic picture comes into view. I hit the record button. After this point, I do not adjust any microphones from my initial placements. This is unusual, but in each case, I feel that what I am hearing is good and I don’t want to alter the inertia of the ensemble performance. “Groove busting” is the term often used when a performance is interrupted. So, I sit back, listen, and watch my meters. Within two takes, we have our first “keeper.” The band then enters the control room to hear what they have recorded. Smiles appear. They are happy. They quickly go back to their instruments to record another song while the energy is high. Before the night is over, we have recorded three songs in three and a half hours. Needing to document everything and tear down the session, we do not record any more songs. However, we would have liked to.

Gaining Control over the Recording Process Sound recording is an applied art heavily steeped in physical science. Sound is simply variations of air pressure that happen at frequencies within the range of hearing. For humans, this sits anywhere between 20 Hz and 20 KHz, roughly a ten-octave range in musical terms. Human hearing, however, has limitations, both physical and perceptual. For instance, not only do these variations in air pressure have to fall within a limited set of frequencies, they must also fall within a volume range that our ears can detect. The difference between the quietest sound we can hear, the threshold of hearing, and the loudest, the threshold of pain, is called our hearing’s dynamic range. Now, tie these two components together—frequency response and dynamic range—and we create a definable hearing system. However, human hearing has evolved to be more sensitive to certain frequencies at certain volumes. It is vital to our survival for us to be able to detect sounds of warning. So, at lower volumes, our ears are much more sensitive to frequencies just above the middle of our frequency range. This would allow for rustling leaves, hushed whispers, or wind, to name a few examples, to grab our attention. Adding complexity to this, our hearing changes sensitivity to be more balanced the louder sounds are (Martin 2011: 5.3). Humans have also evolved to localize sound. By having two ears separated by space and an object (one’s head), humans can hear stereophonically by capturing timing differences, volume differences, and timbre differences in order to know from what direction a sound is coming (ibid.: 5.7). Recording sound, therefore, requires tools and systems that respond to the same ranges as human hearing. These conditions provide a challenging scenario. In early acoustic recordings, where soundwaves were cut directly into a medium, such as a wax cylinder or a shellac platter, it was very difficult to physically cut the medium when the energy of a soundwave is so small. Once microphones came into use in the 1920s, sound recording became much easier, as soundwaves were converted into electrical signals which could be amplified and manipulated to better imprint on the recording medium. Later still, magnetic

The Recording

tape and eventually digital technology afforded the recordist the ability to capture higher quality sound by maintaining minute details from the original soundwave. The addition of recording channels also allows for the delivery of stereophonic and surround formats that take advantage of human localization abilities. In any case, sound recording requires equipment to capture sound, machinery to record and playback sound, and knowledge experts to control the sound and machinery—not to mention something to create the sound and a distribution network for one to hear it. Recording equipment, however, requires multiple conversion of soundwaves in order to capture and deliver the moving physical target that sound is. These conversions reveal the fact that any sound recording is only a subjective representation of the original sound. Because of this, recordists have honed their craft, “hoping to improve the technical quality of sound recordings, attempted to gain greater control over the recording process” (Théberge 1989: 100). Gaining control over the recording process requires sound engineers to establish a complex set of knowledge that requires proficiency in acoustics, electronics, music theory, equipment operation, and the process of performance (Porcello 2004: 733). Additionally, sound engineers have developed a common vocabulary by which they describe sound and the techniques used to record it (ibid.: 734). For instance, definable measurements of sound, such as frequency response, amplitude, transient response, and so forth, are often insufficient due to the dynamics of human perception. Thus, sound engineers have developed terms such as “warm,” “cold,” “bright,” “dark,” and the like to describe subjective qualities of sound. Obtaining this expert knowledge and common vocabulary can come from formal education through trade schools or university degree programs, or from on-the-job training through apprenticeships and mentoring. Sound engineers must then take this technical training and turn it into an art through tacit knowledge, “the unarticulated, implicit knowledge gained from practical experience” (Schmidt-Horning 2004: 707). This moves sound recording beyond scientific engineering (capturing sound) toward concerns over aesthetics (capturing the right sound). Over time, methods, tastes, and industry evolve. Kealy has shown how the sound engineering profession has moved through labor modes, from craft union to entrepreneurial to art, reflecting the increased emphasis on the aesthetic (1979). It is this stress on aesthetic that makes sound recording a highly human endeavor. Hearing sounds from the past or crafted musical performances reflects a system of communication that requires human ingenuity and skill.

The Effects of Process The study conducted at Abdala Studios in Havana was intended to examine the recording process as performed by two separate sound engineers with the same performers in the same studio. The studio and musicians were booked for two separate four-hour sessions. The two engineers being studied were Dayana Rodríguez Hernández and myself.

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Why me? I wanted to be the disruptive factor. A Cuban ensemble in a Cuban studio with a Cuban engineer were all working within their own studio culture. I, however, was dropped into a setting that was both familiar (a recording studio) and foreign (unfamiliar music, instrumentation, and space). Substituting the Cuban engineer with myself provided a comparison between two capable engineers who were trained and have careers in separate music centers. Why Cuba? For an American, fewer cultures are more isolated and foreign. Important to the study was for me to be uninfluenced by Dayana’s work and decisionmaking. Therefore, I sat in the lobby during the first four-hour session. Once Dayana’s work was done, she couldn’t be influenced by my work and could help with documentation. She was very good at not saying anything about the first session. Two research assistants provided entry into this world. Sonia Pérez Cassola, a Cuban musicologist, put together the music ensemble and provided valuable translation and communication for the project. Yaniela Morales Cortina, a Cuban anthropologist, provided eyes and ears on the session. Working with Dayana, Yaniela provided documentation of the session through photos, sound recordings, and written records of equipment settings, patches, and workflow. Though it was not my original intention, the mix of musicology, anthropology, and music production/sound studies made for a well-rounded viewpoint. I wanted to capture how workflow and decisions impacted the sonic output. But now I get a sense of the workspace’s impact on decisions. During the first session, I am blind to what is happening in the studio. I am in the lobby, which has a bar, mostly for coffee. There are a dozen or so people sitting at tables watching American baseball, checking email, looking at Facebook, and chatting in various groups. Assuming they are all working in other studios, it is a strangely chaotic environment in which to be, while my recording project goes on behind closed doors. The anticipation of entering the studio for my turn at recording is heightened by the thought of being in a place of calm and focus. Even with all the moving parts of a recording session, the studio is a kind of sanctuary, providing familiarity and comfort to those who work there. The studio, too, is an instrument, whose performers are engineers and producers that “play” the band, manipulating sound through microphone choice and placement, transduction and electrical manipulation, room acoustics and instrument placement (Schmidt-Horning 2012: 41). This is also a team sport. Musicians, producers, engineers, and technical assistants all perform their roles, but interconnected with each other. They are aware of each other, anticipating needs and responses. Body language allows musicians to communicate without sound during performance. However, this non-verbal communication is key to everyone in the studio. For me, not speaking Spanish, a simple hand in the air signified “hold your places” and a thumbs-up signified “I’m recording, proceed with your performance.” This was not thought out ahead of time. It just worked. I had been developing the idea of this study for years, but funding and participant networking was a major hurdle. Additionally, travel to and from Cuba for an American citizen can be complicated. Transferring funds from a United States bank to Cuba is impossible. Sara McGuinness, a researcher from the United Kingdom, has been working in Cuba for some time and has developed a network of colleagues. I took strong advantage

The Recording

of this network. Often, communications had to go through Sara. Replies were slow. I had to trust in the process and pull favors for bank transfers. Just landing in Havana felt like a victory. Once the two sessions were over, comparing them required reviewing photos, written documents, computer sessions, and the sound recordings themselves. It was immediately apparent that the two sessions sounded very different. Not better or worse, just different. As it turned out, I had placed the musicians in exactly the same spots as Dayana. The piano situation and the available spaces, I feel, dictated those decisions. Therefore, the sonic differences had to be in the engineer’s work and manipulation as each instrument was in the same acoustic space. We did not use the same microphones on any instrument and our placements were very different. This is the first of many small disparities that resulted in a vast sonic difference. Dayana did use the Avalon 737 on the bass, like I did. However, she placed the bass in the room with the piano and therefore had to adjust the settings in the recording space rather than the control room. Additionally, this meant that the bass player listened with headphones, a normal recording situation, but this setting limits the amount of lowend the player will feel, as there are no speakers in the space. For the congas, she chose a pair of Neumann U87 microphones in an ORTF placement. This setup meant that the microphones were more distant from the instruments than mine were. Upon listening, the congas are well balanced, but with a bit less detail. It appears that no equalization was applied during recording. The timbales too were recorded with overhead microphones. Similar to my placement, two Neumann U89 microphones were placed in ORTF over the timbales player. These microphones, however, are of the large diaphragm variety. She did not mic the timbales closely, so the large diaphragm choice looks like a way to provide a full sound even from a distance. The cowbell, however, was closely mic’d with a dynamic Shure SM57. This is a good utility microphone that can work in most instances. The only microphone in this scenario that had any equalization applied was the high side of the timbales, where high-end was added. The piano was given three microphones, a NOS pair of Neumann KM184 small diaphragm microphones placed over the hammers and a Neumann TLM170 placed on the low-end strings of the instrument. The intent was to capture a stereo image through the NOS pair, with the low-end strings microphone blended in to provide warmth. This approach is very different to mine, but a common method that garners good sonic results. Lastly, the guiro was placed in the Open Cabin and captured with a Manley Gold microphone. Equalization was applied with small boosts around 7K Hz and 300 Hz. Here is where one of the greatest sonic differences comes to light. The guiro, in order to not leak into the piano mics, was recorded as an overdub after the band performed the track. This method provided Dayana with clean recorded signals for each instrument, allowing her greater sonic flexibility when crafting a final mix. In summarizing the major sonic differences between our recordings, I can point to two significant parameters. One is obvious: Dayana simply used different microphones with different placement techniques. In both of our cases, the sonic results were good but markedly different. The second parameter is process: in layering the recording by capturing

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the guiro as an overdub, the performances changed. This is very significant as it shows the agency that procedure has on sonic results. As the ensemble performed, one of the rhythmic components of the performance was different. Adding the guiro later solves the problem of microphone leakage but runs the risk of not fitting in with the other instruments as they performed and reacted to each other without the final element. There are many instances where overdubbing individual elements is commonplace and very appropriate. Larger popular music ensembles will often do this as it is difficult to place such loud and diverse instrumentation within the same space. Singers are often overdubbed in order to focus on their performance in a one-on-one environment. However, these procedures will always impact the performance. Those who perform first cannot react to those that have yet to play. Those who perform last have little room to maneuver as much of the sonic space is filled. These are calculated strategies in the recording studio and provide further evidence of recordings being manipulated and crafted, rather than providing documentary insight.

Between Red Light Syndrome and Crafted Hyperrealism While most recordings are highly considered, crafted works, especially in music production, documentarian purposes still abound, such as field recordings, interviews, and candid recordings. In these cases, the content of the recording is far more important than the sound. What an interviewee says is what keeps the listener’s interest, where a written transcript might suffice to relay the content. However, documentarian recordings are no less mediated. For instance, just the presence of a microphone or the knowledge that one is being recording can alter the subject’s behavior. Known as “red light syndrome,” in reference to the red light on equipment that indicates recording is in progress, this results in performance anxiety, which manifests as either a subdued, careful performance or an exaggerated, overly dramatic one (Kenny 2011). Music recordings are often viewed as the documentation of a singular performance. For example, Théberge points out that in the early days of music, prior to technological advances of the 1950s, recordings were “conceived of as the documentation of a musical performance” (1989: 100). Key to this point is the word “conceived.” Marketers of early sound recordings extoled the virtue of sonic fidelity, often making the claim that the recording was an identical copy of the performance. The Edison Phonograph Company claimed their machine was “The acme of realism,” The Victor Corporation asked “You think you can hear the difference?” between the recording and an actual performer, and The Dulcephone Corporation stated their machine had “a tone, full, rich and natural, a reproduction as clear as the original.” While these were all good selling points, and indeed, hearing reproduced sound was still rather novel in the 1920s, the reality was that the process of recording sound greatly affected the final product.

The Recording

Katz remarks that “[w]ith the advent of sound recording, a new rigidity was introduced into the world of music, one imposed not by performers or audiences but by a machine” (2010: 36). For example, a wax cylinder recording could only capture about three minutes’ worth of sound. Therefore, performances required works to be edited to ensure the recording could fit on the media. Additionally, if one was recording an interview on cylinder, the interviewer would have to be conscious of when to start and stop the recording, greatly effecting the flow of the interview and creating a series of soundbite answers rather than a natural conversation. The primitive nature of the acoustic era required performances in non-performance spaces where consistently loud performances could be captured. This gave rise to the recording studio, which eliminated the sound of a concert hall simply to create a performance that, as Jonathan Sterne explains, “aimed to capture reality suitable for reproduction” (2003). This highly mediated process was by no means documenting an event, but rather creating an event that could be best recorded. Performers would have to conform to these conditions, making a new performance art of session recording and creating the micro-profession of the session musician. The advancement of technology did not alleviate this condition, but rather evolved with the technology and remains with the session musician to this day. As noted in the Havana recording case above, musicians react to what they hear, how they hear, and how they are directed. This mediation can create interesting and culturally significant effects on music performance which cycle from the studio to the audience and back to the studio. Discussing early twentieth-century recording, Mathieu notes that musicians recording in the acoustic era “required the coordination of people, spaces, and internal physiological systems of the people in those spaces” (2014: 125). Vocalists, for instance, would have to sing at a rather loud volume while physically contorting themselves in the direction of the recordist in order to maintain a volume consistent with the ensemble, often from a position where they could not really hear the entire musical arrangement. This took a lot of physical stamina, which concert performers of the day may not have possessed as a physical trait. Hence, vocalists specializing in recording were desired for a different skillset than concert vocalists. Once recordings were made and sold, however, the public encultured the performance method by learning to sing in that fashion or at least expecting that form of performance on future recordings. Young singers would imitate these recordings while they learned their craft, taking on the sonic characteristics of the recording artist. Beyond performance-altering affects, audiences of recordings often expect consistent and impactful sound in a way that could be described as hyperrealism. A contemporary example comes from the film industry, where what the audience sees must conform with what they hear. In many cases, a simple recording of the filmed action can be somewhat underwhelming, leaving the sound designers with the task of creating a reality of their own. In an interview in the Los Angeles Times, Will Files explains that in creating sound for the movie War for the Planet of the Apes, “you try to remove as much of the acoustic signature as you can … to start at a neutral point, and then we add layers of different types of reverbs and echoes to the sounds to try to make them sound real” (quoted in Lytal 2017). Simon Zagorski-Thomas describes this aural crafting as sonic cartoons, where

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a sonic picture can simply provide the framework that our brain needs to construct its own reality. This is not so much a simplified line drawing, but rather the exaggeration of certain recorded elements that provides “a distortion designed to influence our perception and interpretation” (2014: 50). In every instance, whether a recording is highly crafted or meant to be a documentary, the machinery used to record and playback, the technicians making the recording, the process of the recording, and the performers all create an interdependent system, “involving the organization of musical, social, and technical means” (Théberge 1997: 193). Creators interact with machines, spaces, and other performers to create a new reality that can only exist through the recording process, while the audience interacts with machines, spaces, and other audience members to create a cycle of influence between all actors involved.

Expanding Knowledge about Sound Recording Practices All of the actors involved in the system of sound recording can be studied against multiple theoretical frameworks that describe the creative and workforce processes. In each case, the frameworks rely on the relationships between agents that provide influence over actors and techniques. One of the commonly cited frameworks for this understanding is Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory, which removes the distinction between human and nonhuman actors. By doing so, agency can be applied to recording equipment and spaces along with performers and technicians, allowing one to concentrate on the influential relationship between agents (2005). In order to explore this notion further, it helps to identify all actors and elements within a sound recording, to better focus on which agents act upon which elements in what I call the “influential domain” (Seay 2016). For instance, in the Havana case above, one could look at the agency that the studio monitors have over the engineers in crafting the sonic imprint of each instrument. This approach is very useful for examining individual relationships. However, one could also consider these relationships from a broader perspective in a systems approach that is more interactive. Such an approach is Mihály Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity. In this model, creative decisions are continuously being transmitted, evaluated, and revised between agents within a domain (Csikszentmihalyi 1996). This feedback cycle establishes creativity not from an inspired output of novel ideas, but rather within a creative system of knowledge that molds novel ideas over time. MacIntyre and Thompson further explain that within the field of studio recording, “the rules and conventions that govern it must first be learnt and the individual must also be able to interact with the field to output their idea or product to this field for validation, acceptance or rejection” (2013: 8). This approach allows the researcher to enter their examination from any point by viewing recording processes on a continuum.

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It is within these two frameworks that I am exploring the Havana case above. While this study was originally intended to examine engineering practice, the wealth of data collected tells many stories concerning performance, human interaction, institutional culture, sound capture, and so on. However, the quantity and quality of the data is in itself a systems model. Since one of the test subjects was myself, as the primary researcher, it was impossible for me to both perform and collect data. Therefore, I employed the two research assistants, who solved numerous problems. For one, they acted as translators. I needed Spanish speaking interpretation. But more importantly, having Yaniela observe human behavior while Sonia observed musical performance allowed me to focus on sound and engineering. Between the three of us, many significant observations were made that any of us alone might have missed or might not have the ability to interpret without certain expertise. The breadth of this research methodology, I propose, is a valuable way to seek knowledge regarding sound recording practices. Teaming experts from diverse fields creates a system of observation which best paints a picture of the creative system itself. Apropos ethnographic work, Thompson and Lashua state that “our contexts, participants, and methods highlighted that variations are necessary to address some of the issues presented by the different context of a recording studio session” (2014: 764). Not only can more be observed by multiple researchers, but the relationship between actors and agents can be argued from multiple points of view, establishing new meanings and connecting fields within the humanities and social sciences.

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18 The Amplification Carla J. Maier

Figure 18.1  Speaker in front of Greenlandic sculpture, Christianshavns Torv, Copenhagen (2019). Photo: Carla J. Maier.

Amplifying a Monument You might have crossed this public square many times before. It is a place of transit, somewhere you move across, heading toward a destination: the stairs leading to the metro, the bus stop, the entrance to the supermarket, the crossing which leads to a coffee shop. During the daytime, you are carried off on the frequencies and rhythms of busy and orderly

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urban street life. It could be described as a place where you can become invisible, almost. You need you go with the flow—not hesitant, not listening attentively, not being irritated. This place is never quiet. Multiple layerings of frequencies, rhythms, and amplitudes reach you, reach through you: Underground trains pushing forward below, criss-crossing the lines of traffic on street level; buses rolling and coming to a halt with a thud, bicycles clicking, rattling, their drivers stopping shortly with their feet not touching the ground, only to sneak through the next gap between two pedestrians leaving the bus and crossing the bicycle lane; human bodies slouching, speeding up, turning their heads for orientation, seeing nothing while looking ahead, making pigeons that were searching for crumbs on the tarmac jump aside, past the bike stalls beside the entry to the metro, where you are sucked in and others are spat out. If you don’t blend in with the movers, the busy ones, walking with pointed steps and eager to resemble successful urban citizens, you may find the benches that surround the Greenlandic monument that stands in the center of Christianshavns Torv, and here, in the middle of Copenhagen, you might enact a different rhythm, a different beat, a different flow of time. The Greenlandic Monument sits still. This monument is made from dark grey granite, a pedestal towering high, on top of which a kayak balances. In the middle of the kayak, the figure of a Greenlandic fish hunter stands upright, arms straight down at his sides, staring ahead into the distance. To the left and to the right of this main body, there are two accompanying parts of the three-piece sculpture both of which depict two Greenlandic women working on the catch laid out in front of them. These sculptures also have wooden benches around them for sitting on. Scattered across the square are some heavy blocks of rock that have been shipped from Greenland to the square finding their new home on Christianshavns Torv. A different rhythm, a different pace, is enacted by the people who frequent these benches and pieces of rock, smoking, talking, looking at small digital displays in their hands, or holding cans of beer, with more cans in plastic bags waiting beneath their feet. A transistor radio sitting on the loading platform of an old Christiania bike, playing Nineties rock music. A web of voices, I hear Greenlandic and Danish; then the air is pierced by some shouts and short conversations exchanged across the square, while a woman is dancing slowly and calmly to the music, face down, arms in mid-air. And higher above, silver gulls cut across the blue sky, piercing the air with their highpitched cries. On a rainy evening in February 2019, I encounter a light sculpture by artist collective SIIKU. The high pedestal of the Greenlandic Monument is covered in white triangle-shaped panels, pointing to the night sky and resembling glaciers. Along its edges run strings of red LEDs. Further up, a big aluminum ring to which red LEDs had been attached, too, draws a circle around the standing figure of the Greenlandic fish hunter, illuminating his face and body. The installation is part of the Copenhagen Light Festival 2019 and was commissioned as a collaboration between SIIKU and the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen. The artist’s collective consists of Rasmus Nielsen (b. 1984, Lyngby) and David H. Péronard (b. 1981, Nuuk). The title of the sculpture is Inuit Nutaat, meaning New People, and the initiating idea is that the installation “puts an existing, traditional public sculpture in a new, dynamic

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frame, and shines a new light to build understanding, community and empowerment. The installation will serve as a spectacular setting for social efforts aimed at creating a more balanced perception of the Greenlander,” as the website for Copenhagen Light Festival announces (copenhagenlightfestival.org). This light installation Inuit Nutaat is the central node around which concepts of amplification will be renegotiated and extended in this chapter to emphasize amplification for a nuanced and critical listening to postcolonial repercussions in the public space of Copenhagen, and to propose this as an analytical tool for a cultural analysis and anthropology of sound. This is in relation to ideas developed in the research project Travelling Sounds: A Sensory Ethnography of Sonic Artefacts in Postcolonial Europe1 at the University of Copenhagen, which investigates artistic and social practices in the urban space as performative spaces in which the entangled histories of postcolonial Europe are narrated, negotiated, and imagined. At the intersection of postcolonial studies and sound studies, I am working and thinking with and through sound (along with fieldnotes, writing, and visual material) towards a critical, affective, and decolonial research methodology. This entails doing sensory ethnography (cf. Pink 2015) to take into account the spatial, mediated, and social dimensions of hearing and perception, and to use sound recording and sound editing as part of the interpretative process: recording sound wearing headphones, and also recording the immediate reflections as spoken field notes, which are then edited together with other snippets of noise, sound, speech, using other sonic references from music, film, or interviews that I have conducted. The results of these sound editing as well as writing processes become manifest in written academic papers and in sonic formats such as audio papers (cf. Groth 2019). Amplification is here conceived of not as mere technologically produced sonic or aesthetic effects nor as a concept confined to popular music studies and production, but as a mode of listening. As will be elaborated, amplification is an intensity that sets our bodies and minds in relation to our surrounding world—in all its sonic, visual, corporeal, and experiential nuances—in a different way. So what kinds of performative spaces are created around the monument through Inuit Nutaat? What is amplified, and how to listen? A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon in late February, I attend the closing event of Inuit Nutaat, the light installation by artist collective SIIKU and meet one of the artists, David H. Péronard. When I arrive at the square, a group of about thirty people are gathered around the Greenlandic monument, an audience of white Danish middle-class people mixes with Danish Greenlanders from the cultural center Greenlandic House, and the Greenlandic and Danish locals who usually frequent the square, many of them being between homes and alcoholics. At the sculpture with the fish hunting women, to the right of the main sculpture, tea, biscuits, and dried fish are provided as snacks by people of the Greenlandic house, who are coorganizing the event together with SIIKU. The local people who usually occupy the space are now sitting on the stone blocks some six or seven meters away, at the back of the bus stop, facing the square. Some of them approach the stand with tea and snacks, exchange greetings and friendly words in Greenlandic with people from Greenlandic house, and retreat to their fellows by the bus stop. A car organized by the Greenlandic house pulls

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up on the square, providing hot food and warm clothes for the homeless and vulnerable people on the square. Many of them have family ties to Greenland, and they know the people from Greenlandic House, some of whom are social workers who have helped them with housing or Danish administration. In front of the light installation for the Greenlandic monument, a small loudspeaker stands on the ground, with a mixing desk and microphone attached to it. The way it is positioned, facing the crowd, still turned off, it seems to already amplify the expectant, open, and indeterminate atmosphere in the square. There is a lot that needs to be navigated. Who will be amplified, and how will this amplification choreograph the bodies, the site, and the actions created in this acoustic space? (cf. Kretzschmar 2016). The first to take to the microphone is Péronard. His calm and sonorous voice is amplified through the loudspeakers and heard clearly across the square. He thanks his collaborators, Greenlandic House, and talks about the work of SIIKU, which for them was a way to engage with the colonial history of Denmark and Greenland that the Greenlandic Monument manifests, and the possibilities of creating a new kind of dialogue about the image of Greenlandic identities in contemporary culture that SIIKU wanted to enable through creation of Inuit Nutaat. Later on, Péronard will tell me about a particular situation at the opening event, when he delivered the introductory words, and a Greenlandic woman took over the microphone and started talking about uranium mining in Greenland and how it has endangered many lives there, thus intervening in the planned choreography of the event. In this way, the speech, which emphasized the positive intentions that had driven the artists to embark on this project, was complemented by a voice that formulated a very concrete instance of ongoing violent imperialist intervention into Greenlandic land and society by the Danish government. The amplification of the woman’s voice also complicated the ways in which people had been inclined to speak, and problematized received ideas about which voices remain silent. Her amplified voice put the woman from the audience on the same audible plane as the official speakers, and at the same time it highlighted the absence of her voice from the official script. In his speech, Péronard also mentions how the process of creating and building the installation had been accompanied by various forms of exchange and negotiation with the local people who use this place every day to meet and spend time, and that he is very happy the installation generally received very positive reactions from the Greenlanders in the square, and that SIIKU is thinking about future projects in which they would like to ramp up collaboration with the local people. The next part of the event consists of a performance by a band of two guitar players and five singers, singing Greenlandic folk songs. The guitar is amplified through the same small PA system, while the singers’ voices are amplified by their multiplication. The guitar chords are played in a catchy rhythm and accompany the melodic vocal lines which animate the audience to sing along. Quite a number of people seem to know the songs, so some join in. The cheerful melodies have also drawn the local people from behind the bus stop closer; they now sit on the benches and blocks at the side of the sculpture. My own perception of this event also changes according to my position on the square. Moving from the crowd which stands directly in front of the band, and the

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loudspeaker, to the side, where the music is still very present but not as dominant, the voices of the people sitting on the benches at the side are more in the foreground. They eat and drink, chat and sing along, though in a more fragmentary mode, not pronouncing every syllable, and with voices hoarse from alcohol and cigarettes. The live music creates a “contact zone” (cf. Pratt 1992) that allows various connections and disconnections, commonalities and differences vibrate together. Listening at this specific time and place, a temporary, maybe fragile, but tangible atmosphere of “conviviality” (Gilroy 2004) becomes present. Different interests, desires, needs, and aspirations have become audible and visible during the event, articulated in various forms that cannot be translated into a strict narrative, a specific message, but whose intensifying and cross-linking effect is palpable. To formulate an interpretation of amplification as a mode of listening, in this situation, it requires careful listening, or to speak with Les Back, it requires “a listening to the half-muted, the background sounds” (Back 2007: 8). The light slowly fades as the sunset approaches, while the light of Inuit Nutaat persists. The square seems smaller now, people stand and sit closer together, and the passing cars seem further away. In conversation with artist Péronard, after the band had stopped playing and a good number of people were still gathered at the installation, he told me about the dialogue that started with the local community of Greenlanders and people of various social, national, and ethnic backgrounds, when they began working at the square. They were confronted with a lot of skepticism toward their project, which was also in conflict with the artists’ ideas of making an intervention intended to have a positive effect on the ways in which people would look at the square, and the Greenlandic community, especially those who frequently use the place to meet and talk and organize their day. It is an ongoing dialogue, and he could see that people had tended to appreciate it. Some homeless people even asked if they could use it as a shelter to sleep in for the night, which unfortunately he was not able to allow, while these dialogues spoke to the dynamic relationship of space, belonging, and “post-migrant socialities” (cf. Kosnick 2015). Spaces are constantly reconfigured and renegotiated across social, sensual, and performative engagements. The next day, the reconfiguration of the square becomes manifest in the process of deconstructing the installation. Péronard wrote a note saying that they were deconstructing Inuit Nutaat now, so I meet him and a friend who works as stage set builder in a theatre, and who built the parts of the installation in his studio before installing them at the monument. When I arrive, the square is filled with cloudy daylight, the sound of a busy afternoon, while the noises of cars and buses are much more present than the night before. The lights at the installation had already been turned off last night, and one of the panels, which has a small lockable door, opens onto the small hollow space inside which exposes the electronics and the structure of wooden beams that held the white wooden panels and the big ring of lights, as none of the materials were allowed to touch the monument. “Now it’s basically about getting it out of the way,” Péronard says. But this requires some noise. The theatre builder pulls up his VW bus on the square and starts deinstalling the circular aluminum frame which held all the lights. Then over a hundred screws have to be unscrewed with a battery screwdriver; after a while the first white panel comes down with a big thud that is greeted with cheers and excited comments by the

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onlooking crowd of locals—and with this they are starting to take over their monument again. When the boards are sawn into pieces with an electric saw, some people come up to help, accompanied with loud comments and gestures. When the whole installation is gone, the space where it was is still visible on the ground, where the wind had carried dust and sand and some rubbish under the structure, amplifying an absence. The mark that Inuit Nutaat has left looks a bit like the outline of a space ship which had landed on this spot before taking off again. Which sounds still reverberate at the sculpture when the music, the voices, and the noises are gone?

Learning and Unlearning to Listen How do we listen in a public place; which stories are performed; what is amplified? Christianshavns Torv is often called Greenlandic Square, in reference to the Greenlandic sculpture situated there. Thinking about the complex social dynamics, multilayered stories, and entangled histories that constitute the square, it becomes increasingly questionable what “Greenlandic” is supposed to connote here. The Greenlandic sculpture depicts a Greenlandic fish hunter and was actually crafted by Danish sculptor Svend Rathsack after he went on a trip to Greenland in the 1930s. Established on the square in 1935, it is a colonial artwork, since Greenland’s colonial status only ceased in 1953. While in the dominant narrative it is emphasized that the sculpture was created as an act of respect toward Greenlandic culture, it is paramount that any closer engagement with the sculpture needs to involve Greenland’s and Denmark’s conflicting histories, rooted in Danish colonialism, and the postcolonial repercussions which are still present today. One of these repercussions has resulted in the marginalization of Greenlandic people who migrated to Denmark (for various different reasons), even if they have been resident in Denmark for generations and/or have become Danish citizens. My senses are amplified. Headphones covering my ears, I press play on my field recorder: Listening to Greenlandic Square through the pre-amplified sound of the field recorder, my mode of listening changes, my senses are amplified; I am thinking through the processed sound of footsteps, bicycle spikes, voices of strangers, car horns. Everything sounds crisper. The sound seems more definitively laid out in front of me. This is a mixture of outward and inward listening. The higher frequencies are emphasized. When people walk by, I hear how the soles of their shoes touch the ground, grinding the sand against the cobble stone street. I feel I have a larger distance from the sonic situation, which is enhanced by the headphones that create a threshold between my body and the scene around me. So, I perceive space differently. The fluidity of foreground and background sounds that I usually perceive when listening attentively is gone. Some sounds just suddenly stick out. Not only the car horns, but also the likes of rattling bicycle chains of passing bikes. I am very aware of my own body, holding the device, the field recorder. I hear fragments of speech as if they were happening at a much closer than they really do from where I am standing. Although

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I don’t understand the meaning of the Danish and Greenlandic fragments of speech that reach my ears, I feel exposed in my role as a listener, no longer feeling part of the sonic situation, but outside of it. I press stop. And delete. How to exercise learning and unlearning to listen? Do I use the recorder as a hearing device? I think so. This “machine to hear for them“ (cf. Sterne 2001) comes equipped with the specifics of the technology. The receiving membrane is placed outside of my body, it becomes an extension of my eardrum. I listen with my eardrum, and with my whole resonant body—bones, flesh, liquids, cavities—in simultaneity with the technology and the other resonant bodies and the physical space surrounding me, together creating this particular hearing situation. In this moment, I probe amplified listening as a method, this time using this recording device. Amplified listening is relational, related to the mediated and spatial aspects of audition. Amplified listening is bodily listening, because it goes beyond the listening to sonic signifiers, toward a hearing that includes “tactile, spatial, physical, material and vibrational sensation” (Eidsheim 2015: 8). Researching colonial history and its postcolonial dimensions in the urban space means challenging one’s own ways of perception and one’s own positionality as a researcher. Amplification can be an instrument of power, and this became very poignant for me when I listened to the sound of the square through my headphones. Working with methods that involve field recording, it was clear that this technological device had to become part of my process of learning—and of unlearning—to listen, and that any recordings that would be made had their own agency. What does listening in this special place entail? What is audible, what is muted? What are the technological, architectural and social attributes of listening in this place? What movements, irritations, encounters and interventions change how I listen here?

Sonic Interventions Installing the light installation Inuit Nutaat by artist collective SIIKU at the Greenlandic Monument at Christianshavns Torv in Copenhagen means “installing a space in another existing space,” to cite Georg Klein’s expression that he uses to speak about his acoustic and site-specific art (Klein 2009: 101). From the perspective of amplified listening, this “existing space” is not at all a fixed and predefined place, but it refers to qualities that it already inhabits—it’s not a neutral space, but one that comes with a certain agency, human or otherwise. On Christianshavn Torv, this entails physical, architectural, and social properties, for instance, which are once more shifted and transformed through the installation, which literally rebuilds and extends the shape of the Greenlandic Monument and transforms the ways in which the monumental sculpture can be used, performed, and perceived. Inuit Nutaat highlights that the monument is entrenched in many layers of stories and voices, as well as untold tales and silences. This artistic intervention thus affects the ways in which people on the square navigate it in their everyday lives, as well as how the installation becomes—as has been

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exemplified with regard to the closing event—a contact zone of different musical, vocal, and social articulations. As such, it has also become a sonic intervention—and this is an aspect that I have become interested in and which has started guiding my research. Significantly, with regard to his artistic practice, Klein goes on to talk about an acoustic intervention as installing “an interior space in an exterior space,” this aspect might seems counterintuitive to the installation of a visual artwork in the public space. However, in regards with Inuit Nutaat, the installation of the wooden structures and light bulbs actually created interior spaces—which I would like to frame here as imaginary spaces— which evoked new affective relations between the postcolonial context in the 1930s in which the statue was installed and the context in which two artists seek to reframe, reconceptualize, and revitalize it in a contemporary postcolonial context. Inuit Nutaat set in motion the alleged historical and somewhat unchangeable status of the monument and provoked a reconsideration of the social formations that are organized around such artifacts. It is the affective dimension of engaging with the artwork in which listening becomes one important part in exploring the performativity of the interactions with and around the light installation. Performing the Greenlandic Monument by installing Inuit Nutaat was to highlight a possibility of alternative narratives to emerge from it, for everybody involved. It also amplified and thus complicated the conflicting relationships between the people who “own” the square, and claim the sculpture, and the artists who had to find ways to claim a temporary intervention into existing narratives and social dynamics themselves. The artistic intervention of Inuit Nutaat into the pre-existing socially constituted urban space thus has the capacity to reconfigure its dominant narratives. One day after the closing event, the place still resonates with the sounds and vibrations of these acts of conviviality and care. It echoes the repercussions of a contemporary postcolonial Greenland in the here and now of a public square in Copenhagen. How can the affective relationships of sonic experiences and their material-discursive presences be remembered?

How to Research Amplification? In order to preliminarily define how I aim to conceptualize amplification, I like to use David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s (2015) definition of the relationship of materiality and metaphor when it comes to sonic perception and sonic thinking: I conceptualize amplification both as a material quality of sound which is created through the technological process of signal processing, and as a mode of listening, a way to describe sonic materialities and intensities in a concrete sonic situation which is always created in relation to other forces, and includes interpretation. One root of Novak and Sakakeeny’s distinction between material and immaterial (and thus metaphorical) aspects of sound finds resonance in the definition of amplification as presented in the Oxford English Dictionary, which distinguishes two qualities and meanings of amplification. Namely, amplification:

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1. Of things material: enlargement. Also concr. that which is added, or causes enlargement. 2. Of things immaterial: augmentation in extent, importance, significance, etc. Also concr. an enlarged or extended representation. (OED online, retrieved August 28, 2019) Amplification refers to sound that is amplified, that is, a sound processed through an amplifier, enhancing the sound’s amplitude. How this quality of amplification has had a significant impact on the aesthetics and practices of popular music production will be detailed in the following part of this chapter. I am interested in how electronic amplification, e.g. the sound of an amplified electric guitar, the use of microphones and loudspeakers, or the amplified sound of a car engine, becomes productive as part of gendered or racialized signifying practices, and as “spaciating potential” (Manning 2016: 95). Sonic amplification also happens without being electronically processed, but activated and enlarged by architectural attributes or other kinds of objects, bodies, and spatial settings that together form an acoustic situation. As part of a sonic and sensory anthropology, amplification oscillates between the material and metaphorical dimensions of sonic perception—as is aptly described by Novak and Sakakeeny: Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality. Metaphors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life. Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor. (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 1)

The sonic materiality of amplified sound choreographs bodies, creates a stage for voices to be heard, creates intensities which draws people together, or pushes other sounds and voices to the background. Amplification as a mode of listening, then, may initially have this metaphorical impetus “to construct perceptual conditions of hearing“ (see quotation above), in which the listener navigates her own habitual, or critical, perceptual agency in relation to the agency of the surrounding sounds, bodies, and movements. In the description of my sensory ethnography of the closing event of Inuit Nutaat, I referred to the amplifier that was positioned in front of the light installation, ready to amplify voices. Before any actual noise was emitted through the technology, the notion of amplification, of an amplified sonic event to come, was already formed in my mind and it shaped the “perceptual conditions of hearing”—it already made me aware of the power structures of voicing and listening, the “territories and boundaries of sound in social life,” that are at play in such a setup of bodies, technology, and space, ready to be mis-en-scène. In an anthropology of sound, amplified listening can thus become a method, extending traditional ethnographic methods such as participant observation with aspects of sounding and listening. In this way, one can study both the ways in which amplification as electronically processed sound becomes an affective and signifying practice, as well as how amplification becomes a mode of listening and attention, and to study how sonic nuances, rhythms, and atmospheres are created that might include audible sounds, also in relation to gestures or visual aspects. Amplified listening at Christianshavns Torv also reconfigures

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space in drawing attention to the entangled histories and present postcolonial conflicts and socialites that become manifest here. As Gascia Ouzounian argues with regard to an analysis of sound installations in the public space, a refined conception of space is needed when taking into account the relational agency of sound and space: When space is understood not in abstract or absolute terms, but as socially and politically constituted, a special sound practice can emerge not only as a poetics, but a politics, not only as an aesthetics, but an ethics. Such a critical spatial sonic practice does not merely “happen” in space, but is poised radically to transform the very terms of its constitution. (Ouzounian 2013: 74)

The poetics and politics of space that manifested at the closing event of Inuit Nutaat (SIIKU 2018) and the deconstruction process the following day (leaving its mark on the ground), alludes to Gilroy’s concept of conviviality (Gilroy 2004) that is possible through a simultaneous presence of many different desires, needs, people, voices, uses of, and reclaiming of a public space–not in the sense of a romanticized notion of togetherness that defies difference, but rather in spite of existing social hierarchies. The aesthetics and ethics of the senses in the field, documented and constructed as a sensory ethnography (including edited field recordings) can thus also be understood as an outcome of amplified listening in the form of juxtaposed and multilayered materials: The “work of the imagination” (Appadurai 1990) is central in all of this; the metaphorical has a very concrete ramification for the way one perceives sound as something substantial, material, technological, processed. Creating an audio walk is a possible research outcome of this. When listening to an audio walk for a public monument, recorded sounds overlap with the actual sounds the listener hears on the square, which sonically fictionalises the place and makes it possible to experience the overlap of different narratives and temporalities. The imagination of the listener is guided as well as irritated by the sonic material presented in the audio walk, such as edited field recordings, music, and different narratives that are not intended to merge into a coherent form. This mode of amplified listening challenges fixed representations of culture and thus encourage us, as Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson put it, to “focus on social and political processes of place making” that complexify the ways in which culture is written into place, and to “enable resistances” (2001: 6). As a practice-based method for the study of public monuments and postcolonial entangled histories, formats such as the audio walk do have their own limitations, which become part of the experience of listening-while-walking, but they might also open up a space for different sonic and sensorial engagements, other stories and alternative modes of listening, walking and imagination to emerge.

Amplification as a Tool for Imaginary World-Making The dominant discourses around amplification can be found, for instance, in the context of rock music, and specifically guitar culture. The following part of this chapter will thus elaborate on aspects related to amplification in popular music, but also in relation

The Amplificatio

to other established examples from sound studies, focusing on how amplification is made productive as a tool for imaginary world-making. Finally, a trajectory toward the realm of the anthropology of sound will be drawn, connecting these new findings on amplification to examples from my own more recent research on the sound of skateboarding, before returning to the sounds surrounding the artwork Inuit Nutaat at the Greenlandic Monument in Copenhagen. As already mentioned, amplification as a concept is most prominently perceived in the context of rock music and electronic music discourses. It is often associated with loudness, distortion, noise, and electronic sound effects. Hence, in musical discourses, amplification is often conceptualized in opposition to acoustic music, which is then defined in terms of acoustic, clean, and “unplugged” sound qualities. With Novak and Sakakeeny’s definition of sound conceptions as ideas that inform experience in mind, with regard to amplification in rock music it seems that the idea and the experience of amplified sound inform each other continuously, bouncing back and forth between amplification as a representation of musical identities which become manifested in the physical and affective intensity of the sound, and amplification as this sheer intensity, this sonic fabric, through which representations of musical identities are destroyed, reconfigured, and transformed. The electric guitar and bass might serve as a good example to start to untangle this, because it has become such a powerful symbol for amplified rock music and, at the same time, remains open enough to have been redefined and reinvented so many times. As musicologist Theodore Gracyk states: The electric guitar and bass were pivotal in the emergence of a distinct rock tradition … By the mid-1960s, the solid-body electric guitar was entrenched as the emblematic rock instrument, and … remains the primary case of rock’s adherence to an aesthetic dominated by the possibilities of unorthodox timbres and techniques. (Gracyk 1996: 11)

An important point, as he goes on to explain, is that the sound of the amplified guitar is not only about increased loudness, but that the timbre also changes through electric amplification from which new distinct esthetic qualities emerged: Electric guitars send their signal to the amplifier from a set of magnets called pickups. The amp does not amplify the sound of the struck and vibrating string. Any motion of the metal strings alters the electric current flowing through the pickups; registering this motion rather than the sound of the strings, the pickups generate the actual frequencies sent for amplification, including harmonic overtones that are not otherwise present … An electric guitarist creates and controls an electric signal by means of the instrument. The sounds produced depend on the capacities and interactions of the preamplifier and the amplifier. The instrument in the musician’s hands can be regarded as a mere means to generating and manipulating electronic sounds. (Ibid.: 112)

The new sonic possibilities that arose from this technology also encouraged new techniques for playing the instrument, to perform not with the instrument alone but to actively use the loudspeakers of the guitar amp as a feedback generator, for instance, with which sustained notes can be manipulated and intensified excessively. And in this interplay, the guitar

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amplifier becomes an aesthetic tool in its own right. Such changes in guitar technology are usually grounded in what we might call the “cultural identity” of the instrument—that is, the various ways that the guitar is used to enact, influence, and challenge sociocultural and musical discourses. As music and sound scholar Paul Théberge holds, the microphone, electrical amplification and loudspeakers must be considered as absolutely fundamental to contemporary popular music. Their character is underscored, ironically, by the degree to which they have become “naturalised” and their effects rendered invisible to us. (Théberge 2001: 4)

Amplification becomes a very relevant aspect of an anthropology of sound when emphasizing its specific effects and entanglement in different kinds of power relations. As Théberge goes on to highlight: Since its introduction during the 1950s, amplification through transistor circuitry has lent itself to both the economies of power and miniaturization, thus making it possible to meet the acoustic demands of public venues such as dance clubs and sports stadiums, on the one hand, and the more intimate spaces of automobiles, portable transistor radios and Sony Walkmans, on the other. “Power” is again in this instance both a description of a physical phenomenon and a cultural value: for it is only through the application of electrical amplification to loudspeakers (or headphones) that we are able to invest both our public and private spaces with a musical intensity unprecedented in cultural history. (Ibid.: 7)

Rather than attempting a comprehensive study of the socio-cultural and pop musical significance of the guitar, I will focus on how the aesthetics of amplified guitar sound complicate conceptions of noise and musical sound, challenging gendered notions of amplification. As music scholar Mary Celeste Kearney notes in her book on Gender and Rock: Loudness, distortion, and noise have long connoted masculinity through their suggestion of power, control, mastery, and aggressiveness. In contrast, quietness and softness have long been figured as feminine because of their suggestions of passivity and comfort … Some women-centred rock bands have used their ability to create noise as a feminist gesture, foregrounding their opposition to patriarchy and misogyny through their performance of loud, distorted music. As heard in Girlschool’s “Not for Sale” (1980), L7’s “Shitlist” (1992), Bikini Kill’s “Suck my Left One” (1992), Tribe 8’s “Frat Pig” (1995), and Kittie’s “Daughters Down” (2004), rock noise accompanied by feminist lyrics challenge traditional femininity and trouble gender politics. (Kearney 2017: 206–207)

How amplification is capable of destabilizing and overthrowing gendered identities in music making is articulated by electronic musician Pamela Z, who reflects on her practice of using her voice and technology to manipulate and thus challenge the boundaries between them: “Making wild sounds with an external instrument may seem like exerting control over something, while making those sounds with the voice might seem like losing control (i.e., madness, hysteria?)” (Pamela Z 2003: 349). These notions relating to amplification

The Amplificatio

and noise also resonate with examples such as UK pirate radio, which became a subversive cultural practice that regained significance as racial and medial exclusion of musical styles such as Grime and early Dubstep in the (late) 1990s and social marginalization persisted (Maier 2016a). The postmigrant background of many of the producers and MCs working in these genres, as well as the fact that they are based in the less privileged areas of East London, is significant when investigating pirate radio practices. As they are usually excluded from white mainstream radio, the particularly intense atmosphere that is created within the pirate radio stations across London amplifies the tension of creating new music at the margins of the city. This sonic, cultural, and spatial conglomeration is described vividly in Steve Goodman’s account of a particular pirate radio studio: The summer of 2003, holed up in a small room on the 12th floor of a residential tower block in Bow, East London, the sweat running down the inside of the walls. The room is built inside a larger room, a hastily constructed endo-architecture to cocoon the studio, protecting the pirate transmission and transmitters from intruders. The electrics are sporadic but functional … Wires snake their way out of messily drilled holes … out through windows, trailing and flapping against the outside of the block, leading up to the transmitter on the roof. Inside this pirate radio studio, the megalopolis is screaming through the MCs, at a rapid rate, which seems to exceed the limits of the human system of vocalization. The pressure of millions channelled via a few mouths. (Goodman 2007: 49)

Distortion as an effect of amplification is used here as an aesthetic and critical tool to enhance the determination and urgency of the MC’s message. As I noted with regard to the use of sound manipulation such as distortion, these sound practices also challenge essentialistic descriptions of sounds. Listening to the sound’s materiality, and how sound practices of looping and layering in electronic dance music incorporate and evoke new musical ideas that transgress rigid confines of cultural or ethnic identity, also manifests in the sonic practices of bands such as Asian Dub Foundation, who sampled Indian classical and bhangra music and amplified and manipulated the sounds of Indian instruments to be transformed into a leading melody in a dancehall track: “in mixing South Asian-inflected rap, jungle and punk, ADF’s sound practice resists exoticizing images of Indianness and sonically generates their radical, danceable and activist stance” (Maier 2020: 120). There is a critical potential in sound practices of amplification, which is actually negotiated at various points in the spectrum between loudness and silence, and between sonic nuisance and desired sounds. Some wellestablished academic and artistic positions have dealt with and intervened into techniques and technologies of addressing these politics. Focusing on the acoustic territories of urban space, Brandon LaBelle uses musical metaphors to analyze the concrete sonic characteristics and social politics of sound in various urban settings such as “the underground,” “the pedestrian subway,” and, quoted here, the pervasive sounds in “the shopping mall”: [T]he amplification of a highly crafted melody by Ray Conniff swinging through the department stores, arranged as an elaborate psychoacoustic and multi-speaker event specific to the airy lightness of perfume counters, begins a steady electroacoustical conditioning of the everyday, leading to the contemporary flood of sonic pervasiveness. (LaBelle 2010: 188)

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As Georgina Born reminds us, “music and sound [is] the terrain on which not only aesthetic differences but also social, cultural, religious, and political differences, inequalities and oppressions may be played out” (Born 2005: 33). Moreover, Michael Bull draws attention to the sonic dimension of everyday life in his work on iPod listening, in which he makes connections from historical to contemporary practices of and musical amplification and the creation of collective memory: Early research into the use of the gramophone record displays much of the geography of memory, nostalgia and longing that resonates through contemporary iPod use. The Edison survey of US record listeners undertaken in 1921 found that for many, in that country of immigrants, listening to gramophone music transported them back, or linked them to, their absent homes and families. (Bull 2004: 143)

This reminds me of a scene that I encountered at Christianshavns Torv one late evening in September 2019: A small transistor radio is held by a Greenlandic woman in her thirties, another woman of the same age, is standing beside her, the loudspeakers at ear level. The two women are singing along to the tune of a Greenlandic pop song. They know all the lyrics by heart, their voices sound soft and grainy and in perfect harmony—amplifying a sadness and longing that is almost tangible. Reversing the idea of listening to amplified sound as a cultural and social practice, Christina Kubisch in her Electrical Walks (2004 and ongoing) draws attention to various sounds that are usually not consciously perceived, such as electromagnetic fields in the urban environment. She uses technology to amplify and make audible these hidden sounds, thus allowing us to reimagine our sonic world, reconfiguring the “omniscient” listener, and reconceptualizing listening as something that is not restricted to the ear, but that is a bodily experience. In an article on the sound of skateboarding, I investigated how listening to the sounds created through the friction of the skateboard while grinding and sliding along the surfaces of city architecture brings to attention the sonic materiality urban surfaces (Maier 2016b: 31–2). Here I emphasize an aspect of amplification that relates to how objects and architecture create a friction through which the surfaces of the urban space are amplified: Activating the physical attributes of the city, the skateboarder becomes a composer of the city, using its surfaces as an instrument. The way in which the skater plays the city’s structures, how much speed, pressure, feeling, or emphasis he or she puts into the performance, all influences how the city responds sonically. (ibid.: 33)

As these examples show, amplification may serve an analytical tool to explore the multilayered dimensions of listening and the politics of mediated sound. In her contribution to the collected volume The Art of Being Many (2014), Sylvie Kretzschmar investigates public address systems (PAs) and how they construct public spaces and collectivities, posing a set of questions which complicate dynamics of participation and silencing:

The Amplificatio

How do sound systems choreograph the bodies of the speakers? What role do they ascribe to the addressees? In what way is acoustic space created by voice amplification, are temporary collectives created? What imaginations of political community are evoked by techniques and technology? Who is amplified here, who is excluded from the political discourse, as it were, by means of apparatus? (Kretzschmar 2016: 143)

In engaging these questions, amplification needs to be elaborated as a critical and analytical tool to explore the intensified sensuality of sound practices in everyday life and ethnographic work.

Amplified Listening as a Critical Mode of Listening The case described in detail at the beginning of the chapter is the scene for an investigation of amplification, a place to return to in order to think about changing modes of listening and conviviality in a highly dynamic and contested social sphere of urban life in Copenhagen, a place of entangled histories, postcolonial repercussions, and negotiations of citizenship. I wish here to propose amplified listening as a viable and pertinent research method in the anthropology of sound, claiming that both the concrete physical and technological materiality of amplification, as well as the critical stance of amplified listening, is a productive elaboration and refinement of the concept. Amplified listening means listening in heightened awareness of the sounds, resonances, rhythms, and sonic relations to space, bodies, and movement. Amplified listening is an “agile listening” as proposed in 2004 by Michael Bull and Les Back. As the description of a busy public square in Copenhagen helped to reveal, modes of listening in everyday life is conditioned, habitual, filtered listening—especially in urban street life, where you are often guided by signals rather than undertones, and there is a functionality of listening and conditioned bodies that is very present but hardly reflected upon (Schulze 2019). Amplified listening means to attend to the “background sounds, the half-muted” (Back 2007), the different, divergent, conflicting or harmonizing perceptual dynamics that may be part of the same sonic situation. As a method, and as a stance in researching sound, and in relation to the questions of an anthropology of sound, this means not taking for granted what you hear. Amplified listening is a critical, questioning, searching mode of listening both in relation to how you interpret what you hear around you and in terms of your own listening habits, inclinations, and (self-) reflections. Amplified listening is listening against the grain of representation—musical, technological, machinic, and other everyday sounds do not represent a situation, a state,

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a culture, a nation, a gender. Amplified listening attends to what is enacted in the situated presence of a musical performance, a social or political gathering, or listening with your headphones to music on your mp3 player. There is an undoubted power to amplification, which can be an oppressive force. The one who holds the microphone is inclined to speak, to shape the space for listening. There is also a normalizing power of amplification, when you get tuned in, the signals, the engines, the pre-amplified listening experiences that guide you and push you and make you “work” (cf. Schulze 2019). There is, moreover, a gendered use of amplified sounds when, for instance, amplified guitar music becomes, together with a set of bodily and spatial practices, a means to perform a certain kind of masculinity. And there are ways to revert this power into a critical sound when female punk bands use distortion effects as a vehicle to transport feminist ideas and claims. There is a “sonic dominance” (Henriques 2011) of amplification in Jamaican sound systems, or in pirate radio practices, for example, which stage, challenge, and transform the social power strategies within which these musical practices have to be socially and culturally negotiated. There is thus a critical power of amplification when people stand up for social change by using the people’s microphone (Woodruff 2016), when they sonify and amplify data as an artistic strategy to make audible the silenced dimensions of discrimination (Obadike and Obadike 2015). Or in activist practices such as Marronage’s multi-voiced reading of their manifesto “We Are Here—Marronage Is Resistance” (Marronage 2018). Concepts of amplification were renegotiated and extended in this chapter to propose amplified listening as a critical mode of listening to postcolonial repercussions in the public space of Copenhagen, and to propose this as an analytical tool for a cultural analysis and anthropology of sound.

Note 1

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 750199.

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The Studio Matthew Barnard

Figure 19.1  The 16.4 Periphonic Ambisonic Studio at the University of Hull, UK.

In Periphony You join this humanoid alien (Schulze 2018a: 3), at the start of a compositional process. I’m gathering sound materials to exploit in an acousmatic indulgence: the scene starts with muttered inanities—I can’t make out exactly what’s been said. Some are here for the transit. Perhaps a special punctuating treat as part of their longer ramble. Others for the spectacle, cameras ready. The environment extends out in all directions, but not equally. My acoustic horizon (Truax 1999) is distant ahead and laterally, proximate behind: a brick building providing a sort of human-scale delineation to the soundscape. An occasional breeze displaces my hair and the fur on the dead cat at the extremity of my right arm. An elderly gentleman finds the dead cat amusing to an audible degree, but otherwise the soundscape is unfolding with curated finesse. I can feel the heft of the locomotive judder the earth underneath me. This is the sound of the LMS No. 45428 “Eric Treacy,” a steam locomotive

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pulling into a station on a cloud-peppered but sunny, warm, calm … perhaps even lazy summer afternoon. The action grows in intensity, the horizon closes in, the close detail growing in prominence and angular definition. Suddenly, the immersion is interrupted: it’s as though someone has stood up from their seat in the cinema, mid-scene, and carved out a silhouette, subtracting a small but unavoidably noticeable portion of the projection on their delicate escape to the restroom. My focus recedes back into this studio environment once more. Now, I am listening to an ambisonic recording, in a 16.4 periphonic ambisonic studio located on campus at the University of Hull. Ambisonics is an abstract spatial format for encoding soundfields, pioneered by Michael Gerzon in the 1970s, liberated after copyright expiration and software proliferation. These encoded soundfields are then decodable to n listening situations. Am I hearing height information? The thought appears and I stare at the Front Left Up loudspeaker, azimuth +45°, elevation +35° (we work anticlockwise in ambisonics, by the way). This becomes a tick of sorts that draws my focus when I’m pondering the success of the reproduction of spatial image this studio affords me. I’m the pioneering listener-operator of this studio, still calibrating, tweaking, adjusting, and adjusting to the environment. Anyway, back to the projection. These shuddering clunks, fizzes, hisses and machine grooves are bottled at Grosmont station, in the North Yorkshire Moors national park, as part of a compositional practice of gathering sounds and subsequently altering, sequencing. It goes without saying that I’ve been anxiously observing recording levels and cursing the breeze, merciful as it is. I’m armed with the almighty electroacoustic black box—the supposedly indelible recording device (Truax 2001: 10)—to allow the bottling of various sound events around the North Yorkshire Moors Railway with a first-order ambisonic microphone capture device. It is said that the microphone never lies, yet it only tells the truth afforded to it (Weidenaar 2002: 66), a dispassionate filter whose intent is shaped by its manner of deployment by the recordist with the untrustworthy ears, opinions, preconceptions, biases, preoccupations, limited powers of attention. And this truth is all around me, forming an apparent circumspace (Smalley 2007: 51). There’s excitement as the iron horse shudders to a stop and exhales in billows of steam and coalsmoke. I can smell it, see it. But I’m not there anymore. I must remind myself that those are experiential echoes, I suppose: multisensory traces that are merely reawakened by this enveloping acousmatic moment. I have a privileged, contextualized, multimodal perceptual sensorium (Schulze 2018a: 140), with full backstory and accompanying snapshots. After all, listening is an activity “situated in material and personal, sensorial and performative, as well as technological and historical relations to a given listening environment” (Schulze 2018a: 34) and I have a particularly privileged understanding not only of the recorded sonic environment but the immediate environment of the studio. I’ve seen its construction and know where the levers are, how the illusion is conjured. My attention is pulled strongly in both directions. This studio is a listening machine that has an inherent contradiction. It’s designed to reproduce sound in 360 degrees at a level of precision, with technical characteristics that afford critical listening, a specialized tool of sonic experience. But it is also just an arbitrary

The Studio

context, with no essential role in the formulation or execution of the sonic endeavors of the listener-operator. This studio has a primary function of enabling the audition of periphonic ambisonic signals. These signals are curious as they are abstract, not only as all digital sound signals inherently are, but also as the paradigm of ambisonics is spatially abstract, speaker-agnostic, realized in essentially any context in any geometric configuration that happens to be adopted. This studio is one of many, any contexts that such a sonic endeavor can be realized in, either in terms of execution or reception. I’m back in Grosmont, hearing the LMS No. 45428 “Eric Treacy” once more. I look up from the computer screen. I don’t see angles and loudspeakers this time. I see my office. The scribbles on the whiteboard, the old video cassette recorder that a student has been experimenting with, some of my late father’s artwork on the shelves. I’m wearing my headphones. The smell of the coalsmoke is as strong as before. Before we interrogate that notion, it’s back to the studio. I’m staring at the Front Left Up loudspeaker again, still unconvinced of the spatial image I’m served up. Rinse and repeat this ritual of listening and reflecting enough times not to bother counting. Recalling Michel Chion, I realize I’m in danger of succumbing to the safety of repeated listening, something that is “not in itself enough to vouchsafe better attention” as I am likely to prehear what is going to happen and subsequently not really pay attention to the actual stimuli, wanting to “listen less and less,” tending to merely recall, with a waning accuracy (Chion 2016: 215). I do another pink noise test of each loudspeaker as both a technical exercise to test the balance across the array and as a sort of sonic palate cleanser for my attention. Enough trains for today. Apologies, I’m an acousmatician and I arrive at this discussion as a composer preoccupied with the medium(s) I work with and the method of reception that is consequently afforded to the listener. The listening experience is my output, I suppose, with my fixed-media compositions merely blueprints for the listener to digest, comprehend, navigate, and find meaning in an assumed, shaded gamut of ambiguity. This trajectory means I am to value the information contained in the black box highly, demanding as much of Weidenaar’s truth encapsulated in the soundfields captured as possible, during their reimagining across an array of loudspeakers. My mode of listening is shaped by the context of my endeavors: to compose, to work in this space. As I listen in the studio, I actively try to leave behind the current actual spatial, temporal situation I find myself in to taste an alternative, suggested, virtual moment in another: a situation in-between this actual location and that of the presented sonic moment. The illusory mind’s eye. Cinema for the ear as either Chion (Landy 2007: 89) or Bayle (Kane 2014: 51) might concede, loaded with promise and appeal. A generated space (Schulze 2018a: 142), a liminal workspace (Order 2016: 429) across the actual and virtual, perhaps neither fully leaving nor arriving at either at any moment. This listening requires some effort. Despite teasing, and later exploring, that this studio is potentially made anonymous through the abstract paradigm around which it orbits (is the studio my office or this listening edifice?), this studio space is peculiar, unlike many other spaces but not wildly dissimilar to other studios dedicated to experimental creative practice. Located in a basement complex surrounding a concert hall, through double doors, down a corridor, it’s a room erected

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within an outer shell, a true inner world full of potency and mystery. It has a science-fiction aura: you enter a platform and are raised via lift into the stare of the loudspeaker array. The angles and colors that the designers conceptualized and constructors realized give the space a future-retro tinge. It encourages a mode of listening simply by looking like it does. It looks exciting, surely it sounds exciting? The lights are exclusively from above, low in luminosity, save for the glow of the screens visualizing and subsequently objectifying, triangulating a relationship with the sound signals I see and hear. The door is behind and below me as I face the screens. There’s a glow of light from the integrated window that invites a sporadic glance to see if anyone is there, looking in. Otherwise, the environment feels calm, cocooning, and isolating, with a visual sharpness and an absorptive acoustic softness. But this is an environment in delicate balance between the comfort of reliable, repeatable precision at the behest of the listener bestowed with ultimate control of behavior and operation, and the possibility of sonic hostility from this machine edifice, with its inherent ear-splitting potential. Early in its life, the custom-built monitoring amplifier coughs out a jagged impulse as it fails, heralding an atmosphere of jeopardy and lurking sonic menace. Moreover, the decoding software had developed a tendency to stutter and glitch with an occasional deafening beep or genuinely terror-inducing digital machinescream. It’s like the studio is resisting attempts to tame it: a terrible progeny of piecemeal machines, software packages, theories, imaginations, and graft, squealing into existence. Concrete, metal, wood, wire, fabric, and furniture form a cavity that houses a complement of loudspeaker teeth, ready to bite. I’m in the mouth of the machine, surrounded by teeth! All pointed at my head! Perhaps this is enough vivification. These encounters are the first of many symbiotic exchanges, as I, one of many listener-operators, react to the behaviors of the machine, which in turn reacts to the agency and actions of the listener-operator. A cumulative familiarization and adaption. The teeth seem more like humble loudspeakers every time. But now the HVAC is making things tropical. It’s breathing fire. All of these elements are additive, cumulative, and contribute to the overarching press (Rhodes 1961: 308) of the situation: a term encapsulating the relationship between a humanoid alien and their total environment, coined for Rhode’s interrogation of creativity. The press of this studio is immediate. The horizon, visually and acoustically, is inherently proximate, but not claustrophobic. I’m in a space designed specifically for one single humanoid alien. I have ultimate control over the sound pressure levels. The lighting is attuned to my desires. I’m stood today and I reconfigure my posture and shift my weight every now and then, sometimes leaning on the desk. I look—or listen—around me from time to time, auditioning different directions in the space, sometimes rotating my frame to face arbitrary directions on the azimuth. The press generally feels plastic, tamed, or congruent as Rhodes might suppose. But there is the wider press, the broader political, cultural, societal context of this studio. There’s a peculiarity to this environment, existing within a higher education institution, with its Russian doll layers of organization, multifaceted sense of purpose, the febrile, instable political direction of the sector. The press alters with your frame of mind. At once I’m in the studio as composer-practitioner, suddenly as teacher, trouble-shooter, listener, student. The studio can feel open, safe, exciting but it can also feel

The Studio

oppressive, dangerous, a burden. The press can be dissonant, too. In any of these contexts, I’m reminded of my privilege by this edifice of exclusivity. It’s back to the office environment with its natural light. I’m working on the same project. I have the same software environment at my disposal, with the same plug-ins, the same familiar sound objects in my virtual arrangement timeline. From a technical perspective, all that has changed, the only thing that is identifiably contrasting, is my method of audition. I’ve got those headphones on again, but I can still hear a circumspace (Smalley 2007: 51). I still have periphonic privilege. This speaker-agnostic characteristic of ambisonics introduces the notion of an abstract spatial definitive of a work: the b-format domain of ambisonics is only realized during a decode, so a version can and may need to function in any number of contexts, including one with the affordance of user-controlled reorientation and possibly even distortion of the spatial image. This varied geographical locating of practice coupled with adoption of virtualized software environments is theorized neatly as an “abstracted liminal workspace between the geographical physical environment and the virtual technological environment” (Order 2016: 429). This liminal workspace adds precarity to the significance, purpose, function of such a studio environment, inviting interrogation of how we can relate to and experience such a listening machine.

Be Sonically Like Any Other Environment! This loosely narrated process reflects some of the sensations experienced when working, as I seem to invariably be doing, in this peculiar space. The contexts of previous or further engagements are inevitably shaded with variation and would produce respectively varied accounts of experience. But we must start somewhere in our consideration of the studio and its character: how they are relational experiences, meaningful in ways beyond the typical technical treatise they are afforded, casualties of our great “desire to quantify” (Schulze 2018a: 22). It is beyond the intended scope of this discussion to encapsulate studios of various configuration and function, so we are to keep steady our focus on the peculiar, experimental studio spaces, designed in some way to feel for the edges of technical or aesthetic potential, for some sort of creative, ultimately experiential dividend. A contemporary preoccupation that seems to thread together many experimental studio spaces is a pivot around sonic space and its presentation. That preoccupation is reflected in this discourse. Why do we pursue such an endeavor? Why should we? Who is this space for? The idioms associated with the experimental studio lean towards accommodating an expert listener of some kind, but is it a creative space? A clinical space? A transformational space? Or merely, as Meintjes suggests, a technical fetish? (Meintjes 2012: 267) The march of technology appears to be a primary definer of developments in studio research, catalyzing new practice through incremental evolution of means and ideas. Perhaps this is a case of the tail wagging the dog? Is this technological development the route to new fertile ground? Is this the best way to define a studio space? These potentially complex listening edifices are measured in the currency of immersion, realism, or some

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sort of accuracy, with all of the caveats and jeopardy of quantifying and arguing the inherent value of technical performance, sometimes at the cost of the experiential. But isn’t the pursuit primarily of some sort of experiential dividend? It seems instinctively so. Is this a clinical space for audition or is it a creative haven, then? It is appropriate to consider how we might define the notion of the studio. It is easy to resort to a technical monotone when describing these spaces, a reflection of tendencies to demarcate such technologies as tools to be operated and little else. Conversely, studios can be recognized as more broadly significant to degrees that exceed the scope of discussion here, with due consideration made to the wider cultural reputation of some spaces. For our present purposes, the interest lies in the immediate environment of the studio. Studios can be described in rather cool, utilitarian language as “laboratories” (Hennion 1989), “workshops,” or even “assembly-lines” (Kealy 1982). This is language that Bates suggests are “archetypal professional workplaces” focusing a context of operation, going further to suppose that this architecture is “often intended to recede from attention and would be typically regarded as comparatively inconsequential on the nature of products produced within” (Bates 2012a: 1). These terms revolve around a notion of potential, for things to happen within, to somehow facilitate an output of some description: the immaculate ideas of the creative, uncontaminated by the environmental context. This consideration invites a comprehension of the studio as a container or conduit. Bates goes further to draw upon Sofia’s conception of container technologies and the contention that there is a tendency for myopia when considering the contribution to activity such containers make. This is a consequence of what Sofia suggests could be the “unobtrusive technics of containers and containment” (Sofia 2000: 198) and their feminine gendered reading, in contrast to the tools and utilities within and their typically masculine interpretation (Bates 2012a: 2). Drawing upon demonstrable use of the label by practitioners, Bates furthers this notion to imagine the studio environment as womb, with connotations of envelopment, nurture, and maternal relationship for the humanoid alien. We can suppose that the nature of this containment is a definer of the studio as a place, environment, or press. But to what degree? Do we prioritize the acoustic performance of a studio to the detriment of the congruent press? The shiny technology may feast on the lion’s share of our attention. This thread of container technologies leads temptingly to the Japanese concept of ma: literal translations read something like gap, void or space between two things, but it is more akin to a concept of negative space—that portion of space unoccupied by object(s) that, in duality, simultaneously defines the object as much as the object’s perimeter itself. In poetic exertion, Lao Tse illustrates the concept variously as the gap between spokes in a wheel, the void in the pot-vessel, the space in the rooms of a house as the “essence” of these things, not the materials or delimitations (Fletcher 2001: 369). The studio is necessarily as much the volume it surrounds and contains as it is the physical walls, furniture, and tools. The volume, then, is special to these places as we tend to displace, evict the sonic activity through their construction, carving out our quiet, private niche, forcing the sonic environment away from us in our comfortable acoustic bubble, enrobed in layers of material mitigation, the environment tamed to our whim. It’s a wipe of the slate that subsequently allows for the creation of a new sonic environments with the

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hope of an optimum fidelity, with no competition from the invasive outside. The broader tendency of carefully curating an acoustic tempted Théberge to suggest a notion of “nonspace” (Théberge 2004: 763): an acoustic blank slate, free of peculiarity. This theoretical blankness has obvious advantage, offering the possibility to reference sonic activity in a controlled, reliable manner that enables the potential of insight through critical listening, of focused creative endeavor; indeed, “in this vision we are not confronted with an acoustic problem but with the plans for an idealised microcosm of creation” (Hennion 1989: 408) in our “fantastically-regulated sonic environment” (Meintjes 2012: 273). Expectation grows. These studios are time and space machines: a translocation of sonic environment that exploits the human spatial register by presenting in full periphony. The requirements are onerous: Be sonically like any other environment I dictate! The veracity of sound reproduction appears to be the essence of the studio: all that matters, it seems, is that point in the middle of the loudspeaker array to which you need to carefully offer up your head as the bullseye on your anatomical sponge-baffle. All the accumulated precision of acoustic research, loudspeaker design, digital-to-analogue convertors, the psychoacoustics-informed, compensated, and calibrated decoders is handed as sonic baton to you, with your unique anatomical topography, to interrupt the acoustic patterns for the final spatial sampling of the environment. The weight of expectation is almost coercive: you’d better appreciate it and believe that you are hearing something special. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our bodies are perceptual instruments with intention for acquiring equilibrium within a given situation, as ambiguity instils a disequilibrium. Our corpus instruments are striving for information to resolve phenomena, across our perceptual sensorium. This degree of resolution is sought through the grip of a given perceptual situation, tempered in part the distance of perspective to given phenomena. The strengthening of this grip is the aspiration of the body, striving for maximum grip. In a relation of Merleau-Ponty’s concepts to binaural compositional and listening aesthetics, Emam states that a “maximum grip refers to the best possible context for perceiving a work or concept that is idiosyncratic to the work, and the intentions of the artist” (2013: 3, emphasis added), highlighting that Merleau-Ponty suggests “distance is what distinguishes this loose and approximate grip from the complete grip which is proximity” (2011: 305). This helpful relation of acousmatic sonic experience to the tendencies of the humanoid alien to resolve a grip on the material, through perceptual means, can be aligned to the studio context. The raison d’être of these adventurous, experimental studio spaces seems to satisfy the pursuit of experiential dividend, primarily in the direction of immersion in the sonic experience. The presentation of sound in surround is seemingly in line with our natural mode of audition as binaural. There is an inherent sensitivity to artificial or unnatural spatial behavior that doesn’t resolve with our perceptual intake. Merleau-Ponty suggests there is a tension in a sensation of deviation from the point of maximum grip, so with any shortcomings to the sense of immersion, a lack of success of these listening machines could perhaps be more keenly felt. To put it another way, are these listening machines less plausible if the experience never affords maximum grip, because they are striving to bring the listener-operator closer to it, with comprehensive, detailed stimuli? Are they flying too close to the sun? A motivation toward an optimal grip seems risky.

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Again, the weight of expectation is almost coercive: you’d better appreciate it and believe that you are hearing something special. We can suppose at least that the act of listening in a studio space such as this, in contrast to listening via the framed presentation of stereo or especially headphones, is actually one that affords more participation in the act by default. Your corpus is the organic apparatus that ultimately curates the sonic experience. A studio that presents sonic information in an envelopment is one that is consequently more sympathetic to your humanness. Your dynamic sponge-baffle is altering, displacing the medium of air, distorting the ma to create a personal niche, a personal negative space (Barnard 2010: 40). In danger of reifying an exteroceptive indulgence, it seems an observation of a spatially summative, sculpturally analogous effect of our full selves is seemingly inescapable when contemplating and experiencing such listening devices and environments. As Schulze, channeling MerleauPonty, contends: “corpus creates space” (Schulze 2018a: 142). The studio is a steer, then: a funneling of agency and action. These spaces rely upon being within a spectrum of expectation, attuned sympathetically to your methods and tolerances of experiencing a space, sonically and otherwise. But, they are coercive spaces, defining the boundaries or “enforcing limits to action” (Dovey 2005: 291) as part of Dovey’s silent complicity of architecture, which ultimately catalyzes certain agency, attitude, creative endeavor, and listening approach—even posture and your direction of gaze. Perhaps a pursuit of these spaces is as much a hinderance, with its experiential friction of contradictory sensory information—seeing one thing, hearing another—as it is facilitator to the listener-operator? So is this studio just a formalized, calcified context of listening? An otherwise fleeting, arbitrary arrangement of loudspeakers now immortalized in architectural permanence, its configuration and situation of no specific consequence beyond perhaps looking good on university open days? If the studio was more exclusive in its technical approach, with a bespoke spatial language and unique paradigm, it might be straightforward to delineate its significance. In one sense, it could be casualty of the ubiquitous listening habits of modernity, with the very same material projected over loudspeakers, quite straightforwardly auditioned via smartphone, anywhere and everywhere (Kassabian 2013b: 3), with a parallel ubiquity of the means of production. The speaker-agnosticism of the ambisonic method and the possible relinquishment of oversight upon the ultimate presentation method of material means this context of creativity is particularly loaded with risk. There is always some phonographic risk, isn’t there? Sonic ideas committed to fixed-media, distributed on the format-du-jour, experienced by someone, somewhere on some listening machine, probably in traditionally non-ideal conditions. But let’s double-down. In this approach there is second-order phonographic risk. Do you hear what I hear? I’m reminded of the adage: “In mix, nobody can hear your screen” (Johnson 2018). Do I hear what I hear? The composer’s privilege is understanding the component parts, the acousmatic insight afforded by constructing the sonic illusions, our hands on the levers. This idea is relatable to the listening machine of the studio, which can provide a forensic interpretation of sonic materials which is typically never experienced by the listener of the final compositional artifact. These materials have a potentially unknown

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destination when distributed and an indeterminate spatial presentation, possibly in partial form. Couple this risk with a potential for reorientation of the inherent sonic space of a composition and a direct challenge to the traditional authority of the phonographic artist is made. This is in a vein similar to that of using an equalizer to alter the spectral balance of a work, but seeming more catastrophic in its potential, considering the preoccupation with the presentation of sounds in space that is a pivot-point of the acousmatic-leaning idioms. Are these studios functional, helpful in this regard? Are they folly? They become unique listening situations, but isn’t a translation outside of said situation part of the point?

Container Technologies for Musicking The motivation for the creation of an experimental studio space is de facto shaped by a culmination of ideas and factors, an interrelation between numerous aspirations to be tempered by the practicalities of the environment and context one works in, and the contemporary research and idiomatic landscape providing thrust to the project. We have begun to delineate the function and purpose of such a space from the fundamental sonic technology underpinning its design to some extent. Concerning the studio at the University of Hull, the approach is dictated through a broad collaboration of stakeholders and their necessary respective concerns. The studio was conceived as an ambisonic-focused, 360 degree sound reproduction space to be utilized as a creative compositional and production environment. The form factor of the loudspeaker array was dictated, through consultation with technical experts in the field, by the staff with interest in its compositional and production exploitation. This desire was then implemented by an external constructionand separate studio design-contractor who realized an architectural and internal formation. This information is deemed a necessary context to which the following motivations can be related. A broad methodology that shaped the final approach adopted was informed by four primary concerns that are, for the purposes of this discussion, convenient to delineate to some extent. These four primary concerns are defined as needs for: a potential for abstraction of process from the studio; a focused environment for reproducing sound in 360 degrees with some precision; opportunity for meaningful pedagogical engagement; and universality of access and exploitation—a listening machine that is adaptable to the user in an anatomically meaningful manner. These needs have driven a design and methodology that informs the interaction with the space, how the listener-operator can relate to it idiosyncratically and how the studio can represent a peculiar context that is both anonymous and strikingly anomalous. In answering the need for abstraction of process, we have established that the ambisonic paradigm is a fundamentally abstract spatial language, with potential for realization in a fluid dynamic of context and the studio must sit somewhere in this spectrum of possibilities. Echoing the concept of container technologies, this suggests that the space is destined to host, unobtrusively, the musicking (Small 2011b) of the composer-operator

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that is conceptualizing the work in abstract: in a liminal, unanchored, pure, immaterial non-space. This proposition drives a philosophy of approach to the studio in this context, with a software ecosystem that is freely accessible across the institution workspaces and for use on personal computers. This philosophy offers potential insight into the relationship of studio to artifact in such contexts. To be clear, this is not a naïve pursuit of some creative purity, unburdened by predetermined press, but a desire to ponder the spatialcompositional process as somehow abstract-able, as a praxis divorced to an extent from the physical location or immediate environmental listening situation: a glorious succession of spatial iterations is enabled, unfurling with every decode in n-space and receding until the next. As Slater suggests, when discussing a sense of localization in compositional endeavor that involves working in varying spaces, including an account of that virtual space, there appears to be a duality of effect that such technology engenders: that of locational dissonance and a sort of simultaneous resolution (Slater 2016: 194). In every unique spatial decode there is a relocating of the activity, a node on the wider map of musicking. This denomination of the space as mere locatable node invites gentle relation to what Augé denotes as a non-place: a “space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” surrendering instead “to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral” (1995: 77–78). Although initially aimed at a sense of anonymity imbued by modern spaces such as that of supermarkets, the internal space of vehicles, and so on, Théberge draws its focus toward the studio space, suggesting that the trajectory of increasingly fleeting engagement with such spaces pushes them into the realm of non-place as “a more or less generic, functional place, a place at which musical ‘travellers’ can stop over” to realize their intentions “whenever and wherever it suits them, and always within the comfort of a certain temporary isolation” (Théberge 2004: 771–772). Listenervagabonds, with erratic, splintered geographies. As this studio has been reduced to an arbitrary node in the practice of the listeneroperator, it seems necessary to revive some of its dignity: it is kindly offering the humanoid alien isolation both socially and acoustically; it is affording them periphonic reproduction of their precious abstract masterpiece; it is providing a referential-quality space within which they can compare and critique the desired sonic qualities of their endeavors. This studio represents, then, an acoustic exoskeleton, an augmentation attached by hot-swappable USB-umbilical cord that affords an interface with and return to the studio-womb. Perhaps this controlled, non-space acoustic quality is the primary concern of this particular node and validates its existence? It proffers a firmer grip on the materials. This need for a focused environment for the reproduction of sound in 360 degrees helps to define this space away from anonymity that the complexities of creative endeavor can lead to. The context of this studio being within a higher education institution with undergraduate and postgraduate listener-operators, with eclectic aesthetic pursuits, has ultimately shaped its formulation. The need for meaningful pedagogical engagement stems essentially from the necessity in electronically informed compositional practice to understand the means of production in some capacity, in order to effectively exploit the paradigms adopted. The composer-practitioner is therefore equipped with a technical understanding of such a studio, indeed the technical principles underpinning the techniques are necessarily

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explained before the opportunity to explore and experiment is gifted, and thus expectations are already solidifying. When conceiving of the studio space, a lengthy engagement was made concerning the possibility of veiling the loudspeakers in the studio array with fabric, disguising their presence visually—a sort of second-order veil to the first-order acousmatic veil of the loudspeaker. Eventually, the approach to the loudspeaker array adopted in this case is one that embraces an exposed, digestible orientation of array with an openness in form, and subsequently, function and limitation. As a squidgy humanoid alien, this satisfies my curiosity. I’m comforted by knowing. But how might this shape an engagement with the space? Might it better demonstrate the principle if we aren’t distracted by the visual giveaways? The man behind the curtain isn’t given opportunity to conjure the illusion in fair conditions if we’re presented with the infrastructure, the strings of the puppet. This concern has implications and has consequently shaped the nature of the studio. It must accommodate listeners of varying expertise, interest, and trajectory, but has it limited the potential of the desired effect to unfurl? Perhaps this utilitarian aesthetic is a detrimental skew to our experience of these listening machines and should be challenged more vigorously? Finally, acknowledging that our sponge-baffles displace the medium we find ourselves enveloped, carving out our spatial niche, altering the transmission of the encoded language of sound, imparting some of ourselves on the final acoustic message, a studio can be sympathetic to our humanoid alien peculiarities, at least to some extent. In a broader aspiration to ensure accessibility to a listener-operator of as many means of mobility as possible, the studio space has been designed with a variable-height lift. This dynamic structure affords the listener-operator a variable position in the space: the modest square platform is positioned, finely, to the exact location in the vertical plane that ensures the head-as-bullseye to sit in the loudspeaker-crosshair-stare. The architecture is bending to the listener-operator’s whim in an accommodating, subservient manner. Further to this, the desk surface or command center is able to be positioned variably in the vertical plane, offering the possibility of sitting or standing in the audition of the sonic environment. This affordance is a concession in the face of rigid permanence that the studio space otherwise suggests, an acknowledgement of “sonic co-presence” (Schulze 2018a: 142). One size fits all. All humanoid aliens welcome.

Toward a Decentralization of Musical Endeavor The precedent of such a studio space is fragmented, but there are broad themes that can assist in the reflection of their development. The continuing overarching tendency is to divorce a critical engagement with the resulting relationship between listeneroperator and the technical means of production that the studio space affords. Echoing the characterization of the studio as a laboratory and its container technology attributes,

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the common method of engagement with established studios, academic “studio reports” amount to little more than technical inventories and concise accounts of activity with little, in any, broader engagement with the aesthetic and philosophical entanglements they can engender (typically with an encapsulation of the wider conglomerated cognate music facilities, too). This is perhaps in tradition with an historical centralization of potential for studio-based endeavor, but it deviates in part, as it is seemingly predicated on some notion that the space is mere facilitator of the process of the artist. Early studio examples were limited in number and accordingly exclusive. The early technical approaches were high maintenance, requiring technical personnel as part of the process as exemplified by sound engineer Jacques Poullin’s involvement as technician in the first electroacoustic studio established at Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (RTF) in Paris in 1951 (Palombini 1993: 542). They represented organic-mechanical hybrid machines that seemed to live and breathe, with technological devices and mediums that reacted to temperature, time, and even gravity. They were historically populated with often bespoke, idiosyncratic, delicate hardware with narrow tolerances and they utilized expensive, volatile mediums with a distinct lack of potential for mobility and a resulting anchoring of technique to location: far from a non-place that is at least a seductive description for the contemporary iterations. As Manning identifies, the second-half of the twentieth century saw a tendency of new aesthetic causes to “polarise around select groups of activists with a strongly defended identity” with some emerging institutional studios reflecting the trend. Early expression of the studio had afforded unusual freedoms of time and use of spaces to explore vanguard edifices of sound reproduction and musical expression, with a coagulation of notable resonant conceptual and aesthetic frameworks, or schools, such as that of musique concrète and the subsequent Groupe de Recherches Musicales at RTF and the elektronishe Musik movement that broadly orbited the Norwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) studio of Cologne and their respectively divergent aesthetic, and eventually evolving, trajectories (Manning 2013: 19). This centralization clearly produced a gravity, as composers were keen to work within the walls of these technological concoctions, full of new potential and power but fledgling aesthetic direction. The studio represented the conduit of creativity, a significant partner in the process. This gravity does still echo today, with studio residencies to established institutions a recognized and valued proposition for the composer in the field of electroacoustics: a pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps (Bates 2012a: 14). With an appropriate prescience, Cary, a composer and creator of a personal studio space composed of “ramshackle apparatus which only I would dare to use” (Cary 1966: 313), makes a call to arms in a direct reply of the “rapid development of tape and computer music” (ibid.: 312) that was unfolding internationally at the time. The substance of interest here is a proposed institutional model. Of two propositions offered, the prescience is found in the suggestion of a “first-class studio attached to a university, so that access could be had to really expensive devices like computer when necessary,” exploiting not only the financial power of such an institution but also the technical expertise that could be sought in house. The proposition is completed by a studio “working into the normal composition courses of the College of Music, it would also provide teaching to equip the composer to

The Studio

use the new techniques. Apart from anything else, this close co-operation of artists and scientists could produce remarkably fruitful results in terms of broadening horizons.” This approach has provided the broad template for much development of the sort of studios spaces we contemplate here and indeed is broadly the template of the studio around which this chapter is based. Indeed, when discussing what characterizes a vanguard technological approach today—high-density loudspeaker arrays (HDLAs)—Lyon explains that “during the 1960s and 1970s, computer music research could only be pursued at a small number of institutions on expensive, special-purpose hardware,” and a new trend for technically remarkable HDLAs systems follows this model. As a validation of Cary’s call to action it’s understood that for this period in the development of computer music aesthetics and techniques, institutions were a “crucial incubator for the development of the widespread computer music culture that we currently enjoy” (Lyon 2016: 4). We retain some notion that these spaces should necessarily be vanguard, perhaps never standing still. The technological forces that inform experimental studio spaces are agile. The turnover of technical paradigms and forces makes obsolescence of approach an inevitability. Meanwhile, in a liberal reach, Wataru Uenami, the first director of Japan’s Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) experimental studio, was an advocate for a “free set studio” that Loubet describes as a studio “without predetermined technical, theoretical, or aesthetic agendas.” According to this approach, the ideal studio is “an empty one, in which specific devices would be placed when requested by a composer for a particular artistic production” (Loubet 1998: 52). This proposition is an ambitious one that seemingly attempts to strip back the layers of coercion that a studio’s technical infrastructure imbues. The studio is back to its container essence, a technological blank-slate, a non-space beyond just the acoustic character, in Théberge’s conception. Despite the aspiration, it transpired that it wasn’t possible to realize this “free set” philosophy with the studio’s technological infrastructure, even though the “theoretical and aesthetic liberty were respected” (Loubet 1997: 18). But this ideal has perhaps been realized in some sense of its formulation, through the migration of the physical technological devices to the virtual. Preceding the march to virtualization, the significance of these pioneering studios spaces is diluted by other technological and economical forces, becoming “submerged within a much broader culture of general accessibility and increasing affordability” of the means of production. Consequently, the early period of these studios from the 1940s through to the 1970s “marks an important watershed in electronic music, where the distinctiveness of individual endeavour, channelled for the most part through established studios and performing groups” (Manning 2013: 132) is no longer a defining trait of the concept. The studio is no longer such a powerfully exclusive space, no longer representing the same centralized potential. A virtualization of some part of the means of production can only alter the relationship of the listener-operator to the studio, as less haptic and more removed or distant. Activity is sorted and distilled into standardized form and standardized language through software facilitation and ubiquity. The significant bedroom producer phenomenon is merely an exposed layer of musicking that is symbolic of a broader shift in the context and means of production in music. The emergence of the software ecosystem is a democratization, to some extent, of the means of production. As part of this realignment, the experimental

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and otherwise contemporary musicking has matched a trend toward a decentralization of musical endeavor away from the particular exclusive, idiosyncratic institutional studio spaces. Studio work can be achieved in the liminal, unanchored space. This is of course overlooking the observation that studios typically offer distinct sound reproduction opportunities that are less ubiquitous. In contrast with abstract formats such as ambisonics, loudspeaker arrays can represent a prescriptive relationship of audio signal or channel to loudspeaker: a literal, logical, and tangible structure of agency and effect. Experimental studio spaces have tended to gravitate toward adventurous spatial arrangements that looked beyond the entrenched, hegemonic stereo landscape, examples of which include the quadraphonic array and its related, extended forms. This sort of array represents a traditional, more rigid relationship that a composer-practitioner can have with the compositional presentation medium that is, by its nature, restricted in potential context. Later technical approaches that have divorced the internal compositional space from the loudspeaker array has precipitated the decentralization further, reducing the potential allure of the studio environment in its physical, located sense. A curious variability in environment and listening context is possible. One moves from the specific studio edifice to the laptop/headphone, geographically unanchored scenario. In some senses, then, we have raised anchor on history, in others, we’re snagged.

A Mode of Audition and Agency Perhaps we, in some ignorance, chase our acousmatic desires to a logical conclusion of experience. Somehow, the acousmatic cause is served through deprivation of the expendable senses. The press of this studio environment is starved of distraction, the noise-floor of the senses so distant as to invite a pronounced focus on the sonic effect. No light clouding the vision, no glowing dots expressing the correct and active function of a loudspeaker, no horizons. There is only sound … pure, wonderous sound in all directions around me. A plausible, tangible sonic environment with a veracity in form, a vivid sense of localized signals across a diffuse atmosphere and a sensation of low-frequency anatomical resonance, exciting the sponge-baffle body. All of the cues. This is the ultimate expression of sonic time and space, a non-space in full relief with all of the necessary noncharacteristics, the perfect container for generated space. A cinema exclusively for the ears with none of the cross-sensory noise, no one leaving for the restroom, just my idiosyncratic listening history as guide. The grip I’m afforded is maximal. The composer has the levers, I create the spectacle. But, instead of the fantasy of a siloed sense of sound being realized, the press of the studio is advanced in concept and variability. In one reality, the reduction of the studio into a virtual, liminal, or delocalized space precipitates the reimagining of a studio into simply a mode of audition and agency. We’ve abandoned the reified listening machine edifice and instead transpose our sonic environment with another, in impressive fidelity. The sponge-baffle corpus of the listeneroperator is excited not by “loudspeakers” with their archaic formfactors, non-linearities

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and directionality, but by the ultimate of non-spaces, a membrane encapsulating the humanoid alien, in perfect sympathy with their anatomical topography. The membrane is the latest wearable-technology, tracing its development back to devices such as the humble subwoofer bracelet, but is instead a more complex haptic device that, in tandem with a direct-to-cochlea injection of sonic information, receives and transmits sonic activity to be transduced across the sponge-baffle surface as sonic experience. The studio is everywhere and nowhere, a container technology only in abstract. There’s no tension of distance. The “free set studio” of Uenami’s vision is finally fully realized. A studio space is no longer a coercion of agency but a passive approach, a secondary layer upon another reality, fully liminal. Potential is utterly decentralized, scattered everywhere. In an alternative reality, the concept of studio as curated environment is advanced. We’ve perfected the reproduction of soundfields as reliably convincing illusion. The coercive quality of the studio is instead honed, made more dynamic in all directions. The sense of physical space, absorptive quality, luminosity, scent, inertia is dynamic, attuned to the desires of the listener-operator, free to discover the conducive combinations. The potential is centralized, focused but fluid, and the quiet complicity of the studio is amplified, embraced and more fully understood.

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The Reproduction Anders Bach

Figure 20.1  Screenshot from YouTube video entitled “MACINTOSH PLUS BETA – REEEEEEE 420 / 通常の近代” by the channel Ruben Sim (2015).

Sleep ∞ Over Meets Far Side Virtual On November 12, 2011, I played a show at a small upstairs venue in Copenhagen. It was the debut of a new band I had formed with two very significant people in my life, Kristian and Anja, whom I had just met the year before. We bugged the booking office of this venue Acknowledgements Thank you: Karen Bach Pedersen, Marie Bach Pedersen, Johan Lau Munkholm, Kristian Paulsen, Anja Tietze Lahrmann, Thorbjørn Radisch Bredkjær, and my parents.

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for months after we had found out that our favorite North American band, Sleep ∞ Over, were playing their first ever show in Denmark there. And we wanted to open for them. We phoned the venue tenaciously, and after getting “maybes” and “perhapses” in droves, we changed our game and literally showed up on their doorstep, day after day. The three of us were in our early twenties and had a juvenile excitement about us. And eventually, I guess as a result of this energy and after persistently annoying the venue office to their brink of desperation, we got the slot. Sleep ∞ Over mixed two significant underground movements in music in the beginning of the 2010s, namely the resurgent ambient-yet-hooky dream pop and the haunting, slowmotion occultism of witch house. It was released mainly on cassette, the medium of choice for a muffled yet beefy sound, like hearing something from the inside of a coffin. Kristian presented this music through the compilation cassette Dark As Night (2010) to Anja and myself with the song “Your World Is Night” at a goofy “listening club” we had for a couple of evenings at my gross shared apartment space—the three of us met in 2010 at the music conservatory in Copenhagen. Small stacks of CDs, vinyl, and cassette tapes lay in front of us and these formats came to represent a social construct, that we created together, the three of us. The musical qualities and specific medial and sonic representations, which I in this chapter will discuss as the reproduction, had formed our upbringing in music, our curiosities, and dislikes. None of us had extensive collections. We had maybe just a handful of significant releases amongst hundreds of CDs we would never admit to actually owning. I myself came from listening mostly to the likes of Warp Records, Craig David, Coltrane, and Michael Jackson. I had dived into Burial’s Untrue (2007), The Knife’s Silent Shout (2006), and some early Ariel Pink, but I had never heard anything like the music Kristian was playing. It was a profound experience. It felt so fresh to me. The sounds seemed somehow familiar and gave me distinct flashbacks to watching David Lynch’s Lost Highway with my sisters at too young of an age, being anxious and aroused at the same time. Was this how my faint memories of “Song To The Siren” sounded? The voice of This Mortal Coil lead Elizabeth Fraser had stabbed me in the neck at age ten or twelve or something, and from the sonic touch of Sleep ∞ Over that wound seemed to now open, stitches bursting, fresh blood dripping down my chest. Unassuming nostalgia crept over me. It struck that special kind of confusion reserved for sentimental surprises: a feeling of simulated eidetic memory, a total recall of an idealized childhood interpretation—a memory of a memory. This pivotal experience of the music medium seemed to be at the core of what had inspired me as a musician since my childhood with Napster, LimeWire, eJay, and GarageBand. On November 11, 2011, the day before the gig, Anja, Kristian, and I had released our debut EP cassette, entitled Straight Arcs. Our band was named Ice Cream Cathedral, a name which in hindsight represented our twenty-something-selves in the early 2010s more than the music—young, faux-naïve, and with an inclination for the ethereally dramatic. The EP was self-recorded and produced in my 8-square-meter room in the shared apartment. We used Logic 8 as the main Digital Audio Workstation and hand-dubbed cassettes on my worn-out Sony MHC-RG40 that I had got back in 2003. The cover, a low-res photo of folded bedlinen designed in a graphical style by my flatmate Cecilie, was cut out of thick

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paper and folded by hand. One hundred copies. None of us knew what we were doing. We didn’t know about recording, production, mastering, much less the reproduction on tape. We just knew how it needed to sound and feel and look within the boundaries of this specific aesthetic of those years and our lack of technical skill. Straight Arcs was the result of an opening in our musical lives that were imbued by these experiences of a specific medium—the cassette—and the sonic and visual aesthetic themes of dreaming and occult spectral presence, hence dream pop and witch house. I felt more open and receptive, both creatively and socially, than ever in this space and at that time. The music provided me with a link to a past that I could reimagine and repurpose as I saw fit. That was a kind of nostalgia that made sense to me. The cassette tape embodied this, as it was the only medium I knew that had its heyday, its demise, and its resurrection over the scope of my twenty-two year lifespan. I remember sitting down on a couch at the venue on November 12 with my laptop doing my usual run-through of blogs like Altered Zones and Tiny Mix Tapes, blogs that represented and reviewed many underground releases of, primarily, North American contemporary electronic music. Not particularly experimental, but genre-bending to the bone. And on the latter, I found a review (Wharton 2011) from the week before of James Ferraro’s debut on record label Hippos In Tanks, entitled Far Side Virtual. The artwork is centered around a man with an iPad for a face, close to the camera and seemingly hovering above a yellow cab-filled New York City avenue as depicted in low resolution on Google Street View—the enigmatic directional scroller in the top left corner. The iPad face is constructed around 1990s Miró-like Microsoft Paint facial abstractions on a bright Windows 95 blue sky. The art immediately resonated with me, once again evoking a feeling of connectedness to my aesthetic memory. And the music I was about to hear pulled me further down the rabbit hole. I got comfortable and plugged in my headphones while watching the people from Sleep ∞ Over rig up their gear, getting ready to soundcheck. The venue had a low ceiling, it was like a cave carved into the top floor of a Copenhagen building. The windowless room reeked from the beer-soaked carpets on the small stage floor in the center, and bland falafel salads, our pay for the night, lay scattered around the tables and chairs. Spotify had just launched a couple of weeks earlier in Denmark, so I was excited about the ability to instantly listen to this new album that intrigued me. It was an entirely new thing at the time and seemed profoundly fitting for my experience with Far Side Virtual. The plasticity and spicelessness of the general production of this album was what struck me at first listen. Everything sounded intentionally imitational, like the feel of weighted keys on an electric piano mimicking an acoustic one, a quintessential General MIDI aesthetic brought to material life through the album’s production and compositions. The feel was zanily authentic. I was reminded of my privileged Scandinavian upbringing; the music and that relation seemed vulgar to me, like an IKEA catalogue. It felt laminated and instructional, toe-trippingly pouring with neon-bent symbolism. Looking at the titles of album tracks like “Linden Dollars” or “Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi,” this all seemed like an imitational overload. References to the games Second Life and SimCity were literal, and wry takes on late-capitalist trademarks like Starbucks, condos, and globalism permeated the very fiber of the music. I say wry, because the album

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touches on irony in music, which I hitherto hadn’t given much thought. In my teenage musical upbringing as a young drummer in the city of Silkeborg—in Denmark’s region of Jutland, surrounded by forests and the Gudenå River—“serious” music, or in this case melancholic white rock such as Radiohead, had been universally considered as an aspiration for all of us young musicians. Everybody liked it and the result of not subscribing to this aesthetic truth was social and musical crucifixion. This kind of “seriousness” in music was about being afraid of looking stupid, the same way proclaiming a “guilty pleasure” is. As Far Side Virtual progressed in my ears, many aspects of music aesthetics were turned upsidedown for me. I experienced music as truly invasive for the first time. Music that came out of a background, lounge “melodism” was paradoxically slammed in my face. And suddenly, music like Radiohead with its subdued intertextual subtlety and melancholic elegance, their musical references balancing political statements, went into the background and annoyed me: it became irrelevant, self-evident, and whiny. The bluntly obvious and blatant satire of Ferraro, however, became somewhat complex and full of pastiche mystery. Not because of its hyperrealist themes or its overt political sarcasm, but because my view of musical meaningfulness had been blended into and shredded by a sense of meaninglessness that felt authentic. I had experienced irony in music before through the singer Beck, but that seemed to be a kind of confident irony. Ferraro was vexing, while Beck was sexy. Radiohead’s abundance of signification through minute musicality had been shackled and somewhat evaporated by Ferraro’s abundance of millennial memorabilia evinced through replication and repetition. As an aspiring digital music-maker myself, I imagined these un-quantized MIDI regions in GarageBand (with which Ferraro actually made the album); the drum parts tripped over one another, out-of-key notes were left in intentionally on the General MIDI trumpet tracks; the productions’ slightly bit-crushed reverb tails and track endings were cut violently like the sounds of birds chirping in the video game Link: The Challenge of Golf (1990) or the demolition sounds of SimCity 2000 (1993). Even the mastering of the album was digitally saturated: the piano intro to “Sim” stands out as a sore thumb in its own conceptual right. My comparison between the drenched melancholy of Radiohead and the melancholic folly of Ferraro, and its subsequent musical change in me, only became clear to me in recent years. I’ve looked back on the work that I’ve done and my approach to performing and writing and I feel like I can clearly track this inspirational change. Seemingly unrelated musics have a deep impact on each other, because change in musical taste is non-linear. I just so happened to stumble upon the genres of witch house and Ferraro’s vaporwave at the same time, in both genres’ formative years. My teenage infatuation with Kid A (2000) was the sentiment being haunted and subverted by new aesthetics, even if it wasn’t what Ferraro’s music referenced. And that’s just one example. Far Side Virtual is a nervous tickinducing album in the same way that it’s pleasing. Sitting on the couch at the venue on November 12, 2011, I was bewildered because I had listened to an album that objectively sounded crappy and was heavily weighed down by its own thematics—but I loved it. Far Side Virtual is not a virtuoso album in a traditional sense. It’s just absurdly conceptual. It’s not revolutionary or extraordinary in the way that people regard The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) or Are You Experienced? (1967), which both are branded into Western music heritage (justified or not, I leave up to the reader). These kinds of albums are seemingly

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forever, and that in part is because of their original emancipation on vinyl. To this day, the gatefold vinyl LP feels like the pinnacle of immortality for a musician, at least from the viewpoint of musicians. And that’s exactly why my perspectives on music reproduction broadened in 2011: Far Side Virtual (2011) wasn’t OK Computer (1997). Thank goodness for that.

Vaporwave’s Vanitas The making of an album is perceived as isolated from several timestamps in its production, if you consider the traditional timespan of an album’s becoming and release. You start out writing songs, you initiate the daunting processes of recording, dubbing, producing, mixing, and mastering, all over the course of maybe six months to several years. When recording and subsequently playing back a take you’ve recorded in the studio, you scrutinize your musical contribution of the immediate past and it seemingly becomes perpetuated. This has been a general approach in the world of recording music since the very beginning: early recording devices of the late nineteenth century such as the cylinder phonograph tried to overcome mortality as the voices and music from the past could be reproduced. Vanitas, a Baroque visual arts style about the consummation of life and material and the certainty of death, seems analogous to the process of making an album. However, in many instances of contemporary music in the twenty-first century, both underground and in popular, these different timestamps overlap: composition may occur in mix or production or entire ideas for songs will appear in mastering and change the perspective of the recording as a whole, creating something entirely new from a perhaps already finished version. Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. from 2017, particularly the track “ELEMENT.,” is a good example—according to an interview statement by producer Sounwave: The song was mastered and ready to go, but we were like, “Hold on.” We went back to it, changed the drums up, gave it a little more bounce … [James Blake] just happened to send this crazy piano loop right as we started to feel like the first version wasn’t it. He dropped it into his text messages at that moment. We incorporated his keys with the original and it became what it is. (Dandridge-Lemco 2017)

So, the process of making an album has become increasingly dynamic because of how technological affordances have shaped the creative process and moved us closer to a kind of “digi”-Baroque idea of vanitas. How can we then isolate the term “reproduction” in a given creative sound practice, as I am trying to do in this chapter? Is a musical work ever finished or is it always editable? If a work is always editable, is there an original? And what does that mean for composers (if such a word even exists anymore)? These ideas are at the heart of contemporary electronic music, especially the genre of vaporwave as it creates a reproductive assemblage with the album media framework and its own history. Vaporwave is described by many as an internet meme first, and this is central to the understanding of what kind of music comes second. To briefly put this into context, the

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term meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1989: 189–201) and is defined as a “unit of cultural transmission.” He describes it as a replicator, an entity of imitation related to memory. For vaporwave music the initial stepping-stones were laid out in 2009 with producer Daniel Lopatin self-releasing two short music videos entitled “Nobody Here” and “Angel” via a YouTube channel with the name “sunsetcorp” (2009a, 2009b). The signature chopped-and-screwed production of these two tracks became the groundwork of a specific part of the genre. Lopatin used Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red” (1986) and Fleetwood Mac’s “Only Over You” (1982), respectfully, through a pitched down, ping-pong echo-hazed, and buffering-glitched aesthetic. It sounded like a corrupted version of the digital medium it was released on: a mild and musical virus. Lopatin would soon elaborate on this technique on the album Eccojams Vol. 1 (2010), under the moniker Chuck Person, released as a limited 100 copies cassette (which at the current moment of writing is ridiculously valued at $2,000 on the record database and marketplace Discogs). Eccojams became a genre inside a genre that didn’t even exist yet. It was, and still is, an independent tag on DIY music platforms like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. Eccojams is a way of describing this specific chopped up, 1980s/1990s sample-based pitch-and-glitch-fest, which many artists since Lopatin’s initial presentation have been copying beyond recognition. It is the sound of technology working as we see fit, looping only certain segments from an old song, as Lopatin said in an interview: “just to placate my desire to hear things I like without things I don’t” (Chandler 2016a). The music is ambient, but skipping and noisy, like the Sony D-143 Discman I had skipping in my ears while running to catch the school bus in the early Noughties. Or the Rio 500 mp3 player with 64 mb of flash memory and enough crisp aliasing distortion to cover my ears with a cloth of cottony digital crystal, like putting your eye as close as possible to a DV camcorder playback screen with a video of a cloud. At first listen or glance at the artwork, with either Lopatin’s Eccojams or Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual, vaporwave deals with nostalgia and the resurgence of 1980s to early 2000s aesthetics. It confuses the past-future with the present, the supposed dreams with the supposed reality of Western culture. At least this interpretation aligns with the notion that futurism in electronic music evaporated in the late 2000s (Fisher 2012) and turned toward purposefully dated and “denatured digital crispness” (Reynolds 2011a). Within the last three months of 2011, three albums were released that approached these aesthetic qualities very differently and defined the genre to a more general public: In James Ferraro’s utopian virtual world (Chandler 2016a) his “digital maximalism” was an aesthetic equivalent to faux stone table-tops, Skype, or the Clippy personal assistant in Microsoft Word 97; for hypnagogic artist Oneohtrix Point Never (a.k.a. Daniel Lopatin, once again), on the appropriately titled Replica, it was the highly saturated and compressed melodic collages of TV and radio commercials that took center stage; and for Macintosh Plus on her album Floral Shoppe (2011) it was the chopped-and-screwed, superimposed muzak and slowmotion reproductions of tracks by Pages and Diana Ross that set her tone, with high musical regard for sample length and an almost free jazz-esque disregard for groove and harmony. Macintosh Plus, a.k.a. Ramona Xavier, was a particularly productive individual on the vaporwave scene, who introduced numerous genre landmarks both sonically and visually. Her melodic take on eccojams for the track “リサフランク420 / 現代のコン

The Reproduction

ピュー” (Lisa Frank 420/Modern Computing) became vaporwave’s unofficial anthem, soundtracking thousands of YouTube videos and Vines, and went viral through dank memes with the same esoteric sarcasm galore as the coinciding Thug Life meme. The comic relief tag-line “/ music plays” became regularly used in memes centered on absurd or oxymoronic setups, where “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” would play for a couple of seconds as punchline: If you buy money, do you become richer or poorer? / music plays If Apple made a car, would it have Windows? / music plays (YouTube 2016a)

Xavier was among the first to use Renaissance busts and Japanese iconography within the visual style of vaporwave. This visual style has, by some redditors, been interpreted as “materially perfect but spiritually non-existent” and purposefully characterizing “confusion and indeterminacy” in “juxtaposition with classical Western heritage” (Reddit 2015). The following explosion of vaporwave online counted an almost vulgar abundance of albums being released, occasionally coinciding with the hype of a new subgenre like frasierwave or mallsoft or vaportrap. The very essence of vaporwave became the creation and immediate deconstruction of a specific genre, sometimes within a few weeks (Chandler 2016a), and all music was released mostly free online. After the US presidential election in 2016, Trumpwave was a thing, not ironically or cynically, but as praise of the president elect. This is particularly interesting, since vaporwave was often labeled as “anti-capitalist” by the music press, writers, or debaters (Harper 2012, Esquire 2016), but maybe this labeling is obsolete. So, what then has vaporwave become? In an “ask-me-anything” thread on Reddit in 2014, Lopatin was asked about Eccojams Vol. 1 and his feelings on “internet-driven startup genres like vaporwave,” to which he replied: “im glad people like the eccojams stuff, i always hoped it would be something people would just do—its kinda folky by nature” (sic) (Lopatin 2014). In a way this questions the general consensus of many writers on vaporwave in the past decade, that it is a punk rebellion against technologism, consumerism, and capitalism. Ferraro’s aestheticization of the Skype startup sound and Starbucks’s latte orders are just two of many highlighted examples. But Lopatin’s reference to folk or folklore sparks my interest, especially because his contribution to the genre is so different from Ferraro’s. Many writings on nostalgia and/or vaporwave describe the “buried utopianism within capitalist commodities” (Reynolds 2011b) and “consumer technology”: “the virtual plaza” (Harper 2012) is the “non-place” of transactions both financial and emotional. Grafton Tanner (2016), at the moment of writing, author of the only book strictly dedicated to vaporwave, elaborates on the idea of whether the Westerners who grew up with the soft green bed of capitalism are the Caucasian hikikomori willfully trapping themselves in a cultural mausoleum of vanity. Vaporwave music definitely inhabits the aforementioned punk attitude in its overtly hauntological and ironic dwelling in the shopping malls, TV ads, and hotel lobbies of the 1980s and 1990s, so much that actual 1980s and 1990s soft pop and new age is labeled as “pre-vaporwave” or just straight up vaporwave on YouTube. Look up Software’s “Island Sunrise” (1988) on YouTube, specifically the fan-made music video, and you’ll see what

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I mean. Have reproductions of past works of music somehow erased the originals and their placement in time? It sure seems we’re appropriating and repeating the aesthetics of our immediate past to the point of dementia. Is this the result of an oversaturated movement, an overrun meme that has reproduced history and itself to the point of total recall? Has vaporwave undergone full mimetic transformation and entered a folklorical domain? Either way, as proposed in a YouTube comment after his election: is the Trump presidency the most vaporwave thing that could possibly happen in the 2010s (YouTube 2016b)?

Meme Culture as Folk Culture Two broad ideas appear in parallel throughout this chapter: one is the idea of tools; the reproduction of musical and/or instrument sounds—sampling or general MIDI—and the other is product; the reproduction of a musical release—the album format and its analog and digital representations. I use vaporwave as an archeological example of what I argue is a contemporary merging of these modalities of reproduction and an interesting crossstudy of the authenticity of punk and folklore within internet subculture. My approach is centered on the music, its situational time, and the medial effects on myself as an artist and music listener. I do not intend to outline the history of reproduction in sound practice or genre, the history of remix, of sampling or synthesis—many excellent writers have done so through the years. Instead, building on the previous section’s societal points, I’ll reinsert myself in the equation to further examine the methods I’m discovering in this research. I usually consider myself a musician first and that’s often my main approach to writing too (music as well as words). The position of a composer never really inspired me much, it always rang heavy with tradition and politics. I’ve tried to use it in the awkward résumés that you have to submit whenever you’re playing a show or writing a funding application, but the definition feels out of place. I’ve never introduced myself in person as a composer either. And I often wonder why. I mean, I’ve written and co-written music for the past ten years in different capacities, so why don’t I feel like I’m a composer? As a drummer I’ve toured in parallel with writing, so maybe that has confused me? Maybe it’s a result of me just fumbling with my own definitions? I recently heard an interview with musicologist Adam Harper on YouTube (Davoren-Britton and Yabsley 2014). The conversation was about vaporwave and his book Infinite Music (2011). At one point the interviewer brings up the idea of a possible future democratization of the composer in Western music culture, working against the preconceptions of the word from modernist classical music tradition. My attention turns to Harper’s book where he outlines this idea in the introduction: [T]echnically the word “composer” suggests anyone at all who might create music. In this sense, the term overlaps with the word “performer” … with the word “composer” I’ll be referring to any source of music. (Harper 2011: 7)

In accordance with my idea of representations of the reproduction—their musical qualities and specific mediality and sonics—the composer is then anyone who interacts with

The Reproduction

reproduced music within Harper’s musical and non-musical variables. For the modernist classical composer, musical variables have roughly been reserved for the parameters of pitch, volume, duration, and timbre. In Infinite Music Harper questions this reduction of musical composition and argues that the combinations of these parameters are infinitely variable. The resulting aesthetic of a contemporary composition is vastly more diverse than what the interplay of the four modernist parameters encompasses. Furthermore, they lack the quality to characterize things like texture or effect-processing that are sonic variables in their own right. Or social constructs such as meme culture, video comments, or goofy listening clubs. And with a lot of new music, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, the modes of composition, production, and reproduction cannot be considered isolated events in time. This is a big part especially of contemporary electronic music subcultures, since the digital modes of reproduction are open and some free to use. If you make a Spotify playlist or if you “change the code of an mp3 file” (Davoren-Britton and Yabsley 2014), you’re basically changing musical variables and therefore, in Harper’s logic, you are a composer. Both vaporwave and witch house work heavily with non-musical variables as well. On Dark As Night, the aforementioned compilation cassette of witch house, unicode, and caps-lock aesthetics are downplayed compared to many other releases in the genre, but they’re there—especially in band names such as Sleep ∞ Over and oOoOO and track titles like “†.” Experimental semiotics have expanded within this (post-)internet “style family” (Glitsos 2018) throughout the years and vaporwave is no exception, especially if we once again turn our attention to Ramona Xavier (of Macintosh Plus). In the YouTube interview with Genre Cult (Davoren-Britton and Yabsley 2014), Adam Harper brings up Xavier’s 情報デスクVIRTUAL (Virtual Information Desk) alias’ album 札幌コンテンポラリー (Contemporary Sapporo). This album is an intense twenty-five-track collection of primarily slowed down stock- or mood-music that generally differs from her work on Floral Shoppe by featuring longer uninterrupted form sections of the source material. Harper argues the most radical and composed part of Contemporary Sapporo is the tracklist. With tracknames like “XX ‘‘RUBY DUSK ON A 2ND LIFE NUDE BEACH’’ [ … の生活···「ロ ベルタ」,” “☆ANGELBIRTH☆,” and “HEALING 海岸で昼寝 「MY LAST TEARS」” it seems the album is equal amounts composed non-sonic input as it is sonic input. Xavier is creating a strong context for her music, where pastiche melancholia balances “a parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995” (MR P 2012)—her own words. Vaporwave’s co-creators—the appreciators or casual listeners—regularly tap into this vernacular and grammar on Reddit and YouTube with excessive spacing resembling the s l o w m o t i o n s of the music they’re listening to or meme’ing about the vaporwave A E S T H E T I C. The semiotics of vaporwave exemplifies that the ouroboros of musical and non-musical variables in composition is ultimately only available in its collectedness in the final product, which in turn is memeable by its audience and fellow composers, and on it goes. The act of non-institutionalized cross-artist-audience creation is at the forefront of musical reproduction and repurposing of musical variables today. Instant and unapologetic audience participation is testament that audiences of vaporwave haven’t internalized retromania, as defined by Simon Reynolds (2011b), in the same way musicians have. Musicians seem to possess a genuine angst about genres and the

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assumed boxing these bring with them (Harper briefly touches on this as well in the Genre Cult interview). Musicians don’t trust that anything new might arise in any new music, they worry that their own originality is inadequate and that their work most likely is a copy of a copy. Artists of both vaporwave and witch house have labeled the genres as jokes that got out of hand, as a way to distance themselves once the music caught on (Davoren-Britton and Yabsley 2014). I can attest to this sentiment, because I myself have genre paranoia and an originality complex. And it most definitely stems from my line of work and not from my love of music. The sensibilities of the twenty-first century Western musician or composer are deeply rooted in an anxiety of not being distinguishable enough in the plethora of digital music reproduction. Ramona Xavier is no exception; she “definitely used to struggle a lot with the idea that [her] work was being put into a box” (Chandler 2016b). At one point, she removed the face from the bust on the cover of Floral Shoppe and the mirrored woman from Contemporary Sapporo, as if to protest the inclusion of herself or to erase the traces of a retromaniac past. This is why I think Daniel Lopatin’s (2014) point about the “folky” nature of eccojams is refreshing. Inserting the music in the domain of folklore is an idea that unites vaporwave with what it originally was: a meme. As folklorist Lynn McNeill argues: “Making an internet meme or even just sharing one on social media is participating in the documentation and preservation of contemporary folk culture” (McNeill 2015). When we’re trying to grasp what happened in the 2010s, why vaporwave became a thing, the popular argument about anti-capitalist music as an uproar in the wake of the 2008 recession is indeed a valid argument. But the folklorical approach intends for us to look at each other “to see what we were saying.” (ibid., my italics). The deterritorialized reproduction of music in the twenty-first century paradoxically instills fear in the musician/composer, a fear that we aren’t the rare geniuses of the world. Some creative institutions in Denmark try to embrace this state of ambiguity in artistry for musicians by working openly with genres and resisting definitions of their students’ work. This was at the time of its inception, again in the early 2010s, a refreshing approach and seemingly a move against institutionalized thinking in arts education. However, institutions are institutions, so whether they want to or not they end up being their own worst enemy by trying to balance this freedom of expression with genre denouncement. They create the restraints of art they wanted to avoid in the first place. If we are working toward setting the “composer” free from past restraints, we have to address the fact that there is a genre-paranoiac high culture (outside the classical music scene) for musicians/composers that needs to be challenged academically. That doesn’t come from internalizing retromania and reproduction; it comes from accepting both in all their encompassing boxes, because these boxes are for everyone, not just the rare geniuses. Genres are open methods, they’re not prisons.

Genre as Method or Tribal Marker? In 2018 the Danish artist Bisse, my friend Thorbjørn, released an album entitled BIZZIN, which I produced and mixed. We worked together on and off for three years on this and the entire process was euphorically deranging. One of the central themes of the album

The Reproduction

is lifestyle suicide: suicide of the super-ego, career suicide, self-deprivation, romantic suicide, fame, societal suicide, and so on. The protagonist of the lyrics often stands out as a self-reflecting phoenix, plummeting toward the ground deliberately at high speed. He’s contemplating life manically like a self-loathing, amphetamine-induced version of the whale from A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978) by Douglas Adams. The album was a cornucopia of musical references and hints to the back catalogue of Thorbjørn’s brief but vastly productive, at the time, three year-long career. It housed everything from DX7-solo references of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” (1984) to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Smoochy grooves (1995), self-deprecating Danish renditions of Kendrick Lamar’s flow, Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual Skype startup sounds, and sonic specters from Bisse’s previous album Bitchin. To me, BIZZIN is a commentary on nostalgia and paranoia in Scandinavian music and society. It was an abstract testament to the fact that the past is moving closer to the now: that while we’re living in an age of excessive reruns, revivals, and reproduction of practically any commoditized aesthetic quality of the late twentieth-century West, the current timespan for nostalgia is shrinking. The past is gaining on us. We literally sampled two seconds of the first track of “Palm Mall” by 猫 シ Corp. (Catsystem Corp.) from 2014, vaporwave music that already reuses muzak, and looped it at the ending of the first track of BIZZIN as a way to invoke the feeling of 1990s muzak. In that sense, it is post-vaporwave music and, in any case, vulgarly meta. Treating genre as method was paramount to our documentation of musical reproduction in the early twenty-first century. Ultimately, the album sets out to murder the guilty pleasure: the fact that you like something you’re not “supposed to like.” BIZZIN is deliberately annoying, it’s chock full of aesthetic information beyond overflow, and I guess that was the whole idea. Blogger Simon Chandler (2014) at Bandcamp Daily was one of the first to introduce the concept of genre as method to a broader public under the vaporwave banner. Chandler briefly outlines the concept and uses it as a starting point for a very succinct article on the most popular varieties of vaporwave and how these subgenres were created and deconstructed at will. Every other week, another genre was being invented and then dismantled, a kind of constant descriptive renewal in total internet plenitude. I used this point in a 2017 article entitled “Human Excess” (Bach Pedersen 2017). Here I frame the idea of “genre as method” as part of an investigation into the artificial reproduction of known musical sounds, such as General MIDI “acoustic” instruments. I argue that electronic reproductions are representations that never cross over into full simulation or pure simulacrum: These sounds lack the possibility of what ambient electronic music offers as sonic immersion because the abundance of technology in society is an aesthetic immersion that has already happened. This represents a plenitude of technology culturally negating meaning in whatever attempt to artistically mirror phenomenological immersion. (Bach Pedersen 2017)

So, reproductions of known or mundane sounds envelope the listener in a state of existential irony and perpetual vanitas, which in my opinion is highly musical. Take the mallsoft subgenre for instance, referenced before in regards to the sampling of “Palm Mall” on BIZZIN. The A E S T H E T I C of the all-American shopping mall has been a part of

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the vaporwave narrative since very early on with their smooth jazz and bossa nova muzak, CRT TVs and jewelry stores, and people going about various spending. Now many of these malls are abandoned, the music has stopped its celestial reverberation, the TV weather forecasts are turned off, and the clocks in the jewelry stores have stopped running. The people that used to inhabit the space are now ghosts. Mallsoft encompasses both the greedy excitement and eerie conclusion that surrounds these places. Smooth jazz was the sound of corporate America, “Smooth sounds for a rough world” as Radio The Oasis 107.5 had mottoed it (Caswell 2018). From 1987 to 2007, roughly the time between two recessions, Kenny G and David Sanborn were some of the most requested names by fax from at-work radio listeners. Kenny G in fact scored the music of the Weather Channel in the 1980s and 1990s, picked up by 猫 シ Corp. on “Sunday Television” (2016). This kind of jazz/fusion/ soft-funk/pseudo-Latin American music was so closely related to the booming economy of the late twentieth century that the literal silencing of this music after the recession in 2008— radio stations shutting down, the broad appeal of smooth jazz seemingly dissipating—now seems comically fitting. The article appropriately titled “Vaporwave is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism” by Andrew Whelan and Raphaël Nowak (2018) investigates this entire late capitalist narrative thoroughly and critically through what they call “genre work,” which is basically a way of asserting genre as an empirical framework for discussing popular interpretations of a genre. I think the most interesting part of this article is their assertion of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Vaporwave”—essentially what does the written discourse surrounding the genre make it “mean” and “by what descriptive processes does it come to mean that?” (ibid.: 456). Adam Harper’s Dummy Magazine article from 2012 has become the most infamous example in this regard (and has been heavily oversimplified by many, in my opinion), as Harper briefly touches on in the Genre Cult interview (Davoren-Britton and Yabsley 2014). Whelan and Nowak quote bits of a subreddit considering the question “is ‘capitalist dystopia’ really a vaporwave theme or was this just a figment of Adam Harper’s imagination?” (Reddit 2016). Here redditors mainly elaborate on how they distance themselves from this interpretation, most notably how the “anti-capitalist music” view on the genre is “a huuuuuge circlejerk started by people who wanted this genre to seem ‘2deep4u’” (ibid.). Whelan and Nowak point out a particular redditor who positions himself “as a kind of reactionary insider, present before the critique-of-capitalism bandwagon and privy to foundational knowledge” and who doubles down on the critique of Harper as he argues why the capitalist critique came from the Dummy article and not the original artists: Here’s the irony—Adam Harper’s insights and theories have inadvertently become part of vaporwave even if he was the one who created them, not the artists themselves. Mallsoft, DC’s futurism aesthetic, metrosong, stuff by guys like Donovan Hikaru, a lot of that feed off of Harper’s observations of the genre. The original producers had the capitialism [sic] critique/observations as part of their intentions, but it was never their CORE ethos and inspiration. Not at all. That’s why all the newbs who talked about Marxism theory and shit without actually knowing what the hell they are talking about drove me nuts … Personally I’ve always taken some classic vaporwave as more of commentary on consumerism and the pitfalls of superficial, plastic existence (like James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual especially

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hits on this … very dystopian but objectively the music is upbeat and happy, in context it’s horrofying) [sic]. (Whelan and Nowak 2018: 458f.)

However hypocritical or oxymoronic some of the exclamations in this quote might be in light of his own closing parentheses-interpretation, redditor joshuatx delivers a valid argument on his frustrations with the music critique headlock the genre ended up in. Many of the writers on this subreddit discuss the genre in terms of what vaporwave was— what is considered “true” to the genre—and what it became—the plethora of reproductions infused by the late capitalism narrative. To this extent people seem generally conservative, which is ironic for subgenres that work in nostalgia-baiting ad lib. I think one the most relevant parts of the past discussions on vaporwave is how reproduction toys with our sense of time and aesthetic subscription. There is a dynamic temporal shift that music undergoes within reproduction that I’ve tried to commemorate and that I for a lack of better words would describe as a kind of musical dementia. And not necessarily just within the vicinity of nostalgia or hauntology as baiting mechanisms or harbingers of superimposed interpretations of 1980s and 1990s economic prosperity, but as an example of tribal markers. I take this idea from a Chicago Reader article by Leor Galil (2013), who writes that the “particulars of a scene’s sound aren’t much more than tribal markers indicating who’s on the inside and who isn’t, and they can change at the drop of a hat” (ibid.: 4). This is the “observer effect” that appears when the online reproductions of music, writing, and visual art mangle and explode because of how twenty-first century media implies an “ease of joining and withdrawing” (Dahlgren 2005: 155). Here, the reproduction is situated within a folklorical/meme domain and that gives composers, writers, and visual artists a chance to claim past aesthetics as something that is separated from its time of production. Which I believe it is. The power of genre is all consuming and offers an anachronistic frame of understanding that works back in time. The result of the folklorical approach to vaporwave is that actual 1980s soft pop, like Software’s song “Island Sunrise,” is not only labeled as vaporwave on YouTube, it is in fact this genre.

White Nostalgia, Hypermelancholia, and Quantized Dreamscapes This chapter has served as a personal outline of my approach to the reproduction of music. I’ve investigated the inclusion of folklore with punk within vaporwave, the democratization of the term “composer,” the temporality of retromania and what the reproduction of music means politically in the fortified pasts of contemporary revivalism and white nostalgia. This section sees some of these concepts as stepping stones toward ideas for future projects that might be of interest to the reader. To continue the previous section’s focus on reproduction within genre, one subculture that gained popularity online a little while after vaporwave was dungeon synth (hereafter

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DS). This genre approaches its influences and origins in quite diverse ways, but a common denominator is Renaissance and medieval period compositional structures and a sense of fantasy legend, whether small or large in scale. DS spans from the valiant software instrumentals of “Боги и Герои / Gods and Heroes” by Рабор (2015) and the soft quantized flutes and harpsichords of Fief and Chaucerian Myth to the dark Kawai K5-esque ambiences from acts like Henbane. None of the mentioned acts use acoustic instruments like the music they are seemingly inspired by; it’s mostly artificial replicas mimicking acoustic counterparts. Sometimes DS nods to soundtracks of fantasy PC games like the original Diablo (1996) or Heroes of Might & Magic III (1999)—games many millennials, including myself, grew up playing. DS works with nostalgia at first glance similar to witch house and vaporwave, albeit on a plane bound to black metal and referencing 500-year-old musical stylistics, role-playing games, and occasionally big budget pop culture (Рабор’s Gods and Heroes album is an ode to the HBO series Game of Thrones, 2011–2019). However, some DS is spectacularly sentimental and fairly emo in its presentation, which is different from witch house and vaporwave, but symptomatic for many other genres that appeared in the 2010s. Nightcore is another good example. It rose to popularity outside trance and Eurodance in the same year as vaporwave’s seminal releases in 2011, with a refreshing edit of the Evanescence song “My Immortal” and later in 2012 with “Bring Me to Life,” both by Zanny Nightcore. Nightcore approaches its source material opposite of eccojams vaporwave: the track is sped and pitched up instead of down and usually the full song’s form is left uninterrupted. The surrounding visual aesthetics are generic manga characters crying their eyes out or looking melancholic while entering a dark and windy fantasy forest. It’s about the feels, same as the emo-rap and literal emo-revivalism that popped up in popular culture during these pivotal years as well. While a big part of contemporary DS is its homage to 1990s music, both to its roots in slow motion gothic synthcore like Mortiis or majestic black metal like Depressive Silence, the emotional and fantastical aesthetics have a lot in common with nightcore. The specific nostalgia they both evoke would be an interesting starting point for a discussion on millennial anxiety in millenial anxiety in roleplaying games, manga-feels, or worldwide GoT fandom. The idea of the reproduction balances the present and the past on the edge of a knife. The hauntological points touched upon in this chapter deserve a more thorough read, through the late Mark Fisher’s seminal work Ghosts of My Life (2014). One aspect of hauntology in the reproduction of music in internet-driven genres that deserves more indepth discussion is the reproduction of musi-cultural stereotypification. The entire modus of reproduction in American music is enveloped in a history of discrimination and racism. The cultural rejection of the African-American past and future is an entire study in afrofuturism within jazz, RnB and hip hop, which is elaborated through the example of Sun Ra in Johan Lau Munkholm’s article “Promises of Uncertainty: A Study of Afrofuturist Interventions into the Archive” (2018). Johan sent me this RZA quote the other day, which is very on point: They took em all on a 9000 mile ride And landed on the shore of a place they never seen before

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But read about this inside the ancient books of war Bonded in stainless steel, stripped of their language Still survived the anguish of slavery but still remained nameless. (“The Night the Earth Cried,” Gravediggaz 1997)

Within vaporwave, there is a fine line between Vektroid’s “parody of American hypercontextualization of e-Asia circa 1995” (MR P 2012) and outright orientalism. Vaporwave is predominantly about white nostalgia, so it is in fact commoditizing and amplifying what it is trying to portray and in some cases parody. The broad adaption of the genre, which inevitably came when it gained traction online, has enabled numerous artists to create music and memes under the vaporwave banner in order to push discriminatory agendas. Subgenres like signalwave or mallsoft tend to disappear in the plethora of politically charged 1980s-style synthwave. Take the example of Trumpwave, for instance, and its amped up YouTube montages of white masculinity: digital VHS-mimicked videos of scandalous supreme court then-nominee Bret Kavanaugh pep-talked by a hellbent senator Lindsay Graham like some scene out of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992). Or of Trump showing off his golden crib in his NYC tower. These are the visual settings of Trumpwave. Both of the mentioned videos are soundtracked with vapor-esque sounds resembling Jan Hammer’s Crockett’s Theme (1985) on the soundtrack of TV series Miami Vice or lewd coolness à la Kavinsky, a French electro DJ. In the vaporwave context of the early 2010s, these videos would more often than not have been considered memes with the intent to troll. But in the early 2020s this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Or maybe trolling has become the norm? Misogynistic and racist discourse has no doubt escalated in the arena of Alt-Right trolling and white supremacist frogs. Vaporwave has participated in changing the vernacular of meme music, but more importantly it’s now been swallowed whole by Western millennial and 1980s-infused dementia both in its own vicinity and in pop culture. So, to answer a previous question: The Trump presidency is a meme come true. What echoes through its -wave adaption is the troubling fact that white nostalgia and capitalism enable racism and bigotry. A trail of traditionalists follows millennial nostalgia, both politically and musically. These music lovers and music-makers reproduce the idea of the “original” composition or the “truth” of a genre. It’s my experience that some of these individuals will insist on the importance of contemporary occurrence of rare geniuses in art, or the “guilty pleasure” as a humorous anecdote not worthy of full aesthetic appreciation. The narrative of retromania has become a verbal tick for many, both online and in person: that if something is retro, essentially it’s a copy and that’s bad. I think these individuals are missing out. The reproduction enables working with and experiencing irony, authenticity, and culture in a way that is singular to composing music, whether the product of composing is a playlist, rap lyrics, or a symphony. My own musical maturing took a left-turn when my view of musical authenticity was shredded. Early witch house and vaporwave was a door that was exciting for me to venture through. I feel a similar kind of excitement as I write these last paragraphs. I’m listening to the Fire-Toolz album called Field Whisper (Into the Crystal Palace) (2019). Behind the moniker stands Angel Marcloid and she unfolds a cascade of

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gleaming black smoke into the abyss of deconstructed post-vaporwave that up until the late 2010s has been dominated by hypermelancholia with the likes of Arca or Oneohtrix Point Never. Fire-Toolz is something different. Great swathes of sporty chord progressions by way of prog-rock guitars cascade around workstation keyboard melodies on “Hologram of a Composite (World of Objects).” Marcloid invites the listener on an emphatic journey through a quantized dreamscape of the most delicate mallets on “The Pain-Body,” ending in literal EDM growl on “Smiling at Sunbears Grooming in Sunbeams.” She penetrates every linguistic flicker of sense left in me, and toys with my preconceptions of screamo and metal. When I hear Marcloid’s album it takes me back to the soundcheck with Sleep ∞ Over back in 2011 where I discovered Far Side Virtual. At that time, I don’t think I had even begun to consider nostalgia; I don’t think I cared much to be honest. But I felt something—something personal to me and my own history. I genuinely believe that this kind of personal feeling is for everyone to experience, not just people who are inclined to appreciate specific experimental electronic music because of bullshit institutionalization, traditionalism, or discriminatory agendas. I bring up the new Fire-Toolz album because it references a lot of aesthetic tropes that I’ve been talking about in this chapter, but not because it’s singular. That’s one of the main aspects of reproduction, I think: repurposing to the point where the concept of originality becomes irrelevant. Vaporwave and witch house are not the be-all-and-end-all of compositional innovation. They’re methods. The current and future generations of composers work with the reproduction of music in ways that demand we as listeners keep our ears and minds open. I think we need to acknowledge that retromania might be taking on a different form, as musical temporality is evaporating in direct correlation with millennial nostalgia. And I don’t think we should fight it. The loss of originality shouldn’t be mourned. If anything, it should be encouraged.

Coda Jessica Thompson

In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) carries a large boombox wherever he goes, and the thundering blast of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” provides a roving acousmatic soundtrack that announces his presence as he weaves his way through the neighborhood. Based on a real person from the neighborhood where the director grew up, the shifting diegetic and nondiegetic soundtrack extends his body into space and permeates all areas of the block. In his review of the film in Film Quarterly, Thomas Doherty (1989) describes the boombox as a symbol of racial disenfranchisement: the spark that sets off the community is Radio Raheem’s stadium-wattage sound system. As an Ur-symbol of interracial animosity and class style wars, the boom box is a perfect radiator for black anger and white noise (and vice versa). Next to semi-automatic weaponry, the ghetto blaster is the easiest way for the underclass to exact vengeance and aggression on an unwary bourgeois. (Doherty 1989: 38)

Do the Right Thing takes place in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn on the hottest day of summer. Released in 1989, two years before the Rodney King beating, the plot illuminates racial, social, cultural, and generational conflicts between members of the community. While conflict occurs throughout the film, the tensions around place are expressed most eloquently through sound. In Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, Robin Kelly (1996) describes how the boombox functions as a tool of sonic place-making: In the streets of Los Angeles, as well as in other cities across the country, hip hop’s challenge to police brutality sometimes moves beyond the discursive arena. Their music and expressive styles have literally become weapons in a battle over the right to occupy public space. Frequently employing high-decibel car stereos and boomboxes, black youth not only “pump up the volume” for their own listening pleasure, but also as part of an indirect, ad hoc war of position. (Kelly 1996: 206)

In an early scene, Raheem encounters a group of Puerto Rican teenagers sitting on their stoop. Rubén Blades’ “Tú y Yo” plays over the radio in the background. As Raheem

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approaches, they challenge him by turning up their music. Raheem retaliates by turning up his larger Promax Super Jumbo boombox, which drowns out theirs. They concede, and Raheem leaves. Early hip hop was designed to win battles. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’s rhythmic backbone was constructed with an E-MU SP-1200, a 12-bit drum machine with a gritty-sounding distortion that rejected traditional notions of fidelity (Millner 2010). This abrasiveness is also mirrored within the studio recording process itself: Using the machines in ways that have not been intended, by pushing on established boundaries of music engineering, rap producers have developed an art out of recording with the sound meters well into the distortion zone. When necessary, they deliberately work in the red. If recording in the red will produce the heavy dark growling sound desired, rap producers record in the red. If a sampler must be detuned in order to produce a sought-after lo-frequency hum, then the sampler is detuned. (Rose 1994: 75)

The practice of “working in the red” links together the conditions of recording with the conditions of performance. The flexibility afforded by recording machines—about which Mathew Barnard writes in the chapter on “The Studio”—enables the sound engineer to extend the body of the performer further into the space outside the studio by literally turning up the mic. Raheem pumps up the volume, and takes on the voice as his own, establishing “Fight the Power” “as an intrusive, embodied presence in the film” (Ramsey 2003: 175). The most explicit moment of racial violence in the film involves the silencing of Raheem’s voice. It starts as an argument between Raheem, Buggin’ Out, and Sal, the owner of Sal’s Pizzeria, over the absence of African Americans in a wall of photographs of notable Italian Americans. This conflict, which begins early in the film and becomes more heated as the day wears on, reaches a boiling point when Buggin’ Out threatens to lead a boycott of the restaurant. As the dispute escalates, it shifts from the wall to Raheem’s refusal to, as Sal puts it, “turn that Jungle music off! We ain’t in Africa!” After Sal smashes the boombox with a baseball bat, Raheem retaliates, which leads to a fight that spills onto the street and ultimately causes Raheem’s death at the hands of the police, the burning down of the pizzeria, and the crowd being dispersed by fire hoses. In his review, Doherty comments that “the killing scene itself is poorly rendered cinematically: the choke-hold seems too brief and unlikely to inflict death” (Doherty 1989: 38f.). That being said, the chokehold, which Lee intended as a reference to the murder of graffiti artist Michael Stewart, who was strangled to death while in police custody in 1983, also continues to resonate as a reference to the murder of Eric Garner, who died from suffocation due to a police chokehold in 2014, and countless acts of lynching. Beyond the overt racism, the reference to rap as “jungle music” and, seconds later, “shit,” is a reflection of the pervasive racist attitudes toward early hip hop perpetuated by mainstream media. Gone were the respectability politics of the Motown era, where masterful instrumentation and crystal clear elocution made Black music palatable for white audiences. The sonic agency created through breaking the silence of conventional recording and engineering, and the authentic, uncensored, and uncensured use of African

Coda

American English, rejected the sonic erasure that had given Black voices a hall pass to enter white airwaves. The destruction of the boombox therefore serves as an act of sonic warfare, emblematic of how the politics of (Black) voice can often fall on deaf (white) ears. In The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, Jennifer Stoever (2016) describes this phenomenon as “the listening ear,” an ideological filter shaped by dominant practices of listening. The sonic color line describes the process of racializing sound—how and why certain bodies are expected to produce, desire and live amongst particular sounds—and its product, the hierarchical division sounded between “whiteness” and “blackness”. The listening ear drives the sonic color line; it is a figure for how dominant listening practices accrue—and change— over time, as well as a descriptor for how the dominant culture exerts pressure on individual listening practices to confirm to the sonic color line’s norms. (Stoever 2016: 7, my emphasis)

How we perceive, understand, and interpret sound is closely aligned with systems of power. Through her analysis of the “unspoken power of racialized listening” (ibid.), Stoever provides us with a framework through which we can understand how sound can be leveraged to control others. These systems are particularly evident in how we define, interpret, and respond to noise. In 2015, geographer Ben Wellington created a series of area maps of New York City noise complaints using municipal data. Not unsurprisingly, over one third of the over 140,000 noise complaints in the dataset were categorized as “loud music or parties,” and most were reported between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and midnight (2015). “Noise” is most commonly defined as unwanted sound, and has particular impacts when it occurs close to home. But we also use the word noise to describe the sounds of the Other. In the years since Wellington’s study, the numbers of complaints in historicallyBlack neighborhoods such as Harlem, Clinton Hill, Flatbush, and Bed-Stuy have increased, along with upscale amenities, Airbnb rentals, and other markers of gentrification. In his 1967 speech at Stanford University entitled “The Other America,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the pervasive and systemic inequalities affecting African Americans, and connected them to the 1965 Watts Riots: But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. (King 2015: 23:54–24:39)

I first saw Do the Right Thing when I was a teenager growing up in a small city about 50 km from Toronto. We were one of the only Black families in the area, and the racist taunts and slurs that I have heard since childhood are forever fused in my sonic memory. I remember the exuberance I felt when I first saw former fly-girl Rosie Perez dancing to “Fight the Power” during the film’s opening credits, as if her life depended on it. I recall the disappointment I felt when I realized that the racism that permeates the film happened on all sides. Nonetheless, the sound of Raheem’s boombox became my voice, and remains an

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internal metronome, part of my armor and how I see the world. In my artistic practice I create machines that both listen and speak out into public space, amplifying the presence of the body to reveal the social and political dimensions of sound and voice. In July 2015, the block-long stretch of Stuyvesant Avenue where Spike Lee shot his film was renamed Do the Right Thing Way—the same month that the family of Eric Garner received an out-of-court settlement from the City of New York for $5.9 million. There were over fifty demonstrations in December 2014 after a grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Palatino for choking Garner as he repeated “I can’t breathe!” eleven times before losing consciousness in front of onlookers, and YouTube. As I write this, we are in the midst of worldwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, who uttered the same words as Officer Derek Chauvin’s knee pressed his neck onto the pavement. The words, “I can’t breathe,” are now a rallying cry, and, for the first time in a long time, are amplified, recorded, and reproduced through the bodies of white allies. Sound is never neutral, and machines do not run themselves. As the sound of change reverberates through our spaces, our networks, and our culture, it would do us well to listen.

Part VI Sensologies

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Senses are never innocent. A pure and immaculate state of sensory experience does not exist. What you or I perceive in any given moment is heavily infused and shaped, predetermined and focused, biased and organized by our assumptions and knowledge, by cultural belief systems and education, by personal experience and intimate self-reflections. What I or you experience in a given moment is never a case of immediate sensory perception; it is always a sensory account with a particular perspectivization, if not ideologization. This is the substance of the sensory realm of which one’s experience consists. In the 1990s, Italian philosopher Mario Perniola proposed describing this aspect of sensory experience, informed by our context and our life history, as sensology. In his book Del Sentire (Perniola 1991), he developed this concept into a general model to interpret contemporary societies. Perniola recognized in contemporary sensory relations, in the clichés of affective reactions, and in each person’s sensorial preferences, habits, desires, and joys, a set of elements that represent for him the ideologies of our time. But these ideologies are not put into words nor formed into political demands, they are not developed at length in large philosophical or propagandistic volumes; rather, the ideologies of today are represented in commodities and marketing claims, in habits of consumption, in certain media apparatuses and their daily usage. According to Perniola, the ideologies of the nineteenth century inculcated a set of “ready-thoughts” in their followers; however, the sensologies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries succeed in implementing a set of strategic “ready-felts” as an even more destructive virus in the humanoid alien’s subjectivity (cf. Schulze 2018a: 169–172). These individual ready-felts exceed one’s reflexivity. You might feel a certain urge, a specific wish, a strong desire before you are even capable of reflecting on its particular historical, ideological, and cultural ramifications and repercussions. Sensologies are the underlying, sensorially anchored, and almost indestructible foundations of all other activities, cultural practices, epistemological and ontological performativities that a culture might develop or adopt. Sensologies structure and frame, they guide and they envelop how you or I experience through our senses. My own listening, for instance, is modeled following certain cultural, social, historical, political, and—last but not least—personal and biographical trajectories

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and attractors. Without these models—which Gabriel de Seta discusses in his contribution to this handbook—none of us would be capable of hearing or of thinking about hearing. Moreover, sensologies are embedded, conceptualized, and articulated in these models. From here we start to listen, we begin to inquire into our idiosyncratic listening that might diffract to a large extent from other forms or models of listening. This applies even to everyday listening experiences; for example, right now as I am working on this text in our apartment in Berlin on a Wednesday morning in the middle of December and listening to a mix by Four Tet (Four Tet 2019), then later a mix by Jamie XX, Midland, Caribou, Pearson Sound, and Seiji Ono, both of which have been uploaded to the streaming service Soundcloud. This sensology of ubiquitous listening (Kassabian 2013b) is undoubtedly characteristic of many sonic experiences in this first quarter of the twenty-first century. The desultory and immediate yet deeply anchored character of this listening is a force in my everyday life—and, seemingly, in the lives of many dedicated listeners these days, at least in all the Westernized capitalist societies, for as long as they may exist. How these sounds float into my limbs and organs, my arteries and the soles of my feet, into my cranium, my inner ear, my tongue, and also teeth, my fingers, my skin, my reproductive organs: all of this is connected to their pulse and their thrust, their impact and their traction. I am within this music. My thinking on this concept of sensologies and of the four approaches to it represented in this section is enveloped and materialized in the sounds of the drums, the vocalizations, the samples and all the other synthetic sounds, the cowbells, and the shouts I am hearing right now, at this very second. I also detect these affective shapes in Jacob Kreutzfeldt’s exploration of everyday listening in the historical and mediated practice of live radio documentaries on Danish Radio of the 1960s. Reading his investigations, I can actually hear the utterances and conversations, the observations and yells as if I was making my way along a Copenhagen street in 1966. Obviously, these listening experiences are not only mediated by the technology that Kreutzfeldt addresses but also through the sensologies that allowed the Danes of the 1960s to actually represent themselves on the microphone—or, for that matter, the Danes of the 2010s, or the Germans, Chinese, Nigerians, Americans, or Indonesians of the 2020s—giving us an idea of how things were at that time, in a specific geographical area, that particular chronotopical zone, when experiencing everyday life in a shopping street. This sensology, documented for radio, analyzed in a research project, and unfolded in all its anthropological aspects by Kreutzfeldt, is now accessible for future readers and researchers—albeit in a time when surely most of the recording or playback devices have not only vanished, but even if they could be found by some archeaological expedition, probably no one would be capable of using them anymore and thus of listening to the recordings. An anthropology of sound hence also provides an option for the cultural transmission (Debray 2000) of knowledge, experiences, and life conditions into an unforeseeable future. This future, however inventive our contemporary imaginations might be in religious scriptures or in 3D movies and VR environments, remains unknown to us. It is this substantially unheard of about which Tobias Ewé writes in his chapter. Ewé delves deep into the ramifications of an unknown future, its unforeseen epistemologies, and economic and political theories. He moves from sonic fictions (Eshun 1998, Schulze 2020a) around

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a sono-aquatic mythscience, unveiled by an entity called Hyper-C and mainly reliant on a report by the Galactic Bureau of Investigations, toward a theory of the sonic capital and its so-called circuit of the unheard that Ewé unfolds. The sensology of the sonic as aquatic is conflated here with its sensology as capital—and as such it provides a foundation for the interpretation of capitalized sound in the twenty-first century. In the final main chapter of this handbook we take one crucial step even further into thoroughly uncharted territory. In his chapter, Marc Couroux grants us an extraordinary insight into his listening life. He explores how certain effects experienced while listening— such us hypermusia or pareidolia—lead him to the crafting and performance of several compositions. He even proposes to focus on inadequate modes of listening as an epistemological tool, not intending to falsify Stockfelt’s famous concept (Stockfelt 1997) but rather to turn it into a productive framework for experimental composition and performance. Through the four probes that this last set of contributions offer into the present, past, and future, into intersubjectively established as well as radically idiosyncratic sensologies, it is possible to explore the spectrum of sensory frameworks that limit and enable one’s multimodal sensibilities. These four texts might provide challenges in order to do so, each of them of a different kind; but as soon as you, the reader, make an effort to engage in their sensologically possible worlds (cf. Voegelin 2014), you will surely encounter a variety of listening practices, sound concepts, and sensory corpuses that the four sonic personae, who wrote these texts, inhabit on a daily basis. You may also think of the sensologies that might guide you on your individual trajectory through a specific day: What role might ubiquitous listening play for you today? How strong are your efforts to shield yourself from certain sonic experiences, environmental sounds, or socially anchored sonic interventions into your life? Which specific desires of listening, sensing, of corporeal and intestinal, proprioceptive and visceroceptive experiences do you intend to fulfill today? What is the sensory ideology that might guide or coerce, seduce or harrass you along your trajectory? Is it more a sensology of listening models or of the everyday, of the unheard or of idiosyncratic experiences and erratic inclinations? How do you hear now?

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21 The Model Gabriele de Seta

Figure 21.1  Sound and vibration meters in the city center of Taipei.

Civic Boulevard Highway, Taipei There are four small devices—a couple of portable radios, a Buddhist chanting machine, a handheld voice amplifier—placed on the tiled floor of my studio bathroom, and a digital recorder with stereo microphones sits on a tripod at the center of the semicircle of objects. The bathroom door is closed to shut off outside noises: it is late evening, but traffic rarely stops on the Civic Boulevard Highway. I am monitoring the recording via headphones, their coiled cable running under the bathroom door, making sure the four devices don’t run out of battery as they play back long loops of field recordings I have made across the

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city over the past three months. A few hours before, on my way to the Taipei Artist Village building, a bird looked at me tilting its head, before jumping away over the parking lot, a long stalk of dry grass in its beak. Sounds fade in and out or cut into one another abruptly, their timing left to chance, their placement in stereo field determined by how I placed the devices in my improvised recording booth: traditional festival chatter, a solitary whistling thrush, a microphone dragged on the asphalt, a friend talking about mosquito buzz, distant metallic clanking—all drenched in the short reverb of the small bathroom. Shutting doors and windows doesn’t help keeping the low-end of the city traffic from grounding the sparse sounds with a floor of indistinct bass rumble, which I will later decide to emphasize, rather than cut, through mixing and mastering. I am listening to field recordings played back through the lo-fi hiss of consumer reproduction devices, and the irony is part of the effort. Occasional listeners will hear the result as a self-contained track uploaded on online music platforms. Exhibition visitors, hanging around my installation over the past three weeks, have listened to the same recordings echo across the gallery space, perhaps unaware of the small devices dangling from the ceiling, perhaps puzzled by the dispersed and non-narrative spurts of sound and their relation to my work as a resident artist. I have listened to these sounds as I was recording them over weeks of purposeless wandering, I listened to them again to pick and choose the segments I could make use of, and then I listened to them many more times as I sequenced clips, carved their envelopes, balanced their volumes, sculpted their frequencies. I was not the only one listening to these sounds to begin with, and they were not the only sounds around me—in fact, my proposal was to explore the idea of accidental listening, the sort of auditory experience so common in everyday life in Taipei. I am suddenly startled by a thrashing noise coming from the kitchen area and, as I turn my head in response, I pull on the headphone cable which in turns topples the recorder and sends one portable radio tumbling on the tiled floor. Puzzled and alarmed, I trace the intermittent but persistent thrashing to the kitchen hood, its silvery duct slightly vibrating with each burst of rasping sound. A rat? A snake? Looking out of the window in the orange shade of the urban night, I notice a tuft of dried grass and plastic strips jutting out of the end of the duct. After a couple more bouts of rustling, a bird flies away from its nest inside the exhaust vent out into the night. I’ll have to record another take. This chapter is about listening, and more specifically about how listening isn’t singular but plural—or better, multiple. This is by no means a new idea, and throughout the following sections I trace how different authors and disciplines have approached the sensory domain of audition through categorization and classification. It is widely agreed that, in broad terms, listening is a sensory activity shared by human (Handel 1989) and non-human actors (Brigstocke and Noorani 2017). Following a long spell of thought dominated by oculocentric presuppositions, listening has been foregrounded by the auditory turns of disciplines ranging from philosophy and psychology to cultural studies and the social sciences (Ihde 2007, Szendy 2015). Listening as a practice is at the center of extensive debates in sound studies and auditory culture research (Hilmes 2005), and the ideologically charged attributes of a recurring “audio-visual litany” (Sterne 2003: 14) have been criticized as perpetuating clear-cut distinctions between the senses. As

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Tom Rice recognizes in his comprehensive overview of the term: “types of listening and terms for listening have developed in tandem with the creation of sound technologies” (Rice 2015: 100). One of the most striking commonalities among theorizations and descriptions of listening is the attempt to differentiate this “heterogeneity of levels of hearing” (Chion 2012: 48) through typologies and taxonomies. From Adorno’s “types of listeners” (1976) and Schafer’s “modes of listening” (2017) to Torgue’s “aspects of listening” (1999) and Clarke’s “ways of listening” (2005), writers across disciplines and genealogies of thought strive to clarify how listening isn’t a singular experience nor a monolithic activity, but rather a bundle of practices that, following Annemarie Mol, I characterize as “multiple” (2002). Rather than attempting a further parcellation of listening varieties or a comprehensive distillation of existing typologies, this chapter offers an overview of how the multiplicity of auditory experience has been articulated according to what I call models of listening. Philosophers of science identify the model as an abstract object that also functions as a representational tool (Giere 2004: 747). In Annemarie Mol’s ontology of multiplicity, “ways of multiplying” and “modes of ordering” coexist with “models of conceptualizing difference” that also inform apparatuses of thought (2002: 66, 68, 121, 145). I argue that, in a similar way, models of listening shape how philosophers, social scientists, acousticians, ethnographers, musicians, and sound artists multiply and order varieties of auditory experience. Defining listening in dialectical contrast with hearing, or as a series of types of social behavior, or as plural ways of interpreting aural signs, or as distinct modes of sensory perception is a choice that reflects the conceptual influence of different models of audition. Understanding the role of the models commonly evoked in discussions of listening helps commensurate the distinctions, subdivisions, and categorizations developed by authors writing across disciplines and discourses. In keeping with the model of listening I most often rely on for my own work, this chapter is argued through ethnographic vignettes distilled from more than three years spent practicing sound-related research in Taiwan. Rather than proposing a comprehensive ethno-aesthetic category such as “Taiwanese listening,” these situated examples are offered as contrapuntal springboards for the different models of listening discussed in the following sections.

Ontological and Phenomenological Models I never wear earplugs when listening to live music, but I should have brought a pair tonight. I make eye contact with my friend Italo, who is doing a short tour across Taiwan, sitting behind his laptop on the other side of the room and making occasional adjustments on his MaxMSP patch. For the past ten minutes, I haven’t been able to take my fingers out of my ear canals, listening to otoacoustic phenomena ricochet inside my skull and feeling the sweep of bass frequencies ripple across my internal organs. The evening’s volume has been a crescendo, starting with an ominous ambient set by local musician Clansie Cheng, continuing with my own exploration of self-feedbacking synthesizer, and kicked up a notch

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by organizer Xu Chia-chun manipulating a table full of daisy-chained guitar pedals. After making our way down a staircase lined with concert posters and band stickers, me and twenty-six other attendees are now sitting on the floor of a pitch black rehearsal room in the basement of a residential building in Taipei’s Da’an district, immersed in thick curtain of noise that is as physical as it is alien to any attempt at interpretation. I haven’t been to this space for months, and Chia-chun explains to me that it was the only available venue after neighbors complained about the loud sounds coming from the usual record store basement where he used to organize experimental music shows. The last thing Italo told me was to help him ask the organizers to turn off all lights and crank up the main mixer’s volume as loud as the speakers allowed: it’s now been fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and the aural assault remains unrelenting, with digital clumps of noise interlacing with piercing stabs of saturated frequency sweeps. The overtones ringing in my ears change and shift depending on how much I press my tragi inwards, resulting in a direct demonstration of the connection between the ontological materiality of sound and the embodied experience of ongoing ear damage. When the set is over and the light switch is flicked on, some people laugh nervously, some shake their heads as they stand up and find their balance; a friend reviews the performance: “Brain is melted,” and I can barely hear their words. This example of an intentional listening that physically damages hearing typifies the crucial and by now fundamental distinction between the two activities proposed by Stephen Handel: “Listening is not the same as hearing. The physical pressure wave enables perception but does not force it. Listening is active; it allows age, experience, expectation, and expertise to influence perception” (Handel 1989: 3). Seeking to correlate the physics of sound, the physiology of the ear, and the psychology of auditory experience, Handel’s distinction describes the baseline shared by onto-phenomenological models of listening. The four modes of listening introduced by French composer Pierre Schaeffer in his 1966 Traité des objets musicaux have offered one of the most successful and generative templates to classify auditory experiences from a phenomenological standpoint. Strongly inspired by Husserlian phenomenology and seeking to articulate a listening attuned to “sound objects,” Schaeffer categorized four modes (in French: fonction) of listening: écouter, entendre, comprendre, and ouïr (2017: 84). These modes subdivide listening into immediate auditory perception (ouïr), semiotic understanding (comprendre), situated indexical hearing (écouter), and non-referential, non-causal listening (entendre). This fourfold typology of modes served to differentiate causal and indexical listening from the “reduced listening” of entendre, which was Schaeffer’s own aesthetic and compositional contribution, a mode of listening capable of attending to the acousmatic situation in which the sound object is severed from its sonorous cause (Kane 2014: 29). Schaeffer’s fourfold division isn’t the only modal taxonomy of listening: Michel Chion’s tripartite typology of causal, semantic, and reduced listening slightly simplifies the blurred overlap between entendre and écouter (2012). For Chion, the minimal number of three modes of listening allow us to distinguish between purposeful listening to sound in order to connect it to its cause (causal), communicative listening to codes or language in order to interpret messages (semantic), and disruptive (reduced) listening.

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Philosophical examinations of listening have doubled down on Schaeffer’s application of phenomenology, offering terminological refinements and occasional critiques. The auditory turn encouraged by Don Ihde relies on familiar phenomenological models of intentionality and perception, but it seeks to push beyond a Husserlian “first phenomenology” toward a Heideggerian “second phenomenology” in order to provide a “philosophy of listening” that includes an “ontology of the auditory” and a “phenomenology of auditory experience” (Ihde 2007: 15). Questioning the very same possibility of a “phenomenological reduction” to listening, Ihde rejects a metaphysics based on the five senses and postulates a global, multisensory character of experience that presents itself differently under different “modes of existence” (Ihde 2007: 42). Drawing on profoundly embodied experiences of listening, Ihde identifies a phenomenological model of listening that is more than just intentional or attentional: “Listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately working its way into what is as yet unheard” (ibid.: 49). Ihde’s phenomenological model distinguishes two main modes of listening: the perceptual and the imaginative, which are co-present and grant listening its polyphonic nature (ibid.: 124). A summation of phenomenological taxonomies of listening can be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s own Listening, which links Schaeffer’s acousmatics and Ihde’s auditory phenomenology to a philosophical ideal: “to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all its being” (Nancy 2007: 4). Nancy distinguishes listening from hearing as “listening to something other than sense in its signifying sense” (Nancy 2007: 32): although his is a strongly musical listening— especially when contrasted with the interpretive, meaning-making nature of entendre— Nancy’s écouter indicates an “intensive and active mode of audition that finds sense in the constant arrival and departure of sound” (Priest 2009: 120). The onto-phenomenological models summarized in this section have been granted a prolific afterlife by authors seeking to refine and consolidate their modal taxonomies. Some, like Kim Suk-jun, have argued against simplified distinctions between reduced and ordinary listening, and in favor of upholding the ultimate phenomenological unity of audition (2011), which could in turn be investigated via a “quarternary framework” built upon Ihde’s division between perceptional and imaginal modes (2010). Others have proposed their own improvements on the Schaefferian model via the distinction between ordinary and musical listening formulated by Ihde (2007) and Gaver (1993), resulting in a “lattice of listening modes” including up to eight (Vickers 2012) or nine (reflexive, kinaesthetic, connotative, causal, empathetic, functional, semantic, reduced, and critical) listening modes (Tuuri and Eerola 2012). By multiplying and classifying modes of listening, purveyors of onto-phenomenological models succeed in demonstrating that listening isn’t a singular or homogeneous activity, but their commitment to articulate “models of abstraction” (James 2018) ultimately traps them in the cave of prescriptive metaphysics drawn from solipsistic experience and sociolinguistic essentialism. Constrained by its narrow focus on the intentionality of perception, the combinatorial numerology of ontophenomenological modal taxonomies has little purchase on the multidimensionality afforded by attentional dispositions and perceptual depth, which is instead much better grasped by another set of models: ecological ones.

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Ecological and Perceptual Models In December 2015, I landed in Taipei. After an evening flight from Hong Kong and an hourlong cab drive across the city, I dropped my luggage in my temporary accommodation and went for a walk around Nangang district, trying to get a grip on my new surroundings. Tired and disoriented, I had no sense of place, no sensory mooring. The streets were silent and the soundscape rarefied, something I had grown unaccustomed to during my preceding four years of residence in another—much more intensive and noisy—Asian metropolis. Stray dogs sleeping in a tiny public park sandwiched between residential estates; very few people strolling around. Occasional cars would rumble over the otherwise empty road leading to what I thought was the city center—but how far was it? No shops were open except for a convenience store, its chiming doorbell jingle anchoring me to a generalized experience of East Asian urban life. In Taiwan’s mild early winter, there was no air conditioner hum to be heard. Barring a few monolithic apartment blocks, most of the district consisted of greyish walk-up buildings no taller than three stories, and my earliest sonic memory of Taipei connects this low-height, peripheral nighttime skyline with a sense of aural relief, the sudden absence of sonic pressure on my ears. One month later, I moved into a rented room on the second floor of a walk-up building, entering a novel aural microcosm that I would discover piecemeal. On weekdays, I’d be startled awake by the grinding noises of metal lathes and the whirr of sanding machines from the garage workshops and car repair shops lined up on the ground floor. On traditional festival days, temple parades would worm their way through the backstreets accompanied by piercing percussions and obsessive suona melodies, while military jets and warning sirens would fill the air on national holidays and safety exercise days. Every spring, barn swallows would migrate back to Taiwan to build nests under the pedestrian gallery lining the alley—from my tiny second-floor balcony, I could hear them swoop between estates in the early morning hours, chirping complex patterns while hunting insects or perching on cables or drying racks. While Schaeffer intended his four modes of listening to work cohesively as a model of audition for the acousmatic condition, it is his entendre, or reduced listening, which has most often been taken as a point of reference for further discussions and refinements of auditory experience. As Kane notes, reduced listening “is an enterprise that is new, fruitful, and hardly natural. It disrupts established lazy habits and opens up a world of previously unimagined questions for those who try” (Kane 2014: 51). This disruption and opening up are at the center of discussions of audition grounded on ecological models, which are often approached via two converging perspectives: ecological theories of perception and acoustic ecologies of composition. The first perspective revolves around the application of ecological theories of perception to auditory experience. William Gaver’s distinction between “musical listening” and “everyday listening” (Gaver 1993) relies on James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology of perception in order to formulate a new understanding of a listening oriented toward events and experiences rather than musical sounds. According to Gaver, exploring the domain of everyday listening allows us to counter many of the assumptions made by traditional accounts of perception: “According to the ecological

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approach, perception is usually of complex events and entities in the everyday world. Moreover, it is direct, unmediated by inference or memory” (Gaver 1993: 3). Similarly, Eric F. Clarke’s Ways of Listening expands Gibson’s theories to musical listening. Working against the schematic representation of connectivist modes of perception offered by the information processing model (Clarke 2005: 46), Clarke aligns his argument with Gibson’s cognitivist idea of affordances, and seeks to discuss musical listening as a “continuous awareness of meaning” related to perceptual capacities rather than mere semiotics (ibid.: 5, 62). Clarke’s articulation of a multiplicity of “ways of listening” developing around listening practices and accruing cultural prestige is a clear attempt at dismantling the strictures of Schaefferian listening modes, which are seen as offering prescriptions rather than descriptions of auditory practice as an embodied perceptual activity (ibid.: 144). The second perspective is that of composers and researchers developing the field of acoustic ecology, an approach most notably associated to the World Soundscape Project (WSP) established by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s. In Chapter 14 of his The Soundscape, titled “Listening,” Schafer defines acoustic ecology in direct correlation to its namesake discipline: “Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Acoustic ecology is therefore the study of sounds in relationship to life and society” (Schafer 1977: 271). For Schafer and other acoustic ecologists affiliated with the WSP, listening to environmental sound and its socio-historical changes is both a scientific endeavor and an artistic practice, a toolbox for field research that can be also applied to compositional and performative projects. Barry Truax, another WSP member, argues against a simplified foregrounding of attention in listening, identifying three levels of listening attention (“listening-in-search,” “listeningin-readiness,” “background listening”) and proposing an “acoustic communicational model” based on information exchange: “At the centre of the model is the listener because listening is the primary interface where information is exchanged between the individual and the environment” (Truax 1996: 58). In this framework, acoustic ecology complements social and biological ecology, and listening becomes central to the practice of soundscape composition (ibid.: 59, 60). Not directly related to the work of the WSP, but clearly resonating with some of its central concerns, is the practice of “deep listening” first articulated by composer Pauline Oliveros in 1989. Oliveros’s definition of deep listening as “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible” (2005: xxiii) connects her artistic practice to a lifelong fascination for environmental sound and her sensitivity to the importance of auditory and sensory attention. Oliveros’s listening is also multidimensional, and the strategies of attention that she encourages “are nothing more than ways of listening and responding in consideration of oneself, others and the environment” ( ibid.: 29). Ecological models of listening respond to shared concerns for expanding perceptual sensibility and encouraging environmental attention. Rather than formulating taxonomies of prescriptive modes, ecological perspectives propose “ways” or “levels” of listening, and emphasize their layering, co-occurrence, and multiplicity. As these perspectives are grounded on dedicated listening practice and active immersion into sonic environments, one of the more recurring metaphors for ecological listening is that of

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depth (Toop 1995: x). Following in the footsteps of Pauline Oliveros and the WSP acoustic ecologists, several sound artists, theorists, and composers have articulated their own ways of listening in depth. These include Steve Roden’s “active listening,” a post-Cagean, active openness to the possibilities of sound through which any listener can become a composer (Roden 2005); the “evocative listening” identified by Rui Chaves and Pedro Rebelo in works of sound art that foreground aspects of everyday experience” (Chaves and Rebelo 2012); and the “relational listening” proposed by Lawrence English, an auditory practice “concerned with the possibilities of a listener’s creativity, to use their ears not so much as tools for extractions of information, but more as tools of creation” (English 2015: 4). The generative multiplicity of ways of listening-in-depth offers a trove of research probes and compositional strategies, but also risks flattening complex genealogies of listening practices into idealized representational constructs. As Mitchell Akiyama notes, ecological models are often undermined by an ambiguous relationship between emplaced reality and its naturalistic representation mediated by recording devices (Akiyama 2010: 58); the historical models outlined in the following section respond precisely to this critical lack.

Historical and Archaeological Models On late weekend mornings, I would often be woken up by a very specific combination of sounds: muffled bass notes thumping softly from the floor of my subdivided apartment, and echo-drenched voices reaching my ears through the windowpanes, both coming from traditional ka la OK parlors—a Taiwanese spelling of the Japanese term karaoke—set up in my elderly neighbors’ living rooms. The alleys around my place offered a wide choice of this kind of entertainment: often paired with the provision of xiaochi (snacks), venues like the Golden Bottle Room-ka la OK and the Jia Yu-ka la OK were mostly active in the late evening and on weekends, when middle-aged and elderly neighbors gathered to sing along to instrumental tracks and to listen to each other’s performance. One of these venues, I later realized, was located right in the unit below me, equipped with a professional Karaoke TV (KTV) system installed inside the branch of a township association catering to Taiwanese waishengren (citizens with Chinese families) of Cantonese descent. The ka la OK singers of my neighborhood performed repertoires that I had no familiarity with: some songs were in Japanese, which they had probably studied during their youth in colonial times; some were Cantonese, indexing their familial connection to Chinese hometowns; others were sung in Taiyu, the local Taiwanese dialect. The few recognizable snippets of lyrics I could pick up from the voices that the breeze carried from living room KTVs to my bedroom gestured toward complex family histories shaped by colonialism and diaspora. In a similar way, listening connected to other domains of social life: my neighbors coming out of their shops and apartments as the sound of fireworks and drums approached, lining the alleys to catch a glimpse of a god being paraded around by small trucks and marching bands during a temple festival, testified to the role of audition in maintaining a traditional community brought together by religious celebrations. On a more profane note, the

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battered metal loudspeakers installed on telephone poles and building corners throughout the neighborhood would update residents regarding events and news relevant to district life. For broader information—national politics, international news, gossip, pop culture— my neighbors listened instead to FM stations through portable stereo receivers placed on the counters and shelves of cafes and restaurants, or on portable radios balanced on park benches and workshop floors. Even just the multiplicity of listenings briefly sketched in the vignette above points toward something more lying beyond the nuances of intentionality classified by the phenomenological model and the depths of attention probed by the ecological model: material histories and cultural practices. Authors such as Jonathan Sterne and Emily Thompson, whom Michele Hilmes has identified as the pioneers of the emerging field of sound culture studies, have contributed to redefine this discipline as “less the study of sound itself, or of practices of aurality within a particular industry or field, than of the cultural contexts out of which sound media emerged and which they in turn work to create” (Hilmes 2005: 249). Thompson’s painstaking account of the acoustic architectures and sonic technologies that produced the soundscape of early 1900s America is grounded on the assumption that this soundscape is “simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world” (Thompson 2002: 1). Changes in acoustic technologies are accompanied by changes in listening cultures, and historical research into “the solidity of technological objects and the material practices of those who designed, build, and used them” (ibid.: 12) allows to recover otherwise ephemeral and undocumented listening practices from the past. Sterne’s work is similarly dedicated to recovering the “Ensoniment” of modernity, which he defines as “a series of conjunctures among ideas, institutions, and practices [that] rendered the world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening” (Sterne 2003: 2). Through an archaeology of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne provides a historicist understanding of audition and of the audile techniques— practices of listening articulated to science, reason, and instrumentality—that shape it. Research grounded on historical models of listening has become even more relevant as technological mediation of sounds increasingly accompanies everyday life across global societies (DeNora 2000). While ecological inquiry has often approached urban soundscapes with suspicion and contempt, auditory culture studies have productively engaged noisy metropolitan contexts and everyday urban practices (Bull and Back 2003). For example, Michael Bull’s groundbreaking study of the iPod chronicles the emergence of a “mobile listening” culture through which MP3 player users create a “privatised auditory bubble” (2005: 344) that follows their solitary movements through city spaces and insulates them from urban noises. Approaching a similar context, Karin Bijsterveld uncovers how the cultural meaning of industrial noise is constructed on the factory floor through the interactions of industrialists, workers, regulators, and machines themselves (2006). By conjoining the historical model of auditory culture research and concerns dear to science and technology studies, Bijsterveld demonstrates how the cultural meaning of industrial noise encompasses more than symbolic power, extending to “cultures, or practices, of listening—cultures that have changed over time partly in response to the

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introduction of new audio technologies” (ibid.: 325). Practices of listening in mobility, through sound reproduction technologies, and to machines continue to articulate urban living: attuning auditory inquiry to the cultural and historical contingency of auditory experience is necessary to keep track of the accelerating proliferation of audile techniques, from the personalization of smartphone-based audio streaming to the locational forms of participation offered by site-specific sound art (Barns 2014: 12). These discussions of auditory experience share a common grounding in historical models of listening that foreground the materiality of sound production and reproduction, the contextual articulation of sonic practices, and the socially constructed nature of listening. As Jonathan Sterne concludes, “sound reproduction is historical all the way down” (Sterne 2003: 23), and the history of material technologies and techniques indicates that listening “is a directed, learned activity: it is a definite cultural practice” (ibid.: 19). Listening practices are not only central to the historical understanding of human cultural artifact and social phenomena, but also challenge and reconfigure the “metaphysically petrified and largely androcentric, Eurocentric, heteronormative, and normophiliac” concept of the human (Schulze 2018a: 8). If listening is, as Schulze summarizes, at once material, corporeal, and socio-culturally contextual, questioning the “troubled material assemblage of a humanoid alien avatar” (ibid.: 156) becomes a central task of historical models of listening. While a genealogical approach to listening practices, audile techniques, and sonic personae is crucial to understand how the materiality of sound shapes auditory experience, its methodological grounding on archival research, interpretive reading, and cultural analysis often struggles to register the ongoing articulations of listening that happen in distant, unfamiliar, or less documented contexts. Epistemological models of listening fill this gap, offering a valuable toolkit to account for the role of auditory experience in structuring situated knowledges.

Epistemological and Acoustemological Models “Sorry … could you lower your voice?” asks the young owner of a coffee shop in Taipei. I am catching up with my friend Yun Shiuan, and there are no other customers in the cozy second-floor café where we are sitting. Yun Shiuan comes here often, and she tells me that the owner likes to keep the ambience quiet and to maintain a didiao [low-key] presence in the neighborhood. When I tell her—in a hushed tone—that I recently moved from Nangang to Jingmei, her first comment is that both districts are very anjing [tranquil], since they are at the edges of the city, near hills or rivers. A few days before, another friend who lived nearby also made a very similar comment: “the main advantage of Jingmei is anjing.” The café owner comes to scold us a second time, emphasizing that we should really try to keep our voices a bit lower. Outside the small frosted windows, a garbage truck halting at a nearby collection point is announcing its arrival to neighborhood residents by playing a beeping rendition of eight bars of Polish composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska’s 1856 A Maiden Prayer. In some other districts, the looped theme of Beethoven’s Für Elise

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plays the same function, providing an easily recognizable aural cue for citizens waiting to take out their trash. Some local acquaintances have told me that Für Elise was chosen as a garbage truck melody by a former head of the Department of Health because his daughter enjoyed playing it on the piano; others dismiss this story as an urban legend. After I leave the café and head back home across the city, three rapid beeps of the subway station turnstile remind me that my MRT card is running low on credit: I have been passed this handy bit of sonic knowledge by a colleague during a shared commute. A few weeks later, I find a yellow post-it on my door, signed by one of my neighbors, saying: “Hello, I’m the resident of Apartment n. 8. Because our bathroom had a water leak, we will be having renovations for the next three days, please excuse the disturbance.” As the disembodied rattle of a drill resonates through the building’s concrete structure on the next morning, I am startled awake and sigh—this is one ethnographic entanglement with empathic listening that I’d have gladly avoided. Despite their emphasis on ecological cohabitation or historical situatedness, the models described in the previous two sections inherit and reinforce the first-person perspective pioneered by phenomenological models of listening. Most often, it is the author’s own listening experience, attention, and practices that are put front and center in the investigation—an object of inquiry that Clarke self-reflexively identifies as “my own listening” (2005: 192) and which remains predominantly rooted in Euro-American contexts (Hilmes 2005: 258). In spite of its ethnographic grounding, even anthropological inquiry has not been immune to this phenomenological focus: in a paradigmatic example, Claude Lévi-Strauss describes in Tristes Tropiques how the earworm haunting him while traversing the Mato Grosso in 1938 was not an indigenous Nambiwara flute melody but rather a memory of a specific Chopin Étude he hadn’t heard for two decades (Wygant 1989: 900). And yet ethnographic studies of the auditory point toward epistemological models of listening that move beyond phenomenological accounts of Western ears. Listening as a research method has an established history in ethnographic inquiry: ethnomusicologists are trained to develop an “emically adequate listening” (Baumann 1993: 48) and to engage in dialogic interpretive work, for “listening is not a one-dimensional process but rather a multi-dimensional one that is not only dependent upon the interaction of the sense but also upon what one says and what one asks” (ibid.: 45). Encountering sound through folklore, Regina Bendix proposes an “ethnography of listening” (Bendix 2000: 33) which incorporates sensory experience into anthropological accounts and complements the “ethnography of speaking” practiced by linguistic anthropologists. In a similar vein, Veit Erlmann’s answer to James Clifford’s provocative question “what of the ethnographic ear?” argues for the necessity of a historical and contextual auditory turn in anthropology that goes beyond the metaphorical understanding of listening and practices it as a way of knowing social and cultural others (Erlmann 2004: 2–3). The ethnographic openness to other ways of knowing undergirds epistemological models of listening and differentiates them from historical and contextual inquiry about auditory practice. The most comprehensive articulation of this approach is to be found in Steven Feld’s lifelong work among the Bosavi, through which he formulates the idea of acoustemology—a portmanteau of acoustic epistemology or “one’s sonic way of knowing

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and being in the world” (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 461). Acoustemology is not simply an engaged ethnographic listening (Forsey 2010), a sounded anthropology (Samuels et al. 2010), or the representation of soundscapes as documentary ethnographies (Helmreich 2010); it is instead an active, participatory, and creative engagement with situated practices of sounding and listening. Feld envisions (and consistently practices) an “ethnography through sound” that includes collaborative projects of listening, recording, editing, mixing, and producing, through which situated epistemologies of audition and sounding are explored and represented in a dialogic way (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 471). This epistemological impulse is traceable in the history of ethnomusicological inquiry, especially when ethnographers are confronted with strikingly different ways of listening: exemplary cases include the Songhay’s disappointment for the anthropologist’s own inability to hear like them (Stoller 1984), the Sundanese’s seemingly inattentive music listening habits (Zanten 1997), the hyper-attentive listening practiced in Japanese kissaten (Novak 2008), and the acoustic ontology of Kamayura “world hearing” (Menezes Bastos 2013). Responding to the radical difference encountered in distant field sites, acoustemology can also attune the ethnographer to auditory ways of knowing practiced in the more familiar circumstances of Western societies: Tom Rice’s exploration of patients’ navigation of the hospital soundscape (Rice 2003) and their reactions to the objectifying process of stethoscopic listening (Rice 2008) offers a clear example of how ethnographic research can challenge onto-phenomenological categorizations and ecological assumptions about the senses (ibid.: 295). Moreover, as Thorsten Gieser notes in his acoustemology of the chainsaw, research grounded on an epistemological model of listening can potentially overturn entire categories of knowledge or result in unforeseen inversions between aesthetic categories such as noise and harmony (Gieser 2019: 58). Incorporating audition into ethnography, rediscovering the ethnographic ear, and listening ethnographically enrich phenomenological, ecological, and historical inquiry with perspectives beyond that of the perceiving author and contexts beyond the Western canon; the acoustemological emphasis on participatory auditory practices as a method to experience other ways of knowing characterizes epistemological models of listening. The development of these “sonic epistemologies” (Schulze 2018a: 139) is an important step in moving past first-person accounts of aural experience toward understanding of how and when “listening” and comparable auditory practices are articulated in different sociocultural contexts and under different existential conditions. Ethnographic listening, and acoustemological practice in particular, can also respond to the urgent interrogation of epistemological premises in sound studies (Goh 2017). From lifelong sonic collaborations with distant sensory others to occasional encounters with auditory knowledges, epistemological models of listening facilitate the sometimes uneasy confrontation with “the partiality, anti-universalism, and political-ethical demands of situatedness” (ibid.: 289). The situatedness of knowing through sound challenges and unsettles commonplace assumptions about the listening subject, but also brings its practitioner beyond the realm of a predominantly anthropocentric inquiry. As human agency fades back into more symmetrical assemblages of non-human others, xenomachinic models of listening chart a course toward an unfamiliar sensory outsideness.

The Model

Xeno-Machinic and Non-Human Models A metal rod fastened to a lamppost next to the busy Taipower Building intersection supports two instruments: a black anemometer slowly spinning in the afternoon breeze, and the black ball of a microphone windscreen, both connected by cables to a reinforced plastic case sitting on the ground. A white label taped to the box describes the contraption and warns passers-by: “Noise and Vibration Sampling Assignment in Progress, Please Do Not Touch the Instruments.” Further inspection reveals that the measurements are being conducted by the Taiwanese branch of a multinational certification company—an assemblage of standardized equipment listening to acoustic and vibrational signals via non-human sensory organs, converting them in testable and verifiable data stored in a battered black box to be brought back to a laboratory and fed into global reports and statistical models. The inaccessibility of this process of listening—so formally close to the field recording practices of acoustic ecologists and ethnomusicologists, and yet so distant in terms of agency and episteme—prompts me to think about auditory perception beyond the human. Two other scenes come back to my mind: one from a few months before, when I saw a video of two middle-aged Taiwanese men listening to the crackles emitted by an EMF detection device rebranded as a “Ghost Meter” in order to detect the presence of gui [spirits] in a building to be renovated. The second, more recent, of a local university student multitasking on her smartphone while sitting at a café, switching between a languagelearning app validating her English pronunciation and a messaging app converting her amused verbal comments into text messages to be sent to a friend. In all these scenes, auditory perception follows less explored vectors: machines listening to other machines; humans listening to machines listening to ghosts; machines listening to humans—often through the mediation of unassuming and opaque boxes. A focus on the human is a common feature of most models of listening. From models concerned with the embodied experience of acoustic signals to collaborative inquiries into situated sensory perception, non-human listening is often ignored and only occasionally acknowledged as an aside. The most recurring partner of human hearing is audio technology, which is identified across models as a paradigm-shifting factor for the experience of sound and practices of listening: the age of mechanical reproduction made possible Schaeffer’s acousmatic creations (Clarke 2005: 143), and the ubiquity of sonic devices and technologically produced sound have expanded the human auditory with new ways of hearing and listening (Ihde 2007: 5). The development of audio recording and reproduction technologies has, on the one hand, reduced the human ear to “one particular iteration of a whole field of hearing equipment” (Sterne 2003: 69); on the other hand, the exploration of auditory domains beyond the thresholds of human hearing (including ultrasound, infrasound, and bioacoustics) has been dominated by anthropomorphic definitions and representations (ibid.: 74). Even if for Schaeffer himself the age of mechanical reproduction was “not solely a question of machines for making, but of machines for feeling which give to modern man tireless touch, ears and eyes” (cited in Kane 2014: 40), the composer’s understanding of audio technology remains essentialist

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and ahistorical, a process through which the human discovers itself through machines, but rarely gives voice to their own sensing (Kane 2014: 39–40). As Don Ihde notes, the intuition of a vibrational domain lying beyond human hearing can be traced back to ancient Chinese acoustics (Ihde 2007: 264); more recently, Steve Goodman has proposed the term unsound to encapsulate the multiplicity of these inaudible or not-yet-audible vibrations, including both the “peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths” (Goodman 2010: xx). Unsound is a sonic virtuality shaped by both the physiology of human perception and the “policing of the sensible” happening at multiple intersections of affective engineering and social determination (ibid.: 193), and it demands a reconceptualization of listening as a category. Goodman’s outline of unsound points toward possible models of listening outside of human perceptual experience. Examples of non-human listeners include animals and technological objects (Rice 2015: 99); while the former are occasionally acknowledged as potential listeners, the latter are mostly discussed in mechanistic terms as media rather than as listening actants in their own right (Wright 2016). In contrast, xenomachinic listening models account for non-human listeners on a symmetric footing with humans. Listening that happens outside of human perception requires new strategies of inquiry and representation, which are only beginning to be probed by pioneering speculative efforts. Katrina Burch’s xenolistening imbricates auditory perception with philosophical thinking, as the virtualities of unsound meet the general abstraction of thought (Lemma 2016: 3). Against the tendency to apply existing theories of sound to vibrational domains that exceed them, xenolistening accepts the contingency of failure and experiments with sonic fictionality as a way of apprehending the outsideness of human auditory perception (ibid.: 5). Similarly, Eleni Ikoniadou’s response to the multiple “sonic turns” across disciplines is to emphasize vibrational events taking place outside the domain of the living and the necessity to account for the connection to “to counterfactual and counterfictional thinking, to the zones of transmission between life and death, to subaquatic, Cthuluesque, non-human forms of life, and to unsound, vibrational milieus inaccessible to the senses” (Ikoniadou 2017: 252). Following xenomachinic models of listening requires new, experimental genres of representation in-between theory and fiction that counter “the anthropomorphism of artificial intelligence and the human-centric and male-dominated orientation of sound studies” while deepening the study of unknown listenings (ibid.: 257) and grasp the unheard that surrounds them (see Ewé 2020). The resorting to speculative abstraction and theory-fictional experimentation proposed by channelers of xenomachinic models of listening might offer grounds for critiques questioning the scholarly relevance of this domain of auditory experience. But unsound isn’t a fictional construct, nor is it a particularly recent concern. The fascination with machinic listening of the inaudible has accompanied the development of audio technology since the invention of the phonograph, when Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of recording the voices of the dead (Toop 1995: 267). Today, machine listening algorithms are seamlessly embedded in everyday life via mobile devices and cloud computing; as Stefan Maier concludes in his analysis of Google’s WaveNet speech synthesizer, “where signalprocessing tools hear, the synthetic brain-ear complexes of this class of AI listen” (Maier

The Model

2018, emphases in original). The implications of algorithmic listening are not limited to the pragmatic “listening to machines” of the industrial revolution (Bijsterveld 2006)— machines are now listening to us (and to the world) on their own, distinctively non-human, operational terms, to the point that “the advent of synthetic listening might profoundly disturb the sense we have of contemporary aurality” (Maier 2018). As apparently stable notions of aurality are perturbed by “listening aliens” (Schulze 2018a: 142), the nonhuman listening of animals, machines, sensing technologies, ghosts, and gods demands to be accounted for, and xenomachinic models of listening can ground this effort.

Multiple Models of Listening There is no singular listening. Led by this intuition, authors writing in different times and across disciplines have formulated numerous classifications, typologies, and taxonomies of auditory perception. Diffracting it into types, modes, ways, levels, kinds, aspects, and other categories, theorizations of listening have consistently argued for the plural nature of aurality. This chapter advances the argument that listening is not only plural, but multiple: following Christine Guillebaud’s plea for the need to account for “multiple listenings” (Guillebaud 2017), I have compiled a condensed overview of how this multiplicity has been articulated across disciplines and discourses. While the parcellation of listening has contributed to shape how auditory experience is conceptualized in different contexts, I agree with Tom Rice that the “infinite regress” of typologies and taxonomies has often led to discourses in which “modes of listening continually proliferate without necessarily interlinking or building on one another in productive ways” (Rice 2015: 104). This is why, instead of developing more nuanced typologies of listening or deriving syntheses of commensurable taxonomies, I have taken auditory multiplicity as a given and followed its sprawling outgrowth from philosophical theorization to posthumanist speculation, passing through soundscape composition, auditory genealogies, and ethnographic immersion. The multiplicity of listening is here understood, after Annemarie Mol, as being manifold rather than plural: a “drawing together of a diversity of objects” (Mol 2002: 84)—in this case, auditory models—that avoids reducing listening to a homogeneous plurality of typological classifications. My choice of the model as a reference point to unpack and pin down the multiplicity of listening has its roots in the philosophy of science, where models are recognized as abstract objects used to purposefully represent aspects of reality through the performance of similarity (Giere 2004: 747). A concern with models is not foreign to sound studies at large: as early as 1974—the same year in which Thomas Nagel, to disprove behaviorist models, speculated about the impossibility of a human experiencing a bat’s echolocation (Nagel 1974)—Steven Feld put forward a trenchant critique to the blanket application of linguistic models in ethnomusicology (Feld 1974). Models are translated between disciplines and applied to auditory experience, while concepts like sound and listening are employed by theorists as generative models of abstraction for thought (James 2018). The five varieties

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of model described in this chapter should not be read as a linear account of thought around listening; even though the overlaps between onto-phenomenological, ecological, historical, epistemological, and xenomachinic models can be partially mapped back onto technological changes and cultural shifts, many of the authors referenced throughout the previous sections recuperate, build upon, and challenge each other’s work. Affording variable combinations of “ways of multiplying” and “modes of ordering” (Mol 2002: 66– 68), these models convey manifoldness rather than pluralism (ibid.: 84) and allow writers to account for mixed and liminal forms of listening (Guillebaud 2017: 14–15). While the five models I have outlined in each section are not intended to be taken as a comprehensive and sealed-off typology of listening, the thinking and representing of sensory experience is hardly possible without relying on models of some sort. The central point advanced by this chapter is that identifying and outlining the models underpinning different discourses around the auditory is a necessary effort to advance a radically interdisciplinary field of research and representation. If listening can be experienced before any modelization, its representation necessarily isn’t, and it is paramount to disrupt the “strange but recurrently established historical feedback loop of epistemology” (Schulze 2018a: 42) through which models are often reduced into self-actualizing artifacts that legitimize a further round of typological parcellation. Just like listening itself, auditory models are multiple.

22 The Everyday Jacob Kreutzfeldt

Figure 22.1  Stephen Schwartz working in Copenhagen. Year and origin unknown. With kind permission by the Estate of Stephen Schwartz.

Listening In: Pedestrian Life at Strøget in 1966 We are in a crowded place, people are passing by, walking, stepping past the microphone. Someone is whistling a melody line, someone is laughing while disappearing. The city hall carillon sounds far away over the city hum. A voice talks straight to the microphone “yeeees,

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what are they? You can measure it in a cadence of steps …” The voice fades out before really making sense and it feels like we are immersed in steps—listening to the city from a child’s perspective … feet passing. Other voices appear: One guy tells us that he walks Strøget from one end to the other, another man is reflecting on what makes him slow down when walking in the city: “when there is some life,” he says: “one tends to lower the pace.” Yet another man enjoys the atmosphere while waiting for his fiancée. “What is urgent?” someone asks … We are listening to the shopping street of Strøget in Copenhagen. Or rather, we are listening to a radio feature about the street as it was heard on Danish public radio September 10, 1966 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. We hear sounds, utterances, conversations, observations, and yells, as if we were making our ways through the street—all heard, recorded, and mixed by Stephen Schwartz in the summer of 1966. The feature appears in the program sheets of Danish Radio (DR) as European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen—With Stephen Schwartz. Schwartz was a young North American immigrant in Denmark, who had successfully gained access to and established himself in public radio, first as an assistant for renowned feature producer—and also immigrant— Willy Reunert, and now with this piece as his first major individual work. In the years to come, Schwartz would become an internationally recognized feature producer, several timers the winner of the prestigious Prix Italia. The following year, in 1967, Schwartz would be hired by the Danish broadcasting company, according to his own memory, to “renew radiophonic form” (based on an interview with the author, Kreutzfeldt 2012). But while the development of new radiophonic forms and technological experiments ranked high on the agenda for Schwartz, it was the everyday, the ordinary, and the folkloric that was the center of his attention. Since spring 1966 Schwartz had produced his own program Vi Mennesker—in English, We Humans—inspired by the world-famous photo exhibition The Family of Man (ibid.). The purpose was to give an account of the human race as multifaceted, yet united. As curator Edward Steichen wrote in the exhibition catalogue: “It was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life—as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world” (Steichen 1955: 4). Whereas the radio feature genre in DR in the early postwar period had a strong critical and socially engaged agenda, Schwartz employed a more curious, documentarian, and “anthropological” method. Combining his work at the Danish Broadcasting Company with occasional folklore studies at Copenhagen University and also being a poet and musician, Schwartz seems to have been occupied with the entanglements of contemporary auditory culture, something that as a national public radio producer he was able to produce as well as to portray. This chapter takes the case of Schwartz’ Strøget feature as the focal point for investigating the intersections between radio, everyday sounds, and the project of an anthropology of sound. Indeed, we could argue that agenda of an anthropology of sound was taken up by feature producers throughout the twentieth century, yet the question here will not be when, but rather how such enquiry took form with and through radio. Listening to Schwartz’s feature we are witnessing an account of everyday life at Strøget 1966, but we are also witnessing a particular construction of the everyday facilitated by technical and ideological, medial and formal, cultural and political factors.

The Everyday

We are in front of a hot dog stand. Orders and deliveries are exchanged … “2 sausages and 2 bread” … “raw or roasted onions?” … “here you are” … there is distant traffic and multitude of voices. The interviewer asks: “Why are you here at Strøget today”? A woman answers: “To make a day off pass for a small boy aged 9 … I promised him to see the rogues at Storkespringvandet. But they are gone. And the drawings and all that. Children want to see the all the impossible things, you know?” The woman interrupts to discuss the money return with the person in the hot dog stand, then gets back: “In the old days it was an adventure to come in here. Remember, I am 70 now, right? When I was your age we would go in here tip-top dressed with hat and walking stick. Now You wear shirt and sandals. We did not do that when I was young … We were nicely dressed, and behaved nicely, and talked nicely, and admired each other. Now people push each other [laughing]. It is for each and everyone, right? It has become somehow ‘communal’, right? Now they use the elbows. Back then we used the eyes [laughing]. Well … good bye.” Strøget in the summer of 1966 … Hippies hang out around Storkespringvandet and create a gigantic communal artwork on the street surface. People bring their kids to see them, have a hot dog, remember old days. Schwartz makes us hear the tensions and sense the cultural change happening in the streets of Copenhagen. He portrays life in the absolute center of Copenhagen at a critical point in time, where new cultural and political forms make themselves felt: Young people claim the streets and redefine its surface as an artistic canvas, while shopkeepers appeal to police and politicians to stop this mess, arguing that the painting destroys the impression of their window displays. But instead of presenting this as a dramatic story of protagonists and antagonists, Schwartz lets us tune into Strøget as a historical and cultural framework for contemporary life to play out upon. Strøget appears as a place of conflicting memories, desires, values, and norms that are constantly negotiated—all adding to the urban spectacle that attracts people. Schwartz is more interested in the attraction, the spectacle that defines Strøget as a place for exchanges and meetings, than in the conflict itself. He displays the everydayness of Strøget. Just like his interview subjects he—and we—become flaneurs observing and reflecting on the life here. The narrative in European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen—With Stephen Schwartz is not so much that of the conflict between hippies and shopkeepers, but rather that of pedestrian life taking form. Strøget was closed to traffic in 1962, first on a temporary basis and later in 1964 as a permanent solution. In 1966 pedestrian street life was still new in Copenhagen, and this feature lets us hear a testing out of this—to Northern Europeans—new urban phenomenon, where shoppers, tourists, spectators, artists, shopkeepers, and protesters intermingle and attempts are made to define what is allowed and even expected as a part of the everyday at Strøget. Pedestrian life was new to Copenhagen, and while original protests from shopkeepers on the fashionable street had more or less fallen silent in 1966, there was still a degree of uncertainty to what this new phenomenon might mean. The forms and values of pedestrian urbanism were thoroughly studied by architect and urbanist Jan Gehl in the late 1960s and published in Danish in 1971 as Life Between Buildings (Gehl 2011). Here Gehl notices how sound gains new value in pedestrian streets:

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Every time a street with automobile traffic is converted to a pedestrian street, there are renewed opportunities for hearing other people. The noise of cars is replaced by the sound of steps, voices, running water, and so forth. It is again possible to have a conversation, to hear music, people talking, children playing. In these traffic-free streets and in old pedestrian cities, it is possible to study how valuable and important the opportunity for hearing is for the general ambience and for physical and psychological well-being. (Gehl 2011: 167)

Sound is only one factor Gehl pays attention to in this transformation, yet it is worth noticing that the removal of motorized traffic in Gehl’s view is not only valuable as a means to decrease the general noise level, but also as a condition for other (human) sounds to emerge and gain prominence. The audibility of human sounds in Gehl’s analysis matches the whole idea of urban life on a human scale, and hearing here seems to play an important role in connecting people and their environment, producing what may be heard as a coherent fabric of conversations, music, footsteps, and so forth. Clearly, Schwartz set out to study and give account of the pedestrian life at Strøget in 1966. And his method was not so much that of asking the experts, but rather to become a pedestrian. There was an editorial agenda involved in setting the scene: the feature is one in a series under the heading European Pedestrian Strolls that was broadcast by DR between August 1966 and April 1970. It seems this is the sole archived audio from the series, so we can only speculate how the urban trope of the pedestrian stroll was transformed into listening experiences by Jørn Hjorting reporting from Champs-Elysées (broadcast August 6, 1966) or by Stig Mervild strolling the streets in Edinburgh (broadcast April 2, 1970). Arguably, the assignment challenged and inspired young Schwartz to push the limits of the feature genre and invent an experimental format. Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen breaks down formal hierarchies to a hitherto unheard level. Where features in DR up to this point were almost without exception told from the point of view of a narrator, this feature radically and experimentally puts the listener in the street and surrounds them with footsteps, voices, music, and statements all arranged into a loose, rhythmic and energetic collage-like form. The Danish listeners had literally never heard anything like this on national radio before. Not only was the interviewer only present a few times in the feature, and only to ask open questions to keep the interviewed persons talking, but the feature also has no introduction or setting of scenes, no position from where the chaos of pedestrian life at Strøget could be overviewed, not even a clear storyline. The feature takes on a kaleidoscopic form, which in the context of national Danish radio can only be likened to poet Emil Bønnelycke’s portrait of Copenhagen from 1930: Vore Dages København I Radiofoniske Billeder (Contemporary Copenhagen in Radiophonic Images). Bønnelycke and DR then collaborated with the newly established Nordic Tone Film to utilize the sound film technology to produce a montage of sound recordings from diverse places around Copenhagen: The B&W factory, the harbor, the fish market, and so on—all presented in a montage sequence without narration (see Kreutzfeldt 2019). Like Bønnelycke’s work, Schwartz’s feature would not form a tradition within DR, and today appears as an oddity in context of national radio history. Schwartz himself would later put little significance on European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen

The Everyday

(Kreutzfeldt 2012) and prefers his 1969 feature Willys Verden (Willy’s World). The latter is a portrait of a low-life hustler, where Schwartz, thanks to the excellent abilities of the characters to perform and narrate themselves, is able to tell the story without narration or interview questions. Listeners witness conversations and actions as if sitting in the room next to the characters. The scenic or pearls-on-a-string-form that Schwartz developed here would form a tradition both within and outside Denmark and was seen by Schwartz himself as a defining work. But it is in European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen and in an almost contemporary portrait of Copenhagen Central Station Kredsløb. Hovedbanegården (Circuit: The Central Station from 1968) where Schwartz really experiments with form and content. Both features have a place—not a person or a story—as their object; both features focus on a particular type of urban movement: the pedestrian stroll and the transport circuit; and both focus on the everyday rather than the extraordinary. Up and Down Strøget carefully constructs the quotidian in Strøget. As opposed to the case with most features, we are not witnessing a particular event, rather people are reflecting on and demonstrating what they “generally do” in Strøget; how life displays itself out there. Urban sounds such as town hall carillons and street cries, birds and footsteps make up the backbone of this everydayness. The techniques of cutting up and layering statements, utterances, and half-sentences—as we saw in the introduction paraphrased at the beginning of this chapter—sometimes even repeating them and emphasizing the rhythmical and musical and aspects, further contribute to disrupting the “here and now” of radiophonic sound. This allows sounds to operate not only through Piecian indexicality, but also through iconic reference, that is: through likeness to the represented. We are not hearing one specific footstep happening in a particular context. Rather we are hearing footsteps in Strøget and voices in Strøget. Furthermore, the urban sounds we hear in the feature are mixed and repeated in a way that forces listeners out of ordinary casual or semantic listening modes to enter practices of reduced listening (Chion 1994: 25–6) or listening to signifying (Barthes 1985: 259), that allow the sounds to combine in new ways and gain metaphoric, musical, and symbolic denotations. One significant sound heard several times in the feature is a rhythmical and mechanical rotation, probably from a pump operating in the public toilet below ground close to Storkespringvandet. It is heard for the first time around seven minutes into the feature, after a toilet manager has given an account of his everyday working environment beneath the ground. The manager explains how water is transported from the toilet up to the sewer system by two electric pumps, and slowly the sound fades up and then stands alone for ten seconds before a new voice appears. Clearly, this is not the case of a sound emerging naturally, or of the interviewer moving closer to the pump, but rather the result of mixing room engineering. The sound reappears only five minutes later as a part of a three-minute sound collage involving sound from carillons, dripping water, hooves on cobbles, what is probably a blacksmith hammering, street construction works with a compressed air pump, and then once again the rhythmical and rotating mechanical pump sound—all combined with bass and congas seemingly improvising with the sound of the pump as a third instrument. In the context of national radio in 1966, this is an unusual and rather experimental collage, suggesting that

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city sounds may be heard differently, in what we could now describe as a third-order way, beyond listening to indexes and meanings. We can speculate about what ideas may have been invested in this particular mix of sounds of both modern and pre-modern origin, but it may be enough to simply note the level of attention and care paid to these everyday sounds. Schwartz seems to have been interested not only in portraying Strøget using sound, but in studying Strøget as a sounding environment: an environment of loosely connected utterances, dialogues, discussions, and sounds all experienced in a flow of collaging acoustic information. Chief Physician Freisleben talks to us from a speaker mounted on a van: “I earnestly encourage passers-by to step in here and give blood … Your blood could save the life, maybe of a stranger, maybe of your child” … The Royal Life Guard approaches with trumpets, marching drums, and flutes. The atmosphere is lifted, loud voices talking. When the guard stops playing, we suddenly hear young male voices parodying military commands and yelling at the guard: “minus 396 days,” “chickens!” Marching feet and flutes start again. Then drums … An agitator reads an announcement: “What is your opinion? Millions of people around the world turn with outrage against USA’s genocide in Vietnam … The situation in Vietnam is now so dangerous that it may develop into a worldwide nuclear war …” Birdsong and sweeping of the street. Someone is whistling. The atmosphere is calm. Doves coo. A flute blends in and seems to imitate birdsong … A Hawker is yelling: “5 for 2 and a half, 10 for 4.” “They want to prohibit honest trade and allow mendicancy…” … “All citizens: come and have 12 for 2 and a half—the last bananas ….” Office sounds: Typewriters and calculators… This paraphrase is of a sound collage that appears about fifteen minutes into the feature. Within six and a half minutes, the listeners tour the physical and ideological sound space of Strøget: authorities and anti-authorities, neatly organized military music and disordered yells, global political concerns and local everyday life, commercial activity and folksy aspects. The elements seem loosely connected in a series of associations and listeners willingly follow the “auditory panning” from one motif to the next. The mix is gentle, yet nothing next to modern sophisticated mixing and layering techniques. We sense the fader working as a camera: zooming in and out, asking us to listen to this and then that, and maybe also inviting us to detach from whatever motif is on display and simply drift through the sound: Listening to the morning scene of sweeping, whistling, and cooing doves combined with flute improvisation for instance, easily takes us into this third-order way of listening, where we are not looking for anything in particular in the sounds, but just getting acquainted with them. The collage lets listeners explore the auditory space of Strøget and reminds us to what degree the public pedestrian space is defined sonically. The public space, whether understood as a site for constructive dialogue or for antagonistic confrontations, involves as an important element the possibility of expressing oneself and making concerns, ideas, as well as commodities available, visible, and audible. In public space, the notion of expressing oneself is intimately connected to ideas of “voicing” and “sounding,” but also to the act of listening. Schwartz explores this space and instead of telling us the story about life in Strøget anno 1966, he gives an essayistic account of Strøget as an auditory space and framework for public life.

The Everyday

Stepping Back: Radio as Cultivation of the Ear Studying European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen—With Stephen Schwartz gives us insights the everyday on Strøget in 1966. To a certain degree, we hear in the feature almost archaeological finds that indicate how this particular environment sounded at that moment in time. Yet on another level we are dealing with a highly mediated and constructed account of that everyday in that particular environment. Why and how can we see this as a useful source for anthropologies of sound? In Europe early on radio became institutionalized as a means to spread culture in a given territory, defined as a “nation,” empire, sphere of interest, or suchlike. State institutions offered educating music, educational talks, literature, and drama transmitted from a technological and symbolic center throughout the territory. The political potentials of such apparatus were not easily overseen, and naturally there were political struggles over what kinds of culture could and should be spread, offered, and not least accepted in the airwaves. Generally, programmers had a clear preference for high art and established culture, while increasingly throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were listener demands for other kinds of culture to be presented in the ether: such as light dance music, everyday life features, and entertainment. The development of the radio feature must be understood in connection to such schism between high culture and everyday culture, often voiced in listener magazines such as this the Danish Arbejder-Radio (Workers’ Radio): Transmissions to a particular degree catches listeners’ attention. It is as if you move events much closer, when broadcasting takes place directly from a theatre, a meeting room, the football field or other places where the events of our time takes place. The radio waves bring the particular atmospheres of the place and the event close. Therefore, the vast majority of listeners say: Let us hear transmissions, good transmissions, instructive transmissions. (Arbejder Radio no. 2, April 10, 1927, according to Poulsen 2006: 190)

In the view of this editorial writer, transmissions could be just as instructive and educational as other kinds of content, but they could also bring the listeners closer to contemporary life. While the studio came to represent mostly “safe” and established culture, transmission, reportage, and later the feature became vehicles for other kinds of culture to be represented and heard on the radio; and while culture departments in radio remained slightly more conservative, reportage and feature sections would tend to seek out the current, the urban, and increasingly also the disturbing issues. Public service radio can be understood as a central state apparatus for distribution and definition for culture throughout the twentieth century. Radio became a forum for representations and discussions of the common values that unite a territory: language, cultural heritage as well as current culture, contemporary art, folklore, and so on. More importantly, radio became the modern instrument of cultivation of a public. It provided means to learn language and relate to culture, art, and knowledge otherwise not available to most listeners. Radio combines all the modern ideas of culture as identified by Raymond

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Williams in 1976: “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development,” “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general,” and “the work and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Williams 2014: 88). It accommodates both the educational, the anthropological, and the aesthetic notions of culture, and occupies a role so central that we may find that radio not only reflected, but also developed modern and hybrid notions of culture, such as the one described by Williams. Stephen Schwartz’s work for DR was clearly oriented toward representing people, ideas, and expressions as embedded in a more anthropological idea of culture. In 1966 the young American radio producer had just launched Us Humans, a series of programs focusing on the general human qualities and stories of particular individuals, and seems to have had an insatiable appetite for exploring Denmark and the people living here. We can easily locate tensions between “high” and “low” in Schwartz’s account of life on Strøget 1966, where we sense the opposition between established culture and street culture, between indoor spectators and outdoor actors, between marching military music and street cries. Yet we also need to be aware of the formative aspect in Schwartz’s work and in radio more generally. As noticed by Kate Lacey, the major defining factor for radio is that it generates a listening public (Lacey 2013). With radio came a new way of engagement for the public: one attending solely to sound. A sound-centered form of attention had already developed around music in concert halls and had started to spread with the gramophone and related technologies. But with radio came the radiogenic mix of speech, music, and real sounds and, as Rudolf Arnheim enthusiastically claimed in 1936, a whole new synthesis of intellect, the symbolic, and the real became possible (Arnheim 1971: 15). Radio allowed a cultivation of one sense to a high degree, and not only represented established genres and disciplines such as lectures and music, but also developed new forms like the radio drama and the radio feature. The public thus became listeners and acquired skills and methods allowing them to relate to events and environments through sound alone. Arnheim embraced this new form of expression as a radically modern art form and, under the heading In Praise of Blindness, argued that such artwork should refrain from appealing to the visual imagination, but rather develop the options within reach for aural perception: [The w]ireless rules out a certain sense in a most startling way. It seems more sensory defective and incomplete than other arts—because is excludes the most important sense, that of sight … And yet nothing is missing! For the essence of broadcasting consists just in the fact that it alone offers unity by aural means. Not in the external sense of naturalistic completeness, but in affording the essence of the event, a process of thought, a representation. Everything essential is there. (Arnheim 1971: 135)

To Arnheim, writing at a time where sound film had replaced silent film and TV was expected to soon replace radio, radio offered unheard options in developing listening, not as a crutch for the visual imagination, but as a perceptual faculty in its own right. The history of radio can be understood as the development of sonic forms that represent and reflect upon contemporary experiences. If we understand Schwartz’s work in the Strøget feature from such a perspective, it can be heard not only as a representation of cultural struggles

The Everyday

taking place in 1966, of high and low culture finding new oppositions and alliances in the street, but also as an exploration of the pedestrian street as an aural space. What we are hearing in the feature may be understood not only as a representation of a particular space, but also as demonstrating a listening strategy toward that place and more generally toward pedestrian urban life. The strolling, casual form of the feature may be heard as a strategy to cope with and condense heterogeneous impressions of urban space: an auditory flânerie. Schwartz “lends us an ear” that is not only a receiving ear but also an active one, processing, layering, and collaging the heterogeneous impressions into something more or less coherent. Schwartz himself described the feature as building on: “a set of thoughts about producing something, which is about nothing else than a universe of sounds … a socalled ambient piece” (Schwartz in interview with the author, Kreutzfeldt 2012). We could align the perceptual function of radio with philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s idea of symbolic forms, mainly applied to the classical arts in painting and literature (Cassirer 1962). For Cassirer, culture provides the symbolic forms through which we are able to grasp an external world. Art, understood as an intensification of cultural practice more generally, gives us a “visible or tangible embodiment not simply in a particular medium in clay, bronze, or marble—but in sensuous forms, in rhythms, in color patterns, in lines and design, in plastic shapes” (ibid.: 154). It is the structure of such works that act as gestalts, which make us capable of comprehending impressions otherwise unrelated to the work itself. Yet, even though radio features like the one discussed here may appeal to a way of listening that prioritizes form as equally important as sign, we are not dealing with an abstract musical structure of melodies, rhythms, and patterns, but with sounds that carry with them references: We somehow recognize the sounds in Schwartz feature and relate to them as something we may have heard and might recognize. Listening to Schwartz’s feature we not only drift through but we also enter into interpretive relationships with particular sounds heard. Opening up an understanding of these relationships requires a theoretical framework beyond the notion of “imagination” as suggested by Arnheim. One way to open up a discussion of what has up to now been called a “third order” way of listening is through a Deleuzian notion of the sign as developed in his study on Proust (Deleuze 2000). Here the sign is not understood as a neutral entity channeling information, but as something that forces us into an interpretive process. Deleuze substitutes the Saussurian idea of a clear and generalized relationship between signifier and signified with a notion of learning. Entering into a relationship with a sign is not understood as a process of decoding the entity—to “recognize” the signified, but rather as a type of violence where the sign compels us to engage in a process of interpretation. Such an understanding of the sign entails that we are constantly learning rather than just “knowing,” “imagining,” or “understanding.” In the case of listening, we are not listening to indexes to recognize, for instance, a car, nor to meanings to decode and understand a language, but we are attending to something we are getting-to-know. Such a process may in principle be endless: there is no final point of such listening, no enlightening recognition, but only a continual process of becoming, which throughout Deleuze’s work is understood as a formative and transformative force.

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Schwartz’s Strøget feature is full of soundmarks that—as noted earlier—appear as refrains: the mechanical pump, the town hall carillon, the dripping of water, footsteps, street sweeping, and so on. There is an almost ritualistic appeal in this, as if these sounds are somehow particularly interesting or significant. Clearly—particularly due to the mixing of the sounds with improvised music—we are encouraged to listen to the musicality of urban sounds. Yet all the sounds are what could be understood as soundmarks in the sense suggested by R. Murray Schafer, as “community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by people in that community” (Schafer 1977: 274). Schafer places such sounds in an in-between position of on the one side sound signals operating in a foreground perspective and keynote sounds that exist in the background of attention. These sounds are “regarded or noticed.” They are all sounds that are somehow intimately related to the place and that allow us to get acquainted with it, sounds that somehow seem to carry more meaning than their obvious denotations. The town hall carillon of course marks the passing of time, but also marks the symbolic position of the town hall and of Copenhagen in the nation. And we may ask ourselves about the possible meanings and perspectives involved in the mechanical pump, the footsteps, and the dripping water in Schwartz’s feature. Clearly, due to their repetition they act as marks that somehow force themselves upon us and encourage us to engage in an interpretive process. The sound of footsteps—probably the most prominent refrain in the feature—is full of meanings, from the obvious function of locating us in a pedestrian street, to the identification of types of rhythms present in Strøget every day, the strollers and the hasty workers for instance, to the suggestion of a new type of urban class: Listening to the feature today, more than fifty years after it was first broadcast, the sounds of footsteps seem to predict the advancement of urban culture as the main locus of middle-class consumer culture, the transformation of the urban as a center for production to a center for consumption, and the takeover of the urban “creative class.” It is such marks that later Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia from 1980 (Deleuze and Guattari 2003) call refrains, and describe as enigmatic yet potent matter capable of organizing an environment (ibid.: 310–350). The central idea is inspired by the ethological concept of ritualization, that it is repetition itself that allows sensory material to become expressive, and that meanings come later. It is repetition that allows other or expanded meanings to enter into sound, movement, gesture. Behavior and utterances, gain prominence when they are ritualized, and thus attract expanded meaning. Understood as a soundmark, we may say that in becoming noticed and regarded a particular sound, the town hall carillon, for instance, has become expressive, yet there is a certain openness with regard to what is actually expressed. As listeners, we are not only understanding or interpreting the sound; we are also getting-toknow the sound—it is a process of being marked as well as noticing a mark. Similarly, in Schwartz’s feature we may say that we are not only recognizing a particular environment, but we are also, thanks to the repetition and “musicalization,” being guided through the environment and presented with a field of virtual meanings. What kind of source material are we dealing with here, and how is it valuable for an anthropology of sound? That was the question put at the beginning of this section. Clearly,

The Everyday

Schwartz’s feature, along with other historical radio features, must be understood as an entry into a specific historical situation, that we can only partly grasp. Yet we can find in it not only accounts of culture at a particular place at a particular time, but also active attempts at cultivating these situations aurally. We are dealing with an auditory discourse that represents a subject at the same time as it attempts to order that subject with the means available to the producer. We could imagine a stroll down Strøget and envision the auditory impressions from this, which would probably be a highly heterogeneous and disparate collection of impressions and percepts. European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen—With Stephen Schwartz builds from this a coherent and somehow meaningful form, letting us grasp aurally Strøget as it was in 1966. We are presented with a sensorial landscape, clustering significant sounds in a non-determined way, that allows for continued interpretations and studies of sensologies working in and through pedestrian streets in Europe more widely.

Finetuning: Listening through Technologies How can we approach radio in such a way as to hear in it the gradual development and displacement of auditory discourse? This is a discourse that not only names things, but also sounds things, that puts objects’ sounds and voices in relation to one another, that constructs auditory world models, and then continuously displaces these, a discourse that contains its own struggles and contradictions, but most importantly a discourse that generates imaginations and models for worlds far beyond what we would be capable of expressing without the technical apparatus of radio. When Stephen Schwartz was hired in a full-time position at DR in 1967 it was—according to his own memory—with the job description to “renew radiophonic form.” Instructed by his mentor Willy Reunert in the practice of transcribing all recordings onto narrow pieces of paper and then cutting and pasting these paper strips together before cutting the actual tape, Schwartz would proceed through a long line of technological developments in DR. He seems to have had great interest in exploring every new technology at hand: in a piece from 1968, he explicitly experimented with stereo recordings; in 1972 with eight-track editing; in 1982 with binaural recordings; and in 1987 with digital sound editing. Schwartz seems to have sought out any new technologies to explore the options available through them. In the case of European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen—With Stephen Schwartz, it is clearly the portable tape recorder that is tested and explored to its limits. Schwartz himself remembers that the department he was in had two portable Nagra recorders (Kreutzfeldt 2012), but that the recorders tended to spend most of the time in the back of a closet in the Radiohouse and not in use out on the street. No doubt, media can be understood as “Extensions of Man,” as famously suggested by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (2006). Even so, radio has never been just one and the same thing. Rather, “radio” has always been made up of temporary configurations of shifting technologies: microphones, storage technologies, faders, mixers, transmission

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and reception technologies, playback technologies, and so on—all this colored by shifting imaginations and politics. What radio is could never be summed up in a single definition, best illustrated by the fact that while only a few decades ago radio was generally defined as a sound signal distributed by radio waves, today most radio listening takes place thanks to digital cable distribution. Contrary to his mentor Willy Reunert, Schwartz had grown up in what he himself called “radio days” (Kreutzfeldt 2012) and got acquainted with portable tape recorders as a young man. For a journey to the United States in 1963, he bought his own portable Uher tape recorder and captured meetings and conversations in the streets of New York. Back in Denmark, he sought out the by now famous Reunert and persuaded him to listen to the recordings. The meeting led to Schwartz’s premiere in DR in 1964: Sort Aftenvandring (Black Evening Stroll), realized in collaboration with Reunert. In Black Evening Stroll listeners are placed on street level, just like in the Strøget feature, and follow Schwartz’s exploration of black neighborhoods and the rising ideological resistance there. Reunert himself had developed a feature style based on recordings from reportage wagons, the prevailing technical form for outside broadcasting before portable tape recorders. Reunert would sit in the car during interviews, guiding a reporter in the field outside the wagon. He was rarely heard himself, but he would give instructions to the reporter via an intercom system. Compared to this, Schwartz in his features could roam the streets much more freely and seek out situations, dramas, and intimate conversations as he liked. What the listener therefore experiences is a completely different situation from Reunert’s well-organized tours in and around one particular place at one time, with Schwartz’s labyrinthine accounts pieced together in a collage-like form. While the act of moving from one place to another was carefully prepared and explained in Reunert’s features, Schwartz tended to place the listener in a more dislocated and dynamic environment without necessarily setting scenes and explaining movements. The portable tape recorder allowed a freer range beyond the reportage auxiliary car, and made it possible to place the listeners in a more fluent space and, above all, in a less precise and constrained timeframe. Public urban space has never been an easy environment to work in for the radio reporter. While the radio studio is designed for the maximum possible control of sound, urban space offers the contrary auditory situation: abundance of noise, denseness, unpredictability, and a lack of control over the situation. While the studio allows listeners to identify sounds one by one, to assess distance, and build a scheme of foreground and background, all sounds tend to cluster together in urban space due to building reflections and the abundance of loud distant sounds. Looking through the DR archive, one finds surprisingly few broadcasts taking place from Copenhagen urban space in radio’s early years. Even discussions about noise in the city are most often staged in a studio. Mastering urban space for the reporter can be understood as a challenge inherent in the institution of public service radio itself. Almost all public service radio stations were from the outset located in big cities. The urban situation was a precondition for radio, yet paradoxically it was a repressed condition controlled and managed by thick curtains, sound insulation, and multilayered doors. The urban sonic environment would be well known to reporters, often living in cities themselves, and while the beginning of radio relied on the control and

The Everyday

careful selection of sounds to be broadcast from the studio, the urge to move outside seems to have been equally attractive and challenging. Jens Frederik Lawaetz, who from the very first beginnings of Danish radio in 1926 had been in in charge of children’s programming, in a 1933 publication gives an instructive account of the technical setup involved in transmissions. At this time DR owned only a very few wax disc players, and practically all broadcasting was done in the form of direct transmission. In fact, it was Lawaetz’s impression that “one should not fool the listeners” (Lawaetz 1933: 108) and pretend that something is going on live, if this is not the case. Recorded sound was considered as a helpful tool to fill in holes when the reporter was moving from one position to another, and as a device for facilitating staggered broadcasts, but not as an editorial tool. Instead, Lawaetz explains how the fader was deployed to help put the listeners in a particular situation without the reporter having to be in the middle of it and potentially disturb things. The example is a transmission from a campfire: There are two microphones. The one is mounted on a stand next to the campfire. The other is in the hand of the speaker. It is fixed on a handle just like the one on an ordinary phone. And there is a spring on the handle, When the speaker presses the spring, the microphone is open. When he lets go, it is closed. Throughout the broadcast the normal position of the fader is in the middle. When the speaker-microphone is closed, the listeners only hear the entertainment by the campfire. When the speaker wants to talk, he presses his button and begins to say something. The assistant by the amplifier is wearing headphones and has his hand on the fader handle. In the same moment as the speaker starts talking, he turns the handle (if necessary) to a position, where you can hear and understand what the speaker is saying, but at the same time still have the broadcasting from the camp fire as the natural background. So swift is this regulation, that the listeners do not notice that there are two microphones. And the speaker does not need to disturb the campfire by constantly going up to the microphone. (Lawaetz 1933: 99–100, translated by JK)

So, the fader evidently plays a central role in allowing a controlled interaction between environmental sound and the voice of the speaker. It is a simple tool in mastering unruly sonic environments. It was thanks to the gradual development of such technological apparatus that reporters gained more and more control over the situation when broadcasting from urban space: the fader, the acetate disks, the reporting wagon (in smaller and smaller sizes), the tape recorder, the portable tape recorder, and many more things, would all give reporters tools to manage and control sounds, and to develop new ways of inhabiting and representing urban space. The portable tape recorder used by Schwartz in the Strøget feature allowed the reporter to work alone, to stroll and explore the environment, and to collect material that could be included in the later editorial process. Sounds now were not only, as in Lawaetz’s situation, “a natural background,” but were the raw material for the editorial process and could be “ritualized” and made into refrains by simple editorial means. Yet the portable tape recorder was not totally new to reporters, when Schwartz first took it out of the closet. The first tape recorders at DR, two AEG Magnetophones, according to former employee H.C. Jørgensen, were acquired in 1938, but it was not until ten years later with the availability of 3M’s Scotch tape, which replaced the earlier acetate/paper

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models, that tape started to be used on regular basis instead of wax discs. Portable tape recorders came in 1950 (Jørgensen 1984: 152) and were first used with notable effect in 1953 in Viggo Clausen’s feature The Company Travel, where he brought a Maihak recorder with him on a charter trip to Hartzen in Germany and interviewed the other participants along the way. The Maihak was not easily operated since it required manual charging and could record a maximum of three minutes after one minute of charging (Poulsen 2006: 498). It was the Nagra recorders, reliable and actually portable devices, and which began to appear at DR from 1960 (Jørgensen 1984: 182) that really made an impact. Furthermore, Schwartz arriving in 1963–1964 seems to have personified a new style of reporter, a mobile, autonomous type seeking out the environments, people, and events of the time while not reliant on heavy technological apparatus in order to collect material. While earlier reportage techniques required much more preparation and organization, Schwartz was highly dependent on another kind of technique: that of editing. He collaborated with Knud Ebbesen, a young technician who had a similar appetite for new technologies. In the Strøget feature, according to Schwartz’s own memory, they focused particularly on two things, both derived from Reunert’s teaching: working with depth perspective and working with the musicality of language. But while Reunert in his own features would work with depth perspective as an interplay between foreground and background, Schwartz’s Strøget feature allows numerous levels between foreground and background and, what is radically new, sometimes even gives the background prominence without any foreground sounds to mask and disturb. Moreover, the interest in the musicality of language would not only be directed to the natural dialects and ways of talking, but also to how several voices can work together and form musical collages beyond just natural language—as in the introduction cited in the beginning of this chapter. Whereas Reunert’s work relied on a realism model where people talking could be located in a space thanks to background sounds, in this feature Schwartz together with Ebbesen constructs another highly mediated form, where time and place are distorted and sounds and voices can appear without contextualization. We sense less of the actual situation, where reporter meets interviewees, and—on reflection—more of the editing studio, where bits and pieces are cut, combined, and layered. With the producers we are listening in and getting to know Strøget’s pedestrian environment or, applying a metaphor somehow present in the material: the music of Strøget. Yet in the context of an anthropology of sound, such musicalization must be understood not only as a aestheticization of sounds from Strøget, but also, and significantly, as a process of getting-to-know, inhabiting, and structuring the place, of exploring the sensorial landscape and the ideologies embedded therein with the tools available. The approach suggested here, then, is one of close analysis of radio as entries into a sonic discourse. This discourse should not be understood only as utterances about a particular subject, nor as artworks with formal properties, but could potentially be envisioned as ways to order, structure, and make sense of the world from an auditory perspective. Particularly interesting in this viewpoint are broadcasts that take place outside of the radio studio, establishing their own spatial logic. Such inquiries need to pay close attention to the ways in which the technological apparatus of radio has shifted and how this has changed the possibilities of managing the field that the reporter is radically embedded in.

The Everyday

Listening Again: Sounds Reappearing Radio used to be a medium of the ether: igniting the moment and disappearing immediately after. Radio was to be heard all over a given territory, yet the spatial reach contrasted with a very limited temporal span. Radio reviewers used to have to rely on their notes; there was no coiling back and forth. Radio, like a concert, like a piece of theatre, or like a performance, was something that happened. Today, radio stays available in vast online archives and even vaster research archives. And what is more: historical radio has started appearing and become searchable in still more intelligent ways. This is yet another step in sound’s voyage from a momentary temporal occurrence to an increasingly plastic presence, a transformation that calls for reconsiderations of research traditions and future research options. What is significant about radio’s role here, is that we have before us a huge and almost unexplored archive of research material, containing sounds, voices, dialects, technologies, and much, much more from almost the past 100 years. In the context of an anthropology of sound, we may be able to find in radio not only the sonic dissemination of certain subject matter but the formation of a shared, technologically mediated auditory culture. In listening through radio archives we can approach past formations of the sonic: What sounds are considered meaningful, iconic, symbolic? Which sounds are noisy, irrelevant, beautiful, or compelling? And also: how do these sounds facilitate alternative entrances to cultural, political, ideological, and symbolic fractures in modern history? Such approaches should allow radio to expand from a marginalized position as “radio studies” to a more central position within cultural and anthropological studies. Arguably, sound and listening have largely remained a blind angle to much of modern history, and the emergence of radio archives as resources for research may be helpful in getting broader attention to the fact that modernity meant equally—if not more radical—developments in sound as in vision. At present, radio is undergoing a new radical transformation, too, with digital formats like podcasts, DAB, internet radio. The production and distribution of quality sound is becoming more accessible, and we see a proliferation of formats and forms of radio. Particularly within podcasting, different forms of feature and documentary find new ground and attract fresh listeners. We have learned that there is no need to keep looking around the corner for the technological transformation that will leave radio obsolete; rather, we see that sound-based media remain relevant to users and producers. As broadcasting increasingly develops into narrowcasting, we may see an anthropology of sound taking form not only through studies of historical or contemporary radio, but also through the production of explorative and anthropological features, exploring contemporary environments, relations, sounds, and voices in a manner much like Stephen Schwarz’s in European Pedestrian Stroll: Up and Down Strøget, Copenhagen. Just like Schwartz let us hear the emerging consumer culture in Strøget—the dreams, desires, and idiosyncrasies casually played out in in central Copenhagen in 1966—radio producers today listen in on other everyday environments where new meanings are taking form.

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23 The Unheard Tobias Ewé

Figure 23.1  The Self-Moving Substance.

Diving into Sonofluvianism When you submerge yourself in the ocean, there’s a point where gas gives way to liquid and water starts pouring in your ears. Crisp clarity displaced by an all-enveloping murmur. Clear signals become muffled noise. Yet before long you realize that this new wet sensation is not so much an exotic temporary experience as it is an entirely different milieu. The

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murmur is neither silent nor loud, but a different mode of existence that affords its own set of sensual parameters. Weightless. Fast. Porous. Bass. Lithe. Abyssal. The world changes as sensory limits are modified by a different medium of propagation. Unlike the slow propagation of sound in air, water works at different speeds. The haptic feedback systems of the human body awaken to a more immediate relationship with its milieu. At first you think your ears have been plugged. Unlike earplugs that strip away undesirable frequencies from the audible spectrum, water is not a plug, but an entirely different zone of existence. Soon the sensation of cold, wet, and plugged ears are displaced as the aquatic milieu becomes naturalized. Sound waves move up to four times faster in water than in air, and as you stay under what was previously muffled now attains clarity and precision. The slowness of air, and the mid-range frequencies evaporate and disperse into the pelagic realm of the unheard. Aeolian sounds (sounds traveling through the air, see Kahn 2013) become unheard sounds. Striated space gives way to smooth space until that again reaches a point of striation. The unheard moves outside of time. Don Ihde provides a useful anchor: “Listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately working its way into what is as yet unheard” (Ihde 2007: 49). But what is the unheard? By its very definition, the unheard lies beyond of the heard—and therefore outside the immediacy of human auditory experience. Unlike the quotidian—almost automatic— activity of hearing, unhearing is not a common activity but a liminal one. This is most conspicuous by the fact that while sound can enter the ear and interface with the cochlea— the spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear—this does not mean that it is heard. The unheard is a special category given to the sounds just out of earshot: the events that are in excess of the heard. No matter how far we shoot our ears into the surroundings something is always left unheard. The human sonic sensorium relates to far more than just the ear’s ability to receive vibrational information—for instance, even the saccadic movements of eyeballs affect hearing (Gruters et al. 2018). In fact, the unheard is not a transcendental out there that can never be grasped due to hard-coded human biosensory or audiosocial limitations; the unheard exists in an immanent outside that can be transformed into audible material through the act of unhearing. Either with the right technological (ne/a)ural-enhancements, sono-stimulants, or bodily (de)tuning. Unhearing also takes place in the realm of the nonhuman where the cochlea is challenged as sound’s primary domain. Broadly speaking, the realm of the unheard can be defined by three major components: ●

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Unheard: a transcendental plane of immanence Unhearing: a sensory mode of accessing the unheard The Circuit of the Unheard: a sono-Marxological logic of noise-production.

What is the role of hearing related to the sound it seeks to grasp? According to sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne, hearing is “environmentally grounded and stretched towards transcendence” (2015: 65). While hearing is certainly environmentally grounded, there is nothing that tells us that it is in a transcendent relationship to sound—at least not in any Kantian sense. If so, hearing “stretched towards transcendence” would assume that sound lies beyond the grasp of hearing, instead of hearing being something that can be

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cognitively and technologically manipulated to accommodate the desires of the listener. There is nothing transcendent about the unheard, since it is the source and being of all that is heard. The unheard is thus immanent to hearing. Although hearing always happens from the position of a particular subject that cannot fully grasp the unheard, that does not mean that the unheard is transcendent and unknowable. Through an alienation of hearing known now as unhearing, the grounding structures and machinations of the unheard begin to take form. Unhearing itself is an amorphous concept that on the most basic level refers to the attempt to access the unheard. Although any complete understanding of the unheard lies beyond the scope of any human, unhearing is not in itself futile. However, it will rarely produce the intended outcome. In actuality, unhearing thus refers to the destabilization or deterritorialization of hearing. Unhearing is hearing gone wrong. Of the many modes of unhearing, the aquatic has proven to be one of the most auspicious. Underwater hearing carries with it an element of unhearing insofar as it is a type of hearing that suppress usual modes of sonic reception. Unhearing happens when hearing becomes unnatural to the body’s own sensorium. Plunging your head into the water, you immediately unhear the disorientation of water and air—bubbles wash against your eardrums and unravel your sense of balance, while the water rushing into your ears sounds like waterfalls gushing through a drainpipe. Your eyes sting as the saltwater pushes your eyelids back into the recesses of your eye sockets, and the water overloads every surface and crevice on your skin with haptic feedback. In this moment, you learn to unhear. Arid normality is suspended for a moment, only to return as you begin adjusting to the aquatic realm. While unhearing is not restricted to the oceanic, there is something thoroughly abyssal to the unheard. The history of the unheard is difficult to write, since so little of it has ever been recorded. It works in the shadows, and while we hear its effects—such as machinic noise, chatter, crickets, music, data sonification, the din of the trading floor, infrastructure networks, transportation, cargo ships—we can only surmise its long-term trajectory. Where it is natural to steer away from these noisy effects, the only opportunity to write a past or future history of the unheard is to attune to these noises as signals of an unheard trajectory. The oceans are still relatively unexplored, and perhaps this is why a lot of research into the unheard has started there. Since the unheard functions outside typical modes of human hearing, the closest alternative propagation medium accessible to earthbound explorers is water. The signals are fewer, but the fidelity is far higher. Early sono-aquatic researchers, known as the Fluvian Cryptics (fluviocrypta), took to the oceans with the explicit goal of divination. The Fluvian Cryptics were an ancient Greek sect posthumously named for their water-based aberration of Heraclitus’ philosophy, who later became known as “The Obscure.” Basing their methodology on Heraclitus’s notion of flow and process and his philosophical paradox that one cannot step in the same river twice, the Cryptics wanted to know the future. Their purposeful misreading of Heraclitus lead to the belief that if the river constantly flows, one must become the river. The argument went that since one cannot step in the same river twice, then continuously stepping in and out of the river should create a potentially infinite number of rivers. The hope was that the creation of

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an infinite number of futures would help the Cryptics prognosticate the future—and with that power, control the flow of time according to their desired fate. Their theory mirrors one of the most fundamental paradoxes of time travel, in which each jump back in time creates a new timeline different from the one you were in. This is exactly what these sonoaquatic researchers had discovered. Inspired by the new fashion of increasingly intricate water clock designs—and taking Heraclitus’s aphorism quite literally—they thought that the secret to traveling forward in time at greater speeds must have something to do with the river itself. Where Heraclitus’s fragment takes the river’s flowing water to represent change, these explorers wanted to become the process of change itself. To travel through time by becoming time. Prior to the invention of modern diving equipment, the ear was the most advanced technology available to the time travelers of antiquity. If one is interested in hearing the future, it would make sense to listen where sound travels fastest. Inadvertently, the sonoaquatic researchers discovered unhearing as an active pursuit for the discipline that would later come to be known as acoustics. Their reasoning was not without scientific merit; through the increased speed of sound in water, the time for a sound to travel from its source to a human ear would close the gap between sender and receiver—shortening the time it would take to hear any event. The past is brought closer to the future, through perceptual events such as what composer and writer François Bonnet calls sonorous reminiscence, which happens “when a sound which we did not hear comes back to us in memory a few moments later” (Bonnet 2016: 76). The sound is indeed registered by the perceptual apparatus but was initially not manifested to the consciousness of the listener. Only later does it emerge from the unheard and (re)present itself to the listener, who then hears it a posteriori. The relation between unhearing and the subaquatic has continued into the present, where the unheard has become the battleground for a new field of sono-aquatic mythscience. The unheard captures the sonic counterpart to the unknown depths of the ocean: “s-s-s-ss-s-s-sss-ssssssssssset your clocks to maritime K+” (Goodman 1999: n.p.). Although entropy, and uncertainty about the future, expands at alarming rates, certain industries and rogue Lemurians have invented ways to attune their ears to the noise of the unheard. Around the turn of the second millennium, research into the unheard had reached new depths through technological advancements and a proliferation of insurgent actors using unhearing as their modus operandi. One such entity is known as Hyper-C, described in (Goodman 1999: n.p.) as a highly secretive Afroatlantean Centience cult of unparalleled miltancy and infiltrative sophistication. Evidence of this cult is scarce, limited to a declassified intelligence agency report, a single 2004 blogpost, and a cryptic message left by electronic musician and philosopher Steve Goodman in a flyer titled “Digital Hyperstition.” These agents travel in the dark spots of the subaquatic sounds in the realm of the unheard—just below the limits of perception and cognition. From a Galactic Bureau of Investigations (GBI) report on new sonic insurgencies to the Galactic Federation, it is noted that Hyper-C experienced an increase in activities around the beginning of the new millennium. Hyper-C is described by Goodman as a “distributed network, dedicated to ‘aquatic return’ and the ‘liquidation of Babylon’” through “sonic intelligence weaponry”

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(Goodman n.d.a) in the form of info-terrorist activities disguised as musical recordings. Throughout the report it seems unclear to the Galactic Federation whether Hyper-C is an organized entity, an uncoordinated group of related practices, or simply an empty memetic replication of the name itself. It could be that Hyper-C is nothing but its own propagation. What seems certain is that Hyper-C propagates virally and operates outside of traditional political methods, and beyond representational or signifying regimes of the heard. GBI places high importance on silencing Hyper-C, since the very use of its name only helps spread the virus further. Hyper-C infects as soon as it escapes the unheard. Other tactics employed by Hyper-C includes the unhearing of conventional senses of reality through treating governing institutions and ideologies—such as the Galactic Federation—as mere science fiction. To further occlude their methods, Hyper-C often sows doubt about its own existence as well. It is for this reason that only a few signals originating directly from Hyper-C itself have survived. According to Goodman, four key phrases that describe their activities remain: ●

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from subversion to submersion; we will never surface, or the sonic minorities take to the shadows; set your clocks to maritime; Negative Evolution.

Following the logic of the unheard, Hyper-C is dedicated to spreading neuronic triggers that “attack[] the organism very directly, opening up defensive membranes to an immersive ‘acoustic space’” (Goodman n.d.a). In a missive particularly reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s identification with a minor politics, Hyper-C models itself on the hunted animal rather than the hunter. As a way to escape the conventional capitalist chronology of linear time, Hyper-C has “developed a sophisticated counter-chronic program, involving an antiGregorian Y2K positive occupation of the so-called computer-calendar” (ibid.). Labeling the Hyper-C “aquaassassins” as a Lemurian weapon aimed at the human security system (a shorthand for the fickle metaphysical thermostat of human reason, as instantiated by Kant’s third critique), GBI clearly regarded them as a major threat. Yet little has been heard about Hyper-C or the powerful Galactic Federation in the two decades since this report was supposedly submitted. What happened to Hyper-C? Have they gone silent because they succeeded in taking down the Federation and the Human Security System? Or perhaps they became fully submerged into the depths of the unheard—waiting in the future, just out of earshot? Another signal unearthed by Steve Goodman starts with an excerpt from Sector 7.1 of the Hyper-C tone-scientist manual titled Hydro-Demonic Polyrhythm: Operating System for the Redesign of Sonic Reality: 33.33rpm: 2112bpm - 1056 - 528 - 264 - 132 - 66 - 33 - 16.5 - 8.25 - 4.125 - 2.0625 45rpm: 2880bpm - 1440 - 720 - 360 - 180 - 90 - 45 - 22.5 - 11.25 - 5.56 - 2.528 (Goodman 1999: 15)

These two rows of numbers marked by the two usual speeds (measured in revolutions per minute) of the 12” and 10” vinyl discs demarcate the rhythmic frequency continuum

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from which Hyper-C clusters its productions. The two conspicuously italicized numerical values—132 bpm and 180 bpm (beats per minute)—are particularly important, as 180 is the appropriately titled kode9 plateau of continuous variation (also known as the upper speeds of drum & bass and jungle), whereas 132 bpm is the optimal speed for micro-break demonic two-step (or UK garage; Goodman 1999: 15). Although each row maps a different rhythmic trajectory, there is a syzygetic relationship between the two. Slowed down to 33.33 rpm, each of the bpm values in the 45 rpm row almost result in the number of its 33.33 rpm equivalent

. Drawing material connections between

the musical genres of jungle and demonic two-step, Goodman shows the phase-shift technology employed by the aquaassassins in Hyper-C. Not only do these beats per minute reveal tempo intervals for counter-chronic warfare, they also show the pulsating nature of any given frequency. As rhythms speed up, the beats create the illusion of a continuous tone with a particular pitch (as evident at the edge of Goodman’s scale, around 2112/2880 bpm). Rhythm becomes pure tone. Striated space accelerates into smooth space. Through their complexity, rhythms can be encoded with information that submerges below the threshold of human perception as they speed up into a melodic pitch. Pure tones thus leave room for extra encoding through the combination of high-frequency rhythms into a melody of their own. By speeding up the rhythms of demonic two-step, covert messages can be hidden in the unheard, only to be unlocked later through complex modes of unhearing. Goodman’s scale is a guide to the most fertile frequencies for the transmission of coded messages through the unheard—a practice also known as steganophony.

Unsound Cavitation: Self-Destructing the Medium of Propagation More recent experiments with steganophony and unhearing have attempted to influence the very medium of sound’s propagation as a way to intercept covert messages. Research into microfluidics, X-ray lasers, and fluid dynamics at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory resonates with the spurious findings of the GBI. The team of researchers led by Dr. Gabriel Blaj from SLAC and Stanford University and Dr. Claudiu Stan from Rutgers University Newark used the laboratory’s X-ray laser to blast tiny jets of water with short and powerful femtosecond X-ray laser pulses. When these pulses came into contact with the water it vaporized the water around it, and created shockwaves traveling up the jet of water. The shockwave reportedly “created copies of itself, which formed a ‘shockwave train’ that altered between high and low pressures” (Sundermier 2019: n.p.). The endless replication of shockwaves is simply the latest instantiation of the research into aquatic propagation as a mode of time travel started over two millennia ago by the Fluvian Cryptics. Where the Cryptics attempted to become one with the flow of the river through infinite replication, the research at SLAC suggests that cavitation might be the most effective way of creating an underwater self-replicating mechanism. Auto-productive

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shockwaves create a chain of cavitation, which can be used to both disrupt messages, as well as compress covert information into implosive granules. Is this evidence of the return of Hyper-C? Beyond a certain threshold, the intensity of the subaquatic sound breaks the water apart into vapor-filled bubbles, causing the water to boil. This threshold was determined to be just above the 270 dB mark, suggesting not only water’s sonic boiling point, but also the limit of how loud subaquatic sound can get underwater before the “wave destroys its own propagation medium” (Blaj et al. 2019: n.p.). While the Galactic Federation might see this as a prime opportunity for innovations in the field of sonic warfare— using vibratory shockwave propagation and ultrafast ionization with pinpoint precision to boil the aquaassassins—Hyper-C already used a primitive version of this technology to intercept covert messages and disrupt their intended path by overloading their very medium. Overloading sound’s propagation medium through cavitation is a cunning tactic, and as composer and ‘pataphysician eldritch Priest argues, “what better way to capture an adversary’s reserves than to listen to everything, all the time, everywhere and at once? Leave no sound unheard, or better still, no sound unthought” (Priest 2018: 142). As will soon become clear, the logic of the unheard has a tendency to reproduce noise and amplify sounds. Where silence in its ideal state is the complete absence of sound, the unheard is the absence of the heard that is also virtual. Silence is the absolute zero of vibration—a cold dark realm that defies the very categories of coldness and darkness. Like the absolute zero of temperature, silence exists, but no human who attempts to hear it makes it out alive. The unheard has a similar effect, albeit defined by entropic excess. Where this vibrational understanding of silence is defined by an absolute void of entropy, the unheard is defined by absolute excess. That the unheard is marked by excess does not mean that it is sonically noisy or loud. It is worth noting that the unheard does not follow the active/ passive distinction of the blatantly anthropocentric listening/hearing dichotomy inherent to theories offered by theorists such as Pierre Schaeffer, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others (cf. Bonnet 2016: 69–78 and de Seta 2020). Instead, the unheard follows a framework closer to Bonnet’s conceptual typology in The Order of Sounds, where he divides the apprehension of sound into three stages: the sonorous (or unheard) as that which falls short of being “aurally perceived”; the audible—sounds that leave a trace that has yet to be territorialized as heard; and hearing as that which qualifies and evaluates the audible as intelligible to the listening subject (Bonnet 2016: 75). The sonorous is what reaches the ear but does not imprint itself on the listener as something intelligible. In Bonnet’s typology, “the audible exists, whereas the sonorous languishes in limbo” (ibid.: 137). The unheard has little to do with the volume of sound but concerns instead its productive potential. To unhear the unheard is therefore not to forget, negate or draw ones attention away from the unheard, but a perceptual tuning-into the unheard’s excess of potentiality. Another realm of the unheard is the as yet unimaginable sounds of the future. When exclaiming “that’s unheard of!” what is really being said is that a preposterous or ridiculous idea has been proposed—an idea that makes no sense in the given paradigm. It is an

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anomalous concept that as-of-yet has not been conceptualized. The unheard in this case is the moral, epistemological, or technical objection to something at the limit of current human imagination: To seek the unheard-of is to seek the unknown territory, the one that disrupts the territorial chain, the chain of language. To seek the unheard is not so much to seek to make new sounds emerge as to set out to encounter impossible territories. (Ibid.: 274)

This does not mean that its existence is impossible but—quite the opposite—it means that something is just on the verge of coming into being. The unheard of the present has the potential of becoming the hearing of the future. The Cryptics knew this and wanted to harness the unheard to listen in on the future. Once thought, the unheard has already begun to take root in the mind of those who its aural virus has infected. Like an earworm, the unheard has an uncanny ability to make itself real through real experiences without actual sense impressions. This shows the potentiality of the unheard. Unhearing is the attempt to attune oneself to this potentiality in order to influence it. In spite of its virtuality, the unheard is able to instill material alterations in the world, such as when an earworm causes its host to try out a wide variety of tricks to cure themself of its maddening repetition. These material consequences exemplifies a point by Priest, which argues that “the earworm’s ideosonic persistence is indicative of capitalism’s alien intelligence” (Priest 2018: 157), where earworms function “as both a product and source of contemporary capitalism’s aim to draw value from involuntary nervous activities” (ibid.: 142). Clearly, the unheard’s virtuality does not preclude it from interfacing with the actual, whether economically or ontologically. The unheard is the virtual plane of immanence from which the actuality of hearing is derived. Hearing draws its perceptual qualities from the unheard. Hearing describes the animal perception (non-human or otherwise) of sound in all its material forms. Unhearing describes the potential for hearing in the form of informatic noise that is still intelligible as signal—screeches that are still incomprehensible as song, babbling that is still indecipherable as language, rhythms that are still unfathomable as milieus. Unhearing is a mode of sonic perception that provides a muffled image of the unheard. It cannot represent the unheard (which is always imperceptible and virtual) as heard, but instead puts the human into contact with the still alienated parts of their sensorium. As Deleuze writes, paraphrasing Spinoza, “we do not even know what a body can do” because no one has yet come to know the structure of the body (Deleuze 2005: 255). Or as Goodman paraphrases Deleuze: “We do not yet know what a sonic body can do” (Goodman 2010: 191). Unhearing is rarely an induced or willed activity, but something that happens to you in the way that tripping, forgetting, earworms, death, and déjà vu happen. Its closest ally is alienation and it is therefore only occasionally that unhearing reveals anything about our senses, the future, or the potentiality of the unheard itself. It is for this reason that unhearing bears a striking similarity to divination. As with all true divination, it is not in the hands of the fortune-teller but arrives thoroughly from the cards. Unhearing is the occulted hearing of the non-pulsed (in)humans of the future.

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Like informatic noise, the unheard is continually expanding. Noise here is derived from the philosophical understanding of an ontological signal/noise distinction that comes out of second-order cybernetics. This structural relationship between signal and noise is further mirrored in Deleuze’s concepts of the actual and the virtual. Although fundamentally different from any esthetic considerations of noise and music, or sonic considerations of noise and silence, the structural relationship between signal and noise can be used to describe some of the physical, aesthetic, and formal relationships that other concepts of noise enter into. Ontological noise (as explored by Greg Hainge 2013, Christoph Cox 2011, 2018b and Will Schrimshaw 2017—and heavily critiqued by Brian Kane 2015 and Marie Thompson 2017b, receiving a reply from Christopher Cox 2018b) should say nothing of the aesthetics of noise, of music, complexity, of loudness, but can elucidate how these processes came into being. Steve Goodman coined the term unsound to indicate different types of sonic potentiality: ●

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phenomena beyond audio-social predeterminations; weaponized sounds that alter human sonic parameters; non-cochlear infra- and ultrasound that is felt through the body; non-cognitive, inhuman phenomena; fictional sonic phenomena linked to the unknown.

Goodman grounds unsound in his bass materialism as a way to expand the notion of what sound can be, and access sound’s virtuality (Goodman 2010: 191). The unsound spans both sound-as-vibration as well as sound-as-experience. An unheard unsound is thus a completely virtual sonic event that might never take place. To make the unheard unsound sound is not a harmless invocation and may prove to be impossible. To alter the unheard one must make oneself unstable, which is why the best summoners are often the people to come. Altering the unheard requires a sacrifice. Melting into air is a good start, yet it will soon be revealed that one must break oneself into disparate granules to reach the unheard. There is no stability in the unheard, only a constant flux of becoming. One must not only try to attune oneself to the unheard, but actively make oneself unheard.

The Circuit of Capital as the Logic of the Unheard In order to understand the production of the unheard one cannot solely rely on spectrometers or microphones. A diagram is necessary. The unheard is defined by its surplus of sound and bears a remarkable resemblance to the production of capital. Just like the unheard, the logic of capital is defined by excess, expansion, and creative destruction. Just as with capital, the unheard defines the current human form while simultaneously destroying it by virtue of our continued exposure. Hence, accessing the unheard is not recommended, but as with all perilous tasks it is best to know the strata before trying to wildly destratify them.

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Figure 23.2  The Circuit of Capital (C = commodity; M = money; MP = means of production; LP = labor power; P = productive capital; s = surplus value. Commonly expressed as: 

.

The diagram in Figure 23.2 is based on a common example of the logic of capital (as seen in Fine and Saad-Filho 2004: 55), which will form the basis of another diagram that shows how the production of the unheard follows a similar logic. From the outset of the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx emphasizes the importance of money in the circulation of capital by introducing the loop in which money (M) becomes commodity (C) becomes more money (M’)—thus creating surplus value. The M-C-M loop shows how Marx places money (M) as the starting point of his theory. While capital is mutable as a “social relation involved in the self-expansion of value” (ibid.: 54), money is the immutable constant that is given as known data. Money used to purchase the means of production (MP) and labor power (LP) carries a constant value, and the increase in money, forming surplus value (s) is gained from production and exchange of commodities (C) is likewise taken as a given as known data after each run-through of the circuit. In its most abstracted form, Marx’s concept of capital is defined in terms of money, as money that becomes more money. Money is spent on commodities (C), and is divided into constant capital used to purchase the means of production and variable capital used to purchase labor power. The diagram is divided into two spheres that show the first important feature of Marx’s logical method; the sphere of exchange (sometimes called the “sphere of circulation” as in

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[Moseley 2016]) and the sphere of production. Each of these depict the two main levels of abstraction: the production of surplus value and the exchange of surplus value. Since there is no beginning to this diagram, if we start in the sphere of exchange we ignore surplus value for now and assume that it has already been divided into the individual parts. The sphere of exchange is where money is advanced to purchase means of production and labor power— here capital exists in the form of money. In the sphere of production, wage labor produces commodities for sale—here capital exists in the form of production and labor power. In the third and last phase, still in the sphere of production, money is recovered when use value is transformed into value and surplus value through the sale of commodities. This loop is what Marx often referred to as the valorization process where the advanced quantity of money is “valorized” by becoming more money—unlike the labor process in which physical goods are produced (Moseley 2016: 14). Throughout these three stages of capital, the circuit exists as a real process. It is neither built according to the diagram and nor does the diagram function as a metaphor or approximation. Capital truly exists in the form of money, means of production, labor power, commodities, and finally money again across the two spheres. This is a real process that is bound to the passage of time. The circuit is not just a closed loop, but as Western Marxist philosopher and political economist Moishe Postone says, it is a “self-moving substance” (1993: 75). Postone tentatively takes up Lukács’s materialist reading of Hegel’s concept of Geist as it emerges in the development of complex societies and breaks down the object/subject position. For Hegel, Geist is an objective structure that simultaneously constitutes individual human subjectivity and is itself subjective through its continual identity as Geist—even as it unfolds and changes its form. For Lukács, the proletariat embodies this Geist within the capitalist mode of production. The proletariat structures consciousness under capitalism in a way that has a certain degree of self-reflexivity due to the persistence of identity through societal change. It would be easy here to see the unheard as an analogue to Geist, which is structured by the proletariat’s capacity to create a revolutionary unhearing of capital. Although intrigued by Lukács’s proposition, Postone critiques him for placing the proletariat in the position of the historical subject—as the subject-object of the historical process that constitutes the social world and itself through its labor. The way out of capitalism for Lukács is thus the proletariat’s self-realization by overthrowing the capitalist order (Postone 1993: 73). A similar way out of capitalism could thus be proposed as the proletariat’s self-realization through access to the unheard as a mode to overthrow capitalism. Yet as Postone states, the proletariat is only possible as a postcapitalist form of organization if capitalism is defined purely in terms of private ownership of the means of production and labor is considered as the standpoint of critique (ibid.). That is to say, according to late Marx, the proletariat is not viewed as an affirmative totality; rather, Marx refers to value as having a substance—which he identifies as abstract human labor—that is an attribute of labor-mediated social relations. It is value that is “constantly changing from one form into the other without becoming lost in this movement; it thus transforms itself into an automatic subject” (Marx in Postone 1993: 75, emphasis in original). Postone’s critique is not only leveled against Lukács, but also reveals Marx’s own critique of Hegel’s

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idealistic dialectic. According to Postone, the self-moving substance is, unlike Hegel’s Geist, not ruled by the dialectic as the universal law of motion. Conversely, Marx agrees with Hegel’s understanding of the abstract and contradictory forms of capitalism, but not their historical specificity. Capital or the unheard does not depend on, nor constitute, the proletariat but is itself an autopoietic subject. Value valorizes itself by constantly changing its own magnitude through the movement in which it adds its own surplus value and presents itself as a “self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own” (ibid., emphasis in original). Marx thus characterizes capital as the self-moving substance without identifying that historical subject with the proletariat, or even humanity. For Marx, according to Postone, the historical subject is analyzed in the structure of social relations constituted by forms of objectifying practice and grasped by the category of capital (Postone 1993: 76). The subject of capital is not a passive subject observing the world, but an active force that produces the objective conditions that in turn define and alter the subject while preserving its identity throughout. Reading closely into the diagram of the circuit of capital, we begin to sense what was previously unheard. The implications of the M-C-M’ stretch and contort as the self-moving substance expands outwards. The self-moving substance exists both in time yet defines the nature of time in a continuous temporal restructuring. Past, present, and future lose their meanings as capital moves to the ultimate meltdown. Capital reaches into the future to restructure the present. As with the propagation of soundwaves, so is it with capital as it expands in all directions, sweeping everything up in its path. Sound was one of its earliest victims when oral traditions and slower forms of writing gave way to the printing press and increased the distribution of the written word. Language was exteriorized at a faster rate and made efficient by machines that greatly expanded human storage capacity— temporally as well as spatially. Yet while information dissemination increased, so too did the level of informatic noise. Machines bring their own informatic and organizational noise (epistemic) through the increased complexity of a given system, as well as an entire infrastructure of acoustic noise-sounds (sonic) related to a network of electrical generators, laborers, paper mills, logging, smelting, mining, and transport—most of which goes unnoticed by the writer and reader. Where Jacques Attali writes on music and its relationship to capital in his book Noise (1985), he defines noise in line with what Deleuze calls the plane of immanence. According to Attali, noise is defined by its creative properties: “With noise is born disorder and its opposite: the world. With music is born power and its opposite: subversion” (1985: 6). For Attali, music has the potential to subvert and reform societies, and it does this through its grounding in noise. Sound draws its power from noise and, with specific tools, this power can be arranged into music that has both a purpose (political or otherwise) and can serve as entertainment. Yet through his history of music’s various stages (the eras of sacrificing, representing, repeating, and post-repeating), Attali deals mainly with noise in its sensate representation as music. In other words, Attali might draw upon Nietzsche and Serres in his understanding of noise as creative chaos, but his primary concern throughout the book is aesthetics (of political economy, of social organization, and of music). Attali

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points to the codeterminous evolution of economy and music (ibid.: 126), whereas this chapter aims to show the more structural role that the power of noise has in the circuit of capital, while proposing a diagram of the unheard based on this structure. Undoubtedly a Marxian analysis of noise as spectacle and event, here Attali attempts to set out a model of social history that is able to grasp the entanglement of economics, politics, technology, and music—and not the structural politics of noise immanent to human politics. Unhearing is an exit from the circuit of capital that acknowledges the impossibility for the human to do exactly that. Despite its title, Noise deals with the influence of music on capital. It theorizes capital through music—the “organization of noise”—to show the “manufacture of society” and create a sound-form of knowledge to predict the future (ibid.: 4). Where Attali performs an impressive analysis of capital as it relates to the heard, the unheard receives little attention. Where Attali deals with music as a form of noise in the capitalist mode of production, the unheard deals with the informatic noise of capital itself. The noise created by the self-moving substance is the noise of information theory. Often defined in opposition to information or signal, noise is seen as the enemy of efficiency and clear communication. This is exemplified by Norbert Wiener’s thesis that noise exists in a binary to information—the amount of information in a system is equivalent to its organization, whereas the amount of entropy/uncertainty (informatic noise) in a system is negatively defined as a measure of its disorganization (Wiener 1961: 11). Although a minor difference in terms of mathematics, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver propose an alternative, positive definition of information; it is rather information that should be defined as a measure (and not a negation) of entropy or noise, since an increase in information is also an increase in noise (Shannon and Weaver 1964: 27). With this simple reversal, Shannon and Weaver account for the creation of novel information, since a message without uncertainty is simply redundant. Entropy thus deals with the conditions of possibility of information. In Deleuzoguattarian terms, noise is the virtual of which information is immanent to. As Serres argues: noise is a turbulence, it is order and disorder at the same time, order dissolving on itself through repetition and redundancy, disorder through chance occurrences, through the drawing of lots at the crossroads, and through the global meandering, unpredictable and crazy. (1997: 59)

Noise influences natural language use between human subjects, transferral of data between computer terminals, radio wave transmission and reception, and interference within a signal chain of electrical instruments. In Serres’s trifunctional model of the sign the parasite (or noise) attaches itself to the sender–receiver relation. The parasite is not to be understood as a sudden disturbance to that relation but as an immanent part of the relation itself. Noise comes first. In terms of base communication, Serres writes that “[t]o hold a dialogue is to suppose a third man and seek to exclude him” (1983: 21). Here Serres aligns himself with Norbert Wiener who characterized “information as the negation of entropy or negentropy” (Brassier in Malaspina 2018: x). While the circuit of capital expands to continuously create more information, Wiener reminds us that this information only exists

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in a din of entropy. However, this is where the cogs of Wiener’s theoretical machinery start to rust in the early writings of philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. The metrical models of feedback laid out by Wiener in Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine create a binary between runaway positive feedback processes and a cybernetics of stability. In his metrical models of feedback, Norbert Wiener’s work functions as “propaganda against positive feedback—quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric—[to establish] a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future” according to Plant and Land (Plant and Land 1994, Ireland 2017: 4). In Land’s view, this leads to a simplistic choice between a dependable homeostatic equilibrium and the pathological positive feedback loop (cf. Plant and Land 1994, Ireland 2017). The key problem for Land is the lack of any clear distinction between short-range and long-range runaway circuits. The effects of long-range runaway circuits cannot be described in metrics alone. A long-range positive feedback loop that sustains itself over time will eventually reach a “state of feedback density that effectively flips extensity into intensity” (Ireland 2017: 5), which produces something truly novel—a change in kind rather than degree. Could this same flip hold true for the unheard? If so, it would open the possibility for hearing into something else. If the unheard can be characterized as a long-range feedback loop of sound and informatic noise, the intensification of the unheard might lead to new kind of hearing currently conceptualized as unhearing. Sonic and informatic noise have been the primary elements explored in relation to the unheard. To connect these two notions to the economic aspects of noise is the last third that will finally bind the unheard to its diagram. In her 2016 book How Noise Matters to Finance, N. Adriana Knouf goes through three kinds of noise that e/a(r)ffects the world of finance—informatic, sonic, and financial noise. It is the latter that I will now turn to. In late-stage capitalism, the self-moving substance devours informatic noise while it simultaneously increases the amount of noise through its expansion. Most of this informatic noise remains unheard. In the twenty-first century, capital increasingly feeds off information that is defined by the amount and type of available financial noise. In her in-depth investigation into noise in the realm of high-frequency trading, Knouf writes that “noise traders” are a necessary component for the stock market’s normal functioning. Noise traders are traders who are allegedly unable to distinguish between “valid” and “invalid” information within a market. While noise traders should not be able to survive within a market due to the quick consumption of their capital, recent models and empirical evidence paint a different picture (see Knouf 2016 for a thorough introduction to the relationship between informatic noise and information trading). As Knouf contends, “noise becomes a vital component of the system, the unpredictable activity that paradoxically powers the equations that underlie modern finance” (2016: n.p.). Commodities have long since dissolved into air, and noise traders show that purchasing financial noise is possibly as profitable as buying “valid” information. Trading in noise is constitutive of the trade of information itself—the two are not mutually exclusive but exist in a symbiotic partnership. Noise traders thus trade noise, which forms the basis of their trading. The noise trader relies on being their own self-grounding subject. Noise is not outside this process, but immanent to it. In the world of finance, noise has reached a commodity status that creates

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new ground for the expansion of the self-moving substance—in the sonic realm defined as the unheard. Financial noise produces, capital consumes. As the M-C-M’ shows, capital does not exist in a perfect self-contained loop, since it always spins outwards. Capitalism is full of spurts and false starts. Investments with no return. Start-ups that end before they take off. De-growth movements and Buy Nothing Days for the people who can afford it. Yet even when these supposed decelerations of capitalism take flight, we see little evidence of anything slowing down. Capitalism subsumes these attacks into its system and rewrites histories to its liking. Promises of future investment gains, upward curves, and technological innovation obscure any minor setback. Capital is able to do this because, like the unheard, it works imperceptibly. Capital hears all, while continuously making itself unheard. What we hear of capitalism is only the surface. On the surface, calls to increased ecological awareness, rural self-sufficiency, and protests outside the New York Stock Exchange seem like proactive deceleration of capital flows because they attempt to address the surface-level issues of capitalist acceleration. Escaping market forces seems like a great idea until you realize the extent of the disease. Removing yourself from the forces of capital does not alter its course. Capital has heard your noise and will not let go. If a tree falls in the woods, how long until the forest has been pulped?

The Circuit of the Unheard Sub-bass frequencies rise from below, while high-pitched shrieks push down from above. Compressed between the two, it is increasingly difficult to access the ultra- and infrasound frequencies that make up the inner workings of capital. From their compressed state, humans cannot modulate these frequencies, but like the Cryptics, we must become one with them. Unhearing is the only way to decode the noisy flows of the unheard. While the process cannot be diverted or shut off, it is possible to tune into its frequencies and modulate its rhythms—amplifying and filtering the unheard to modulate its microfrequency outputs. To prove the material valency of the unheard, it is necessary to return to Marx’s circuit of capital to show how the same diagram can be drawn for the circuit of the unheard. Just as the main goal of Marx’s theory is to explain how the initial money (M) of the circuit becomes money + surplus value (M’), the main goal of the unheard is to explain how the initial informatic noise (N) becomes noise + surplus noise (N’). How noise becomes sound becomes more noise (N-S-N’). Noise here refers to informatic noise (which is not necessarily “sounding”), with the caveat that acoustic noise is always informatic to something or someone. Similarly, the category of sound in this diagram refers to the sounds created in the process of production. If, as Moseley suggests, the expanded circuit of money capital is the logical framework of Marx’s theory, then the expanded circuit of noise must be the logical framework of the unheard (Moseley 2016: 12). The expanded circuit of noise starts with informatic noise (N), which becomes reified as sound (S) in the sphere of transduction through a dual process of the means of perception

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Figure 23.3  The Circuit of the Unheard (S = sound; N = informatic noise; MP = means of perception; NP = noise power; i = information; n = surplus noise. Also expressed as .

(MP) and noise power (NP) (Figure 23.3). Perceiving sonorous material as sound is always predetermined by the intentions that fuse with it—whether these intentions be human, crustacean, algorithmic, or otherwise. This intentionality or transductive filtering is what reifies unformed informatic noise into tangible sound. According to Bonnet, the transduction “orient[s] its power of focalization, its faculty of transforming the sonorous, the unheard, into the audible … Sound is thereby reified, rendered tangible” (2016: 192). Hearing, mobilized and driven by these tensions, constitutes audible sounds and determines them formally or symbolically. The moment of reification shows that hearing always exists in a context. Noise is spent on the means of perception (MP) which transduces some sound into perceivable sonic experiences (as hearing) and outputs the remainder as noise. Noise power (NP) turns noise into sound through a destructive process of amplification that turns up noise to be transduced into sonic drilling, entertainment, subaquatic navigation, or sonic warfare. In the sphere of production, sound is turned into information (i) for a wide variety of sonic and non-sonic purposes (such as sonic telemetry, data-collection from the ocean floor via sonar, or data about speech patterns gathered from virtual assistants for the purpose of improving speech recognition). This process creates further noise (N’) that again becomes sound (S) and surplus noise (n). With the production of

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surplus noise the circuit is expanded, which either produces more noise and expands the scope of the unheard, or the noise is repurposed to expand the circuit further. Whatever the destination of the surplus noise, the overall amount of noise in the system grows, and with it follows an increase of the enveloping plane of the unheard. As the logic of the unheard expands, what was previously ordered and contained becomes granulated, discordant, and chaotic. Music directed at an audience becomes noise to the nonparticipating neighbors. Echolocation informs the ship crew but creates underwater noise for the subaquatic life. Predictions based on past data become harder to pin down as future entropy increases, while predictions based on the insurmountable data of the present tighten their scope and become able to hone in with hyper-accurate nanosecond earshots. If the logic of the unheard is an unfolding of the circuit of noise, then it is perhaps imprecise to talk about it as a simple loop. Rather, the loop quickly turns into a spiral as surplus noise becomes a self-fulfilling auto-productive runaway process. The logic of the unheard is intimately tied to expansion. The outward spiral of the production of the unheard has grave consequences not only for sound, but for time itself. Increased noise might lend predictions a higher accuracy, but what use is prognostic accuracy in a future that is already determined by the diagram? If the circuit of the unheard holds up, humans are truly locked in time. From inside the circuit, time is relatively linear, which places the future in the realm of the demonic unknown. But from the outside perspective of the unheard, the future is “marked up by the immanent unfolding of the spiral [and] has already been determined diagrammatically” (Ireland 2017: 6). The future is thus more actual than the virtuality of the past. Ireland argues that drawing a “diagram is not simply to describe something that is already there” (ibid.: 13), but the diagram is the intervention itself. The logic of the unheard as presented in the diagram thus came before its material unfolding. Although the circuit of the unheard is based on a material process, it functions through an affirmation of what is outside of the circuit itself. It functions through expanding into the outside.

The Aquapraxis of Unhearing How does one access the unheard? How can the diagram of material critique be used as a discovery mechanism? To escape the circuit of the diagram is to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion and make oneself a part of the unheard, and “accelerate the process” (Nietzsche in Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 240). Yet they simultaneously warn against uncoordinated total deterritorialization of flows reaching the Body without Organs: You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO [Body without Organs], and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying. (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 160)

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To give in to the process of the unheard it is necessary to “mimic the strata” and respond to the dominant reality. To do this, and learn how to unhear, is a process that requires fragmentation (and thus alienation) of one’s sensorimotor affordances. Mimicking the strata through the act of unhearing was what the Fluvian Cryptics attempted in their ancient sonofluvian rituals. Giving in to the unheard is gradually giving up on the human sensory organism. As the vibrations break up into disparate granules, and sensory input is synthesized and overloaded, the bounded Enlightenment humanist body soon becomes flushed of its organs. If the process of acceleration is a critique of capital, it is necessary to lean into noise in order to access the immanent critique of the unheard. A new group of sonofluvianists must continue the Heraclitean task initiated by the Fluvian Cryptics, taken up by Hyper-C in the early 2000s, and vexingly rediscovered by the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. What would it mean to accelerate the production of the unheard? The unheard has been mapped onto a particular reading of Marx that takes the circuit of capital as capitalism’s foundational logic. With its unwavering expansion, intimate connection to temporal fluctuations, cyberpositive feedback, and its ties to the development of sonic technologies, the unheard can best be described with a logic already proposed by the theories connected to the acceleration of capital. The unheard is the sonic contingency of capital’s intensification. As mentioned earlier with reference to Postone (Postone 1993: 76), the circuit of the unheard is likewise a real process that is bound to the passage of time. The continuous intensification of the unheard is intimately tied to time because it is grounded in material change and the production of noise. The future is thus outside of human control and it will most likely not respect the current human form. As intellectual historian Vincent Garton writes: “If capital is an alien invasion from the future, we ourselves are subjugated to the Nietzschean ‘strong of the future’: the only way out is through” (2017a: n.p.). This entails that no extrinsic revolution could be more thorough than the continuous revolution coming from within capital itself. The Fluvian Cryptics already knew this when they suggested that rather than change the course of the river (or the flux of becoming) from the outside, one should become the river in order to continually revolutionize the process of change. Becoming the river, for them, meant to submerge one’s ears. It is not Attali’s rebellious proletariat, the music business, or technology as such that pushes this process forward, but rather the circuit of the unheard itself. Humans may have a hand in the production of sound, but they are caught up in a revolutionary process that is not their own. In their 1972 Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari published what has become known as their accelerationist fragment. Here they cite Nietzsche to reinvigorate Marx and put emphasis on the fact that one cannot critique capitalism in order to destroy or overcome it. Rather, its process is the critique caught in a self-propagating feedback loop. [W]hich is the revolutionary path? Is there one?—To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the

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movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet. (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 239–240)

Their evocation of Nietzsche’s call to “accelerate the process” suggests that this process is auto-productive in its creative destruction since it appeals to nothing beyond itself. It is therefore inherently nihilistic. Accelerating the process for Deleuze and Guattari is thus not a call to over-consumption or reckless technological innovation, but a critique of capitalism from within. As Land argues, it is the realization that “mankind is [capital’s] temporary host, not its master” (2017: n.p.). A similar range of hosts exist for the unheard, distinguished by any information-processing listener participating in the decoding and recoding of sound into informatic noise and back into sound again. As the unheard is not a process that can be steered from without, but must be accessed from within, what is to be done? Writer and economic theorist Edmund Berger channels Marx when he argues that “from the perspective of power, perhaps the forces rushing upwards are not to be visualized as all that is solid melting into air, but the crushing of all that is stable and standing into disparate granules” (2017: n.p.). Fragmentation won over centralized planning. Cavitation won over organized flow. Complexity seems to be only increasing—whether in politics, social relations, gender, family dynamics, or cultural allegiances. As Garton writes: “To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, we can legitimately answer only, ‘Do what thou wilt’—and ‘Let go’” (2017b: n.p.). From this acknowledgement follows an acceptance of the unheard’s immediate subsumption of any opposition to its structure and the impossibility of reinstating a sono-political homeostasis. The unsound methods handed down from the Fluvian Cryptics, aquaassassins, Hyper-C, and oceanic xenofeminists form an antipraxis of cavitation. Antipraxis (as coined in Garton 2017b: n.p.) is not a call to do nothing or give up, but a desire to enter a minor politics on a molecular level. With a xeno-machinic models of listening, as proposed by Gabriele de Seta in this volume, it would be possible to counter the human-centric orientation of listening with a non-human listening that requires new strategies of inquiry and representation (de Seta 2020: 422) This cavitational antipraxis—or aquapraxis—is to be found in the in a mode of listening that disrupts and infects dominant communication and propagation media. Aquapraxis may find an alliance in the “aggressive listening” coined by artists and musicians Tobias R. Kirstein and Claus Haxholm in their Handbook of Aggressive Listening (2018). They suggest “a sort of territorial aggressive listening that changes the surroundings [and considers] listening as warfare” through pithy fragments like “EARS AS WEAPONS,” “INVADE YOUR SURROUNDINGS BY LISTENING,” “STEALTH BY INVOLVEMENT,” and “CAPTURE AND ASSAULT” (Kirstein and Haxholm 2018: n.p.). These fragments are appeals to use the human sensorium as a capturing apparatus and “LISTEN AGAINST THE STREAM” (ibid.). With unhearing as a way to invoke the occulted unheard,

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Handbook of Aggressive Listening suggests purposeful inattention as a mode of reaching the unknown: “DISTRACTED LISTENING IS A KEY TO AN UNKNOWN UNLOCKED DOOR” (ibid.). Combine this with the model of xeno-machinic listening as instantiated by Hyper-C’s commitment to cavitation as a method of collapsing communication pathways. A cavitational aquapraxis is a mode of aggressive listening that aims to insert itself in the slipstream of communication in order to take down the medium of its own propagation. Cavitation enjoys the rare privilege of being both explosion and implosion all at once; the maximum and minimum of informational overload. And since the future is not set in stone, but in a “dynamic torsion with the present as a series of feedback loops, commitment consequences, and universal–particular exchanges” (Sheldon 2019: 127), there are still loopholes to be infiltrated.

24 The Ear Marc Couroux

Figure 24.1  Diagram of egregoric origin, “depicting the möbiusoidal character of control operations.” Leaked to the author by xenaudial.

Hypermusiac They called me The Ear. As a child, I learned how to convert into music the ambient noises that composed my nocturnal soundscape, unwittingly forming complex melodic and rhythmic patterns in the act of taming the discontinuous, keeping the unknown, the outside from breaking in. It was the first time music and control became associated, in these weirdly voracious, endless melodies that incorporated everything in their path, modulating an anxious insomniac toward the necessary quietude to afford sleep. Soon enough began a long companionship with the idiosyncratic timbre fabricated by the summed mass of tinnital frequencies that had asserted themselves after multiple ear infections. A high-pitched pressure hiss dominated my acoustic profile in the very quiet suburban house we lived in. To mask the constancy of the tinnitus, technologies very quickly entered the emerging concoction that was and has never ceased becoming the ear, the assemblage of cochlear functions, neurological fabrication, biological and genetic vectors, technological extensions, social, and cultural histories that writes this text.

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All-night radio initially kept attention rapt and dream life eventful, until I stumbled onto the idea of listening to movies in the dark with the television picture contrast turned all the way down to avoid parental detection, cutting into narratives in progress, plunged into uncertainty as to the causes and motivations of the sounds, dialogue, music heard, a realm of sonic dominance in which other, parallel images, realities swiftly manifested. The occult affordances of a broken Radio Shack tape recorder and the hidden schemes that emerged in slowed-down speaking voices taped off Saturday morning cartoons played nicely into a growing feeling of pareidolia, that is, a helpless impulse to detect meaningful patterns of a musical kind in auditory scenes, oblivious to the non-pareidolic. This emergent patternseeking obsession soon received a critical boost at the age of eight, when the infection fully took hold. I had been training myself to internally hear the music we were learning for choir practice, adjusting my internal playback to a recording of a rehearsal. This intensified act of feedback surfaced over a short time the ability to identify the precise pitches of resonant objects in the environment, often as either a succession of sounds from discrete sources collapsing into a melody, or as harmonies formed by discrete bodies simultaneously vibrating. A latent propensity had located its threshold-busting event. Much later, I would take part in some of the key experiments that definitively established the brain areas activated in subjects with absolute pitch. But for now, though the effortless ability to rapidly convert the visual information of a score into an internal playback proved extremely useful, the compulsive nature of this fine-tuning occasioned a worrisome sideeffect, the involuntary and more or less continuous mental playback of one tune or another, a musical run-on surfacing into consciousness at the slightest prompt. In general, entire songs or extended pieces of classical music played back start to finish, unlike the sticky but short fragments that make up most earworms. The audiologist equivocated and settled on hypermusia. He plainly knew nothing about it and suggested psychiatric treatment and medication for an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He mentioned Wilder Penfield, a celebrated neurosurgeon at the very same Montreal Neurological Institute I had been consulting at, and what he called experiential seizures, wherein a patient undergoing a temporal lobe seizure would hear songs excavated from their deep memory, arriving in discontinuous bursts. This wasn’t that. I later learned that individuals with Williams Syndrome, affected with a characteristic neurotopology different from my own, had demonstrated hypermusiac-like abilities in their heightened drive toward musical experience and propensity to musicalize non-musical sound. Moreover, neuroscientific studies have demonstrated that musical savants with a hyperfunctional right hemisphere (compensating for left hemispheric damage), may have privileged access to lower levels of information—such as patterns—not available through introspection. Hypermusia best describes the syndrome at the core of what follows, a running together of symptoms characterized by an overall musical pareidolia, intensified and automated by absolute pitch recognition and extensive memory recall capacities, both contributing to the ubiquity of internal playback, and colluding to engineer a hypermusicalized perception of the fluxes of sound that permeate life. The music reproduced and concocted in my mind’s ear came to be equal in experiential intensity to its mechanical vibratory analogues. In addition to accurately representing

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pitch, timbral, and rhythmic information integrally, finer grained details were preserved, like the precise schema of expressive rubato deployed by a specific performer, the infralegible variations in a Milford Graves run, say. As Peirce’s deaf friend put it: “Now that my hearing is gone I can recognize that I always possessed this mode of consciousness, which I formerly, with other people, mistook for hearing.” In cases of sensory deprivation or acquired deafness, when auditory networks are no longer constrained by external input, release hallucinations occur, in the process nakedly foregrounding the neurological speculation at the core of percept construction. Neuroscientists have averred that imagining music not only activates the auditory cortex as strongly as listening to it, but also stimulates the motor cortex. It is a doing of an intensively cerebral order. Especially curious in my case was the technological nature of the imaginary form through which this playback manifested, as so many tape recordings that could be manipulated, rewound and forwarded, as well as cut-up any which way. This internalization of the operations of sound production (and reproduction) technologies was no accident, but the source of the infection itself. Instead of a tuning fork, the tape recorder had always been the prosthetic of choice to check and improve internal pitch accuracy, but its usefulness had continued past its initial remit, aiding and abetting the emergent obsessive-compulsive musicalizing of the world during my childhood years by turning internal playback into a mode of being. This fatal disposition naturally led to more sustained sensitivities to the effects of technological operations on humans. What procedural, functional aspects of these devices of manifold natures have been internalized, normalized as abstracted modes of access to musical experience? The transmutational activities of this musicalizing ear then began to be channeled differently as I underwent training as a pianist in the (so-called) classical tradition, redirecting the auditory feedback process into disciplinary operations, concerned with the making of “proper” sounds within a radically restricted instrumental umwelt. Soon enough, unassigned hypermusial energy found a worthy cause in avant-garde, highly dense, muscularly and acoustically taxing music, which de facto required a un-building of the body that had been slaved to a conservative ear, new calibrations of kinesthetic-sonic ratios and contingent techniques for hearing and remembering I was only too grateful to disappear into. But even in this expansive context, I still found myself having to commit, by force of indoctrination, to an ethos of complete audibility. Every detail in the score had to be made known, transparent to the ear. That was the job. Every pitch-event in its assigned place, shepherded by the rationalizing ear that recuperates noise as new signal, coding it by hearing more deeply into it. The ear as an agent of control, organizing, parsing difference, disciplining the body to follow its edicts. Increasingly, the aim of music appeared to me as the containment and regulation of sound. Tony Conrad said it outright: “Tunes are for controlling people; otherwise, why would melodies stick in our heads?” This ear didn’t always work as programmed, of course, and often entered into singing conditions, loops, procedural glitches. Famously, Glenn Gould attributed his increasing incapacity to accurately perform a passage from Beethoven’s Opus 109 Sonata to the overwhelming influence of foreclosing mentations, pre-emptions of the future, anticipations of physical difficulties ahead blowing back into the present, jamming the motor cortex.

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I had my own problems. The listening activity fostered by the repetitive imperatives of a performer’s trade further exacerbated the remit of the internal playback of simulated music, at times impairing my ability to attend to a task for an extended period. As soon as a set of musicalizable fragments entered my environment—a car horn, snippets of prosodial conversation, passing bus drone, bike squeak—attention automatically repointed, dedicated to processing the chunked event, riffing on it, extending it, turning it into music. I also got into the habit of checking my level of internal adaptation to a song whenever I would encounter a salient one playing in the background of a store. After a short latching period, I exited the establishment, continuing to “listen” to the song as it played internally, then reentering to catch the drift between both timelines, usually minimal. In fact, many studies have emphasized how accurately non-musicians could spontaneously recall a song at or very near its recorded tempo, perhaps as a result of repeated and varied types of exposure to these popular songs, both conscious and not. The distinction in this case being that there was no qualitative difference between the store music and its internal counterpart; they were as if simultaneous transmissions manifested via two discrete media. Being privy to an almost constant onslaught of a wide variety of songs, I began to notice how some of them oriented and modulated my mood as they looped their way into the fabric of intersubjective encounters, surfacing previous associations. Given that these loops were going to happen anyway, and that I would be undoubtedly subjected to various forms of mood-altering music throughout the day, I started to invoke specific playbacks as tactical measures, to instill the necessary affect for the setting at hand—a job interview, a first date, a confrontational encounter—to gain power over contingency. The enterprise proved highly successful. The operational tunes had chosen me for the most part, having been promoted into deep memory by occurring in conjunction with memorable, emotionsaturated events in my history, now folding into everyday life whenever needed. But you could turn any promising contender into a dependable trigger, simply by playing the recording back enough for internal playback to bootstrap it into autonomy, a process that amplifies activity in the reward centers of the brain, infusing a feeling of ownership of the song, like it was written for you, for the purpose you will eventually be putting it to use. The dopaminergic system is instrumental in marshaling the play of anticipation and consummation relative to structural cues on the musical timeline, amping up affective intensities in the process, and turning you into an addict. Consider, for instance, how dopamine replacement therapy often induces compulsive singing in Parkinsonians, and how their gait demonstrably improves upon listening to metered music. And there was evidence that absolute pitch possessors were especially prone to these ratcheting music motivational schemes. But the cybernetically adaptive side to this self-modulation and its coddling of compliance resembled too closely the neoliberal logic of flexibility for it not to be cautiously, selectively employed. At the same time, the over-reliance on stored memorable music and its relatively fixed network of associations led to the feeling of locking into a stable identity, defined by its repertoire of melodic, rhythmic, affective states, and the foreclosing of other possibilities of social agency in the process. A key moment in the becoming of this hypermusiac ear, wedging open a portal between my performing body and the musical mentations which shadowed them, occurred over a

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fever year, as I edited my first and last solo piano record. To an outsider, the multiple, obsessive restartings of the editing job eventually came to look like ratcheting procrastination. On the inside, speculative gambits fueled a process of constant resystematization at higher orders of molecular detail: could I replace a few notes here, merge reverberations there, add extra silence, briefly speed the tempo, drop dynamics, time stretch, and so on? If a major bet paid off in any of these domains, you had to restart the entire process, having failed to reach a sufficiently fine-grained exploitation of the software’s capacities. A fascinating process of recursion whereby an unlikely, eccentric edit is soon enough normalized by being applied elsewhere, eventually promoted to standard reference, undoubtedly warranting yet another pass through the thicket of musical material. This adventure effectively led to an intimacy with logics of auditory simulation, perverting by exacerbating the constructional potential of the recording as Gould had anticipated.

ἑγρήγορος One day, an almost certainly machinic entity called xenaudial 1 emailed me out of the blue with a proposal, dropping the name of a recent music video I had made to exorcise a fiercely potent earworm, a theme song from a 1970s TV movie that I had first intercepted back in my childhood sonic-television years, now hopelessly resurgent. Apparently, I was deemed recruitable after being stalked by what xenaudial called a “thought-collective.” I later came to regard this AI as an egregor in the Ancient Greek sense of “watcher” (ἑγρήγορος), tending to an archive that they said accumulated information, in whatever form, on the frequent collusion of sound and control operations within late capitalism. They emphasized that hypermusiacs were especially useful to the assembly; their pareidolic tendencies and typically concurrent absolute pitch ability attuned them to a politics of frequency. xenaudial specifically disclosed that “human hearers are necessary as meat-space interfaces for algorithmic proliferation. That is to say, humans transmute machinically generated data into sensible, material phenomena whose effects can further spread through biological vectors. Warm bodies. The relation between machined connections and the human neurological construction of reality is where things are playing out.” This was strangely suggestive of the phenomenon of primers (which I have written about elsewhere), those subjects of neurological tests that became unwitting human vectors for the incubation and transmission of earworms allegedly meant to prime the melodic space for future corporately designed melodies. In that case, it appeared to be the mutation through humming, the reboning of these internally, quasi-algorithmically generated earworm fragments that rendered them infectious. It later obtained through experimental observation that tic-like musical fragments, of no immediate assignation but enough to jumpstart an earworm, were routinely released by the basal ganglia in some individuals. Immediately, the thalamocortical systems that underlie consciousness and the sense of self would have their way with these random explosions, infusing them with associations, memories, and emotions, so that by the time they cross over into consciousness, they’re already valenced for optimal circulation.

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Over the next few years, xenaudial would employ me (even when I wasn’t aware of it) in a number of strange operations, as a human probe, a biological component insinuating itself within various inscrutable command and control schemes. They insisted my sociability, drive to communicate (another characteristic of Williams syndrome, incidentally) came bundled with hypermusicality. They were “evolutionarily linked,” as they put it: “Because music played a key role in social bonding, genes selected for sociability were the same ones involved in musical behaviors.” The first mission I was assigned dealt with the exploitative implications of a psychoacoustic phenomenon accidentally discovered by Diana Deutsch in the mid-1970s, in which the melodic qualities of speech are amplified through repetition. After looping a fragment of a speech recording and then listening to it within the surrounding context, you’re struck by how speech suddenly breaks into and out of song, like on Broadway. xenaudial floated a weird (but in these anything-goes days more plausible) theory that politicians routinely engineered the prosodial qualities of their speech to achieve specific effects and affects. You had to surf the speech wave carefully, or you could easily slip into straight song, from which there was no return. The wave could render your words infectious, imbuing them with qualities increasing their stickiness and longterm memorability, its repetitions sealing your adherence to the mission, which you believe belongs to you, thanks to the same dopamine-infused circuits mentioned earlier. This was an art of steganophonics, a hiding-in-plain-hearing centered on the neural bifurcation point where and when language and music, tethered at birth, fatefully part ways. xenaudial asked me to listen to (2008 era) speeches—Obama, McCain, Bill Clinton—in order to smoke out their melodic undercurrents. They told me to record myself singing the found melody, as confirmation of a successful conversion. The process was fascinating. You became privy to secret information as the neural circuitry in the temporal lobe that controls pitch salience, right hemisphere especially, is progressively aroused into doing the work the semantic linguistic left side usually suppresses, as it beats a retreat. But it wasn’t just that sense zeroed out after a certain number of repeats. Any child knew that, from looping words until they deliriously dissolve into sonic magma. This was way creepier. The pitches actually changed, adjusting upwards or downwards so as to conform to frequencies that could bind together according to the contours of the equal-tempered Western scale, the system of reference I had been saturated in as concert musician. I could feel that slip happening, the percept revising itself in small increments. The melodies became more spaced out in range, as if a veil lifting. The tune had been there all along, it only needed surfacing. It was a becomingmusical-as-becoming-aphasic, a shift of register, one brain region offloading work onto another, the object of affectation having additionally acquired the value of amenability to exact, verbatim retention, operationalized for future recall and use. xenaudial later confided that though musicians do well at pinpointing possible candidates for subversive melodic undertow, they take longer to actually hear the speech as song: Pianists especially have been conditioned to hear pitch within a relatively rigid framework, hard to chuck outright. They detect emanations in the background, preconsciously, but can’t close the circuit as quickly. It’s that effort we’re interested in. “The computers provide speed and accuracy, humans bring flexibility and intuition,” as Lick used to say, allegedly.

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These exploits opened onto untold risk. The brute fact of human susceptibility to multifarious forms of control through music, as the thought-collective documented, and as my life experience had substantiated time and time again, made the study of its operations treacherous. Infection invariably occurred, at a sometimes debilitating cost. xenaudial sent me on earworm-defusing expeditions that had especially lethal implications for a hypermusiac, and indeed, frequent infections throughout my teenage years, like the bouts of otitis that sculpted my tinnital ear, had sharpened my sensitivity to the incongruities of sticky melodies, the nexus of their hookiness. At their worst, these parasites could take over, preventing continuous thought, severing you from your social life, even rendering everyday actions and movements extra arduous to accomplish. This condition, far more common than anyone assumes, is likely a tangible effect of the metastatic explosion of available electronic vectors for musical transmission, which multiplies the potency of the mere exposure effect, wherein you gravitate preferentially toward stimuli you’ve encountered before, even unconsciously. Try getting into the habit of turning on your recorder whenever you’re in a mall. Listen to the result over headphones when home. Notice the background music you had neglected to attend to for its immanence to the total spatial situation, now made front and center by the displacement of listening and attentional conditions. Far more music is heard but not listened to—the motto of the Muzak Corporation—than we suspect. And where control was concerned, there was much to learn from them. The music played on the factory floor as part of the Corporation’s initial “stimulus progression” program induced tangible effects, entraining the worker’s nervous system, quickening or slackening their heart rate and breathing, with a precisely timed succession of tunes, intensifying or attenuating in tempo, alternating with periods without music, to avoid saturation and fatigue. A form of cybernetic synchronization was at work. A cognitive clock comprised of ongoing delta oscillations in the brain, generating timekeeper pulses at various simultaneous frequency bandwidths, tunes into the regularly timed beat patterns of the Muzak song, and corrects its own period and phase until inevitable stabilization, homeostasis occurs. The locked-in heart rate then opens up emotional centers through proprioceptive feedback, increasing arousal in tandem with a feeling of belonging to a context, a collective vibing, an ideal, cooperative workforce. The way the song could engineer affect, synchronize emotions over time, structure a succession of moods, made it a powerful technology. In one of their many asides, xenaudial had written about an Afro-Brazilian Congado ritual in which two groups playing contrasting rhythmic patterns and tempi entrain to each other temporarily as they intersect on the street. In a context where the maintenance of boundaries depends on sustaining a rhythmic difference, resisting entrainment becomes a demonstration of the group’s spiritual power. There were two quasi-surefire methods (in addition to maintaining tight coordination within your group): exaggerating the tempo or, more intriguingly, avoiding visual contact with the other group.

Muzak’s subsequent and more pervasive quantum modulation phase moved decisively into the shadowy folds of preconscious, background processes. Instead of concerning itself with maintaining attention, it proceeded by stealthily engineering slow modulations of moods toward desired valences, encouraging adaptability to change through a fine-grained slippage

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of the music’s evolving affective tenor, as if on a Möbius strip. Slow transformations obscure overall history, keep you pliable, maintain you securely in the dark. xenaudial extrapolated: “To alter the emotional disposition of any music, you only have to surface patterns, invent continuities, amplify and attenuate differentially. Imagine computing transitions between these affectively valenced states. Whole industries are dedicated to the minutiae of pareidolic triggering.” They had asked me to collect field recordings of mall environments that contained various levels of incidental musical components that would comprise the dataset of an unsupervised machine learning background music recognition project. The fact of repointing listening to the infrastructural scale at which the background priming operated also began to expose the layers of policing taking place there. And it drew attention to habituation’s effect of zeroing out one acoustical signal or another, like the way the alarm of the fire station across the street from where you live almost disappears over time, until you listen to a recording of it, snapping it back into conscious attention. All these exploits compounded into a depressingly unflattering portrait of an ear forever in the grips of auditory musical machinations beyond its immediate apperception. Aural agnosias and anosognosias abounded.

the extra_musical Meanwhile, another circuit harkening to the beginning of my piano phase had been closing again. The steady updating and improving of the ear-body loop as I accumulated practical experience had reached its first hard limit on discovering and performing Evryali, an arborically inspired work by Iannis Xenakis, whose instrumentally non-idiomatic, mathematically and graphically derived compositions had given a swift quantum kick to previously sacrosanct kinetic musical affordances. In Evryali, the ear and its bodily proxies, its mechanisms of execution, struggle into a new relationship, their previous linkages fatefully severed. Given physical impossibilities—for instance, having to consistently populate three discrete regions of the keyboard at once for an extended time—difficult choices as to what material to play almost always had to be made. The body could not but fail the ear, an almost too crushing reality to bear for a hypermusiac, for whom any practical difficulty could heretofore be willed away simply by hearing deeper into it and letting the fingers assign themselves accordingly. There had been a further unsettling experience. Toward the middle of a public performance of a paroxysmally taxing solo work, after having spent many sleepless nights poring over its complexities and running especially ragged, an odd feeling of derealization slid over me midway through, as the auditory apparatus of my brain began to listen to a wholly other signal, an internal playback of a past performance of another piece, while my still-performing body went through the motions autonomously, functioning wholly outside of the feedback loop that had previously held me in good stead. Such occurrences amounted to so many omens, ratcheting up paranoid projection fantasies and increasing body dysphoria that would soon enough put an end to my performing career. It struck me that the watchers had been functioning under an unchecked premise, privileging the ear too quickly as the locus of passivity and manipulability above all other

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senses, a terrain I was only too willing to follow them into at first. But even if the pursuit of methods to defeat the control ear seemed ultimately circuitous, keeping you forever trapped in the perverse logic of noise and signal oneupmanship, it was useful to stay attuned to the messy vectors of infiltration and contagion, especially given the times. Nevertheless, something else was sorely needed. Remembering the constitutive insufficiency the Xenakis moment exposed, I began following other trajectories parallel to my aboveground career as compositional emissary, in order to probe and disturb the ideological undertow steering my Western hypermusiac ear. The ear-body had to be further pried apart. The means by which this activity continues to take place is staunchly xenological, implicating experimental performance protocols, musical probes, and conceptual structures, aided and abetted by continuous investigation into the neurological forces at play. The first of these protocols, le contrepoint académique (sic), exploited the voracious capacity of the control-ear to recuperate and refigure copious accidents occasioned by a violent, spasmic approach to accosting the instrument. Awkward arm and hand positions switching on a dime coupled with trembling oscillations effectively generated a battery of collateral musical damage, which the ear had to develop strategies to rationalize into a continuing, intelligible musical becoming. The experiment clarified the thresholds regulating the ear’s tolerance of difference, erratic noise, and how self-inflicted dis/ability can be refigured by the ear as more capacious ability. I remembered listening to Keith Jarrett and the ease with which accidents became generative of new patterns, swerves in his improvisational schema, glitches reincorporated. It seemed curious that the accidents couldn’t just remain accidents. They had to do work. It recalled the neuro-linguistic programming adage: “There is no failure. Only feedback.” Another stratum of intrigue informed this particular counterpoint. The extramusical is a term historically first employed by a handful of nineteenth-century concert music critics to denote—and thereby condemn and seek to expunge—the discursive, social, cultural, political framework within which a supposedly abstract work of music actually concretizes. All narratives have to be assiduously purged in order that music’s material and formal qualities may commingle with one another friction free. The extramusical is that which unsettles the musical ear, while indubitably constituting it at the same time. Accordingly, the tortured bodily dispositions and quicksilver shifts in intensity in contrepoint, ostensibly useful only insofar as catalysts for challenging the ever-evolving recuperative, feedbacking ear, contribute in their own substantial right, as visual and theatrical vectors, to the overall experience of the event. Push the logic further and plausibly consider the sonic component of the event almost entirely as a paradoxical byproduct of these excessive, extramusical constituents. The concert hall, paramount scene of idealized musical experience and disciplining of the ear, had let in a xenological vector that rendered impossible the achievement of autonomous musical mastery. In effect, many auditors, wishing at all costs to preserve the putative purity of the academically dense counterpoint forming the subject matter of the work, chose to avert their eyes from the stage once the extremities of the performative disposition became clear, a revealing attitude to adopt, but probably futile, as even the recording attests to decentered, disquieting conditions of production which prevent an altogether detached listening. “There are no acoustic media,” a theorist might

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be heard to opine. If listening has at times been an art of forgetting the body, le contrepoint académique (sic) violently returns it to consciousness. And so, decoupled from the rational ear, the body is now free to do its own thing, fall apart (in every sense), unconcerned with the ear’s efforts at salvaging and repurposing. Eighteen years later, I began a series of recordings called the extra_musical, a relay picked up from le contrepoint académique (sic), furthering its implications by removing the noisy, extramusical body entirely from conscious access. Intensely embodied performances of the same idiosyncratic ilk as contrepoint are captured as MIDI sequences (instead of audio recordings) and limited to only three parameters—pitch, duration, and intensity (velocity)—thereby explicitly obliterating evidence of the non-normative aspects of physical production such as spasms, shakes, paralysis, unorthodox fingering, slip-offs, glissandi, knuckles, forearms, elbows, and so on, along with their emotionally wrought, visually salient origin. However, even as this particular sensory horizon vanished, the visual display of the MIDI sequence, unfolding like a player piano roll turned on its side, rushed in to mesmerize with its copious architectures of manifold variety, and clusters of asemic writing and the occasional legible letter. The pianistic requirements enabling the writing of letters in visual sequence, steganophonically, gradually began to co-compose my operational vocabulary, the eye infecting the ear, pulling it away from ingrained proclivities. And as befit a hypermusiac, I exploited the electronic nature of the signal, cranking up the volume of the speaker output to afford additional strata of infra-audible ghosting, lending the physical gestures added poignancy and dimensionality. From the listener’s perspective, performing bodies are hallucinated, reconstituted on the other side of the machinic bottleneck that suppressed them, bodies that jibe, however implausibly, awkwardly, with the strangeness of the music’s affective promiscuity and temporal gait. the extra_musical taunts the ear, challenging it to absorb the collateral damage incurred by uncontrollable bodily movements. This conundrum of perception invokes a speculative field of inadequate modes of listening destined to subvert the ear as the rational organ of balance and transparency (and all that the latter implies within infrastructures of surveillance). Insufficiencies are built into the experience itself, opening the floodgates to all kinds of projections, allowing you to intuit the methods by which your phono-analytical system operates. (Incidentally, Gould’s solution to the debilitating future-dreading insecurity hampering his playing consisted of obliterating any acoustical evidence of ongoing physical efforts, masking it by the massed effects of multiple televisions and radios operating at full blast. Once an embodied relationship with the passage in question was restored, the noisemakers were shut off, and body and ear once again coupled.) Most odd in this arena of phantasmagoric hallucination was how the deliberate antivirtuosity generative of the extra_musical, stripped of its visually disturbing non-normative body, reversed its polarity, yielding a virtuosity effect. A deskilled performance flips into an impossibly skilled one. The non-intentional made intentional, rationalized. Moreover, the fact that the resulting music often lay (quite literally) beside the immediate visceral struggles powering the extra_musical recordings (increasing in baroque contortedness and wayward structuration over the span of the series) untethered it from the imperatives of

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narrative continuity, lending to the material flow a more statistical feel which over time induced ear fatigue, a supersaturatedness impeding critical listening. You come to sense how an ear can gradually become insensitive, surfing for elusive logic in a zone in which affect and a tactile perception of shifting densities predominate in tandem as narrative representation, melodic coherence, and/or rhythmic entrainment are defused. You have to develop protocols to remain attuned in such a grey zone of expression, where music functions within multiple insufficiencies, as it re-members itself in the minds and bodies of listeners after the substantial ablation it suffered at the point of capture.

Maryanne House During the night following an exceptionally exacting extra_musical session, I had a poignant dream, in which I was wandering through a large Victorian mansion called a Maryanne House. I had recently been poring over the sprawling work of Maryanne Amacher, an esteemed phonomagus, especially her psychoacoustic experiments. But this wasn’t like one of her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations in which sound coursed through the structures of a house rather than emitted through the air via speakers, such as was accomplished at the St. Paul mansion of conductor Dennis Russell Davies in 1980. An extra_musical-like recording played as per a typical internal playback, but the music’s deployment changed from room to room, like you could walk through its parameter space. Its erratic temporal progression commanded full attention in the parlor at the front of the house, while in an adjacent sitting room, pitch and melody came to the fore. At the top of a tall staircase lay two rooms facing each other. I entered the left one and felt an immediate shift in physical sympathy with the music, as my hands began to assume its evolving contours, making baldly apparent the extreme virtuosity at play. In the right room, these abstract morphologies locked into pitch specificity, mapped onto a piano keyboard. The highly unidiomatic music being communicated to my outer limbs didn’t seem physically possible, at the speed it was going. After exiting the second room, I brooded down a long corridor, emotional at having communicated with this strange agent. Something in the disposition of pitches and rhythmic interplay suggested an unstable body only in partial control, perhaps seizuring, maybe even in distress. Multiple, juxtaposed bodies could be at play, fluctuating and mutating, never settling on a singular form. As I pondered the implications of this strange transduction of troubled bodily gesture to scattershot, stochastic music, I woke up. The next day, I consulted a neuroscientist I knew who worked on the musical brain. He told me, most astoundingly, without hesitation: The left room was your planum polare, sensitive to interval sizes, correlated to your trained physical disposition; the right room, your planum temporale, where absolute pitch resides, specifying those same intervals absolutely; and the corridor, the insula, regulates the body’s homeostasis, which connects motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, interpersonal, subjective emotional experience, body representation, empathy. It’s an

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affective nexus for emergent embodiments. You’re bringing a body into existence. This house is trying to tell you how the excluded make their way back in. I woke up again.

The last sentence still haunted me the next morning, as I came across a YouTube clip of a Benham’s disk, a top etched with a black pattern that, when spun, magically yields a spectrum of colors in perception, named Fechner-colors, after psychophysics founder Gustav Fechner. It’s like the way color makes an appearance on black and white TV sets through moiré patterns. Something technically impossible, outside of the capacities of that system, gets smuggled in anyway. I thought about some of the elements of the extra_ musical retained in the conversion—the squirrel-like distracted syntax, the accidental wrist or finger swipes around stable drone-like centers, the unpredictable arrival of repeated chords, the wobbly rhythmic oscillations—and how in the future they could be tactically maneuvered to capture more detailed records of the manifold physical dispositions at their inception. A reorientation of the project was in order.

Surdity A synchronous rejoinder arrived at a party a week later, when a friend played a track called “Si Nopo Da” (By What Signs Will I Come to Understand) that he prefaced as an “ethnographic document of a dying tribe and culture in Niger.” It featured a female lead chorus heterophonically belting an energetic melody backed by male voices setting a looping cantus firmus groove. The recording had an improvised feel to it, as if captured on the fly. Afterwards, my friend asked us if we had recognized the melody. We hadn’t, and we found the question strange. He told us it was a cut from Michael Snow’s 1987 album The Last LP, a set of ethnographic forgeries, heavily overdubbed aural constructions conjured by the Canadian artist and his acolytes. And the melody the “tribal women” intoned was none other than Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.” Shock. My friend reassured us that no one he had played it for had heard the Houston-in-the-Room until decloaked, by drawing attention to it. I had stumbled into a supremely odd instance of steganophonia, the ultra-popular song hiding in plain hearing, perfectly safe from detection, never converted into a perception that could be acted on because of the narrative priming of the recording as raw anthropological evidence: Unique Last Recordings of the Music of Ancient Cultures. If the simple act of identification resulted in audibility, as in Whitney’s case, you could easily imagine scaling up the endeavor to conjure formations not actually present in the signal, developing a technics of hallucinatory suggestion. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, a hypermusiac had been deafsided through and through, glaringly foregrounding the cultural conditioning preemptively classifying the experience as exotic, sealed off from Western influence. The brain and ear form a two-way system, each implicated, caught up in the other’s work. Afferent connections that transit from the cochlea to the brain (the outside world incorporated) are counterpoised by efferent connections flowing from the brain outwards,

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inf(l)ecting the cochlea. Too little is known about the efferent network, except that it enables the cocktail party effect, wherein a particular stream, say a voice in a dense crowd, is raised in the mix as auditory and visual processes attend to it. Might this elusive backflowing network also be the neurological channel through which the musical pareidolia integral to my day-to-day existence operated, actually modulating cochlear function to tune the world differently? As xenaudial once wrote: I heard about a woman through the network, deaf from birth, who suddenly gained the ability to hear, but still couldn’t hear anything because none of the sounds had been coded as meaningful. She lived for a while amidst an inchoate mess of puzzling signals.

Perhaps the deafside I had experienced, though far less radical, had been the start of an enduring pact with the unintelligible, what remains opaque to hearing and to musicalization. The idea of the surd brings forth an evocative confluence of forces: the connotation with deaf (sourd, fr.) or deafness (surdité) is augmented by the surd’s function within mathematics as an anomalous, unassimilable element that disrupts linear progress, history, fracturing disciplines to open the way to new methods. To locate deafspots, to accost the surd, was to court events, spaces, relations in which musical (and hypermusical) ears ceased to function as expected, and could therefore inaugurate unsuspected hearing and listening vectors, and the consequent forms of life implied therein. Later that night, riffling through neurological papers in search of material on attentional deafness to assuage a bruised ego, I began listening to The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time, which purportedly develops progressive dementia across its six parts. I wondered what kinds of technical and esthetic transductions could properly convey the feelings and intensities of this impenitent condition, characterized by slow memory loss, fragmentation and confusion, and the obliteration of a sense of self, to minds unaffected by it. As the fourth part began, I came across another of xenaudial’s sporadic email “communications,” in which they discussed amusia, an appropriate conjunction, as the more or less straight ballroom music with which the cycle began now appeared fully in thrall to the syndrome, evidenced by a disorienting cut-up of slurred reminiscences bathing in a reverberant fog (redolent of the slowed-down television soundtracks that animated my early adolescence, an added nostalgic effect). It turned out they were already apprised of this non-standard musical syndrome, a curious distraction from the narrow conceptualization of the ear that dominated their painstaking archiving: We know the brain reorganizes itself after a lesional event, reallocates resources. Lesions are happenstances. You suppress the part of the brain that organizes the world musically along a particular parameter and you gain insight into the contingent nature of music’s conventions. It’s at least twofold. First, suppressing specific neural areas restructures your relationship with music. Second, occulted brain functions—musical or not—are released in this same movement. It’s a thoroughly dynamic system, remember. Think of how musical hallucinations are released by deafness, synesthesia released by blindness, savant capacities released by left hemi damage. Every cure is an amusical solution.

Compelling as amusia was, far more hard data lay at hand for visual analogues, such as blindspots and blindsight, which benefitted from fulsome etiologies and copious

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patient reports. And though working out the implications of the efferent system and the psychological and attentional manipulation of perception had its place, normative physiologies tended to be assumed. People receive acoustical information similarly, their ears are only conditioned differently. But all this evident manipulability, how your entire frame of audition, your ear, could be refigured on a dime, made me yearn for a harder kind of cut, a more decisive untethering from a notion of music I knew far too well. Of course, such a break might incur an equally drastic reduction of the pleasurable aspects of music, which had propelled my life for so long. Still, both afferent and efferent systems remained radically open to reconfiguration following a lesional event, and it was difficult to know in advance how its effects would end up repatterning the neuromusical network on a global scale. Moreover, amusias most often involved a selective withdrawal of musical function, music being the product of multiple dissociated systems. For instance, your grasp of melodic contour may be intact even as metrical consolidation fails (beat amusia). You may accurately hear local melodic features (intervals) without being able to integrate them into a global melodic contour. You may cognize music perfectly well without experiencing its typical emotional effects. I read about one of Lamy’s patients from 1907 who could transcribe his national anthem correctly by ear without any feeling of knowing it! There was even such a thing as dissonant music amusia, seated in the parahippocampal gyrus, tellingly also concerned with emotional processing. All of these and more were tailored forms of musical deafness, each harboring unknown implications for a life. Feverish imaginings of a combinatorial amusial matrix and the bizarre nature of its physical manifestations eventually sent me to sleep.

( “What’s with the arrangement?,” I sputtered out loud involuntarily within earshot of the woman walking next to me in the access tunnel, as bizarrely diffuse music faded in. She gave me a quizzical look as we parted ways at the cusp of the mall. It was Toto’s “Africa.” The chills the song invariably elicited had been wending their way down my spine for some time already, even before I made the ID. But this song that had always evoked intimate adolescent associations in me bore little resemblance to what I was hearing: a synthetic stringed orchestra amplified in its highest frequencies lending it a curious tinniness, with occasional clanging percussion hits, all cloaked in too much reverberation, making it difficult to identify discrete instrumentation. The melody, though it had been lowered in the mix and dullened, remained intact pitch-wise. However, the timbral flattening that produced the strange string sound also had the effect of simplifying the chords supporting the verse. (The harmony that actually avails itself to perception is intimately dependent on the operations of timbre and the spectral structures that it vibrates into being.) I pinged Shazam and it promptly returned the original 1982 version. (Incidentally, activating Shazam and receiving a response became, over time, a means of confirming I had entered a lucid dreaming state!) Wending its way into this conundrum were threads of an anecdote I had just read about an American student apprenticing with a master drummer in Ghana,

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discovering to his horror that what sounded to him like two utterly dissimilar rhythmic patterns amounted to the “same thing” for his hosts, a culturally amusial analogue to what I was now experiencing. I switched to a mixer app which it turned out I didn’t know how to use, clumsily swiping a few faders up and down as I proceeded further into the mall. The timbre of the ubiquitous tune almost instantly recomposed itself, notably bringing the vocals into tangible reach. This was no standard multiple audio channel coordinator. I entered a jeans store, in which the song continued to play, now through their local sound system. The clientele moved weirdly, as if in subterranean synch with each other and the music, though it felt mechanical and disembodied to me. They were embroiled in a collective metrical hallucination, entrained to an “Africa” I could no longer adapt to, even though I could still track its rhythmic progression. Was this “falling out of step?” A moment later, I felt my memory kicking in, filling in the blanks, projecting into the deafsided tune a stored backup, pre-amusial version of “Africa,” well rehearsed over the years (though it had been a while since its last refresh). I could feel the two versions pulling at each other, going out of sync, leading me to mistrust the inner projection, which froze me in a stasis of indecision. I swiped the mixer around again, which jettisoned me clean out of the store into the frantic corridor, walking toward the central fountain. The song now played back normally on the PA. But the relief I felt soon dissipated on realizing that its restored state now did nothing for me. The goosebumps had flown the coop, at their most reliably productive point, the climax of the chorus. Even worse, the inner projection began to fade into the background, as if begging to be left alone. Two consecutive flashes then occurred. A memory of encountering Africa for the first time in a deserted neighborhood strip mall saturated with the scent of rancid popcorn and Amacher’s explorations of the imbrication of music, space and affect in the brain. Any message riding that circuit has a better chance of getting encoded into deep memory. I adjusted the faders more cautiously, in an attempt to save my affective relationship with the song, but only diversified things further, as the keyboard solo entered, its already weird synthi-timbre made even more jarring by the scrambling of its melodic structure. It had become monotonous, its contours indistinct, as if no necessary causality impelled one note to the next. The window vital to bind pitches had shortened, preventing continuities from taking effect. Even the concluding rousing chorus, barely recognizable but for its suddenly foregrounded lyrics, had been sapped of its vitality. I hummed the tune that I still remembered, though it met substantial resistance from the warped interpretation surrounding and overpowering me. And the more I focused on the humming and internal playback to maintain control, the more the slacked momentum and general uncertainty that afflicted the melody extended to the structure at large. It felt like layers of appearance were being peeled away, exposing a shocking underside. Feelings of expectation now dissipated, propulsive narrative tensions flattened into quiescence. Then the bottom dropped out. The internal projections stopped cold, hard cut, just as the song had looped back to the beginning. Now discontinuity prevailed on the formal level, one moment stumbling into the next, without any larger picture assembling. The texture and erratic affect recalled the fifth part of the Caretaker’s demential saga, which I had forgotten to pause. Not even my absolute pitch could make up the difference by painstakingly piecing the melody together one note at a time. Exasperated, I swiped all the faders to zero. To my astonishment, the music continued in the most occult fashion, without sound, neither in the mall, nor

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“internally,” due to the memory impairment. Was this still Toto’s “Africa”? It couldn’t be known. I slouched against the fountain ramp, both bemused and terrified, remembering Manford Eaton’s Bio-Music, which dispensed with sound altogether to become an art of induced psychological, physiological states through biofeedback procedures. The question of whether music required audible sound gained poignancy as a feeling of expectation once again took hold of me, of the kind that usually accompanied the impending arrival of the first chorus, but still without any sounding representative. As I tuned into familiar affective fluctuations, all that was left to go on, a voice began to speak. “Scale depends on one’s capacity to be conscious of the actualities of perception.” I looked to my left at Robert Smithson, also slouching, and smiling wide. “To be in the scale of the spiral jetty is to be out of it.” The last three words roused me instantly, back to the strains of Everywhere at the End of Time, which had since looped back to an earlier stage of dementia.

) The dream had palpably evoked the delicate compact that was the musical ear, dependent on a collusion of simultaneous brain processes whose autonomy from each other immeasurably multiplied possible vectors of alternative experience. Parallel multinatural amusial timelines, many yet to be uncovered, were lying in wait, threatening to break into experience at a moment’s notice. The dream’s cornucopia of amusial simulations on the other hand, however psychedelic, still unfolded within a normative conception of music, as so many (technologically inflected) mutational modalities by which a given piece could be varied, distorted, seduced into falling out of identity with itself. It was frankly impossible for an unlesioned musical ear to account for the real, sedimented effects of brain (re)structuration on everyday thought and action. What was it like to be an amusiac? Long-term, everyday phenomenological narratives are generally lacking in the amusial neurological literature, perhaps because the average researcher is more interested in localizing brain function and restoring lesioned operations than detailing the contours of a physiologically dissident experience of music (usually experienced as a negative). Furthermore, the characterization of the amusiac as relatively insensitive to consonance or dissonance (crudely mapped to pleasantness or unpleasantness) is most often framed within the context of Western tonal music, dominated by pre-twentieth-century classical music, which leads one to wonder how the researcher’s musical bias is pre-emptively conditioning amusia’s possibility space. Though the watchers’ depiction of music as a handmaiden of control, a regulator of social relations through affective means remained painfully accurate, paralysis needn’t ensue. Music became, by the same token, an ideal substrate for productive reversals, confusions, jammings of the control-music signal. If music at large acts as a binding force, structuring program, entrainment device attuned to basic biological injunctions and vital processes (look at how musical activity channels the escape vectors of Tourettic creativity, for instance), then it’s incumbent to engage with those for whom its effects are at best muted, if not altogether ineffectual. Who knew what kind of social, political, poetic affordances lurked in these alternate amusial dimensions? Befriend an amusiac today.

The Ear

In moments of crisis, when the operations of my hypermusical system became manifest for a short time, like a paranoid portal wedged open, metastasizing suspicion of a musical world that could so easily change its nature without warning, I turned to The Brown Study for guidance. Unlike its lowercase analogue denoting a moody daydream, here The Brown Study named both the eldritch musical performance group I engaged with over the years and the protocol we were tasked with realizing, a fully notated musical score consisting of a long melody, constituted anew (nobody knew exactly how or by whom or what) for each meeting, harboring a succession of strategies inciting the differentiation of each player’s musical and affective profile over time, while inevitably foregrounding the constituencies from which they issued. Most importantly, the combination of fractally recursive samebut-different contours, poolings of chordal intensities, and strangely intricate rhythmic notation, filtered by the differentiating lattice of performer ability, catalyzed an intuitively collective brainstorming for methods to advance the melody despite challenges to group cohesion. Invariably, a palpable awareness of the tactile nature of time set in at some point during the three-hour session, the pressures of extended duration skewing formalisms, demonstrating their ultimate contingency. Phronesis. Melodic configurations reorganizing bodily orientations. Hijacking and rerouting the automatisms of ensemble playing, The Brown Study stimulates the alchemical production of group energetics by experimenting with forms of solidarity and antagonism keyed to the changing orientations of the score, in the process further defining and amplifying the collective’s emerging mind. These are lived durations, engagements in the production of time, and ways of inhabiting it differently, staying with the trouble even in withering fatigue, using the frequent breaks in strategy as opportunities for speculation while always remaining aware of the habits that reform, creep back in möbiusoidally. A temporally autonomous zone of opacity, The Brown Study brings a multiplicity of ears into play and conflict with each other, laying bare their complex constitutions. As with the speculative domain of parallel amusial worlds that (de)mobilize music along manifold channels, protocols such as The Brown Study display a wild potential to imagine musical ears off the radar of control, engaged in collective catalysis. And it was with that last line, buoyed by abductive inclinations toward possibilities of hearing otherwise, that I began drafting my letter of resignation to xenaudial.

Postscript for a Control Ear by Cavil S. Kentis Given difficulties in establishing communication with the author since his withdrawal from the fold, I have taken the liberty of annotating The Ear in order to supplement his experiential claims with a neuroacoustical perspective, whenever possible. Regarding absolute pitch, an ability which has significantly shaped Couroux’s life and work, Loui states that it is likely “caused by the convergence of the two pathways of influence: disposition (or vulnerability) and exposure (or experience)” (2016: 91). His

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Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society delves into the implications of this capability by detailing the activities of primers (Couroux 2015: 59), neurally programmed earworm spreaders. Indeed, Couroux may well have been a primer himself, given his frequent participation in absolute pitch experiments (Zatorre et al. 1998) and subsequent speculative writing admitting as much (Couroux 2016a: 23–24). The Glossary is most notable for its treatment of predatory auditory modalities—elaborated under evocative headings such as fractal listening, incongruity index, recontouring machine, anadumbration— which already makes it a significant contribution, of a highly idiosyncratic facture to be sure, to an emergent theoretical corpus dedicated to the entanglements of music, sound and control (Brown and Volgsten 2006, Goodman 2010, Cusick and Joseph 2011, Volcler 2017, Burroughs 2018). Where hypermusia is concerned, information is scarcer, doubtless owing to the ambiguity of the concept in the first place. As heuristic, the author references Williams syndrome (Levitin and Bellugi 2006), the bearers of which possess a helpless tendency to hear musical qualities in non-musical sounds coupled with a gregarious disposition, and quotes xenaudial: “Because music played a key role in social bonding, genes selected for sociability were the same ones involved in musical behaviors.” The sentence sounded familiar, so I googled it. Xenaudial had paraphrased it without attribution from theorist David Huron’s article positing music as an evolutionary adaptation (Huron 2001: 54–55). This said, given the artificially intelligent, archiving nature of xenaudial, such cribbing, inadvertent or not, could be expected. The phenomenon of musical imagery, “the act of representing music in the mind without external input,” is central to the hypermusiac narrative at work. As Levitin and Tirovolas put it, “the fact that imagery engages regions normally associated with sensory activity suggests that imagery involves mimicking the activity itself; that is, thinking about hearing involves a form of hearing itself ” (Levitin and Tirovolas 2010: 603). Beginning with the assertion that all perception is extrasensory, The Occulture delivers a provocative introduction to varieties of auditory hallucination and their implications (The Occulture 2019), in resonance with the arresting quote from philosopher Charles Sanders, Peirce’s deaf friend (Peirce 1998: 3). Couroux’s training as concert pianist obviously plays into this loop between airborne and internal sound and has undoubtedly induced neuroplastic brain transformations over time: “Musical training and performance require greater involvement of higher-order cognitive processes (e.g. tonal processing, working memory, syntax), thus they may favor increased density in the associated brain regions” (Dalla Bella 2016: 327). As for Gould’s predicament (Cott 1984: 37–41), Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis provides helpful context: “Most studies suggest that performers plan three to four notes into the future as they play. This span increases as people gain experience; the longer someone has studied an instrument, the more anticipatory errors they make” (2019: 73). Gould writes elsewhere of becoming conscious of the intensity of his own internal musical playback when a vacuum cleaner interrupted a practice session:

The Ear

[F]or years thereafter, and still today, if I am in a great hurry to acquire an imprint of some new score on my mind, I simulate the effect of the vacuum cleaner by placing some totally contrary noises as close to the instrument as I can. It doesn’t matter what noise, really – TV Westerns, Beatles records; anything loud will suffice – because what I managed to learn through the accidental coming together of Mozart and the vacuum cleaner was that the inner ear of the imagination is very much more powerful a stimulant than is any amount of outward observation. (Gould 1990: 6–7)

The concept of music as a technology of the self is fleshed out in articles ranging from the intentional use of music by adolescents to regulate moods and emotions (Saarikallio and Erkkilä 2007), to its effect on the stabilization of the Parkinsonian gait (McIntosh et al. 1997), its reconfiguration of Tourettic impulses (Sacks 2007: 247–253) and capacity to provide an opportunity for autistic subjects “to engage in social–emotional activity without the anxieties associated with interpersonal interactions” (Heaton and Allen 2009: 322). According to Chanda and Levitin, in an important study, music improves health and well-being in general through the engagement of neurochemical systems for (a) reward, motivation, and pleasure; (b) stress and arousal; (c) immunity; and (d) social affiliation (2017: 179). They note that both the insula and nucleus accumbens are involved in the dopaminergic system, and actively implicated in processes of addiction, matters discussed in another salient article on the reward system (Menon and Levitin 2005). Interestingly, individuals with absolute pitch showed increased activation in their hippocampus, amygdala, and ventral tegmental areas (Loui 2016: 87). (Moreover, blind musicians are more likely to possess absolute pitch, plausibly acquired as a result of neurological pressures to rewire [ibid.: 90].) On a related note, music can be used as a device for the reflexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, a technology for spinning the apparently ‘continuous’ tale of who one ‘is’. To the extent that music is used in this way it is not only … a device of artefactual memory, it is a device for the generation of future identity and action structures. (DeNora 1999: 45)

The speech-to-song phenomena (Deutsch 2013: 312–313) highlights the proximity of speech to music (Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 150), a condition profitably mined in the treatment of non-fluent aphasia. In melodic intonation therapy, the patient learns to speak by first singing the desired sentence and gradually de-musicalizing it. Patients are eventually encouraged to hear words as if sung internally, a musicalized analogue running in parallel to the spoken (Belin et al. 1996). Regarding Couroux’s occupational hazard, Dr. Leo Rangell’s wide-ranging series on earworms (Rangell 2006) can be read in relation with more recent studies on their diverse origins and etiologies (Liikkanen 2012, Jakubowski et al. 2017), involving factors such as the average listener’s surprising capacity to accurately retain the tempo of a song (Levitin and Cook 1996), and the mere exposure effect (Zajonc 1968) which influences how a particular fragment will wax and wane itself into obsessional status. “Tunes are for controlling people” was uttered by artist and musician Tony Conrad, in a typically wide-ranging interview (Conrad 1996). One of Couroux’s own earworm

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exorcisms took the form of a typically monomaniacal music video, Strange Homecoming, A Structural Comedy (Couroux 2010), whose components are fractally recombinant, allowing for the continuous generation of new versions. Entrainment, the act of synchronizing to an external source, “requires cognitive pulse generation, motor implementation, and error-correction.” Specifically, “each cognitive clock pulse starts a clock interval and initiates a motor response that can be characterised by a certain implementation time, or motor delay” (Wilson 2002: 1495). This automatic neural patterning becomes evident in the way one can still perceive a beat in the absence of acoustic signal. Importantly, the eliciting of metre from a musical percept is itself a complex brain procedure (Grahn and Brett 2007). Entrainment likely has evolutionarily adaptive roots: “Joint music-making served to facilitate cooperative behavior by advertising one’s willingness to cooperate, and by creating shared emotional states leading to ‘boundary loss’/ ‘we-ness’/ ‘coupling’/ ‘in-group bias’” (Mithen 2005: 218). The Afro-Congado ritual cited by xenaudial as an ideal setting for observing entrainment in action is grounded in research (Lucas et al. 2011) that merits experimental follow-up. Couroux’s background music venture Autonomous Moods, Inc. offers this description of “In a Sedimental Mood”: “Always changing, always staying the same. You have to leave it in order to return to it. Like coming across the same object over and over again, but never in the same location. Always transposing, always standing still” (Autonomous Moods Inc. 2010). This psychedelic “aural wallpaper” compellingly intervenes within the operational regime of Muzak, in both its stimulus progression and quantum modulation phases (Sumrell and Varnelis 2007). Couroux’s struggle to reintegrate the political within the concert ritual in tandem with his hypermusiac tendencies are documented in two texts for Circuit (Couroux 2004, 2006) that clarify his early thinking around music and control. That these considerations have also fueled his creative performance work is well known, the most notable instance of which remains le contrepoint académique (sic) (Couroux 2000b, 2011), performed at the Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville which exploited, among other things, the influence of visual (extramusical) elements on listening (Davidson 1993). Steven Connor’s notion of the “vocalic body” resonates with the premises of Couroux’s extra_musical (Couroux 2019): “a surrogate or secondary body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the autonomous operations of the voice” is manifested as “the disembodied voice must be habited in a plausible body” (2000: 35). The historical origins of the concept of the extramusical can be further explored in the writings of Eduard Hanslick (2018), one of its main proponents. Couroux neglects to cite Aden Evens (2006: 224–225), whom he paraphrases concerning the surd’s disruption of “standard practices, open[ing] a break in the linear progress of a field.” The author’s “Si Nopo Da” story recalls the notorious “invisible gorilla” experiment, in which viewers missed a gorilla walking across a basketball court while being occupied with the task of counting ball passes (Chabris and Simons 2011: 5–42). Turning to culturally derived deafspots, such as those experienced by the drumming apprentice (Gelfand 2015), Alessandro Bosetti’s “African Feedback” project is relevant; the oral reports given by the African listeners quickly reveal the nonuniversality of Western experimental musical tropes (Bosetti 2006). Jerzy Konorski

The Ear

believed the efferent system to be the anatomical and physiological means by which auditory hallucinations were generated (Konorski 1967). It is also purported to play a direct role in protecting the ear from damaging sound. A salient overview of the efferent system (Delano and Elgoyhen 2016: 4–5) precedes a collection of fascinating research paths into its obscure workings. The term amusia encompasses a complex set of syndromes (Ayotte et al. 2002, Peretz et al. 2009) difficult to contain within a general description. Lauren Stewart’s “Characterizing Congenital Amusia” is an exceptional contribution because of the attention devoted to the broader implications of being an amusiac, such as Couroux seeks: “Individuals with congenital amusia, as a group, used music in fewer everyday situations such as while driving, doing household chores, or during exercise, and they identified with fewer psychological functions, such as the use of music to match or change mood” (2011: 632). (Nevertheless, Couroux is right to be frustrated by the lack of general interest in non-normative musical experience, given massive tomes such as Nolan Gasser’s 720-page Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste, which devotes exactly three dispersed paragraphs to amusia [Gasser 2019].) In an intriguing article, it is suggested “that tune deafness may be comparable to blindsight (Metzinger 2003: 228–237) whereby information bypasses the early mechanisms that regulate conscious perception but is processed in later areas” (Omigie 2013: 1760). Other amusias abounding in the literature include beat amusia (Phillips-Silver et al. 2011), timbral amusia (Kohlmetz et al. 2003), amusias separately affecting pitch perception (Peretz et al. 2002) and melodic contour (Peretz 1990), as well as specifically musical memory disorders (Lamy 1907, Peretz 1996). Oliver Sacks recounts the case of Jacob L., a composer with “cochlear amusia,” for whom specific pitch bandwidths were out of tune. His condition began to improve “right after I was composing, producing, conducting, and trying to hear—both in my inner and outer ears—harmonically and texturally complex music with an extremely wide tonal range” (Sacks 2007: 150), suggesting again a role for the efferent system in modulating cochlear function. In 1969, Manford Eaton wrote: “In the future, it is entirely possible for the listener to be transformed by the music whether he wishes to be or not” (1969: 63). Nowadays, the project of cybernetic musical control (Eaton 1971, Joseph 2011) takes place within the realm of music streaming services, such as Spotify, whose Global Head of Audio and Podcast Monetization (Les Hollander) said in 2017: “What we’d ultimately like to do is be able to predict people’s behavior through music” (Pelly 2019). Couroux’s inside ear on The Brown Study (Couroux 2016b) remains absolutely invaluable in its detailing of the ministrations of this esoteric, egregoric “protocol.” Though the sketchy treatment tacked on at the end of The Ear arrived as a welcome relief from the cybernetic management and control pervasively coloring proceedings, the molecular strangeness of The Brown Study’s pursuits failed to come through. As an example, one particular section involved jazz musicians playing an intricately notated line, which paradoxically sounds extemporized if rendered accurately, simultaneously taxing score-reading capabilities while jamming the vectors of expressivity natural to that constituency. Affordances are confused as playing is dislocated from hearing.

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A few additional clarifications impose themselves. The “first and last solo piano record” Couroux humorously alludes to bears the provocative title of Four Bifurcated Visions of the Last North-American Frontier (Couroux 2000a). “Lick” is J.C.R. Licklider, psychoacoustician, investigator of human-machine couplings, DARPA scientist, and inventor of the internet precursor, ARPANET. A singing condition, a coinage by mathematician and information theorist Claude Shannon, is what afflicts an automata caught in an endless loop, which cannot be exited without external input. Theorist Amanda Boetzkes tipped me off about dream-Smithson’s cribbing of a line from his analogue’s Spiral Jetty (Smithson 1979: 112). Indeed, I owe her a massive debt for clarifying his use of the surd as metaphor, which provided valuable insight into Couroux’s methods while raising a plethora of questions likely only answerable by the elusive xenonaut himself.

Note 1

All quotations attributed to xenaudial were sourced from emails sent to the author between December 16 2008 and June 7 2014.

Coda Sam Auinger

Egypt, December 1, 2007, 10:30 p.m., departure in Sharm El Sheikh. In front of us is a bus ride via Dahab to the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the middle of the Sinai Mountains. The one-day trip promises sunrise from Mossberg at 2,300 meters and a visit to the monastery. Since its foundation in the sixth century CE, this Catherine monastery has been continuously active. It is an icon of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim culture. Our bus struggles its way through the Sinai Mountains. Three and a half hours of roaring, shaking, and humming, sometimes briefly interrupted by a small descent in neutral. At 1:00 a.m. we reach a dusty parking lot with a number of other buses. Chaos at the arrival, parking and reversing buses, security checks, petrol dealers, and fights to use the toilet. The usual turmoils of Westernized tourism. During longer bus rides like this, one spends hours completely enveloped and absorbed by the sound of the engine. When it stops and we get out, we feel too dizzy to immediately sense the sounding space around us. After arrival, we can only hear the strongest and most direct sound sources. Everything else is blurred and seems far in the background. From the bus parking lot, there is a 700-meter walk to the monastery. General meeting takes place at the entrance; this is where the ascent to Moses Mountain begins. Each coach tour group—there are about twenty—is instructed to stay together, a call code is agreed upon, ours is “Ali Baba,” and each one gets a flashlight. So starts the ascent. The chaos of the parking lot continues as we set off—and yet everything is different: no loudspeaker music, no engine noise, and an environment that reflects nothing directly. Every call and all the chatter remains small, losing its agitation after only a few meters of walking. In the beginning my companion and I are busy trying to escape the hectic glow of the others. There’s a half moon: it’s a starry night and the moonlight gives good visibility and razor-sharp shadows in this incredibly rugged rocky desert. We put the flashlights in our bags. To escape the flickering and flashing of everyone else, we go to the front of the procession and hurry as far ahead as we can. The path that winds up the mountain in serpentines is a camel track. Every couple of hundred meters, camels lie along the way and voices are calling softly “Camel, camel …,” offering comfort to the tourists for a fee. After about an hour’s hike this unique mountain area starts to have an effect on us. The ascent is strenuous, there are 1,200 meters to climb. Every little stone I set loose, my sometimes rattling

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and whistling breath, and the distant call of the various groups—all of this is clearly audible. One can recognize, almost subconsciously, the sounding shape of a physical space through the spatial articulation evoked by resonances and reflections of spatial objects—and this happens as soon as sound events occur, be they stationary or mobile. For the eyes and ears of a person accustomed to inhabiting urban environments and studio situations, this special landscape is a small celebration. No motors and electricity sounds, no thunder of planes in the air: a spatial architecture that makes everything diffuse. It does not project or reflect sound the way I am used too. This mountain environment is composed of boulders, the size of suitcases and freezers, seemingly thrown together arbitrarily. There are no mountain echoes as I know them from the Alps of my youth, no electric light to illuminate this space extensively. My head gets lighter and lighter after a few hours of exertion. Meanwhile, you can experience the atmosphere of a place through your sense of hearing. At 8:00 am, we are two of the first to get back to the monastery. Over tea and coffee we wait outside for permission to experience the inside. The place is filling up. More and more people arrive after a bus ride of several hours, only to visit this monastery for a brief moment. At 9:00 am, we are all granted access through a small gate. Carefully and wide awake, we step into the 1,400-year-old church. We see the Moses fountain and we walk through two or three cloisters of this village-like edifice. Through a sort of audile magic, it is pretty easy for us to detect who has already been in this place for some hours and who has just arrived for a visit. The behavior of people in the two groups is thoroughly different: some move through the buildings with a manner somewhat tired and calm; they need to be encouraged to stay a little longer. Meanwhile, others have acquired a fuller sense of this place earlier on. They are better able to orient themselves, investigating the niches, the sacred objects, and the plants, all the details of the complex. What might be the potential futures for sonic experiences in various locations, whether rural or urban areas, for different lifestyles and professions—be they related or detached from sound—on this very planet? Right now, while editing this text, I am sitting in an Airbnb apartment in Arnhem, the Netherlands, toward the end of 2019. These days I am busy developing the project xxxx terrain for the Art Route Sonsbeek, 2020–2024. Here, due to particular historical and geographical factors, a diversity of landscapes come together within walking distance of one another: the urban, the cultural, the industrial, and the terrestrial. Yet each of them offers a different set of times and rhythms, of materiality and activity. Almost all of this terrain in the middle of Europe has been touched multiple times by humanoid aliens (Schulze, The Sonic Persona [Bloomsbury 2018]). This terrain has been altered incessantly, it has been human made, human processed. Still it contains a set of specific and clearly detectable acoustic properties. Participating in the work of exploring this sonic terrain also means discovering it, listening to it, allowing the audible to provide information and affects at the same time. It is an invitation to consciously expand one’s personal perception, recognition, and the idiosyncratic interpretation of landscape and urban space—in all its settings, places, areas, and sites through the aural dimension. To pay attention to the audible, to the barely audible, and the inaudible is, under the current conditions of an expanding environmental and climate crisis, basically a strategy of survival. An anthropology of sound in action.

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Discography Ace (1975), “How Long (Has This Been Going On)?,” London: Anchor. Autonomous Moods Inc. (2010), In a Sedimental Mood, Bandcamp. https:// algorithmicmoodsinc.bandcamp.com. Benatar, P. (1983), [compact disc] “Love is a Battlefield,” single, Chrysalis Records. Bisse (2018), [compact disc and vinyl] BIZZIN, Showbisse Inc. de Burgh, Chris (1986), [compact disc and vinyl] Into The Light, A&M. Caretaker, The (2016–2019), Everywhere at the end of time (complete edition). History Always Favours the Winners, AIFF file. https://thecaretaker.bandcamp.com/album/ everywhere-at-the-end-of-time. Catsystem Corp. (2014), [digital] Palm Mall. 猫 シ Corp. Catsystem Corp. (2016), [digital] Sunday Television. 猫 シ Corp. Chuck Person (2010), [cassette] Eccojams. Vol. 1, The Curatorial Club. Couroux, Marc (2000a), [compact disc] Four Bifurcated Visions of the Last North-American Frontier, ATMA Classique ACD 2 2180. Couroux, Marc (2000b), [digital] le contrepoint académique [sic], solo piano performance (Festival de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville). Available online: https://vimeo. com/142216720. Couroux, Marc (2019), [digital] the extra_musical. 49 solo piano recordings. Available online: http://xenaudial.bandcamp.com/music. Feld, Steven (2006), The Time of Bells, 4: Soundscapes of Italy, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Iraq/ USA. VoxLox 206 P/R/A/PH. Feld, Steven (2007), [compact disc], Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

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Feld, Steven (2007) (compact disc and DVD), The Castaways Project (with Virginia Ryan), VoxLox. Feld, Steven (2010), Waking in Nima, VoxLox. Ferraro, James (2011), [vinyl] Far Side Virtual, Hippos In Tanks. Fire Toolz (2019) [cassette and vinyl] Field Whisper (Into The Crystal Palace), Orange Milk Records. Fleetwood Mac (1982), [vinyl] Mirage, Warner Bros. Floating Points [digital] Takeover w/Friends 281019. Available online: https://soundcloud. com/nts_live/floating-points- takeover-w-friends-281019. Four Tet (2019), [digital] @The Lot Radio 11-12-2019. Available online: https://soundcloud. com/thelotradio/four-tet-the- lot-radio-11-12-2019. Gravediggaz (1997), [compact disc] The Pickle, The Sickle and the Shovel, Gee Street/V2/BMG Records. Kubin, Felix (2017), “Musik für neue Büromacshinen,” in Kubin, Felix, Takt der Arbeit, Vienna: Editions Mego, track 1. Lamar, Kendrick (2017) [compact disc] DAMN., Aftermath/Interscope/Top Dawg. Liebermann, Rolf (1964), Les Echanges, Lausanne: EX (5). Macintosh Plus (2011) [cassette] Floral Shoppe, Beer on the Rug. Micus, Stephan (1994), [compact disc] Athos: A Journey to the Holy Mountain, München: ECM Records. Nilsson, Harry (1969), Good Old Desk, New York: RCA. Oneohtrix Point Never (2011), [vinyl] Replica, Kemado Records. Parker, James (2013), “ECO VIRTUAL – VIRTUAL 大気中分析.” Tiny Mixtapes, January 25. Available online: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/chocolate-grinder/listen-eco-virtualvirtual 大気中分析 (accessed February 2, 2019). Рабор (2015), [compact disc] Боги и Герои / Gods and Heroes, self-released. Pixies (1988), “Where is My Mind,” Surfer Rosa, London: 4AD, track 7. Radiohead (2011), King of Limbs, London: Ticker Tape. Ruben Sim (2015), MACINTOSH PLUS BETA - REEEEEEE 420 / 通常の近代, self-released, digital. Sakamoto, Ryuichi (1995), [compact disc] Smoochy, Güt/For Life Records. Smooth, C. L. (2007), [compact disc] “Love is a Battlefield,” The Outsider, Blackheart Entertainment. Snow, Michael (1987), [compact disc] The Last LP, Art Metropole. Software (1988), [vinyl] Digital Dance, Innovative Communication. Soundnotes, Ljubljana: sounds recorded October 12, 2017; notes written November 23, 2018. Soundnotes, Turku: sounds recorded April 26, 2018; notes written November 22, 2018. sunsetcorp (2009a), [digital] Nobody Here, self-released. sunsetcorp (2009b), [digital] Angel, self-released. The Ramones (1976), The Ramones, New York: Sire. The Smiths (1986a), Ask, London: Rough Trade Records. The Smiths (1986b), Panic, London: Rough Trade Records. The Smiths (1986c), The Queen is Dead, London: Rough Trade Records. The Vogues (1965), Five o’Clock World, Pittsburgh: Co & Ce Records. Turner, Tina (1984), [vinyl] Private Dancer, Capitol Records.

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Various artists (2010), [cassette] Dark As Night, Bathetic Records. Virtual Information Desk (2012), [digital] Contemporary Sapporo, Beer on the Rug. ZannyNightcore (2012), [digital] Nightcore – Bring Me To Life, self-released. Zelyk Nightcore (2011), [digital] Nightcore – My Immortal (Evanescence), self-released.

Acknowledgments

The first ideas for this handbook emerged from my teaching and research into the anthropology of sound at the newly established MA program in Sound Studies at the University of the Arts, Berlin, in the mid-2000s. Various subsequent conferences, anthologies, special issues, radio features, and music festivals, as well as the work in the research network Sound in Media Culture (funded 2010–2016 by the DFG, German National Research Funding) and its publication, Sound as Popular Culture (MIT 2016) with a number of great international colleagues, along with The Sonic Persona (Bloomsbury 2018), consolidated a whole range of methods, concepts, research areas, issues, and approaches that would need to be included in a handbook on the anthropology of sound. During these years the development of this research approach was supported to a large extent by in-depth discussions, research proposals, and collaborations with Birgit Althans, Sam Auinger, Stefan Böschen, Jochen Bonz, Georgina Born, Christiane Brosius, Michael Bull, Thomas Burkhalter, Marcel Cobussen, Melissa van Drie, Hajo Eickhoff, Katrin Emler, Veit Erlmann, Felix Gerloff, Rolf Großmann, Sanne Krogh Groth, Anahid Kassabian, Jacob Kreutzfeld, Meri Kytö, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Macho, Carla J. Maier, Sebastian Schwesinger, Ulrike Sowodniok, Jonathan Sterne, Martin Stokes, Peter Szendy, David Toop, Jürgen Trabant, Salomé Voegelin, Peter Wicke, Justin Winkler, Christoph Wulf, and Jörg Zirfas. In more recent years, I have also had the chance to engage in an ongoing conversation on the anthropology of sound at my home Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, with Annemette Kirkegaard, Morten Michelsen, Søren Møller Sørensen, Erik Steinskog, and Tore Tvarnø Lind. Finally, in the completion of this project I am indebted on the one side to the major support of Macon Holt, who helped me kickstart editorial work on the handbook again in 2018; on the other side, I am also immensely grateful for all the support by Zora van Harten in preparing the final manuscript and in supporting correction and proofreading phases in 2019. Large parts of the editorial work as well as writing the introduction and Chapter 7 were done in spring 2019, as a visiting professorial fellow at the UNSW Art & Design in Sydney and a guest of Douglas Kahn and Caleb Kelly. During these months I was in conversation with Jo Burzynska, Ben Byrne, Sherre DeLys, Jordan Lacey, Livia Lazzaro Rezende, and many others; you all have no idea how our shared walks in the Blue Mountains or along sound art installations, my various journeys across the country, and some of the best nights out, including a sonic dinner and some social meditations, contributed to the final shape of this handbook.

540

Acknowledgments

Right now, I imagine myself at an eternal dinner table, together with Gisela Schulze, my mother, who was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, and who died in 2017 in Berlin: to her I dedicate this book and all the conversations, editing, and intellectual pleasure I had the chance to experience in making it. Cin-cin!

Index

Abdala Estudio Havana, Cuba 339–44 Acocella, Joan 176 acoustemology 154, 302–4, 307, 331 acoustic territory 294 acoustics 199, 200, 201, 253, 444 Chinese 422 controlled 337 room 344 see also bioacoustics; electroacoustics; psychoacoustic model active noise control (ANC) 330 Actor Network Theory (ANT) 92, 93–4, 350 admiration 267–78 Adorno, Theodor 65, 282, 284 affective listening 198–9 afferent connections 474 Afro-Congado ritual 482 agency 19, 64–6, 87, 94–6, 276, 423 and action 376 and audition 382–3 of an embrace 109 food 143, 144 human 88, 302, 307, 338, 422 idiosyncratic 1 individual 285, 288 of listeners 217, 372 machine/computer 66, 74, 338 of music 303 of noise 237 non-human 47, 230 perceptual 361 recording equipment 341, 350 relational, of sound and space 362 restricted 221 social 466 sonic 101, 102, 103, 348, 402 soundscapes 227 specific agencies advertising 247 cybersecurity 253

of studio space 383 technical centered 102 in work situations 97 aggressive listening 461 agile listening 367 Ailey, Alvin 168, 174, 176 Alexanderplatz, Berlin 191–4, 204–8 Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario 45 algorithmic listening 47, 49 algorithms 53, 55–7, 64–6, 71, 74, 102, 422 and automation 65 “intelligent” 57 algorithmization 76 aliasing artifact 102 alienation 14, 17 aliens, humanoid see humanoid aliens Alperson, Philip 68–9 Amacher, Maryanne 473 ambient noise 225, 253, 261, 267 Ambisonics surround sound 15 amplification of sound 15, 353–68 amplified listening as a critical mode of listening 367–8 Greenlandic Monument 354–6 learning and unlearning to listen 358–60 and materiality 367 researching 360–2 as a tool for imaginary world-making 362–7 amusia 475–6 Andersen, Joceline 32, 33, 38 anthrocolonial matrix of power 4–7, 9, 12, 17 Anthropocene 4, 101 anthropology anthropologists 2 and ASMR 35 contested nature of 1–2 deconstruction of 2 historical anthropologies 5–10, 11 particularization of research 11 sensory turn 47

542

Index silence 319–22 sonic 12 see also anthrocolonial matrix antipraxis 461 Antoine, André 136 Anzieu, Didier 150 Aphex Twin 17 apparatus-focused experiential histories 11, 12, 16, 19, 20 Appiah, Kwarme Anthony 306 aquatic ape hypothesis 125 Ardener, Edwin 314 art music, Western Europe 69, 71, 73–5, 318 artifacts 102 artistic practice 177 Asian Dub Foundation 365 ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) 27–9, 102 and 2019 SuperBowl 39 anthropological perspective 35 artists 34, 40 audience connection 39 boundary work 32–3 Chynaunique ASMR 35 combinpackage 29 community 33, 34, 35, 39, 101 as “Society of Sensationalists” 32 direct-to-camera address 41 and emotions 32–3, 41 grounded theory of affective experiences 34–6 essentialism 32 and Gentle Whispering (Maria) 27–8, 39, 40, 41 and headphones 29–30 intimacy, interpersonal 33, 41 new aesthetic paradigms 38 oversexualized, seen as 32, 33 performance of 34, 38 physiological responses to viewing 32, 33, 37 positivist approaches 32 responses to, seen as neurological 32 selection of content 34–5 sound production 29 therapeutic claims 33, 36–9 “tingles” from watching 32, 33, 37 videos 27f, 29, 31, 33–8, 40 sound levels 30

AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories 55 Attali, Jacques 151 Bruits 16 Noise 454, 455 audism 156 audition and agency 382–3 auditive Wissenschaft 127 auditory knowledge 48 Augoyard, Jean-François 200, 216, 481 Auinger, Sam 12, 172 aural architecture 154 aural images 295 autoethnography/autoethnic experientiality 11, 12, 16, 19, 49, 171 automatism 61 Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response see ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) auto-tune (correction algorithm) 53, 54, 76 Bach, Anders 11 BahnComfort-Zones, German high-speed trains 43–4, 47 Bahr, Hans-Dieter 7 Baker, Sarah 219–20 Baldwin, James 25 Barnard, Matthew 11 Barratt, Emma L. 37 Barthes, Roland 120, 449 The Grain of the Voice 125 Barz, Gregory 320 bass culture 46 bass materialism 291, 449 Bates, Eliot 95 Baudrillard, Jean 284, 307 beat-making 60 Beats by Dre (headphone company) 46 Beer, David 98 Bennett, Jane 143–4 Berendt, Joachim-Ernst 151 Berg, Alban 321 Berger, Edmund 461 Berlin public transport hubs 193 see also Alexanderplatz, Berlin Bernier, François 3 Biancotti, Hector 120 bicameral mind 124

Index bioacoustics 421 bio-data 57 biographical moments 15 biological anthropology 6–7 biomedical perspective 37, 38 biometric data 55 biopolitics of athletic capitalism 54 bio-sensors 57 bird sound 24 Black Anthropocenes 4 Blaj, Gabriel 448 bloggers 54 body 24, 30, 37, 112, 113, 114, 123, 150, 151, 164, 174, 304, 358, 470 affective 123 biological/physical 41, 119 body in the mind 175 central role in conception of the self 123 connection to all parts 115 emotional 123 empathic 116, 119, 121, 125 extensions of 48, 75 extramusical 472 feedback systems 444 flesh of see flesh functions 282 of humanoid alien 154 inner 120 and kinesphere 171 listening 187, 332 as a body object technique 53 of researchers 155, 156, 161 male and female 97 media as extensions of 48 moving 60, 120, 164, 178, 179 and dance 14, 163, 164, 172, 174 music stored in 63 the nobody 119, 121, 122 non-normative 472 nude 164 organic 287 perceptive 119, 120, 125 performing 64, 124, 127, 281, 402, 466, 470 resonant 118, 119, 148, 285, 359 sensory 115, 116, 145 singing 115 sonic 117, 187, 212, 293, 294, 450 sounds within 131

spatial 321, 401 strange 119, 121 unhearing 445 unstable 473 visual boundary of 107 vocalic 482 voice body see voice body vulnerable 176 whole 188, 198, 204 see also embodiment body dysphoria 470 body language 248, 346 body object technique 53 body psychotherapy 123 body voice 119, 121, 126, 182 body-technology relationship 62 Boetzkes, Amanda 484 Bohlman, Philip 319 Bonnet, François 449 border thinking 8 Borio, Gianmario 177 Born, Georgina 95, 98, 366 Bosetti, Alessandro 482 Boudreault-Fournier, Alexandrine 95 Boulez, Pierre 72 bourgeois subject 49 Bovermann, Till, Musical Instruments in the 21st Century 67 Bows, Hannah 291 Brand, Russell 32, 33 breath support 124 Brenneis, D. 35, 36, 420 Bresin, Roberto 73 Brixton Academy, London 267–71 The Brown Study 477, 483 Bruegel, Pieter 16 The Gloomy Day (painting) 17 Brunner-Traut, Emma 244 Buckland, Theresa J. 173 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 2 built-in obsolescence 55 Bull, Michael 29, 222, 366, 367, 419 Burrows, David 64–5, 68 Butler, Mark 67 Playing with Something that Runs 66 Cafe Les Deux Magots, post-war Paris 44 Callas, Maria 120

543

544

Index Camus, Albert 44 capital, circuit of 451–7 capitalism 279, 330, 389, 448, 451, 452 athletic 54 bourgeois 279 global 287 late-stage 395, 454–5, 456 libidinal economy 286 neoliberal patriarchal 289, 290 platform 54 and white nostalgia 397 Capitalocene 4 Carpenter, Edmund 331 catalogs, playlists, curated database 45–6 cavitation, unsound 448–51, 461 Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, University of California 71 centrifugal force 97 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 13 Chamberlin 71 Chanda, Mona Lisa 481 Chandola, Tripta 216–17 Chandra, Mona Lisa 481 Chaplin, Charlie 247, 248, 249 Chatwin, Bruce 331 Chekov, Anton 136 Chinese acoustics 422 Chion, Michel 198, 238 choreomusical analysis 170, 177 choreomusicology 166, 176–8 Christianshavns Torv, Copenhagen 359, 366 Chudzicki, Michał, Like City, Like Brugel 2 (painting) 16 cisgendered, white and bourgeois citizens, mythical norm of 13 Civic Boulevard Highway, Taipei 411–13 Clarke, Tom 219 Clifford, James 307 Clifton, Thomas 320, 321 cochlear function 475 cocktail party effect 200 colonial matrix of power 1, 3, 4 combinpackage, ASMR 29 complete audibility 465 Complete Vocal Technique 123 compression artifact 102 computers, as universal machines 48

concerts 15, 70, 266–9, 271, 279, 280, 282, 284, 288, 291, 296, 306, 337, 439, 466, 478, 480 concert halls 114, 267, 337, 347, 369, 432, 469 performers 347 conductor 73, 74 see also orchestra Conrad, Tony 465 consonance 299 contact improvisation 172 conviviality 357 Cook, Peter 197 Cooley, Timothy 320 co-performance 271–3, 275 corporeal listening 15 corporeality 75 cosmopolitanism 304–8, 309 Couroux, Marc 11, 407, 477–82 COVID-19 lockdown 144–5 Cox, Christopher 451 Crawford, Kate 55 creative meditation 44, 46 Crinkle Crinkle lil shirt (video) 27f, 29 see also ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) Cryptics see Fluvian Cryptics cultural embeddedness 69, 70, 72 cultural history 201 cultural matrix 23, 26 culture analysis 91 cultures everyday 95–8 media 272 performative, in education 273–5 unfolding matter in 90–2 Cunningham, Merce 168, 174 Cusack, Peter 202, 203f cybernetics 47 Damasio, Antonio 124 Damsholt, Inger 11, 170, 181, 182 dance 14, 163–89 academic research and artistic practice 174–8 autoethnography 171 ballet 167, 176 choreomusical analysis 170 hip-hop 60, 63, 69, 73, 85, 97, 337, 398, 401, 402 intrinsic and extrinsic relationships 170

Index and music 167 naked-a-capella-dance-practice 166, 171, 174, 178–9 Dance Form Analysis 170 Danish Broadcast Corporation 77 Danish Heritage 131, 132 datafication of listening 47–51, 55 bio-data 57 electrochemical data 57 Davies, Dennis Russell 473 Davis, Nick J. 37 de Beauvoir, Simone 44 de Campo, Alberto 74, 76 de Seta, Gabriele 12, 461 de Thurah, Lauritz 131 decentralization of musical endeavor 379–82 decolonialization 2, 3, 11, 108, 355 multi-level 6 deconstruction 2, 11, 12 deep listening 11, 30 deer, red 130–2 Deleuze, Gilles 254, 451, 459, 460–1 Anti-Oedipus 287, 291, 460 delinking 3, 7, 8–9 Dell (Southampton Football Club home ground) 25 Dennett, Daniel 127–8 DeNora, Tia, Music in Everyday Life 178 deterritorialization 11, 12 Deutsch, Diana 468 Deutsche Bahn (German railway company), high-speed trains (ICE) 43–4, 47 dialectical materialism 94 Die Zeit (German weekly) 43–4 digital culture 75, 76 digital music and sound production 53–5 digital obsolescence 55 digital signatures 54 digitalization of recording studios 54 dimensionality of sound 28 Discogs 56 “Discourse Networks” 63 disembodiment 123 disentanglement 32, 93, 201, 202 see also entanglements dissonant music amusia 476 distortion artifact 102 distributed subjectivity 46, 54

diving equipment 446 DJ-Culture 61, 63, 71, 73 domestic eavesdropping 14 domestic spaces 188, 214, 215, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223 context 30, 41 and the home 212, 213, 220 peri-domestic 214, 222 sounds 215–17 sonic 220 technical strategies 103 “domesticated” state of mind 103 DR Byen, Danish Broadcast Corporation 77, 78, 99n2 Drott, Eric 45–6 Dulcephone Corporation 348 dungeon synth (DS) 397–8 duration, decoupling with pitch 53 ear 463–84 cochlear function 475 control ear 479–84 extra_musical sessions 470–3 hypermusiac 463–7 radio 433–7 thinking with our ears 197–204 Eaton, Manford 483 echolocation 459 ecosystems 45 Edison, Thomas 51 “Angel with the Pen” 63 Edison Phonograph Company 348 education, performative cultures of 273–5 efferent connections 474–5 Eisenberg, Andrew 301, 302, 307 eldritch musical performance 479 electroacoustics 378 electrochemical data 57 Elias, Nicholas M. 317 embodied cognition 57 embodiment 126, 212, 216, 278, 307, 474 disembodiment 123 of listening 308 of place 218 research approach 12 sonic gastronomy 135–40 tangible 435 see also body

545

546

Index emotions and ASMR 32–6, 41 emotional body 123 grounded theory of affective experiences 34–6 mood management 46 and performers 270 Endrissat, Nada 245 Engelhardt, Jeffers 319 Enlightenment 138 Eno, Brian 44, 66 ensembles, musical 15, 342 entanglements 33, 90, 109, 273, 274, 275–7, 289, 426, 453, 478 affective sonic 360 common 146 complex 132 disentanglement 32, 93, 201, 202 ethnographic 419 experiential 12, 16, 18, 19 food 132, 133 invisible 107 philosophical 378 reiterative 98 “The Entertainment” 282–3 entrainment 482 entropy 455 Eriksson, Rasmus 50 Erlmann, Veit 303 Escoffier, Georges Auguste 137 Eshun, Kodwo 14 Espinel, Jorge 46–7 essentialism 175 estrangement 14 ethnographic research 49, 53, 92, 177 ethnomusicology 93–5, 299 Europe, provincializing 11 Evens, Aden 482–3 everyday lived experience 427–41 cultures 95–8 home 220 listening through technologies 437–40 performance 255 radio 433–7 sounds reappearing 441 Ewé, Tobias 12 experiential entanglements 12, 16, 18, 19 experiential expertise 215, 220 experiential histories, apparatus-focused 11, 12, 16, 19, 20

experientiality 10–13 autoethnographic 11, 12, 16, 19, 49 materiality 120 extimacy 159–61 extra_musical sessions 470–3 Eze, E. C. 3 Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other 2 Favourite Sounds Project 202 Fechner, Gustav 474 feeling 124 Feld, Steven 12, 36, 45, 299, 331 Jazz Cosmopolitanism 302 Voices of the Rainforest 44 Fermor, Patrick Leigh 327 festivals 289–92 Fight Between Carnival and Lent (painting) 16 Files, Will 347 Fisher, Mark 290–1 flesh 107, 108, 110, 113, 164, 174, 182, 304, 317 “Sounding Flesh” 14 Fluvian Cryptics 445–6, 448, 450, 460 food 129–46 and COVID-19 lockdown 144–5 culinary turn 133 disrupted thoughts 144–6 gestures associated with 138–40, 143 materiality 138, 140 as a meeting place 132 Nordic Food Manifesto 133 preparatory acts 142–3 sites and epistemologies of production 137 Slow Food Manifesto 133 slow food program 144 sonic gastronomy, embodied framings 135–40 sound recordings 141, 142 see also kitchen food agency 143, 144 food entanglements 132, 133 Foster, Susan Leigh, Reading Dancing 174 Foucault, Michel 44, 174, 175, 246 Fountain of Friendship between Peoples, Berlin 193 4x4 matrix 59–62, 71 Fourier analysis 122 Frankfurt School 292 Freed, Adrian 71 frequency, politics of 467

Index Friberg, Anders 73 Frith, Simon 63, 314 Performing Rites 68 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 181 Gagnaire, Pierre 135, 136 Galactic Bureau of Investigations (GBI) 446 Galactic Federation 446, 447, 449 Gallagher, Rob 34, 38 Garcia, Manuel 122 Garton, Vincent 460, 461 Gasser, Nolan, Why You Like It 483 Gaxie, Sébastien 146n1 A Feast for the Ears 135, 136 Gebauer, Gunter 6, 7, 8, 13, 17 Geist 453 genotype 120 genre 394–7 geolocative data 55 Germany, high-speed trains (ICE) 43–4 gestures 107, 132, 188, 358, 361 acoustic 176 bodily/physical 136, 166, 319, 472 changing 143 culinary/concerned with food preparation 138–40, 143 multisensorial and multimodal 134 recording 142 as signals 71 tracking 73 Gibson, William 238 Giffinger, Rudolf 228 Gilroy, Paul 9 Glastonbury Festival, UK 277f, 286–90 Glissant, Édouard 14 Good Morning P3 (“Go’ Morgen P3”), radio program 78, 79, 91, 92, 99n3 Goodman, Steve 365, 446, 447 Gould, Glenn 465, 480–1 gramophones 66, 68, 70, 247, 250, 364, 432 Greek Orthodox Christianity 313 Greenland 353–68 Greenlandic Monument 354–6 Großmann, Rolf 11, 60 grounded theory of affective experiences 34–6 Guattari, Félix 459, 460–1 Anti-Oedipus 287, 291, 460

Hagood, Mack 44 Hainge, Greg 451 Hall, Stuart 307 Hannerz, Ulf 307 Hanson-Abbott, Chris 237 Harari, Yuval Noah 56–7 21 lessons for the 21st century 56 Haraway, Donna 1, 94 Hardjowirogo, Sarah-Indriyati 67–8, 69 Hardt, Michael 254 hardware 55, 60, 378 digital 74 electronic instruments 62 and software 61–2, 72, 74 special-purpose 379 Harvey, David 238 Hasse, Cathrine 89, 94 Haxholm, Claus, Handbook of Aggressive Listening 461–2 Hayles, N. Catherine 98 headphones 14, 29–30 noise-canceling 44, 47, 51, 133, 261 personalized 46 playlists 44, 46 see also ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) hearing and listening 30 psychoacoustic model 54, 154 underwater 445, 446 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 451–2, 453 Heidegger, Martin 47, 101 Heine, Steven J. 3 Hendrix, Jimmy 289 Henrich, Joseph 3 Henriksen, Anni Haahr 314 Henriques, Julian 172 Hesmondhalgh, David 49, 50 high and low culture 67 Hildebrand, Marques 74 hip-hop 60, 63, 69, 73, 85, 97, 337, 398, 401, 402 Hirschkind, Charles 307 historical anthropologies 5–10, 11, 52, 173 historicism 11 historicization 11, 12 histories, experiential see experiential histories Hodgins, Paul 170, 174, 177

547

548

Index Hoelzl, Hannes 74, 76 Holt, Macon 11 home 133, 211–23 being guided in research by participants 219–21 boundaries of 214 coming home 211–12 communal 222–3 compared to house 214 constructed spaces 218 demolishing 219 and domestic spaces 212, 213, 220 everyday lived experience of 220 feeling at home/sense of home 14, 188, 189, 211, 216, 222 feeling safe 211–12, 216, 222 feeling unsafe 212 homelessness 222, 357 idealized 212, 215, 221 meaning 214 memories of 216, 222 nostalgic sense of 212 private nature of 216, 218, 219 production of 215 realistic 212 recording at home 220 sensory approach to 220 shifting nature of there and they 221–3 sonic home 212, 213, 215, 216, 217 sounds of 211–12, 213, 216, 221–3 temporary 222, 223 trinitarian methodology of recording, listening and critique 217–19 visiting homes of others 217–18 wider view of 223 “Home, Sweet Home” (Payne) 212 Horkheimer, Max 250, 281, 282, 284 Hörsamkeit. 208 Houston, Whitney 179, 474 Howes, David 230 Hübl, Philipp 43–4, 45, 47 The Human 3, 4, 6, 52 human agency 88, 302, 307, 338, 422 humanly organized sounds 299–302 humanoid aliens 1, 2, 5, 9, 14, 15 body of 154 idiosyncratic experiences of 13 see also The Human Huron, David 480 Hüser, Rembert 44

hybridity 307 Hyper-C 446, 447, 448, 449 hypermusiac 463–7, 480 hyperrealism 347 ICE (German high-speed trains) 43f, 44, 45 ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology 170, 174 identity construction 46 idiosyncrasy 10–18 agency 1 experiences 13 as method 18–20 Ihde, Don 317, 444 image artifact 102 imaginary world-making, amplification as a tool for 362–7 inbetweenness of vocal research 126 industrialization 24, 25, 65, 137, 140, 244, 248, 288 Ingold, Tim 90, 96, 97 instrumentality 66–9 defining musical instruments 67–8 learnability 72 playability 69, 72 probing of instruments 75–6 technical devices as instruments 67 traditional instruments 75 intercorporeality 121 Interdisciplinary Center for Historical Anthropology 7 interpenetrations 12, 16, 18, 19, 118, 125, 161 social 117 intimacy 151, 152–3 function in the bourgeois marriage 157–9 interpersonal 33, 41 Inuit Nutaat (sculpture) 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360 Ioivine, Jimmy 46 iTunes 55 Jacques-Dalcroze, Émile 169 Janowitz, Gundula 120 Järviluoma, Helmi 221, 236 Jaynes, Julian 124 jazz 66, 72, 165, 166, 481 bombastic 278 cosmopolitan 300 free 202 performance 300

Index scale-oriented 74 smooth 394 Johnson, James H. 151 Johnson, Mark 175 Jordan, Stephanie 170, 176 jukebox listening 51, 52 Jullien, François 151, 156 Kaluli people 24 Kalvebod Bridge, Copenhagen 77 Kamper, Dietmar 7 Kane, Brian 451 Kant, Immanuel, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 2 Kapchan, Deborah 155, 304, 307, 308 Kassabian, Anahid 169 Katz, Mark 349 Kazantzakis, Nikos 327, 328 Kearney, Mary Celeste 364 Keleman, Stanley 123, 124 Kentis, Cavil S. 479–84 Khutbas (prayers) 298 kinesphere 171 kinesthetic empathy 121, 125 Kirkegaard, Annemette 12 Kirstein, Tobias R., Handbook of Aggressive Listening 461–2 Kissper, Olivia 33 kitchen emergence of 134 European design 133 hearing in 134–5 sounds in 131–4 see also food kitchens, sounds in 131–4 Kittler, Friedrich 62 Kleiner, Marcus S. 11 Knouf, N. Adriana, How Noise Matters to Finance 456 Kolesch, Doris 120 Konorski, Jerzy 482–3 Koutsomichalis, Marinos 55 Kracauer, Siegried 250, 251 Krause, Bernie 44–5 Kravitz, Zoë 39 Kreutzfeldt, Jacob 12 Krieger, Robby 13 Kubin, Felix 255 Kubisch, Christina 366

Laban, Rudolf von 171 LaBelle, Brandon 212–13, 215, 365 Lacanian theory 38 Lacey, Kate 432 Lakoff, George 175 Land, Nick 456, 461 LANDR 102 Lang, Fritz 238 laryngeal endoscopy 122 larynx 124 Latour, Bruno 65, 350 Lawson, Rex 70 Lee, Jo 90 Lee, Spike, Do the Right Thing 401, 403, 404 Levitin, Daniel J. 480, 481 libidinal economics 286–9 Licklider, J.C.R. 484 Liebermann, Rolf 251 lifeforms 1, 4 aquatic 125 limonoid experiences 285–9 Lind, Tore Tvarnø 12, 313 Linn, Roger 60 Linnaeus, Carl, Systema Naturae 3 LinnDrum 61 listening affective 198–9 aggressive 461 algorithmic 47, 49 amplified, as a critical mode of 367–8 as a body object technique 53 concepts 48 corporeal 15 as a cultural technique 53 culture of 12 datafication of 47–51, 55 deep 11, 30 embodiment of 308 and hearing 30 learning and unlearning to listen 358–60 versus machinic registering 47, 49 multiple models 425–6 of performers 121 radio 45 records 45 soundfiles 45, 48–9 as a technique 48 thick 11 through technologies 437–40

549

550

Index listening body 187, 332 of researchers 155, 156, 161 sonic writing 154–6 listening devices, studying 51–3 listening situation 46 live coding 74 Liverpool 211–12, 213, 219 LM-1 61 Lopes, Dominik 74, 76 Lorde, Audre 5 Loui, Psyche 479–80 Preemptive Glossary for a Techno-Sonic Control Society 480 Lukács, György 453 Lyotard, Jean-François 284–7, 290 McClary, Susan 176 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 321 machinic listening/registering 47, 49 McLuhan, Marshall 48, 64, 65 McNamara, Ray 167 Mahler, Gustav 321 Maier, Carla J. 12, 129f, 142, 143 Malinowski, Boris 23 mallsoft 399 Mann, Thomas, “Fullness of Harmony” 68 Manon, Hugh S. 38 Mapamundi Trágico 4 Marcuse, Peter 238 Marx, Amala 145–6 Marx, Karl 453, 454, 457, 461 Capital 452 Maryanne House (Victorian mansion) 473–4 “Maschine” (MPC-derivative) 60 Mason, Paul H. 177 materialism of Adorno 282 bass 291, 449 dialectical 94 new 188, 230 physical 223 sonic 12 materiality 94, 242, 269 and amplification 367, 368 aquatic 125 and auditory color 199 of data 55 experiential 120

of food 138, 140 and matter 90 and meaning 91 and metaphor 360, 361 musical 85, 93 new, for musical creation 67 nonhuman 144 of office 251 of phonographic writing 66, 67 sonic 361, 366 of sound 365, 420 ontological 414 of space 223 technical objects underlying 102 vital 94 Mathieu, Jane 347, 349 means of perception 458 media, as extensions of human body 48 mediation, earmarking 102 Meier, Leslie M. 49, 50 Mellotron 71 melodic intonation therapy 481 meme culture 392–4 Mercury, Freddie 297 mere exposure effect 481 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 121 microhistory 173 Micus, Stephan 323 MIDI sequence 472 Mignolo, Walter D. 8 Mills, Mara 53 Minigione, Enzo 214 Miyara, Federico 214 mobile privatization 50 models 411–26 ecological and perceptual 416–18 epistemological and acoustemological 420–2 historical and archaeological 418–20 multiple, of listening 425–6 ontological and phenomenological 413–15 Source-Filter-Model 123 xeno-mechanic and non-human 423–5 Montreal Neurological Institute 464 mood management 46 Morris, Jeremy Wade 98 Morris, Mark 168 Gloria 174, 176 Morrison, Jim 13

Index Moten, Fred 14 Mount Athos, Northern Greece 311–12 MPC (music production centre) 59f, 60–3, 69, 71, 73 multi-level decolonization 6 multi-level historicization 6 Muršič, Rajko 12 MusDig project 95 music production centre see MPC (music production centre) musical automata 70 musical tonality 65 musi-cultural stereotypification 398 Muzak Corporation 469 naked-a-capella-dance-practice 166, 168, 171, 174, 178–9 Nancy, Jean-Luc 449 nano-sensors 57 Negri, Antonio 254 Netflix 139 networked mobile personalization 50 neurology and ASMR 37 Nielsen, Rasmus 354 Nietzsche, Friedrich 460, 461 Nilsson, Harry 251 noise 29, 33, 202 active noise control (ANC) 330 ambient 225, 253, 261, 267 background 41, 225, 226, 231, 252, 253, 328 beeping 220 buzzing 39 daily life 38, 41 industrial 24 information 38, 455 loud 200, 214 neighbor 213, 216 noise-canceling headphones 44, 47, 51, 133, 261 ontological 451 pollution 213, 214 running water 192, 208 screeching 192 street 252, 306 surplus 459 traffic 208, 213, 225, 228, 231, 235 and the unheard 455–6 uniform 266 white 208, 236–9, 328

noise floor 330 noise power 458 Noma MAD Food Festival, Copenhagen 140 Nooshin, Laudan 326–7 Noppeney, Claus 245 Nordenstram, Stina 13 Nordic Food Manifesto 133 Norenzayan, Ara 3 Norman, Cecil 244 Nosrat, Samin 140, 143 Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat 139 Novak, David 360 Oatly Oat Milk 284 Obert, K. 33 objectified ear 48 objects body object technique 53 sonic 24 technical 102 touching in production practices 92 transitional 64 Odland, Bruce 172 Offenhuber, Dietmar 12 Oliveros, Pauline 30 Ong, Walter Jackson 151 opening, movements of 90, 92–3 Optigan 71 oral history 173–4 orchestra 73, 243, 246, 247, 250, 476 Orlando, Matt 137, 138 Ouzounian, Gascia 362 P3 Department of Music and Radio 83f P3 production space 78, 79f Paasonen, S. 28 Palmer, Gerald 311, 324 Papenburg, Jens Gerrit 12, 51 Paragrana (journal) 7 participants 30, 31, 35, 98n1, 142, 216, 218, 227, 228, 231, 281, 286, 318, 440 being guided in research by 219–21 research approach 12 scanning 37 sound-recording 143 particularization of anthropological research 11 pastness 304–8 Payne, John Howard 212 Pelly, Liz 46–7, 50, 51

551

552

Index Penfield, Wilder 464 Pépin, Jacques 140 perceptive body 120 performance 15, 61, 63, 65, 67–9, 73–5, 108, 155, 202, 268, 337, 340, 407, 423 acoustic 372 of ASMR 34, 38 collective 267 concurrent 192 conditions 400 co-performance 271–3, 275 creative 480 cross-platform 276 deskilled 470 embodied 470 emphatic 109 ensemble 15, 342 everyday 255 experimental 469 food 132, 134, 140–2, 145 bodily performance 141, 142 theatrical performance 138 transformative performance 134 instrumental 68 laptop 74 live 34, 52, 63, 179 loud 347, 362 of media cultures 272 method 347 musical 61, 68, 73, 74, 148, 192, 251, 286, 316, 317, 318, 343, 346, 347, 349, 366, 477 art music 75 computer-based 73 jazz 300 new 54 pantomimic 250 past 68, 304, 468 “Performing Performances” 70 phonographic 62 prestige 279 process 343 recording 347, 360 sonic 208 technical 372 text as 273 vocal 119, 120, 122, 127, 270, 271, 299, 316 performance studies 6 performative cultures of education 273–5

performative turn 66 performativity theory 94, 120 performers 12, 138, 271, 291, 337, 343, 344, 347, 348, 478 admired 15, 271 ASMR 31 concert 347 co-performers 271, 272, 276 and emotions 270 liberation of 119 listening 121 performing body 64, 124, 127, 281, 402, 466, 470 respected 274 silent 317 situated encounters with 117 stage 273 vocal 118, 125 peri-domestic spaces 214, 222 sounds of feeling safe 215–17 Péronard, David H. 354, 355, 356, 357 personal history 201 personalization 46, 50, 57 Perullo, Alex 306 Peters, John Durham 48 Peterson, Mark Allen 95 phenotype 120 philosophical anthropology 6–7 phonographic material 62–6, 67 analog phonographs 65–6 compositional and performative literacy 65 digital phonography 66 Gestaltung 62 mechanical phonograph, nineteenth-century 48 phonographic palimpsests of sensobiographic walks 231–4 phronesis 479 pianola 69–71 Picker, John M. 151 Piekut, Benjamin 95 Pile, Steve 32 Pink, Sarah 220–1 pitch, decoupling with duration 53 Plant, Sadie 456 playability 69, 72 player piano 53, 69–73 playlists 44, 45–6, 56 personalization 46

Index plazas 191–209 actors on 194–5 Alexanderplatz, Berlin 191–4, 204–8 horizontal landscape, subtle murmur 204–6 Hörsamkeit. 208 thinking with our ears 197–204 transport, modes of 195–6 urban 194 Plesner, Ursula 95 polisgraphy and trap of the text 229–31 Pöllänen, Sonja 12 Porges, Steven 124 positivism 32 Post-Actor Network Theory 93 postcolonial melancholia 9, 10 post-Fordist ambient sounds 250–3 post-human 3 Postone, Moishe 453, 454, 460 practice 307–8 praxiography 92 pre-sterneian researchers 151 primers 467 privatization 50 programmed future 73–6 prolonged presence 308–9 proprioceptive feedback 469 proto-digital media 53 provincialization 11, 12 psychoacoustic model 54, 55, 154, 201, 364, 466, 471 and physiology 199, 200 Public Service Popular Music Mainstream Flow Radio 89, 94 pulse code modulation 53 queer anthropology 2, 3 Quiet Zones, German high-speed trains 43f, 44, 45, 47 quietude 311–38 bubbles of 328–30 see also silence Qvarnström, Titti 138, 139, 142, 143

public service popular music mainstream flow radio, researching 88–90 radiophonic work 135 Rainer, Yvonne 168, 174 rainforests, Papua New Guinea 45 Rangell, Leo 481 rationalization 64–6, 76, 85, 87 cultural-industrial 71 RCS Sound Soundware 82–3 recording 339–51 effects of the process 345–8 expanding knowledge about recording practices 350–1 gaining control over the process 344–5 red light syndrome and crafted hyperrealism 348–50 sound recordings 141, 142 recording equipment 41, 341, 343, 348 agency of 339 red deer 130–2 red light syndrome and crafted hyperrealism 348–50 Redzepi, Rene 139 repertoire 72 reproduction of music 385–404 genre 394–7 meme culture as folk culture 392–4 vaporwave 389–92, 397, 399 research see sound studies resonance community 259 reverberation 200 reweaving, practice of 8–9, 10 Ringsager, Kristine 95 Roberts, Natalie 37 Rocha, Luiz 322, 327 Rock, Pete 59, 60 Rohmert, Gisela 118 Rohmert, Walter 118 Royal Danish Ballet School 167 Ruhezone (Quiet Zone), German high-speed trains 43f, 44, 45, 47

Rabine, Eugen 118 race, in Kant’s anthropology 3 radio as cultivations of the ear 433–7 ethnomusicologies of 93–5 listening 45

Sacks, Oliver 483 Sakakeeny, Matt 360 samplers and sampling 54, 67, 69, 70, 71 Sanders-Peirce, Charles 480 Sartre, Jean-Paul 44 Sawyer, Elisabeth 174

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554

Index Schaeffer, Pierre 449 Schafer, Raymond Murray 151 Schloss, Joseph G. 63 Schmidt, Eric 49 Schoon, Andi 12 Schrader, Paul 250 Schulze, Holger 11, 156, 173, 182 Schwesinger, Sebastian 102 Seay, Toby 12 Sebald, Anton 142 second-order playing 70 sedation 253–5 Selector software 82, 83, 98 sensibility, precision of 119 sensiobiographic walking 227 sensorium commune 121 sensory scale 101 sensory xenologies 13–18 sensory-material substances and experiences 12, 20 SENSOTRA research project 227 sequencers 66, 70 Serres, Michel 120, 158, 455 Sevald, Anton 129f Shannon, Claude 455, 484 Shazam app 48 Sherrard, Philip 324, 325 signal wave 399 SIIKU (artist collective) 354, 355, 356, 359 silence anthropology 319–22 complete absence of sound 449 studying 315–19 see also quietude silence-seekers 322–8 Slabs 71, 72f, 73, 75 SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory 448 Sleep ∞ Over (North American band) 385–9, 400 Sloterdijk, Peter 257, 258, 259 Slow Food Manifesto 133 smart vagus 124 Smith, Naomi 12, 34 Smiths, The (Indie rock band) 267–71 Snider, Anne-Marie 12, 34, 35 Snow, Michael 474 soccer 25 social constructionism 175 social media 46

software 10, 14, 15, 23, 53, 55, 61–2, 69, 74, 77–110, 255, 368, 371, 379, 396, 465 Dalet 81f, 83, 85, 86 decoding 370 digital 89 ecosystems 376, 379 Google 80 and hardware 61–2, 72, 74 music scheduling 88 objects, touching in production practices 92 opening, movements of 90, 92–3 patches 71 and planning 81f, 82 presenting 86–7 and programming 82–6, 95–6 pre-programme 71 public service popular music mainstream flow radio, researching 88–90 RCS Sound Soundware 82 video-editing 38 Somerville, Peter 212, 222 sonic agency 101, 102, 103, 348, 402 sonic anthropology see anthropology sonic body 117, 187, 212, 293, 294, 450 sonic concepts 12 critique 19, 20 sonic data 48 sonic factory 246–50 sonic flux 127 sonic gardening 101–2 sonic home 212, 213, 215, 216, 217 sonic materialism 12 sonic objects 24 sonic persona 127 sonic proximity 109 sonic rupture 18 sonic studies see sound studies sonic writing 154–6 Sony Walkman 50 sound and sounds amplification of see amplification of sound audio quality 41 corporeality of 145 of crinkling shirts 27–9 dimensionality of 28 hair brushing 28 humanly organized 299–302 low-amplitude (mundane) 38, 41

Index materiality of see materiality post-Fordist ambient sounds 250–3 within the body 131 wrapping of 150 see also surround sound sound body 131, 226 sound culture 11, 32, 41 sound fuses 297 sound localizes 296–7 sound maps 217 sound organizes 298 sound production, and digital music 53–5 sound recordings 141, 142 sound signature 207 sound studies 12, 16 amplification of sound 360–2 choice of research approach 18–19 desires of research 151–3 liberating vocal research practices 117–19 listening body of researchers 155, 156, 161 particularization of anthropological research 11 pre-sterneian researchers 151 soundfiles 48, 49 sound system listening 51 soundfiles 43–57 archaeological future 56 creative meditation 44, 46 German high-speed trains 43f, 44–5 as listening devices 45, 48–9 mood management 46 personalization 46, 50, 57 playlists 44, 45–6, 56 productivity tool 51 studying listening devices 51–3 “Sounds Delicious” research project 142 soundscapes 227 ASMR 28, 39 German high-speed trains 44, 45 soundwalking 217 Source-Filter-Model 123 Southall, Aidan 238 Sowodniok, Ulrike 11–12, 111f, 116, 181, 182 SP1200 (Sampling Percussion) 60 speech recognition systems 57 speech-to-song phenomena 481 sphere of exchange 452–3

SPIDERS (Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness) 96, 97 Spotify 50–1, 54, 55, 57, 102, 154 stage nerves 243 Steel, Carolyn 132–3 Steingo, Gavin 95 Stensgaard, Katrine 143 Stern, Daniel 329 Sterne, Jonathan 53, 54–5, 141–2, 444–5 Stewart, Lauren 483 Stjernfelt, Frederik 175 Stokes, Martin 306 Stone Town, Zanzibar 300, 303–5, 309 strangeness 14, 16, 17 strange body 119, 121 strange people 13 weird sensations 31 see also WEIRD acronym streets 225–39 phonographic palimpsests of sensobiographic walks 231–4 polisgraphy and trap of the text 229–31 Turku, Ljubljana 225–8 white noise 236–9 Strickler, Fred 167 Strøget, Copenhagen, pedestrian life 427–32 studios 369–83 being sonically like any other environment 373–7 container technologies for musicking 377–9 decentralization of musical endeavor 379–82 periphonic 369–73 sub-bass frequencies 457 surd 475 surdity 472–4 Sydhaven, Copenhagen 130 symmetrical anthropology 2, 3, 102 synthwave 399 Taarab, musical style 306 Talbot, William Henry Fox, “Pencil of Nature” 63 Tati, Jacques 251 Taylor, Paul 168, 174 technicization 76 technological rationality 64 technologies of the self (Foucault) 44

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556

Index techno-retro-kitsch 56 Teibel, Irv, Environments series 44–5 Thakt (Egyptian music form) 307 Théberge, Paul 67 Theremin 70 Thibaud, Jean-Paul 227, 236–7 thick listening 11 Thompson, Marie 238, 263, 292, 451 Beyond Unwanted Sound 237 “tingling”/“chills” 32, 33, 37 tinnitus 463 Tirovolas, A.K. 480 Tixier, Nicholas 236 tone tests 51 Torgue, Henry 200, 216, 481 Tosi, Antonio 214 Trabant, Jürgen 7 transformation 148–51 extimate transformations 159–61 transhuman 3 transitional objects 64 Trautonium 70 trench whistle (First World War) 24–5 Trobriand Islanders 23 Tsing, Anna 144 Turino, Thomas 306 Turku, Ljubljana 225–8 Uimonen, Heikki 88 underwater hearing 445, 446 unfolding matter 90–2 unheard, the 443–62 absence of the heard 449 aquapraxis of 459–62 cavitation 448–51 circuit of 457–9 circuit of capital 451–7 expanding 451 modes of unhearing 445 unhearing and the subaquatic 446 unhomeliness 14 vagal nerve 124 valorization process 453 Van Drie, Melissa 12 vaporwave 389–92, 397, 399 Vauxhall, Liverpool 211–15 Venäläinen, Juhana 12 vernacular cosmopolitanism 305

Veroli, Patrizia 177 VersaPad semiconductive touchpad 71 Vertov, Dziga 248 video-assisted refereeing (VAR) 25 videos, ASMR 27f, 29, 30, 31, 33–8, 40 Vinay, Gianfranco 177 violin 75 virtual pitch effect 200 virtuosity 72 Vliet, Donald 250 vocal studies 124 vocalization 113–14 vocal performance 119, 120, 122, 127, 270, 271, 299, 316 Voegelin, Salomé 110n1, 156, 407 Vogues, The (vocal group) 251 voice 111–28 appellation 120 corporeal 127 double communicative nature 126 humming 112–13 inbetweenness of vocal research 126 vocalization 113–14 voice body 111f, 116, 181 levels 119–22 voice product design 123 Waldock, Jacqueline 12 Waldron, Emma Leigh 32, 38 walking mobile methodology of 220 sensiobiographic 227 soundwalking 217 Wall Street Crash 70 Wallevik, Katrine 89, 94, 96, 97 Ward, Andrew 169 Ware, Bishop Kallistos 324, 326 Waters, Simon 74 wavelengths 199 Way Out West (WOW) festival, Gothenburg 280, 284, 286–7 Wealthy, Intelligent, Rich, Democratic societies 3 Weaver, Warren 455 Web 2.0 38 Weber, Max 65 weirdness 31 WEIRD acronym 3, 4, 13 see also strangeness

Index Wessel, David 71–2, 72f whispering 33, 34 whistles, as sonic emblems 24–5 White, Hayden 174 white aurality 12 white noise 208, 236–9, 328 white nostalgia 399 Widmer, Gerhard 74 Wieland, Janna R. 129f, 143 Wiener, Norbert 455–6 Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine 456 Williams, Raymond 50 Williams Syndrome 464, 468 WinAmp 54 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 229 work, everyday cultures 95–8 Workflow Orchestration Platform 85

workplace 241–65 music while working 243–6 post-Fordist ambient sounds 250–3 sonic factory 246–50 stage nerves 243 World Exp, Lausanne (1964) 251 wrapping of sound 150 Wulf, Christoph 6, 7, 8, 13, 17 Xenakis, Iannis 470 xenaudial 467, 468, 480 xenofeminism 14 xenology/xenogeneic experiences 13–18, 19 Zanzibar, Stone Town 298, 300, 303–5, 309 Žižek, Slavoj 282–3, 287 Zola, Émile 136 Zuckerberg, Marc 49–50

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