Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place

1 August, 2021 Tese de Doutoramento em Estudos Artísticos – Arte e Mediações Wayback Sound Machine: Sound Through Time, Space, and Place Maile Nicole Wriston Colbert 2 Thesis submitted to fulfill the requirements necessary to obtain the PhD degree in Estudos Artísticos – Arte e Mediações, held under the Scientific guidance of: Professor Maria Irene Aparício, FCSH-IFILNOVA Co-advisor: Professor Carla Montez Fernandes, FCSH-CLUNL Co-advisor: Doctor Jordan Lacey, RMIT Maile Colbert PhD Fellow in Artistic Studies-Art and Mediations Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa [email protected] www.mailecolbert.com Apoio financeiro da FCT e do FSE no âmbito do III Quadro Comunitário de Apoio. 3 Dedicated to… My daughter, Odette, whose joy and wonder has been with me every step of this journey. And Ethelyn Carol Colbert, whose joy and wonder is deeply missed. (January 17, 1925 – May 12, 2019) Dedicated also to… R. Murray Schafer, whose passing occurred On the same day of this thesis completion. In gratitude for everything he gave to the world, His work and words were a beginning To this path, and I am grateful. 4 Thank you Thank you to Slide Clements, for starting me off right on this sonic journey two decades ago. Thank you to my family…my mother, Prof. Jaimee Wriston Colbert for cultivating and nurturing a deep and lasting love for books and words; my father, Dr. Donald A. Colbert, for the curiosity that drives a love for research; my brothers, Ian Colbert, and Nate Colbert, for their love and care of nature and ecology. My extended family for cheering me on from all over geography. My friends for their patience and understanding. My colleagues at FCSH-NOVA, Estudos Artisticos, and IFILNOVA-CineLab. Filmmakers Courtney Stephens, Pacho Velez, Trang Tran, Kelly Sears, Isabelle Carbonell and Sarah Cannon, for letting me experiment and analyze the Wayback Sound Machine with your films, and especially Irene Lusztig, may many films be in our future. David Velez and Miguel Isaza at Sonic Field, for allowing and trusting me with the related series. Professor Maria Irene Aparício for believing in me and this work, for seeing and hearing it when it was still so rough and wild, for guiding me to shape it into what it should be…eternal gratitude! Dr. Jordan Lacey, for coming on to the project when I realized I really needed stronger aural grounding to the world, and for affective sonic ecologies and sonic rupture. And Professor Carla Montez Fernandes With great gratitude, I thank Albert Ortega, Ana Carvalho, Ana Monteiro, Andrea Williams, Andrew Tetzlaff, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bernie and Kat Krause, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Catherine Clover, Courtney Stephens, Craig Gilmore, David Vélez, Eric Leonardson, Hildegard Westerkamp, Irene Lusztig, Isabel A. Ferreira Gould, Jennifer Heuson, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Jenny Graf, João Quinteiro, João Mário Grilo, Kadet Kuhne, Kelly Sears, Luís Gomes da Costa, Makis Solomos, Manrico Montero, Margarida Brito Alves, Marita Sturken, Mark Street, Michael Gitland, Miguel Isaza, Miriam Kolar, Pacho Velez, Norberto Gomes da Costa, Rafaela Salvador, Raquel Castro, Rebecca Baron, Rita Casto Neves, Rui Catalão, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Sandra Camacho, Sofia Ponte, Susana Mouzinho, and the Radical Self-Quarantine group Thank you to, and please forgiveness, anyone I forgot on this page…especially the one who recommended making a list throughout the years, so as not to forget, thank you, and I should have listened! And most of all, thank you to my partner, Rui Colbert Costa, who never had a doubt, and would remind me of that anytime I needed it. 5 Abstract What can we gather from sounding the past? This interdisciplinary art studies project will research various forms of sound from the past, and designing sound for the past, to consider what knowledge and applications can be gained from the concept, particularly within a culture and cultural history in which the visual is predominant within a segregated sensory hierarchy in mediating our perception of the world around us. Within that, this thesis proposes that the relationship between our soundscape and creative sound design can give us key information about how we listen, what we listen for, and what that can tell us. This thesis will show that this information holds benefits and contributions towards many disciplines-including art and cinema, archive studies, ethnography, and ecology-which will be investigated in-depth through practice-based research, case studies, philosophical inquiry, and a new path in sound studies connecting soundscape ecology, sound ethnography, sound art and design, and aural culture. KEYWORDS: Artistic Studies, Sound Studies, Film Sound Studies, Sound Ethnography, Soundscape Ecology, Ecophilosophy, Acoustic Ecology, Sound Archives, Memory Studies, Sound Design, Aurality, Aural Culture. 6 Index Chapter I: Introduction: What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that, what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design?.......................10 I. 1. What past? A triangle of sonic time……………………………………15 a. Perception: time and place of sound………………………………16 b. Nostalgia and memory…………………………………………….27 c. Presentation and (re)presentation: history and heritage……….......29 I. 2. Methodologies: a. Listening to the past à a critical aurality……………...….............34 b. Composing the past à a critical sound design, a critical ear..........38 I. 3. Soundscape...............................................................................................42 a. Acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology......................................43 b. Sound ethnographies and ecologies.................................................44 I. 4. Soundscape à listening...............................................................................48 a. Listening and Deep Listening: A phenomenology of listening, to time, space, and place...........................................................................49 b. The Biophony and IBEs..................................................................52 c. Introduction Conclusion, the path....................................................54 Chapter II: Soundscape à listening à composing and compiling.........................56 II. 1. Future Memory: Listening and the wombscape.....................................57 a. Womb listening................................................................................59 b. Listening towards learning...............................................................61 c. (Re)collecting the Wombscape........................................................62 II. 2. Soundwalks to access time, space, and place..........................................65 a. The first Wayback Sound Machine..................................................67 b. Radio Terramoto and a Historical Soundwalk.................................69 7 c. Soundwalk-walk: Listening backwards, moving forwards..............72 II. 3. Field Recording and Phonography: Archive forming and archive using– time in the medium...........................................................................................79 II. 4. Musique Concrète and the Acoustmatic, a sonic hauntology..................86 II. 5. Collections and conclusions: the sonic constellation and the aural rhizome.............................................................................................................90 a. Wayback Sound Machine in a Sonic Field, a curated collection of thoughts and theories on sound the past...............................................91 b. Sonic Rupture and Sonic Rapture, Towards a Sonic Ecosophy in Sound Design.......................................................................................98 Chapter III: Soundscape à listening à composing and compiling à sound design (and sound art) .............................................................................................123 III. 1. A case for case studies: Artistic work with the Wayback Sound Machine.........................................................................................................124 a Blinding the performer, tuning the audience (Come Kingdom Come) ................................................................................................126 b. Nostalgia and Place (Passageira em Casa & Passageira australis) ...........................................................................................................129 III. 4. Revival and re-enactment, another sonic hauntology and the aural uncanny valley...............................................................................................132 Chapter IV: Soundscape à listening à composing and compiling à sound design à past...........................................................................................................140 IV. 1. What is the archive’s role in sounding the past, and whom does this give voice to?.................................................................................................141 IV. 2 Silence and silent film, a voice from the past.......................................142 IV. 3 Sounding the past towards a future memory........................................146 a. Giving Voice versus Giving a Place to Listen: Irene Lusztig, The Motherhood Archives and Yours in Sisterhood.................................147 8 b. Echoes of Time in the Walls: Pacho Velez and Courtney Steven’s The American Sector..........................................................................155 c. Sound Survey: Why is sounding the past/sound from the past important to your work?....................................................................158 Chapter V: When Everything Became Wayback, sound in the time of Covid19....................................................................................................................167 V.1. Sounding Our Crisis, Part 2....................................................................168 Chapter VI: Conclusions.........................................................................................178 Bibliography.............................................................................................................187 Table of Figures........................................................................................................199 Annex.........................................................................................................................210 9 16 past unless we cease to think of it as an inaccessible object or artifact frozen in a progression of time. 11 (Benjamin, p. IX). It is an image of the past that fuels us with the desire to create narratives of gods and angels, the power to shrink us down to nothing and make us question existence itself, that allows us to project our own humanity upon it. An image from the past, now no longer. But living and present in our own experience of it, that is how we perceive and feel it, that power and that narrative coming from within us in conjunction with our aural present surrounding us at the moment of experience, our soundscape. If we combine that with the knowledge that it was once, is no longer, we have a powerful event. This is a living archive, a rupture in how we think we experience a process or progress of events. And as we travel further into it with both our imaginations and technology, we are even beginning to have the ability to hear it, and for it to be heard. 12 And looking at the already gone light of stars is like experiencing time in sound, already a trace of what was emitting, with the capture of the present, and expansion towards the future. Listening to a moment like this, how do we think about its time? I.1.a. PERCEPTION: time and place of sound Henri Bergson described, the “moment when the recollection (…) is capable of blending so well with present the perception that we cannot say where perception ends or memory begins.” (Bergson, 1911, p. 106) Sound perception is multi-tiered. “In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds, we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself.” (Brentano, 1874, p. 179) Philosophies of sound can be useful in considering time. While most philosophies focused on perception mostly privilege the visible (as we cognitively often privilege the visible), thoughts towards sound perception, and further sound 11 !"Where!we!see! the! appearance! of! a! chain! of! events,!he!sees! one! single! catastrophe,! which! unceasingly! piles! rubble! on! top! of! rubble! and! hurls! it! before! his! feet! [...]! That! which! we! call! progress,!is!this!storm."!(Benjamin,!p.!IX)!! 12 !The! sonification! of! the! stars! through! NASA’s! Kepler! project,! a! building,! living! archive:! http://kepler.nasa.gov/multimedia/Audio/sonification/! ! ! 17 with vision perception, reveal the complexity of the temporal nature to sound, and its relationship to space and place. “What is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as content at the same time.” (Brentano, 1874, p. 180) But what are we apprehending? Are they objects? Are they emissions? Are they properties of objects, or events? If we know what they are, then where are they? Where they are heard, or where they are emitted? We don’t currently have direct answers to these questions, and it is exactly that ambiguity that can make sound so compelling, bonds it to the art world, and renders it a constructive theme for philosophical discourse. Sound does not fit neatly into our worldly rules, and while history tells us we have understood the biology and anatomy of the ear, and its basic functions for a very long time–Aristotle postulated a theory that the inner ear was filled with a special purified air, aer ingenitus, then in 1761 Domenico Cotugno discovered through dissection it was fluid rather than air, and concluded in his dissertation, De aquaeductibus auris humane internae anatomica, (1761) that there were acoustic nerves suspended and oscillating like strings to transmit the sensation of hearing to auditory centers in the brain–we still cannot easily define what exactly sound is, or at what point, i.e. when, sound is. Is it the point where an event pushes airborne waveforms towards the hearing ear; the point those waves enter the ear and convert the waveforms into electrochemical signals that are then transmitted to and processed by the auditory pathways of the brain, or the point of that processing itself? This is the act of hearing: perceiving sound. Our histories of sound perception and light perception are very different. Professor Nicolas Wade asked the audience at the 2016 International Conference on Stereo & Immersive Media in Lisbon, “Why are so many pages given to vision than hearing? Because we have known more about the nature of sound than light. Vision possessed mystery and the problem”. (Wade, 2016) He gave some examples of early thought on sound: • (570-490) Pythagoras demonstrated the mathematical relationship between the fundamentals of vibrating strings and harmonics. • (384-322) Aristotle theorized about displaced particles. • (1564-1642) Galileo Galilei theorized about the pitch of vibrating string. 18 • (1618-1663) Francesco Maria Grimaldi suggested light might operate like sound propagating waves through a medium, before Newton. • (1756-1827) Ernest Chladni “father of acoustics” and Thomas Young (1773-1829). Published texts detailing knowledge of sound production, propagation, and reception, as well as the speed of sound. • (1774-1842) Charles Bell Scottish, an anatomist on hearing. • In 1827 Charles Wheatstone produced the first binaural augmenting instrument, before the stereoscope, he called a “microphone” (He coined the phrase, but Berliner invented the modern microphone in 1876) He knew sound was transmitted by waves through mediums, and his device amplified weak sounds. 13 In their magazine, Explorations, Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter wrote, “Until writing was invented, we lived in an acoustic space (…) Speak that I may see you. Writing turned the spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech, writing was the visualization of acoustic space.” 14 (Carpenter, 1973, p. 35) Walter J. Ong theorizes the inventions of writing and then printing turned an oral world into a visual space, locking words into a visual field. (Ong, 1991. p 117) Hearing dominance gave way to visual; perception is in part cultural. Sound didn’t propose as much mystery, until we got to perception, where most of the sound perception theories are borrowed from light perception. If we take it out of the visual realm philosophy of perception is changed and challenged. Though some of the most compelling theories of sound were borrowed, at least in start, from theories of perception of color. Contemporary philosopher Robert Pasnau’s work in sound perception stems from this (Pasnau, 1999; 2000), and an integral stream within my own thesis here is based on borrowing terms in visual 13 !Wade,! Nicolas.! (2016,! October! 27-29).!Seeingwithtwoeyesandhearingwithtwoears.! International! Conference! on! Stereo! &! Immersive! Media! 2016,! Lisbon,! Portugal.! http://stereoimmersivemedia2016.ulusofona.pt/!! 14 !Carpentar,!Edmund.!(1973).!Sited!in!Eskimo-Realities.!New!York:!Holt,!Rinehart,!and!Winston.! p.!35! 19 culture, 15 to be applied towards an aural culture. This is an argument not against a visual philosophy, but rather towards a sound and vision philosophy (cinema), to be fully challenged (eventually) with combining philosophies of perception of other senses, until we have a whole philosophy of perception that isn’t inhibited by the limiting of the traditional five senses or divided by the categorization of “secondary qualities”, or qualities dependent on “primary qualities”–shape, motion, arrangement of minute particles. Secondary qualities have the “powers to produce various sensations in us”. (Locke, 1690; chap. VIII, sec. 10). While I believe the division of primary and secondary is deeply problematic, 16 Locke still gives power to the secondary qualities as a power of sensation, which is experience, the basis of what fills our mind with ideas as we grow. It is worth mentioning that there are four methods identified by Casey O’Callaghan in his entry "Auditory Perception", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2018, para. 6-8) that can be useful to consider when working towards philosophies of perception that are inclusive to senses outside the visual realm. These are as well excellent terms when speaking on sound design, and I will be using them throughout this work: 1. Translation: information from visual perception studies towards aural 2. Extension: when considering visual perception, an extension to nonvisual modalities may expose phenomena undetected visually 3. Challenge: comparative studies of situations where translation and extension does not match between the visual and other sense [an example of this is the acousmatic as described by Michel Chion, audio positioned neither inside nor outside the image (1994, pp. 128-31; 1999, pp. 17-57; 2016, pp. 139), which will be explored throughout this thesis] 15 !Visuality,! as! defined! by! Nicolas! Mirzoeff! in! “The! Right! to! Look”,! is! “an! old! word! for! an! old! project!(…)!an!early!nineteenth-century!term,!meaning!the!visualization!of!history.”!The!practice! is!“imaginary”,!not!“perceptual”!as!what!is!being!visualized!is!substantial!and!collectively!seen,! created!from!“information,!images,!and!ideas.!This!ability!to!assemble!a!visualization!manifests! the! authority! of! the! visualizer.”! (Mirzoeff,! 2011,! 474)! He! quotes! Rancière! in! that! visuality! presents!authority!as!self-evident,!that!“division!of!the!sensible!whereby!domination!imposes!the! sensible!evidence!of!its!legitimacy.”!(Rancière,!1998,!p.!17,!as!cited!in!Mirzoeff,!2011,!475)! 16 !As!well!I!do!not!believe!we!are!born!into!the!world!with!no!innate!knowledge;!I!will!go!into!this! further!on!in!Chapter!2,!where!I!will!explain!how!we!already!begin!learning!through!sensation!in! the!womb,!and!sound!is!a!major!element!to!this!earliest!learning.! 20 4. Unified approach: applies in a general manner to all perceptual modalities. It is interesting to consider whether the unified approach even exists; or, in a manner closer to what this thesis argues, whether an approach that considers unified modalities and furthers them towards extension and connection, may allow us a fuller glimpse into how we perceive our world. This project will be considering these said methods as well in the process of applying Visual Culture methodologies towards an Aural Culture, and a critical aurality. A philosophy of the perception of sound can reach towards a “further insights about the nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception,” when considering their spatial, causal, and temporal qualities. (O'Callaghan. 2016. para. 2) This thesis will also make the case for the act of listening to be included within a sound philosophy: to think about giving one’s attention to a sound–a decisive action– and highlight that under the more general definition of hearing, the faculty to perceive sounds. Through Theories of Sonic Perception We can begin an overview of theories of sound perception with a useful foundational entry, “Sounds”, from Casati and Dokic in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which organizes issues of sound perception through spatial properties, including: proximal, from where the hearer is (e.g. that tree falling in the forest would not actually make a sound without the hearer there); (2014, chap. 1.2) medial, within the medium of the resonating object and hearer (e.g. waves in air, water, solar plasma); (2014, chap. 2.1) distal, which locates sound at the resonating object (e.g. like colors and shapes, considered often to be a property of the material object), (2014, chap. 3.1) and aspatial theories that have no spatial relevance at their core. (2014, chap. 4.2) This section will go into these theories briefly, but not exhaustively, as I believe that there is truth and useful explanation in all of them, but that the separation of category, like the separation of senses, is where we can get stuck. An example that will come up often in this work is how recordings, and their later uses and re-recording, throws categories of time and space into question. 21 I hear, therefore there is sound. Proximal theories of sound hold at their core the psychology of perception that considers sounds as sensations that are properties of each hearer. This defines the sound as the sensations that are produced when the sound waves enter the ear, as the objects of audition. This speaks to the subjectivity of sound, as an example; we all hear differently based on the relationship of space (expressed sonically through distance, echo, reverberation, and other filters) between the sounding object and us. (2014, chap. 1) The medial theories immerse both sounding object and hearer in an elastic and vibrating medium. The sounding object creates a disturbance in the medium, setting off waves of particles in back-and-forth motion, bumping into each other and setting off another wave at a certain frequency and amplitude–a compression and depression pattern–losing energy over time and distance. (2014, chap. 2) This brings us back to Aristotle and his theory of sound as movement of air. 17 Early theories led to the wave theory. 18 Renè Descartes wrote in Passions of the Soul, that we do not hear the actual sounding object sounding, but rather movements coming from them that then “excite some movement in our nerves which by their means pass to the brain (…) cause diverse perceptions to become evident to our soul.” (1649, p. 11) When I initially studied sound physics, I aligned myself more with wave theory, as there is something eloquent to its connection between the sounding object, the medium, and our ear, on a propagation line. But there are some challenging critiques to the theory as well, for example metameric sounds that feel the same to the ear; let’s say in pitch, though the properties of the mediums they travelled in are different. 19 And we might ask where is the sound then, when separated from its sounding object and in motion? And would this mean sound is still dependent on its sounding object to make it a sound in that medium, to start the process? Would that render sound a process that connects it as a series of events in time? 17 !On-the-Soul,!420b!10:!“sound!is!a!particular!movement!of!air”! 18 !!“Sounds!are!produced!and!heard!by!us!when…a!frequent!vibration!of!air!shaken!in!tiny!waves! moves! a! certain! cartilage! of! the! tympanum! in! our! ear…! the! more! frequent! the! vibration,! the! higher! the! pitch;! the! less! frequent,! the! lower.”! (Galileo,! 1623).! But! Galileo! also! supported! proximal!theory,!perhaps!wisely!sensing!the!complexity!at!hand.! 19 !! Casati,! Roberto! and! Dokic,! Jerome,! "Sounds",!TheStanfordEncyclopediaofPhilosophy-(Fall! 2014!Edition),!Edward!N.!Zalta!(ed.).!While!I!have!seen!this!theory!stated!multiple!times!in!my! readings!on!sound!perception,!I!have!yet!to!see!an!actual!example!or!study!cited.!It!seems!a!case! where!color!theory!has!been!translated,!but!I’m!skeptical!that!this!argument!could!be!applied! with!strength.! 22 That gets complicated when we consider that sound perception locates sound as where the sounding object is, and there are arguments as to whether that sense of “center” is more sense of location (e.g., a sense of both distance from hearer and direction), or direction alone; and to how much of this is an auditory illusion. (Casati & Dokic, chap. 2.3.3.) But center could be considered origin, and not pure phenomenon–we know there is a sounding object; we know this is an origin, and sometimes our perception directs us to it as the center to which the soundwaves are expanding from. (Sorensen, 2007, chap. 13) But not always. There is also the consideration of a distinction between source medium, and environment medium. The source would be the actual material of the object sounding, differentiated from the medium the waves then travel through before being received. 20 This all gets then further complicated when considering recordings, which I will address later in Chapter 2. Considering waves in source medium brings us to the door of the distal theories of sound; one of which frames sounds as properties of material objects, like shape, or (many think) colors. The actual Property View has immediate, though in part semantic, problems within the idea that objects produce sounds (though, clearly in a way most do). But the related Event Theories are interesting and relevant to explore here–sound as located and temporal events. 21 Located Event theory has sounds located at their source through located vibration processed. (Casati & Dokic, chap. 3.2) Casati and Dokic (1994) theorize that a medium is required which transmits information from a vibrating object to the hearer, yet the medium that transmits is not essential to the actual existence of the sound; sounds are either events or extended processes in time, with a beginning and end. If we consider the tuning fork example, in this theory it begins to vibrate and ends its vibrations whether immersed or not in a vibrating medium, the medium simply reveals in audition. This places the sound in a clear time frame, whether heard 20 !A!useful! example! is! a! tuning! fork,!which! will! be! a! sounding! object! that! will! be! returned! to! multiple! times! in! this! thesis! and!was! an! integral! part! of! the! soundtrack! for! one! of! the! case! studies,! specifically! for! characteristics! and! properties! of! relationship! between! itself,! as! a! sounding!object,!and!its!environment.! 21 !Casati,!Roberto,!Dokic,!Jerome!and!Di!Bona,!Elvira,!"Sounds",!The-Stanford-Encyclopedia-ofPhilosophy-(Summer!2020!Edition),!Edward!N.!Zalta!(ed.),!URL!=! https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/sounds/!! 23 or not. 22 However, problems arise again, when heard, of location–some sounds still elude location, and wave theories allow this. This gets interesting when we consider recorded sounds, and especially sound design, which uses dislocation and mislocation of sounds to affect perception. John Kulvicki takes this a step further in the Dispositional View, stating that; “sounds are dispositions of objects to vibrate in response to being stimulated. Sounds are perceived transiently, but they are not perceived as being transient and they are not in fact transient” (Kulvicki, 2008b, p. 2) As color is essentially the result of an object stimulated by light, compression waves (sound) are a result of an object stimulated by an impulse containing relevant frequencies, or what Kulvicki calls onomatopoeically, a “thwack”. (2008b, p. 4) The thwack reveals the sound in the object by stimulating the frequencies it responds better to (again, think tuning forks). Kulvicki claims, “objects sound roughly the same whether it is white noise [i.e., an impulse] or something reasonably far from it that stimulates them”. (2008b, p. 9) This aural constant within a sound field will be a point returned to when I bring up further on Information Bearing Elements, or IBEs. Dispositional Theory also seems to reveal a spectrum of dispositional constants, including constant characteristics to attack patterns, decay patterns, vibration patterns, patterns when rubbed or brushed, or broken–these patterns seem to both support the theory that there are stable sound characteristics to objects, as well as endorsing the theory that there are other unheard sounds involved–within the dispositional account–“invisible”…an idea that will be explored in some of my case-studies further on. (Kulvicki, 2008b, p. 14) So, a thwack reveals a sound–and then? What is the thing that happens after? And what if the initial sound is outside the constant, as happens sometimes? What of recorded sound, or transmissions, where there is distance from the sound made? Kulvicki calls these hearings. (2008b, p.8) Separate but attached by causality to the sound as disposition, we experience episodes of hearing the dispositional sound, and the sense of the sound lasting past its thwack, or whatever sounded it, is an impression (perhaps like a recording). The Relational Event Theory gives a bit more weight to that hearing moment, a hybrid theory holding sounds as relational events involving 22 !Ibid.! 24 both source and surrounding medium. (O’Callaghan, 2007, pp. 65-66, 70) O’Callaghan postulates that when Aristotle describes in On the Soul sound making as happening because something strikes something else in something, which strikes something else again, “and this last is air”, he meant that sound is not movement of air, but rather a disturbing event on a medium from a vibrating object that sets it moving. The sounds depend existentially on the disruption of that medium. (2007, pp. 60-61) All of these theories inform my work in different ways, as I will show throughout this thesis. They will come up again, and the problems with each render them for me not flawed, but incomplete with missing pieces. Or rather, they are pieces themselves to a whole that is on a level we have not been able to yet imagine or put together, most likely due to our own limited perception–we can only even sense sound on a limited spectrum. If we consider what we call average human capacity for hearing alone, we’re in the very much-generalized range of 20Hz to 20 kHz, which is leaving out the Deaf, 23 the recently-deaf, and hearing loss by aging and injury–about five percent of the world’s population, or 360 million people. 24 Hearing loss is also on a spectrum, really none of us hear the same, and this is for a myriad of reasons that will be explored throughout the thesis, from mechanical to cultural, with many inbetweens. Hearing is subjective, so any theory that holds hearing as the point of sound, needs to embrace that complexity. What can happen if we do away with holding sound perception to space and try to think about sound non-locationally? Aspatial theories don’t completely do away with space but try to resolve the back and forth of sound perception theories that pingpong between the sounding object and/or auditory perception as intrinsically special. For example, philosopher Brian O’Shaughnessy does not believe that sound has no spatial quality, but that, “while we have the auditory experience of hearing that a sound comes from (point) p, we do not have any experience that it is here where it 23 !Deaf,!with!a!capital!D,!is!the!preferred!description!for!those!who!are!pre-linguistically!deaf,! their!whole!lives,!rather!than!those!who!became!deaf!later!in!life,!after!language!acquisition.!For! someone!who!is!Deaf,!sign!language!is!their!first!language.! 24 !McPhillips,!Elena.!2016.!World-Wide-Hearing-Loss:-Stats-from-Around-the-World.!Retrieved! January!7,!2019:!https://www.audicus.com/world-wide-hearing-loss-stats-from-around-theworld/! ! 25 now sounds”. (O’Shaughnessy, 2000, p. 446) There is also the consideration to our own inference, our knowledge of things and happenings with how sound basically works: “…awareness of environmental things and happenings thanks to audition is epistemically mediated by awareness as of sounds and auditory objects, but does not itself constitute auditory perceptual awareness as of those things and happenings.” (O’Callaghan, 2016, chap. 2.3.1) This will again be later discussed with Information Bearing Elements. Which does this thesis support, or rather bring into argument? In a way–in varied, particular ways–I will bring in support from all of them, and connect this to the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis and Information Bearing Elements, taking into account a full soundscape, which includes within the anthropophony (environmental sounds that are created by human beings), the biophony (the acoustic environment often thought of as “natural” and including animal sound), and geophony (non-animal sounds such as weather and water); (Krause, 2008, pp. 73-80) object, medium, and hearer. Event Theory under Aspatial Theories of sound perception can be especially useful with this. If we consider the ontology of listening to our soundscapes with the ontology to listen to music–ontology to hear sounds as music–we can hear sounds as events of whose happening is through our perception, though not completely reliant on it. (Scruton, 2009, pp 28-30, 57-58) Even further and flipping Scruton’s argument a bit, we can consider the probability, as Krause proposes, that listening to our environment is what actually and initially shaped our ontology of music and sense of tonality within it. “Humans, like other animals in the world, were drawn to geophonic voices because they contained fundamental messages: those of food, a sense of place, and spiritual connection.” (Krause, 2012, p. 39) Like in color perception, we could also allow for auditory illusion, and with so much subjectivity, this illusion is an integral, constantly non-constant part of auditory perception. To put simple, our brain seems to base our perception of the world on our system’s sampling of that world, organizing through patterns, and sometimes filling in the gaps. 25 Accepting illusion–what we call illusion–is accepting complexity. Illusion by its general use definition is often negative, for example an 25 !!!Jung,!Yoon!Mo!&!Shen,!Jackie!Jianhong.!2008.!“First-order!modeling!and!stability!analysis!of! illusory! contours“,! in!JournalofVisualCommunicationandImageRepresentation,!Volume! 19,! Issue!1,!January!2008.!pp.!42-55! 32 auditory, where the unheard, the disappeared, are sounded and resonate within the listeners, perhaps provoking thought that leads to action. (2018, p. 3) What is past? We can present that. We do it all the time. Presentation: the giving of something to someone; the manner of style in which something is giving or displayed; from the Latin praesentare, to ‘place before’. Present is to be in a particular place, or to be fully involved in what you are experiencing, happening now. Presentation if the act of presenting, something presented such as a symbol or image that represents something else; something offered or given; set forth for the attention of the mind; or a persuasive and descriptive account; an immediate object of perception, cognition, or memory. Prae: before, esse: be à praeesse à present: being at hand à present. 33 (Re)present. Represent: to bring clearly before the mind; to serve as a sign or symbol of; to portray or exhibit in art, to depict; to serve as the counterpart or image (and sound?) of; to act the part or role of; to take the place of or act in the place of; to correspond to in essence; to serve as a specimen, an example; to form an image in the mind or apprehend through an idea–to recall in memory. Represent: to present again, or anew. 34 What can we gather from sounding the past? For one thing a sound philosophy of time in material, and this with vision can explore the powerful effect of asynchronicity, and the acousmatic as described by Chion (1994, pp. 129-131; 1999, pp. 17-57; 2016, pp. 139)–that effect of the disembodied sound off-screen, like a deity, or perhaps what St. Augustine would call eternity. Time alluded to or conjured outside the frame. The term was first used by Pierre Schaeffer to describe listening to musique concrete, and sounds from the radio, records, telephones, tape records– sounds that one hears without seeing the causes behind it. (Schaeffer, 1966; Chion, 2009, p. 11) The opposite of what he calls direct listening, when sound sources can be seen. (Schaeffer, 1966; Chion, 2009, p. 11) The “audiovisual complex”, as Chion terms audio-visual perception, is split, isolating the sound and changing the way we hear. He felt the experience reduced sound to the act and experience of hearing alone, creating a “sound object,” and simultaneously a perceptual awareness for the listener. 33 !Definitions!from!the!Merriam-Webster!Dictionary.! 34 !Ibid.!! ! 33 (Schaeffer, 1966; Chion, pp 11-13) This concept is investigated with some of the artistic case studies in this project as well. Through frame and immersion, another presentation While this thesis explores media archives, and potential approaches of artists working with them, and the potential of sound within them, I write almost exclusively with a concentration on film and video, and sound’s relationship with those mediums and the artists working with those mediums. The reasons have to do with the phenomenological nature of time-based media, and its relationship with time and memory, its ability to jump through time and space, to stitch together new times, new spaces. And it also has to do with our important and complex relationship with the frame, with the image within the frame, and the sound that carries us outside the frame. The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms a part of a ‘field’”. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962. p 4) The field, the frame. We are push and pull from the beginning, in constant and fluid flux with our boundaries and restraints. A young human will test; will push to be pushed back, to know what boundaries surround them, to feel those boundaries allows them to push themselves further with a sense of safety. Boundaries and borders are important to us, as much as we might at times fantasize escaping them, we keep coming back. A frame, as a structure, separates the inside from the outside, gives us a dualistic impression to lean on. It creates a visible and tangible border that allows this to be visualized without touch, from afar if we rather. It keeps, it emphasizes, and it defines a point of view. We can choose to put something in it; it is a slice of the world we can control. It can shrink our world down to a size and state that we can handle, in which we can investigate, in which we can master. It gives focus to the wandering eye. In language, it does the same for an idea, urging the plan, constructing the shape. In biology, it helps towards an idea of our physical body as a whole, how we see the shape of others, then ourselves, with our parts united and separate. In film and video, it is the border that encompasses what the maker wants to be seen, and what is transmitted for the audience to see, the line around intention. In film and video, it is also the static image–one of 24 per second, or 30 per second, or 50 per second, and so 34 on–that in collaboration with our eye and mind, the persistence of vision, will create the illusion of movement, of change over time, so of time itself. The frame in social science speaks of a social phenomenon involving a set of concepts and theories on how we organize each other and ourselves in reality. For example, a frame in thought could be an interpretation of reality, and a frame in communication could consist of the communication of that interpretation of reality between two actors. (Druckman, 2001, p. 225) The frame is postmodern, within all its antiquity. A ‘schema of interpretation’, collected through time and experience of biological and cultural influences, then utilized in the attempt to make sense of the world. This makes the frame sound two dimensional, which is how we tend to think of it first. But a frame can also increase the capacity for immersion, allowing us to focus and go inward and deeper into the visual, and into ourselves. A frame can help focus the challenge to itself. A frame can be a window, and if a frame is a window, it can be an open window allowing its soundtrack and the soundscape of the interior and exterior to merge and expand. This is what cinema can do with the relationship of the screen and sound, our perceiving bodies with their biological and cultural influences, and the push and pull between them. 35 Salomé Voegelin describes how “sound narrates, outlines and fills, but is always ephemeral and doubtful. Between my heard and the sonic object phenomenon I will never know its truth but can only invent it, producing a knowing for me. This knowing is the experience of sound as temporal relationship.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 5) She points out that this is not a relationship between one thing and another, e.g., the dualism of the sounding object and the listener, but “the thing is sound itself”. (2010, p. 5) Sound is a relationship between. Like cinema is a relationship between what the filmmakers create and the audience, cinema is that between. The film sound narrating, outlining, and filling. I.2 Methodologies: listening to the past à a critical aurality 35 !These!thoughts!led!to!the!Sonic-Field-series!launch,!Soundtracks-for-Strange-Days,!during!the! 2020! Covid-19! pandemic’s! first! months.! This! will! be! written! about! more! in! detail! further! on.! https://sonicfield.org/2020/05/call-for-works-sonic-social-distance-and-soundtracks-forstrange-days/!! 35 Accessing an Aurality: What can giving voice to history and heritage tell us about the past in the present, and what could that mean for our future? This research is in part an investigation into an interdisciplinary use of terms and methodologies from visual studies, towards an application in sound studies, in a similar method that perception studies took when converting light studies to sound. This is to say, that this project will work to highlight the interdisciplinary relationship between the two, rather than a superimposition of one area over another. The crossovers, and even areas where visuality is not so commensurable to aurality, still reveal valuable information and application towards the currently quite changeable borders of critical sound studies. I have found the work of Marita Sturken and Nicholas Mirzoeff on visual culture particularly applicable towards a study of aural culture. Visual Culture came together in the 1990’s to, “investigate the convergence of questions of representation.” 36 Visual Culture methodologies are already being applied towards considering the representation of images in our visual archives, this project calls for the same to be applied to our aural archives. I revisited John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (asking myself why there was no equivalent Ways of Hearing) and found myself questioning aspects of his emphasis on seeing, particularly his belief that seeing establishes our place in the surrounding world. (Toop, p. XI) The limited (but growing) literature I have found existing on aural culture has relationships to sound ethnographies and anthropologies, with a tendency to be quite recent, and most, such as Bull and Back’s The Auditory Cultural Reader, (2003) and Smith’s Hearing History, A Reader, (2004) are attempting to address a world that gives preference to the consideration of visual over aural. Many of these theories and methods display a need for more sensory consideration in cultural research in general, and this project will make a clear relationship between the application in the aforementioned fields, with the arts and artistic studies, as well as ecology. I came to the term “aurality” writing with researcher and artist Jennifer Heuson on the subject of the possible adaptation of terms and methods used in visual 36 !Mirzoeff!states!in!the!Sound,!Vision,!Action!Colloquium!at!McGill!University!2014!organized!by! himself,! sound! studies! scholar! Jonathan! Sterne,! and! Tamar! Tambeck.! Retrieved! June! 5,! 2016:! www.soundvisionaction.cc!! 36 studies towards a sonic equivalent. 37 Sound historian Veit Erlmann defines aurality as the interpretation of the culture and biological, and also states that aurality is still a matter of, “percussing, discussing, percussing.” (Erlmann, 2010, p. 342) Like a diagnosis, knowledge comes through examination and often experimentation. Cultural and biological influences and information will play an important role when further on we relate aurality to the relationships of listening bodies within a soundscape, exploring this with the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis and Information Bearing Elements. “Aurality” is defined as the quality, condition, or degree of being aural, of the ear or sense of hearing. “Aural” refers to the ear, to hearing, an act that is often passive. “Oral” to the mouth, to speaking, an act that is always active. 38 Listening is an active aural act, and an activity increasingly less practiced. We are becoming un-tuned to the bombardment of information of our surroundings, to the information through our devices. We are increasingly passive in how this information enters us; as hearing is an embodied act, we embody whatever this information may be. My thesis addresses how sound art and design, with a focus on listening, can create counter-auralities to passive hearing. A counter-aurality is borrowing the term countervisuality from Nicolas Mirzoeff, who defines it as a way of not just doing (in his case looking, in this case listening) differently, but an attempt to reconfigure, dismantle, rupture, how we have been doing (looking, listening) it. (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. 24) Sound enters us “pure”, we perceive all sound in our frequency range, there is no earlid 39 to close sound out. Listening requires a choice to concentrate, and activation in parts of our brain that often overlap the areas we use when speaking. We listen, we process, we can consider, we can express our consideration and expression of what we listen to, and what we listen for; can transfer information and create new information within the relationship to our “audience”. This can happen in many forms, have a use through many applications, and be effective in many areas. 37 !I! would! like! to! further! note! that! within! an! early! investigation,! I! read! the! work! of! Jennifer! Heuson,! who!had! recently! conducted! quite! extensively! research!into!the! question! of!an! Aural! Culture,!aural!politics,!and!the!use!of!the!term!aurality,!discovering!her!research!has!moved!my! work!forward!considerably.!! 38 !Radboud!University!Nijmegen.!2010,!August!16.!"Speaking!and!listening!share!large!part!of! brain!infrastructure."!ScienceDaily.!Retrieved!September!29,!2016:!! www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110816084007.htm!! 39 !While!the!term!“earlid”!is!often!associated!with!R.!Murray!Schafer,!as!used!in!The-Tuning-of-theWorld!(1977)!to!describe!the!physical!inability!to!close!out!sound!from!a!hearing!body,!the!term! has!been!around!since!the!mid!16th!century.!Retrieved!December!8,!2019:! https://www.lexico.com/definition/earlid!! 37 Aurality is not just about sounds, but about how hearing and listening and even imagining sounds works to generate emotions and affect as well as creating atmospheres that are both lived in and alive. (Heuson, 2015b, p. 30) In The Visual Culture Reader, Mirzoeff describes Visual Culture as “critiquing the lives, powers, desires, and needs of images”. (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. 3) We can replace “images” with “sounds” as a method towards a critical aurality. He describes visuality as a technique of colonial and imperial practice where “power visualizes History to itself”, (Mirzoeff, p 3) claiming authority to produce consent. Aurality examples of this can be found in music, archives, radio, television, cinema, news, and as Heuson writes, museums–all forms of sound design in our cultural institutions. It can also be found in nature, or rather what we consider Nature. The sounds of industry were aestheticized, marketed as a positive sign of progress and Western development. That same noisy progression and pollution that has led to our current Climate Crisis was also the noise that set out to conquer and tame Nature and indigenous people, rendering silence and voicelessness in the face of such volume. Mirzoeff writes in the section “Anthropocene (An)Aesthetics,” in “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” (2014) on how the human conquest of Nature aestheticized our landscapes (and soundscapes) pollution (think of the sound and smoke of factories portrayed as symbols of progression), leading to a loss of perception (aesthesis, those factories become usual and unremarkable in our landscapes), becoming what he calls anaesthetics, to be expected and tolerated. (p. 220) In the essay, “The Right to Look,” (2011) Mirzoeff places listening as a base of action, as a way to be present. This is expanded upon by Dr. Isabel Ferreira Gould, in her chapter, “Acoustic Remains: Listening for Colonialism and Decolonialism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Life Writing”, (Gould, 2018; 2020) when she writes of aural remembrance, and uses the legal term, earwitness, when “listening connects the self to others and functions as a way of resisting from within”. (Gould, 2018;2020, p. 1) In the archives of Figueiredo’s writing, Gould finds “ear-witnessing and aural remembrance are intimately connected to the politics of self-representation in the text” and can only be reconstructed as echoes of the past through the writer’s autobiographical voice in the present. (Gould, 2018; 2020, p. 4) Voegelin points out 38 that while the desire to see a whole, leading us to maps and borders, and traces and certainties, is what is behind Visuality, with the outcome of a sense of objectivity, auditory engagement “when it is not in the service of simply furnishing the pragmatic visual object, pursues a different engagement. Left in the dark, I need to explore what I hear. Listening discovers and generates the heard.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 4) R. Murray Schafer, founder of the World Soundscape Project, and author of The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, (1977) begins a foundational beginning with his work towards a counter-aurality, but it is problematic in its own privilege and separation. Even the chapters in Part One separate “The Natural Soundscape” (p. 15) from “The Rural Soundscape”, (p. 43) to “From Town to City”. (p. 53) He divides our soundscapes into a dualistic lo-fi or hi-fi category, the hi-fi soundscape allowing for more discrete sounds to be heard, allowing for more diversity. This is indeed often the sign of a healthy and functioning environment, and humans as well as other being will get stressed in what he calls a lofi soundscape–the stress of processing so much acoustic information, if you aren’t used to it. He writes the lo-fi soundscape was introduced by the Industrial Revolution, and then extended by the Electric Revolution. (Schafer, 1977, p. 71) He refers to it as Sound Imperialism. “Western Man leaves his calling card all over the world (…) local culture is pulverized into the background.” (Schafer, 1977, p. 77) Leading up to Schafer and Acoustic Ecology’s criticisms of urban noise as purely negative, in need of eradication. This doesn’t allow room for a critical counter-aurality that takes into full account the many people that for many reasons have to or choose to (or often a complex mix of both) live in noisy soundscapes like cities. To properly address the issue of noise and its affects in these places, we need to address their history, their relationship with their history, and the relationships of its inhabitants with the soundscape and what they may or may not call noise–we need to consider complex and complicated objective and subjective auralities. I.2.a. à composing the past à a critical sound design, a critical ear The approach this thesis takes is an approach Voegelin describes, challenging simultaneously the ideas of objectivity and subjectivity (as she states a 39 good philosophy of sound art will do), with the collective, relations, meaning, and sense-making. “The understanding gained is a knowing of the moment as a sensory event that involves the listener and the sound in a reciprocal inventive production”. (Voegelin, 2010, p. 5-6) A sonic sensibility, for Voegelin and this project, is a method towards making thinkable the complexity and connection of time and space, with critical evaluation and engagement. (Voegelin, p. XVI) To ask again, if sensing is of an essence to an embodied experience, how can we create a sensual past in the present, and what do we consider within that act? A consideration of sense is key to the work of Heuson. In her essay, On Hearing Together Critically: Making Aural Politics Sensible Through Art and Ethnography, (2015a) Heuson writes about a “politics of sensing through the productions of aurality”. Through six summers of fieldwork and practice-based research and art, she explored tourist venues utilizing history, heritage, and myth in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and traced how aural experiences are used to “sell American heritage” in presenting a constructed past. (Heuson, 2015a, pp. 74-75) Aural modes of production are subtle, yet powerful, and so an excellent means for managing experiences of the past. (2015a, p. 73) Aurality considers that embodiment of the past in the present; considers the experience a sensual one, and therefore a personal one, and still yet a passive one if merely heard and not listened to. She calls for a responsibility in this, an acknowledgement of the power of choice in giving voice to the past, a heritage to a sound. What is the artist’s role in the archive and with sounding the past, and how can that strengthen a critical practice? How can these questions lead to a critical aurality, and a critical sound design? As if now worn out, the century of cinema, television, photography and audio records relinquishes control to less tangible sensations of a new time. But this sudden growth suggests that the phenomenon of sound in itself, distinct from music and speech, has been neglected in the past (…) sound — and by sound I mean the entire continuum of the audible and inaudible spectrum, including silence, noise, quiet, implicit and imagined sound — can be identified as a sub-text, a hidden if uncertain history within otherwise silent media. (Toop, 2010, p. XIII) 40 “Distinct from music and speech,” articulates an important clarification to this research, in consideration of both soundscape as well as sound design. In comparison to voice studies and musicology, and their related fields, there has been a drought in sound studies dealing with the other elements of our sonic environments. Similarly, within the relatively small amount of text I’ve found devoted to cinematic sound design, often there is precedence towards voice-over and musical elements in the soundtrack. But just as visual studies can allow an adaptation of work under its umbrella towards a critical aurality here, so then can some research in voice studies and musicology. The international symposium Musique et écologies du son: Projets théoriques et pratiques pour une écoute du monde/Music and ecologies of sound: Theoretical and practical projects for a listening of the world, was held at Université Paris 8, in 2013. I was fortunate to attend and present a paper there, the first presentation of the earliest form of this thesis. This international symposium was of great significance to many areas in sound studies and in the following three years four volumes of proceedings have been published with essays from top thinkers in the fields, (Solomos et al, 2016) the last and latest with which I wrote a review of for the annual scientific publication Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, 40 an integral source from The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, 41 and the journal that first published my earliest work on this research as well. Interconnectivity and an urge against dualism are a continual theme throughout the proceedings and is an important contemporary perspective in consideration of ecology. From thought on nature and culture, to urban and rural, to music and noise; what is desirable and undesirable in and from sound, what is individual and what is social in our relationship to sound, conservation and preservation, phonography and phenomenology, landscape and soundscape and the human and non-human within them. The tension between these and related categories-and what can be found and discussed between them, or what can be found and discussed if we do away with them, or what can be found and discussed if we 40 !Colbert,!Maile.!2017.!“Musique!et!écologies!du!son!Propositions!théoriques!pour!une!écoute!du! monde!/!Music!and!ecologies!of!sound!Theoretical!Projects!for!a!Listening! of!the!World,!Reviewed!by!Maile!Colbert”.!Soundscape:-The-Journal-for-Acoustic-Ecology,-Volume16:-Sounds-Emergent:-Diverse-Ecologies-Part-II.-p.!35:! https://www.wfae.net/uploads/5/9/8/4/59849633/soundscape_vol16.pdf!! 41 !The! World! Forum! for! Acoustic! Ecology! was!founded! in! 1993! as! a! multidisciplinary! international! association! studying! the! social,! aesthetic,! cultural,! and! ecological! aspects! of! the! world’s!soundscapes:!http://wfae.net/!! 41 interconnect them-forges towards theories and methodologies on sound-music ecologies and ecophilosophy. 42 As researcher Ljubica Ilic writes in the publication, in her essay “Between Retreat and Return: Rethinking the Sonic Pastoral”: “We are, globally, faced with the fact that the environment is one whole (…) The symbolic mesh that we live in, intertwined in all possible manners, requires more subtle choices, even when sound is in question.” (Ilic, 2016, p. 256) The environment considered as a whole, or a complex and interconnected rhizome. “Every sound is evidence of a particular, earthly vitality, and the provenance and impact of these vitalities is of course the business of sound ecology,” (Nelson, 2016, p. 209) reads a key statement from the text “But Does the World Listen? Some Thoughts on Rhythmic Bonding Between Humans and the Sounding World”, from author Peter Nelson. The essays in the book consider in various ways, from various angles, the embodied information gained from the sound of place connecting the listener to their surroundings, such as the text from Makis Solomos and Frédérick Duhautpas that considers sound and music’s ability to allow us the experience of place, and this ability allowing the “capacity to create links, connections, and bonds,” taking as example the works and writing of Hildegard Westerkamp. (2016, p. 75) Jordan Lacey calls for an ecophilosophy towards sound studies, encouraging us to consider the impact of a soundscape with imagination to provide a “sense of the subjective in the natural, which interrelates with the mental space of the listener”. (Lacey, 2016, p. 149) As Guattari states, ecosophy is concerned with the whole of subjectivity. (2008, p. 2) Soundscape ecology focuses on the relationship between living beings and their environment through sound, and so this relationship is of course inclusive to music and sonic designs and interconnected with really any sonic studies one might consider. Frans Mossberg, points out in the section “Fragmentation of the Field” in his wonderfully comprehensive, “Soundscape, Noise, and Music in Interdisciplinary. Research and Design”: “The complexity of exposure to sound in today’s life and urban environment calls for interdisciplinary approaches that encompass technical, 42 !Guattari,!F.!1989.-Trois-ecologies.!Paris:!Editions!Galilée.!Guattari!defines!ecophilosophy!(also! referred!to!as!ecosophy)!as!a!philosophy!towards!an!ecological!harmony,!highlighting!a!need!for! discourse! to! be! embedded! in! an! understanding! of! the! interconnectedness! of! social! and! environmental.! ! 48 < Figure 3 > Jennifer Heuson, when writing about the silence of the representations of indigenous people in the American Southwest museums, calls for a more artistic approach to ethnography, arguing for anthropologists to grapple with the sensorial representations and politics of their practices. She asks them to ask themselves in their practice “how to make the past sensible to the present”. (Heuson, 2015a, p. 73) How can we share sense across times, places, and peoples, towards a shared understanding. “Sound in its varied forms works to forge common sentiments.” (Heuson, 2015a, p. 76) The power of aurality is its description of the process of mediating and making sound, silence, noise, and linking this to emotional affect. (Heuson, 2015a, p. 77) Her initial approach considered sound as something that could be quantified and contained, then documented and offered as evidence. I can relate to this assumption, having approached my work in a similar way, initially trying to approach as “science”, rather than “art”. In working with methods from soundscape studies and sound ethnographies, it was inadequate. When Heuson also approached tourism as post-colonial, and approach that has been important in contemporary assessment of representations and narratives of the past in archives, this helped to form critical aural culture assessments. The tourism industry (re)produced “stark contrasts between the natural and cultural world, and between Native and non-Native peoples”. (Heuson, 2015b, p. 93) She considers these productions in heritage and tourism venues forms of “frontier aurality”, and what is called for is a counter-aurality to them. (2015b, p. 31) The Wayback Sound Machine as well needed to go beyond soundscape studies and sound ethnographies, though each of those fields is important to this interdisciplinary work. It needed as a thesis to highlight and discuss writing and works that explored these disciplines’ overlaps with sound art and design, and as a conceptual tool in art practice, explore and study those same overlaps, and how sound in artwork allows complex information to be sensible. Art studies allows for the complication and complexity to be an important part of knowledge. And the base for all of this, is listening. I. 4. Soundscape à listening 49 …hearing has evolved as our alarm system — it operates out of line of sight and works even while you are asleep. And because there is no place in the universe that is totally silent, your auditory system has evolved a complex and automatic “volume control,” fine-tuned by development and experience, to keep most sounds off your cognitive radar unless they might be of use as a signal that something dangerous or wonderful is somewhere within the kilometer or so that your ears can detect. This is where attention kicks in. 51 (Horowitz,!2012,!para.!5) There was a point of time in the wild, as the wild was becoming less wild, when listening became not as much an act towards survival and began to lean towards the aesthetic and recreational…or (re)creational. “Re”, that timely prefix connoting movement through time–again, back, repeat. Much of this (re)search is about (re)presentation: a disruption of a history, a transposition, a compelling heterogeneous meshing of contexts–recordings and art–preservation, presentation, and perception. An important (re)occurring point will (re)peat throughout this thesis…when we listen to recorded sound, at what point, or points are we sonically perceiving? Also, important will be to consider: why is that important? I.4.a. Listening and Deep Listening: A phenomenology of listening: to time, space, and place Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears. (Oliveros, 1974) I feel it is important to address the experience of listening as also separate from sound perception. Listening is developed, and so also adds a layer of complexity and subjectivity to sound perception. For example, when we perceive a recorded sound, we may have a learned ear towards placing the sound of the recording material into the past. Listening skills are contextually variable. This is again why studies of sound ethnographies can be important to consider. 51 !Seth!S.!Horowitz!was!an! auditory! neuroscientist! at!Brown! University!and! the!author!of! TheUniversal-Sense:-How-Hearing-Shapes-the-Mind.!2012.!London:!Bloomsbury.!This!quote!is!from!his! article:! “The! Science! and! Art! of! Listening.”! TheNewYorkTimes.! Retrieved! August! 7,! 2015:! http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/opinion/sunday/why-listening-is-so-much-more-thanhearing.html!! 50 In the section titled, “How Pantagruel, being at sea, heard various unfrozen words,” from The Fourth Book of Pantagruel (1552) of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, (1530-1564), the giant, Pantagruel, and his crew are on a sea voyage. Pantagruel stops their talking and asks them to listen, thinking he is hearing “some people talking in the air”. They stop and, “…with full ears sucked in the air as some of you suck oysters, to find if we could hear some sound scattered through the sky”. (Rabelais, 1552, p. 1704) They were frightened, as they could hear but not see, voices of men, women, children, horses, and weapons. His crew becomes terrified, fearing they are under siege and outnumbered. Pantagruel begs calm and to see whom they are first, saying, I have read that a philosopher named Petron was of opinion that there were several worlds that touched each other in an equilateral triangle; in whose centre, he said, was the dwelling of truth; and that the words, ideas, copies, and images of all things past and to come resided there; round which was the age; and that with success of time part of them used to fall on mankind like rheums and mildews. (…) Aristotle affirms Homer's words to be flying, moving, and consequently animated. Besides, Antiphanes said that Plato's philosophy was like words which, being spoken in some country during a hard winter, are immediately congealed, frozen up, and not heard; for what Plato taught young lads could hardly be understood by them when they were grown old. Now, continued he, we should philosophize and search whether this be not the place where those words are thawed. (Rabelais, 1552, chap. LV, p. 1707) The skipper alerts them that they are on the Frozen Sea, on which was a grand battle had happened during the winter. Now with the Spring’s thaw, the frozen sounds “melt and are heard”. (1552, chap LVI, p. 1710) With this in mind, they look around for some not yet thawed, in order to see the sounds. They find some on deck, described as like, “…rough sugar-plums, of many colours”, (p. 1710) and describes the different colors and their relation to the emotion behind the words–some merry and “gules”, some fair and “or”. They picked up the sounds and warmed them in their hands, at which point they were able to hear them once they melted. “…he threw three or four handfuls of them on the deck; among which I perceived some very sharp words, and some bloody words, which the pilot said used sometimes to go back and 51 recoil to the place whence they came, but it was with a slit weasand. We also saw some terrible words, and some others not very pleasant to the eye.” (Rabelais, 1552, p. 1711) The words begin to melt in larger numbers, and a phonic re-enactment of the battle is described. The recorder writes he would have liked to keep some, persevered in oil, but Pantagruel tells him it’s wrong to “hoard up what we are never like to want or have always at hand.” (Rabelais, 1552, p. 1712) Is this an early account of the desire to preserve sound? Or to freeze time? Are the two related? As Michel Chion points out on this passage, this could be the desire to preserve, but that preservation is delaying the time first heard, there is no ability to repeat the frozen sounds. (Chion, 2016, pp. 21-30) We perceive the property of time in sound after it has been listened to, so the act of preserving a sound is in that manner preserving its time, whether repeatable or not. And while we listen, we perceive sound’s other properties–such as timbre–at the same time as…time! The time we listen to is always in the past, and the experience is always in the present, simultaneously. Recorded and preserved sound extends and highlights this phenomenon. Perhaps the Rabelais story isn’t so much about recording, but about listening to sounds from the past. Preservation à presentation à perception. What comes together through sound is emergent and passing time — a sense of duration, the field of memory, a fullness of space that lies beyond touch and out of sight, hidden from vision. Sound must be trusted, cannot be trusted, so has power. (Toop, 2010, p. XV) My first writing on the concept of sound/sounding time led to the article “Wayback Sound Machine, Sound Through time, Space, and Place”, published in the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology’s Soundscape, the Journal of Acoustic Ecology in 2014. The article was a beginning, but also a wandering from my background in the artworld, as I focused more at the time on acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology researchers. These fields did, however, develop with a relationship to art and music, and these parallel paths have conjoined in this project. One of Schafer’s team members in developing the acoustic ecology field, Barry Truax, focused his work through the term soundscape ecology, studying the effects of the sonic environment on all organisms sharing it. Truax is also an electroacoustic music composer, as is another well-known member of this pioneering group, Hildegard Westerkamp, whose 52 phonographic recordings and sound work has also been used notably in cinematic sound design. Given an opportunity to interview Westerkamp, after asking her to explain what she created, I followed up with the open question, “What can that say?” Her response was… Everything I do seems to be focused on understanding the world through the act of listening and on the desire to share this understanding with as many people as possible. I believe that every sense perception gives us valuable and important connectedness to and information about the world in which we live. Our hearing sense has been underutilized (certainly in my lifetime, in our societies, nowadays) and a re-balancing of our senses may mean a re-balancing of how we approach life, environment, culture, politics and ideas. Experience in listening and composing has shown me ever new, changing and deepening approaches to space and time. 52 Anthropologist Steve Feld was inspired by the theories and methodologies of Schafer to apply towards an anthropology of sound, focusing on the idea that the creative interpretation and presentation of sonic fieldwork is an important path of both intellectual exploration, as well as a public engagement. In David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s invaluable book keywords in sound, (2015) Feld defined the term “acoustemology”, conjoining “acoustic” and “epistemology” to describe sound as a way of knowing and being in the world. (2015, p. 12) His work calls for a sensuous relationship and investigation with place, a call integral to the research within this project, and one shared with other researchers that cross anthropology with art and philosophy, such as David Abram and his book The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World, (1997) where in part he considers our relationship with the soundscape as a communicative experience that led to language– an investigative thread also researched by soundscape ecologist, musician, and author Dr. Bernie Krause in the development of his Acoustic Niche Hypothesis, which I will explain further in the next section. 52 !Colbert,!M.!2011.!Interview!with!Hildegard!Westerkamp!in,!“Within!a!Grain!of!Sand:!Our!Sonic! Environment! and! Some! of! Its! Shapers”! in! Sounding-Out:- theSoundStudiesJournal.! NY:! SUNY! Binghamton! 53 Where the research and bibliography found initial gaps in the thread between soundscape and sound design, the relationship of sound design with affect theory has been fundamental. Other literature supporting and expanding that bridge in phenomenology and sound is the iconic work of Don Ihde on phenomenology of listening, (2007, p. 147) as well as Jean Luc Nancy, who speak of the relationship of sound with beings–by its physics, nature and other characteristic–as a touch–more than a simple vibration, but a communication. He describes how we stretch and strain to hear, the act of listening expanding in a bodily way, while the body stays, straining to bring sound inwards. (Nancy, 2007, p. 5) Timbre, the perceived tone and texture of the sound where information bearing elements reside in overtones, frequency envelopes, and temporal characteristics, conveying information and affect of the sounding object or body. “Resonance is at once listening to timbre and the timbre of listening.” (p. 40) An “echo of the subject.” (p. 39) The listener, “…resounds, responding to a momentum, a summons, a convocation of sense.” (p. 30) Listening is fundamentally embodying an act that connects through resonance the external soundscape, be it a dawn chorus or song or soundtrack, and our bodies. (Andrisani & Droumeva, 2016). I.4.b. The Biophony and IBEs There is a constant challenge within the world, a challenge of being heard. It is about survival and communication, attraction and distraction. The Biophony describes the acoustic bandwidth partitioning process that vocalizing animals collectively create in still-wild biomes, by which non-human organisms adjust their vocalizations by frequency and time-shifting to compensate for occupied vocal territory. 53 (Krause, 2012, pp. 68-69) Thus each species evolves to establish and maintain its own acoustic bandwidth so that its voice is not masked. In The Great Animal Orchestra, (2012) Krause goes further into how listening to the biophony, and sounding in the biophony, could be the basis for human’s sense of composition, listening to the biome, listening to these soundscapes. (2012, pp. 104-105, pp. 212124) 53 !Biome!is!defined!by!Merriam-Webster!as!a!major!ecological!community!type!(such!as!tropical! rain!forest,!grassland,!or!desert),!a!community!of!distinctive!plants!and!animals!living!together!in! a!particular!climate!and!physical!environment.! 54 Biologically important sounds can be described as holding informationbearing elements (IBE) within them, as studied by neural researcher Nobuo Suga, who worked specifically with bats and how they listen–and how they are listened to– within a shared soundscape. (Suga, 1992) Perhaps I take liberties with such a useful term by applying it to the Humanities, but it could be theorized that responses to complex sounds and soundscapes, and so as well cinematic sound design, could be explained in part based on these IBEs. Remembering O’Callaghan; an “awareness of environmental things and happenings thanks to audition is epistemically mediated by awareness as of sounds and auditory objects but does not itself constitute auditory perceptual awareness as of those things and happenings.” (O'Callaghan, 2011a, p. 378) Most IBEs are generic acoustic patterns and sound elements, (Suga, 1992) deceptively simple, and often even shared across species, for example signaling danger, or communicating with one’s dog, and other acoustic biosemiotic sound happenings. This research will further consider how the affect of listening, and IBEs in what we are listening to, is used towards a designed experience; and the relationship between that design and our soundscapes, and this further into consideration of time and place. The consideration of IBEs allows a mereological view of sound perception, relating and perceiving the parts to the whole they create, which brings us back to theories from O’Callaghan, who again asks for the consideration of a sound to be an event, and that relationship between source and sound as one part to a whole. Parts towards wholes are important to time-based media, and the perceptual illusion that fills in and allows the whole: screens, frames, fields, pulses, and vibrations. Parts are important to a fuller perception of the world, creating a soundtrack to an event; woven with the visual profile of the same event–it is one event we are sensing. Rather than cause and effect, the relationship of part to whole may allow us to sense the whole. (Bermúdez, 2000, p. 10) And this whole includes time. I.4.c. Introduction Conclusion, the path What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that, what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design? If the study of acoustics is about sound in relation to space, and the study of sound ethnographies and ecologies 55 is in relation to place, and the study of sound in affect and phenomenology adds time, a soundscape ecophilosophy in relation to sound design can interconnect the whole. To consider sound and audition, we are also considering time. This is where considering philosophical theories of sound perception is useful, though limited in that most were lifted from theories of visual perception. In general, more contemporary theories that acknowledge and consider sensory perception as a system in which our senses aren’t so compartmentalized, but more like a net or network, or matrix, of sensing and processing, are more useful towards accepting the complexity of the thesis questions. But a history of existing theories was given, and how they may apply. These will be reflected upon as well, further on. 54 To sum up points from the introduction chapter, and bridge to Chapter 2, the Wayback Sound Machine is a concept, a theory, and a virtual tool for creation, investigation, and use of sound from the past. The principles explored in this project, with research and thought, as well as the art project case-studies that utilize the conceptual tool, form and test its theory. Researchers and investigators, such as those working within disciplines such as soundscape ecology or sound ethnography, can also consider this theory when considering an aurality critically. Part of the theory explores the relationship to memory and emotion that audition plays, and we can also consider the biological and historic relationship to listening to our soundscapes for survival. As a concept and a tool (as in art concepts are often tools), when considering designing sound of/for the past, artists and designers can make affective use of these relationships. The way we process sound, from what we understand, allows an infinite complex of information to be sensed and sorted, in collaboration with our other senses. Listening to our sonic surroundings, or sonic surroundings designed for an artwork or cinema, is a source of knowledge, of complex, sensory information. Sound Studies is an umbrella term for many different disciplines that are considering this. Listening can be a form of scrying, the act of detecting a message or vision, with 54 !We!can!recall!this!paragraph!stated!in!page!14-15!of!the!thesis!Introduction:!A philosophy of the perception of sound can reach towards a further insight to “nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception”, when considering their spatial, causal, and temporal qualities. This thesis will also make the case for the act of listening to be included within a sound philosophy: to think about giving one’s attention to a sound–a decisive action–and highlight that under the more general definition of hearing: the faculty to perceive sounds.- 56 the possibility of information of another time and place. There are threads of thought and work in these different fields of considering sound from/for the past, but rarely have they come together in a coherent path. This is in part what I am attempting with this investigation, and with asking: What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design? This investigation and research will help map that path. I will explore this question with my own case-study artwork, but as well with asking this question towards the artwork of others. Most of the work written about gathers and employs sounds from the past and/or sounding the past in the creation of creative soundscapes in cinema and artwork, some are examples of specific terms and techniques I write about in this thesis, a few are examples of where I feel an application of the Wayback Sound Machine in production would have served the work well. A driving impetus to this work moving from an art practice to an art studies research project and thesis was working with the Wayback Sound Machine as a tool of sound study and theory, towards sonic philosophy. I use my concepts, questions, and the schema to analyze and critique the sonic aspects of the work written about in the next chapters. I also further explore the relationship of listening to our soundscapes, paying attention to what we listening to and asking what we listen for, and creative sound design, where we apply that thought to expressive and sensible cinematic soundscape design. 57 Chapter II: Soundscape à listening à composing and compiling The Wayback Sound Machine studies recording as preservation, recorded sources as representation, their usage as presentation and (re)presentation, and affect in perception. To recapitulate points from the introduction chapter, and bridge to Chapter 2, I stated the Wayback Sound Machine is a concept, a theory, and a virtual tool for creation, investigation, and use of sound from the past. I wrote that the way we process sound, from what we understand, allows an infinite complex of information to be sensed and sorted, in collaboration with our other senses. When we are considering designing sound of/for the past for creative work, we can make affective use of this process, just as researchers and investigators, such as those working within disciplines such as soundscape ecology or sound ethnography, can also consider this when considering an aurality critically. Counter-auralities can be created and explored, where “tactics to dismantle the visual,” (and here, aural) “strategies of the hegemonic system,” (Mirzoeff, 2011, p. 24) are employed, reconfiguring aurality. What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design? An interesting, and here integral, challenge to sound perception and time is to consider the act and object of recording sound. Already the act of recording includes within it the act of composition. A choice is made to frame a soundscape; pressing record at a moment, aiming a microphone that was chosen for the frame it captures– shotgun, cardioid, omni, binaural, surround 55 –deciding upon a measure of time, and pressing stop on the recording. Wherever this recorded sound goes, however it is used in its hypothetical future, it already carries with it information about its time and 55 !Different!microphones!have!different!“polar!patterns”,!essentially!where!the!mic!will!pick!up! sound,!and!where!sound!will!be!“blocked”!spatially.!A!cardioid!will!capture!what!is!in!front!of!the! mic,!and!mostly!block!out!sound!from!the!back,!allowing!one!to!“point”!the!microphone!at!the! desired!sound!source!for!capture.!These!are!the!most!usual!microphones!chosen,!primarily!for! control…the!allowance!to!block!out!“unwanted!sound”,!or!“noise”.!This!is!a!good!example!of!the! subjectivity! and! composition! choices!that! are! made! even! in! the! pre-production! of! sound! collection.!A!hyper-cardioid!or!shotgun!mic!are!often!what!you!will!find!in!a!film!production,!to! concentrate! the! recording! pick-up! on! the! human! voice,! blocking! out! the! other! sonic! environmental! elements.! Omnidirectional,! binaural,! and! surround! array! microphones! will! be! mentioned! throughout! the! thesis! as! choices! for! attempting! to! get! a! fuller! soundscape! when! recording.! 64 hearing is clearly a major information channel operating for about 24 weeks before birth. 63 The more we understand and realize about fetal hearing and processing sound, the more we understand how fetuses can detect subtle changes and process complex information. Memory starts to form around 30 weeks, and it’s possible early sound interventions at this time could help babies with detected abnormal development. Speaking and singing to the unborn fetus, allowing them to experience different soundscapes while still in the womb, helps shape their brains. 64 This may be why the urge to do so is there. So, the connection between the soundscape, listening, and learning from listening–in conjunction with memory–is an early one. Those steps as a process, one could therefore theorize, are quite ingrained. To take information from our sonic environment; to trust information from our sonic environment. O’s very first fetal movements, called “quickening”, was around 16 weeks– often the time for first movements, along the time hearing has developed. The fetus floats in a rich and complex soundscape; it is anything but quiet. The womb filter: amniotic fluid, embryonic membranes, uterus, the maternal abdomen-low frequencies, and blood in veins whooshing, the mother’s voice and body noises such as hiccups and the gurgles of digestion, and of course, the heartbeat. The mother’s heartbeat can be as loud as a vacuum cleaner and ultrasounds as loud as a subway car arriving in a train station. There are studies showing that the wombscape sound shapes the plasticity of the fetus brain, and prepares newborns for hearing and language development, this is called “early life programming.” 65 We can try to mimic the wombscape, imagining sounds being filtered through the body. We can use a hydrophone–a pressure microphone designed to be sensitive to soundwaves through 63 !Chamberlain,!D.B.!2016!“The!Fetal!Senses:!A!Classical!View.!“Retrieved!December!12,!2017:!! http://schoolbiosynthesis.es/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Fetal-Senses-A-ClassicalView.pdf!! 64 !Ibid.! 65 !Benson,!C.,!Heller,!H.,!Benson,!C.,!Lahav,!A.,!Webb,!A.!R.!2015.!“Mother’s!voice!and!heartbeat! sounds! elicit! auditory! plasticity! in! the! human! brain! before! full! gestation.”! ProceedingsoftheNationalAcademyofScienceoftheUnitedStatesofAmerica.! Retrieved! August! 3,! 2020:! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4364233/!!! 65 fluid matter–on the abdomen to get an idea and sample for our wombscape and explore the affect it may have in listeners. 66 All newborns emerge with the same cry; it is near impossible to distinguish one from another, even as a mother. This could be for many reasons and serve many a purpose. Should something happen to a birth mother, then the indistinguishable cry may help draw attention from another. It could be that, considering again Dr. Krause’s Acoustic Niche Hypothesis–in which animals adapt their calls to a frequency less populated by other environmental sounds–and aside from other biological reasons, a newborn’s cry is shaped by the wombscape from whence it came, and I speculate that one wombscape is similar to another. Primarily what a fetus is hearing is low frequency. So, it would serve that they would have an instinct to initially call out in a high frequency range. The baby then develops its cry according to its surrounding, such as a household in the city versus a country, a household with other children or not, a household with constant media sound. They would adapt to their soundscape, finding their acoustic niche. Artist and scholar Jen Heuson in her Media, Culture, and Communication Doctoral dissertation, references my use of the term wombscape from its initial introduction in the article “Future Memory: Womb Sound as Shared Experience Crossing Time and Space”. (Colbert, 2015) She takes the theory that our earliest sounds begin to shape our future selves, and applies it to what she refers to as, “productions of heritage”, (Heuson, 2015) specifically in the Western U.S. region of the Black Hills. There is an obsessive preoccupation with both the preservation of heritage materials and myths and the future “payoff” of heritage productions. Heritage producers, similar to Colbert, are creating sound environments that they hope will pass along their own inherited senses and affects. (…) Frontier aurality involves a technological mastery over time and space; it is myth made experiential heritage, a sort of immortality through a materialized sensory inheritance. Aurality opens up entire lifeworlds as resources for future use, teaching what these worlds mean and how they 66 !These! tests! can! be! accessed! and! heard! through! the! original! article! on! SoundingOut:! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/01/12/past-future-womb-sound-as-shared-experiencecrossing-time-and-space/! 66 are to be felt and inhabited. And, importantly, these “teachings” or experiences are what are being made as resources, commodities, and products for both tourist and heritage industries. (Heuson, 2015, pp. 237-239) There is already an aural culture surrounding and affecting us, from the beginning. Media, marketing, politics, peers and schooling. The sound of the recording material for film and television from the 1950’s–it’s warm limited frequency range and dust, the slight addition of music just under, subtle and following the emotive curve of the story–for me this still calls up my grandmother’s house where the television was a time-machine always switched on to a channel playing older shows and movies. How can art explore this in a critical and aesthetic manner, at times perhaps even creating counter-aurality? How can we immerse a listening back into it? The disembodied sound–the acousmatic, the haunting–embodied once heard. Sociologist Doreen Massey said feeling out of place is the cultural symptom of late capitalism’s political and social reality, creating a sense of place may actually involve the use of a sense of dislocation. 67 The power within that act, and the artistic urge to create, or re-create it. I am interested in exploring why it happens, what gives it that power. But also, how artistic acts can explore it. II. 2. Soundwalks to access time, space, and place Connecting soundwalks as way to connecting and exploring listening, memory, and movement together, can be compared with Bergsonian methods. Henri Bergson, whose writings on memory inspired Deleuze, which I will write about further on at the beginning of Chapter 3, believed that when it comes to memory, nothing is ever lost. Beyond the mind, which serves to store and activate habitual memory, formed by habit and stored in brain matter, there is pure memory, stored within consciousness. (Bergson, 1911, chap. 2) As not clear where this pure memory archive resides, one could speculate the body in full, especially in consideration to cellular memory, 68 which the full and complex body as a sensing and remembering 67 !Massey,!Doreen.!“New!Directions!in!Space”,!Chapter!in!Sonical-Relations-and-Spatial-Structures.! ed.!Derek!Gregory!and!John!Urry.!1985.!London:!Palgrave.!ISBN!978-0-333-35403-2! 68 !Interestingly,! the! cellular! memory! hypothesis! seems! to! be! more! connected! to! procedural! memory!and!the!body!doing,!outside!of!consciousness,!such!as!forming!a!traumatic!memory,!or! 67 system stores. Bergson imagined the brain processing and selecting with the aid of perception which future memories called for immediate action, usually the habit memories, while the pure memory is stored and called during less engaged moments, like daydreaming, or if it can be used to recollect during perception. (Bergson, p. 4243) Much like how the brain processes sound in its two streams, and just as mysterious. When truly trying to consider the mind as a sensory network, more complex than the simplified five senses many of us grew up with, we almost always need to cross the border of the brain itself and consider the full body as part of this network. As Labelle stated, “sound conditions our sense of place (...) it participates in relational exchanges, in our daily experiences.” 69 When considering that, soundwalks become an especially useful and engaging method of listening, deep listening, and radical listening, weaving perception with consideration and active imagination of listening to the past. The term soundwalk was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project under the leadership of R. Murray Schafer in Vancouver in the 1970s. 70 Hildegard Westerkamp defined soundwalking in her 1974 essay “Soundwalking”, as "...any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are." (Westerkamp, 1974, p. 4) While the exact when and why is still a mystery to us, for the earliest pre-humans the act of walking likely would have arisen from the need to find ways of survival and growth, it allowed our hands to be free to use tools and touch our world, to carry and practicing! something.! The! body! remembering,! rather! than! the! brain! remembering! something! about!the!body.!Cells!do!have!mechanisms!to!pass!on!memory!to!next!generations;!this!has!been! so! far! studied! in! traumatic! memory.! !Cosier,! Susan.!"Could! Memory! Traces! Exist! in! Cell! Bodies?"!Scientific-American.!Retrieved!1!May!1,!2019:!doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind051514b! 69 !Biserna,!E.!(August,!2010)!“Brandon!Labelle,!Where!do!sounds!come!from!and!where!do!they! go?”!Didimag,-Issue-56,-July/August.!Retrieved!November!1,!2020:! http://digicult.it/digimag/issue-056/brandon-labelle-where-do-sounds-come-from-and-wheredo-they-go/!! 70 !While!this!is!true!of!the!term!“soundwalk”,!I!want!to!also!acknowledge!prior!to!their!use!artist! Max!Neuhaus!conducted!his!listening!walks!between!1966!and!1979.!There!is!a!whole!timeline! that!could!be!mapped!of!listening!with!walking,!the!span!of!which!would!go!back!to!the!songlines! of!Aboriginal!peoples!of!Australia.!Early!versions!of!this!thesis!research!did!begin!down!that!path,! but!it!was!soon!realized!it!would!be!a!whole!other!dissertation!to!map!it!out!properly.!Instead!of! attempting! a! summation! of! such! expansive! history,! I! will! admittedly! jump! from! that! early! speculative! moment! where! survival! moved! towards! aesthetic,! to! the! contemporary! term! soundwalk.! 68 throw, and explore a world where the climate had changed drastically to deforestation. Once these needs were met, walking could become in part a symbolic form of relationship with the world, possibly the first aesthetic act of humanity. 71 A walk in search of water, or, if the location of the water is known, a walk to a trusted source of water where beauty and sensation can be experienced with thought and focus. We can extend this theory to the act of listening, in a possible parallel history. In Camera Lucida, Barthes states, “I want a history of looking.” 72 I want histories of listening, and deeper listening to histories. II.2.a. The first Wayback Sound Machine Working on a project in Cornwall years ago, I walked a lesser-known arm of the Santiago Pilgrim Route called St. Michael’s Way, an ancient pilgrim path halfcovered in time and time’s artifacts. As I got lost again and again making my way towards Saint Ives, I found myself marveling at all sorts of sensations. My ears tuned from the project on which I had labored, I was especially taken by the sound. Towards the middle of the path atop the hill, the wind from both sides carried sonic pieces of the day to day from the villages on each side, wisping past as quickly as they came. I began to wonder what this path may have sounded like back in the time of its famed thieves and pirates, and back when its soundscape was composed of shared occasions celebrated with the voices of people, priests, prayers, and populated markets and fairs along the way. As I continued walking, I wondered how it might have sounded even before then, before the hills were blanketed with crops and cattle, before the many battles that must have been waged; villages built and grazed. Were there more birds then? Were there more trees? Were there more boar and fox? What about even before these hills were hills; could there be a way to sonify these hills forming? I started to dream of a wayback machine for sound. What if as you walked this path, you could listen to time spinning back, listen to how it might have sounded, listen to its history? And what could you take from that experience; what would the experience contribute? (Colbert, 2014a) 71 !Careri,! F.! (2017).! Walking! as! an! aesthetic! practice! {Walkscapes:! El! andar! como! práctica! estética}!Barcelona,!Spain:!Editorial!Gustavo!Gili.!pp.!19–20.! 72 !Barthes,!R.!1981.!Camera-Lucida-(La-chambre-claire).!trans.!Richard!Howard.!New!York:!Hill!&! Wang.!p.!12! 69 This first experience was interestingly acousmatic, with those aural fragments traveling to me from unknown source and emission. A bit like Rabelais’ frozen sounds as well. The aural hauntology (I will return to this term further on) of this experience, a persistence of sounds alluding to and calling up the past, led to considering sound through layers of time, and how that might be perceived; and how that might be created to be perceived. I was inspired to explore the concept in practice, but also wrote an early paper on it in 2013, that begins with a quote from Place Matters, where Frank Vanclay says, “’Place’ is generally conceived as being ‘space’ imbued with meaning. Thus, it refers more to the meanings that are invested in a location than to the physicality of the locality.” (Vanclay, 2008.) 73 Biophysical characteristics (Biophony) can establish a foundation for these personal meanings that transform the sense of space to place (the specific sound of the trees in your childhood backyard, calling up the hiding spot you would run to when you didn’t want to go inside in the evening, facing fears of the dark with a shield of familiar sense). Before examining how earlier cultures might have used auditory spatial awareness, we need first to explore how sound connects listeners to an external event. What would hearing have meant to our distant ancestors? (Blesser & Salter, 2009, p. 71) Dr. Miriam Kolar is one of the earliest scholars I contacted on this concept, having been recommended to her research on Chavín de Huántar, a 3,000-year-old ceremonial complex in the Peruvian Andes. For six years, Kolar measured acoustics and conducted auditory experiments on site, working towards an “integrative archaeoacoustics”, which brings together acoustics, audio engineering, perceptual psychology, anthropology, and computer science. (Kolar, 2013a) She states how important it was to this work to consider subjective possibilities, along with the application of the scientific method towards theory and measurement. Kolar explains, “I focus on understanding how sound influences people, what people do with sound, and what this means for humans as individuals and social beings.” (Kolar, 2013b, para. 3) For example, at Chavín, Kolar and her team explored the effect the following channels of water built in underneath the structure’s Circular Plaza staircase and considered the perceptual affects it would have had on audiences thousands of years 73 !Vanclay,!Frank.!2008.!Place-Matters.!Sited!in!“Wayback!Sound!Machine:!Sound!Through!Time,! Space,!and!Place”,!in!Soundscape:-The-Journal-of-Acoustic-Ecology!13,!no!1!(Winter/Spring):!21-24! 2014! 70 ago. Chavín was a spiritual temple, and it is speculated to have been a Shamanistic site in the context of convincing followers, with evidence of production and consumption of psychoactive plants found widespread. Signs of light manipulation and exclusion, gathering and isolating areas, and the acoustically manipulated and morphed sound of water–the water channels diverting, absorbing, or reflecting–could facilitate full sensory psychotropic experiences. “Archaeologists toe a wavering line: as professionals, we strive to present a transparent account of our explorations and discoveries, but at the same time, we’re compelled to create narratives that explain our activities and motivations.” (Kolar, 2013b, para. 4) Much like archivists, or other employments towards the documents of time. Kolar states in the section, “Echoes of Ancient Experience,” that “Sound–because it’s experiential–is an ephemeral artifact of spaces and objects that we can use to better understand past life. Performing a replica shell horn inside Chavín’s galleries, I can feel through my body the resonances between instrument and architecture, a physically and emotionally transformative experience that would have been similarly sensed—but interpreted differently—by humans in the past”. (Kolar, 2013b) II.2.b. Radio Terramoto (and the SUNY Binghamton Historical Soundwalk) The concept of a Wayback Sound Machine concerns itself with, as well as problematizes, histories–and what we define and decide as histories. The Wayback Sound Machine works to challenge histories, rupture historic lines, challenge who drew them, at times reveal how they were created, at times reveal who created them, and why. It depends on the individual project, but the Wayback Sound Machine’s concepts and questions help the guide and uncover and express what is uncovered. Allowing for another auto-ethnographic moment to reflect the internal on that thought: as I did in the first Wayback Sound Machine, I often find myself imagining what the place I am experiencing sounded like at different points of time while walking, as well as placing that imagined soundscape next to the current one on the path I am experiencing; then super-imposed onto…then fluctuating back and forth through a time line and geographic line, in a comparative sensory experience. The street I live on in Lisbon, Portugal was once an important stream that made its way to the Rio Tejo. I can imagine in front of the church that stood then, and still stands now, 71 the washing of clothing, the swimming, the watering of animals, the sounds of the water and current touching earth and rock. A project that I explored this with is Radio Terramoto {Earthquake Radio}, 74 (Colbert & Costa, 2013) a radio based soundwalk in which audience members walk a path from Convento do Carmo, down one of Lisbon’s winding hills to the river. An old note from a work notebook from the conception of the project reads, “Will attempt to go acoustically back in time.” At key moments, and broadcasted over specific radio frequencies, the audience listens on portable radios to “a broadcast from back in time” of the great and horrible earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of the city and killed up to 100,000 people with its subsequent fires and tsunamis after the initial quake itself, bringing the seemingly distant devastation into contemporary space and consciousness. Having no access to actual recordings of the event of course, I had to imagine the subjective experience through my own senses internally, employing personal and collective memory gathered when reading accounts from survivors, along with early data that was collected. The broadcasted radio-play “from the past” weaves down the path with the audience, and into their soundtrack of the present, creating a dissonance and dialogue of time and place, embodied and collective. The audience considers this history from the perspective of the phantom recorder–each pause of fear, each decisive turn for survival, each witnessed disaster–we hear as they might have heard, their sonic POV. We bare witness in two different times, at the same time and place. As the tsunami hits, we are under water with them, and the transmission goes out. < Figure 4 > Sound Studies scholar and author of the Sonic Color Line, Dr. Jennifer Stoever wrote about Radio Terramoto in her sound studies blog Sounding Out! Radio Terramoto is a soundwalk research and art project designed to bring this seemingly distant devastation into contemporary consciousness. Based on the idea of 74 !The!audio!file!of!Radio-Terratoto!can!be!listened!to!here:!https://soundcloud.com/mailecolbert/radioterramoto-mix-of-live!! 72 listening to sound from a past historical event, “Radio Terramoto” is a traveling audience immersive event. 75 The project and research for Radio Terramoto asks the question, what can listening to the past reveal about the now, both in artistic practice and research? Can experiencing an event from the past, embodied and present, allow for a new embodied knowledge and understanding of that event? What we experience, as opposed to, for example, what we read, is processed and stored differently within us, and art conveys insight into how we understand and order our world. 76 Radio Terramoto’s site-based (yet mobile) sound design weaves between the present and the past and is based on research on the earthquake, using documents of first hand experiences and the first seismic and “earthquake-proof” architecture that came after what may be the largest earthquake recorded in history. The soundwalk included hand-held sculptural octahedra, researched and designed by artist Jeff Cain, created using a geometric framing system designed and assembled as a singular form approximating a Pombaline cage, the first modern earthquake resistant architecture. The radio transmitter and other key electrical devices were suspended in these 1-foot 3-inch octahedra made of brightly colored sticks of wood, held together with friction and tension. The large cage broke apart into the individual octahedron to aid in the transportation of equipment and providing a visual way-finding aide for the participants. The concept and project inspired Dr. Stoever to develop with her students a historic soundwalk where their University, the State University of New York, Binghamton, was located. The concepts and methods were worked into a class syllabus, with a final project resulting in a sound-map and archive exploring and investigating the soundscapes of Binghamton’s past and present. 77 Stoever wrote about the outcomes with the students: “the majority opened their ears to alternative 75 !Stoever,!J.!(2014).!“SO!!Amplifies:!Maile!Colbert,!Rui!Costa,!and!Jeff!Cain’s!“Radio!Terramoto”.!! https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/10/23/so-amplifies-maile-colbert-rui-costa-jeff-cain-andradio-terramoto/! 76 !Bender,! J.! (1993)! “Art! as! a! Source! of! Knowledge:! Linking! Analytic! Aesthetics! and! Epistemology”.!Contemporary-Philosophy-of-Art,!(J.!Bender!&!G.!Blocker,!ed.)!Englewood!Cliffs,!NJ:! Prentice!Hall! 77 !Stoever,! J.! 2017.! “The! Binghamton! Historical! Soundwalk! Project.”! The! Project! can! be! found! online!here:!https://binghamtonsoundwalkproject.wordpress.com/! 73 understandings that left them questioning the exclusivity of their own listening practices. Students realized that while they may have been inhabiting Binghamton for the past few years, they hadn’t been perceptually living in the same town as yearround residents, and, conversely, that the locals’ tendencies to hear students as privileged nuisances had historical and structural roots.” (Stoever, 2017) Listening as an act towards an embodied empathy and understanding within a shared geography, spanning generations. II.2.c. Soundwalk-walk: Listening backwards, moving forwards: 78 Soundwalk-walk (Colbert & Monteiro, 2017) is a practice-based art research project, holding an emphasis on walk. A guided and shared aural experience of a soundscape along a path, with a concentration on movement, the external and the internal, and the relationship between our bodies listening and moving through time, space, and place. Why do we call it Soundwalk-walk? What makes a soundwalk-walk different from a soundwalk? Or a walk, for that matter? How do we define this, and why do we define this? Having already described a soundwalk, we know that a soundwalk and a walk hold path in common, in the sense that more usually we set out on a path with a means to an end in mind. A soundwalk-walk wishes to hold focus on the moment between the point A and B, linger there with a study and play on the relationship between the movement of walking with the activity of listening, and consider what knowledge and applications can be gained from this. Walking and listening–two acts often took for granted, automatically, not often considered together. (Colbert & Monteiro, 2017) II.2.c.i. Walking towards our bodily ears 78 !Soundwalk-walk:,Listening, Backwards,, Moving, Forwards,, a! practice-based!research! project! by! Maile! Colbert#and! Ana! Monteiro#(FCSH-UNL/IFILNOVA).! The! original! proceedings! from!the!Invisible!Places,!Sounding!Cities!Sound!Symposium,!written!by!Colbert!and!Monteiro,! 2017,!can!be!found!here:!http://invisibleplaces.org/#proceedings.!Excerpts,!the!score,!and!rewriting!from!that!paper!are!within!this!sub-chapter,!with!permission!from!Monteiro.!A!blog!with! images!and!sound!recordings!can!be!accessed!here:!https://soundwalk-walk.tumblr.com/! 80 II.2.c.vi. Soundwalk-walk, the score 85 Soundwalk-walk is a soundwalk with a concentration on walking, movement, and the relationship between our bodies listening and our bodies moving through time, space, and place, guided by artists and researchers Ana Monteiro and myself. A guided, scored, and choreographed walk that includes the focus of deep to radical listening, intertwined with the focus of movement meditation and kinesthetic exploration. Two of composer Pauline Oliveros’ scores from Sonic Meditations (1974) were woven with a movement meditation, with permission from her foundation, as well as the concept and question of sounding place, and sounding place in the past. Oliveros’ practices of listening and Deep Listening offer guides for both listening as well as sounding, often as radical acts in their concentration and deep attention to our sonic environments. The practice of Deep Listening is notable for its commitment to cultivating receptivity, to “extend receptivity to the entire space/time continuum of sound”. (Oliveros, 2005) And like Soundwalk-walk, Oliveros held import to the relationship between the body moving, and the body listening, and to the internal and external soundscapes that could be accessed in that practice. Like many of Oliveros’ Deep Listening practices, Soundwalk-walk begins with a slow walk, tuning the body, paying attention to it, turning that attention inwards and deeper, then beginning to attend slowly outwards using the listening practices, such as: Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears. 86 (Oliveros, 1974) Walking slowly in order to notice and consider sensation and perception. Walking slowly with deep listening changes our usual time, creating an event within ourselves that can be called upon later. Remembered for its different time felt, its concentration and consideration to sensation, how this affected us, what this made us think about and feel. In a way, this allows a moment for the body with the mind to record. The start button: slow down your walking, your breath, listen and feel. The end button: take a deep breath, open your eyes, and come to the present. The playback: recall what you were experiencing and thinking with the other 85 !The!full!score!can!be!found!in!the!Annex,!pp.!ii-iii.! 86 !Oliveros,!Pauline.!“Native”,!in!Sonic-Meditations.!Smith!Publications.!1974.!! 81 soundwalkers. One of the participants on the island wrote to me the following year to say that she still returns to that moment every now and then. II.3. Field Recording and Phonography: Archive forming and archive using–time in the medium As we are primarily a visual culture, no longer connected to what environments can tell us through sound, we’ve lost aural acuity once central to the dynamic of our lives. From what we have just begun to see, it appears that ancient human beings had learned well the lessons imparted by natural sounds. Their lives depended as much (if not more) on their ability to hear and understand the audio information imparted by their surroundings as those given by visual cues. (Krause, 1993, p. 6) We walk, and we listen, and we have enacted these two activities together from time immemorial, often without much thought about it. We tend to think of this as two acts, rather than two parts of a complex bodily system sensing the world around us and giving us information. Sometimes a sound arrests our movement, we stop to listen. We stop to focus, to not make sound from our own body, to try and silence ourselves to bring in “pure” that outside sound in. The focus of that moment, the intent of the act, and the nature of the sound that called our attention in the first place, is very likely the beginnings of the desire to record sound–whether person, place, or thing. Once we began to listen aesthetically, once it was no longer about pure survival but also beauty and wonder, there would be pleasure and aesthetic interest, and the desire to experience again what our own memory is not fully capable of. When we lose something–a person, a moment–it is often more the sense of that/them that we miss. Memories may initially haunt as we attempt to call up sounds and smells and temperature and touch. They may play back to us as an abstraction, missing an essence. Essentia: being, from esse, to be. We use this word in connection with the senses, an essence for flavor, an essence for scent. We debate over what essence means, perhaps elusive due to its connection to the senses, which we are also still striving to define. What makes something what it is, and what happens to that 82 something when the something it is essential to is gone? 87 Can we capture that, in a sense, bring an essence to our memories? Perhaps our tools of capture were not intended to mimic, but rather serve mnemonic. When the Lumière Brothers developed their Cinématographe, within a few films they began to experiment with the earliest cinematic techniques to change time and the sense of movement, to create narratives and provoke affect and emotion. 88 (Lumière, 1895) The first sound recording made was not of a voice speaking, but of a voice singing artistic and expressive composition. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s recording on his Phonautographie of a rendition of Au Clair de la Lune, 1860, was recorded nearly two decades before Thomas Edison. In 2015 the UN inducted his work and recognized the sound recordings as, “humanity’s first recordings of its own voice”, but in his own lifetime Scott de Martinville’s work was overshadowed by Edison’s. Humanity’s first recording of its voice; the choice was through song, through expression to provoke sensation. 89 (First Sounds, 2007-2009) And when sensing became less about survival, and more about an aesthetic? Perhaps that is when we began to dream of ways to capture the sense around us, as a bridge through limitations on time and memory, to return. Are the material aspects to sound transcendent? I hear here, not there…put simply this locating sense can be provoked through a sound object (a hammer hits the wall next to me), or a recording playback device (the recording of a hammer hitting a wall is played next to me). Your words, for example, are preserved in the tin-foil, and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke in them in. 87 !Jones,! Jan-Erik.! 2018.! “Locke! on! Real! Essence.”! TheStanfordEncyclopediaofPhilosophy.! Edward! N.! Zalta! (ed.)! Stanford,! California:! Metaphysics! Research! Lab,! Stanford! University:! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/real-essence/!! 88 !You!can!watch!this!unfold!in!the!1996!“Lumière!Brothers’!First!Films”!collection!from!Kino! Video.!! 89 !Another!sounding!of!the!past,!First-Sounds-is!a!project!that!studies,!researches!and!develops! methods!and!technology!to!play!back!the!earliest!audio!recordings,!including!from!Édouard-Léon! Scott! de! Martinville,! Thomas! Edison,! Charles! Batchelor,! and! the! Volta! Laboratory! Associates.! Their!website!archives!their!work!between!2007-2009,!including!the!research,!tools,!and!access! to!the!recordings!to!listen!to,!as!well!as!use!with!attribution.!All!their!work!is!under!Creative! Commons! Attribution! licence.! Their! statement:! “We! have! digitally! preserved! every! airborne! sound! recording! known! to! exist!from! before! 1861,! plus! many! incunabular! recordings! made! thereafter,! and! we! offer! free! and! universal! access! to! our! images! and! sounds! on! this! site.”! Retrieved!April!23,!2018:!!http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php!! 83 How many times? As long as the tin-foil lasts. This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, speaks with your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this thin iron diaphragm. 90 What is material distance in concern to sound? I hear here, not there. I record that here, you hear there, here. Jean-Luc Nancy writes about the cognitive subjectivity in sound, about intentionality in listening, how the listener listens, and their choices in the act of listening. In Listening, (2007), this is in reference to listening to Pierre Schaeffer, but we can extend the ideas of resonance, of the act of listening, sending and resending, the resonance of both the structure of the subject, and of sense. (Kane, 2013, pp. 439-447) And now we can consider what happens with the addition of the intentionality to the act of recording, which includes the intentionality of the recordist’s listening choices, and what they intend for the speculated future listener. A recorded sound transcends geography. A recorded sound transcends time. It allows a listener to share a space and perspective with the recordist. It allows a future people to hear the songs, languages, voice, and sonic surroundings of people passed, and possibly of their shared past. It allows for an extinct bird to call into the future, for a child to hear that bird and wonder, and question, and to have that question affect her future and therefore perhaps the future of others. I often think about what soundscapes or sound I have experienced that O. might not have the opportunity to experience when she’s older. Already since my childhood visiting family summers in Hawaii, three birds that I had heard in my childhood soundscape; that my mother grew up with, that her father grew up with, that his parents grew up with (and so on), are no longer calling in the wild. But what the world and I can share with O. and her 90 !Owens,!B.!2012.!“Thomas!Edison’s!Tin!Foil!Recording.”!Inside-the-Conservator’s-Studio,-An-ArtConservator’s-Journal.!From!an!interview!with!Thomas!Edison!from!The-Washington-Post,!June! 11,!1878,!during!his!presentation!of!his!“sound!writer”!at!the!Smithsonian!Edison’s!Ars-Memoria,! concept!for! the! phonograph,!what! he! called! his! Sound! Writer.! Retrieved! November!13,! 2015:! http://insidetheconservatorsstudio.blogspot.com/2012/04/0-false-18-pt-18-pt-0-0-falsefalse.html!- 84 generation–can give her, can leave her–are recordings, context for those recording, and a warning for the future. 91 The sound library I am constantly creating, since my earliest sound art and design works, shaped by my choice and perspective, my art and my research–where to hit start, when to stop, where to point the mic, what equipment to use, how to frame this aural moment that captured me and invoked the desire to save and to share. I thought of this often during the early years of this thesis when a friend and great soundscape ecologist and composer had passed. Steven Miller left a wealth of music, sound, and writing that his daughter and family can share. 92 His daughter will be able to put on headphones and transpose to a space her father formed with his perspective, his choices, his interests. A sharing active with him, transcending space and time, her in her now, sharing the soundscape of his now, then. This is not a rigid document of time, her now might bleed in through headphones or an open window in the room she is listening in and may mix and mingle with the soundscape of his then-now, mixing and mingling time and place, and perspective. The Wayback Sound Machine isn’t about traveling to a past, but experiencing a past in, and with, our present...making it present. And as I write this, my first official full draft of this thesis, (2018) I am listening to the recordings of another friend and collaborator, made in various areas in Bolivia. Manrico Montero was a Mexican sound artist, phonographer and field recordist, free improviser, and researcher in bioacoustics and biosemiotics. 93 I just found out he passed away. I write this and listen; I hear the call of the Agelaioides badius, common name the grayish baywing. Two actually, as one closer to where he was recording, calls, and is answered by another further away. There is traffic in the 91 !Some!examples!of!these!sounds,!in!the!Macaulay!Library:! Kaua’i `O’o: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/6031 Po’ouli: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/5125 Hawaiian Crow: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/13434 92 !Aside!from!his!website,!Steven!Miller!had!a!blog!with!sound!and!writing!about!sound,!which! can!be!accessed!here:!https://sightssoundswords.wordpress.com/about/! 93 !The! memorial! message! we! wrote! at! Sonic-Field-for! Montero! can! be! found! on! the! site! here:! http://sonicfield.org/2018/05/manrico-montero-1973-2018/! 85 distance, and at one point a car passes on a dirt road a bit closer to him. The echo to the sound gives us the mountains, the insects give us the summer, and I am present with the recordist, in that moment of recording, in a transcendence I find specific to field recordings. It sounds like the view was impressive. The next track’s insects also give us heat, and the sun setting in Llanos de Moxos, a tropical savanna. We hear we are out of the mountains. We are low to the ground, cooling with the coming night. A single bird calls near, somehow mournful with no reply amidst all the sonic emissions around it. Each call has its moment, it sounds like a music composition. I am sensing through Montero’s sonic perception and point of view, I am experiencing not just time, but place, from the place and time of his recording. 94 There is a relationship between the field of biosemiotics and Krause’s theories, tied with a history of learning to listen. Biosemiotics is a field that brings areas of semiotics and biology together towards studies of prelinguistic meaningmaking–how signs and codes are produced and interpreted, the signification, communication, and habit formation of living processes. 95 Biosemiotics posits that life is based on signs and codes, and that this goes down to a molecular level–copying and coding. Natural selection can be considered copy-based, and natural conventions code-based; signs are fundamental components of the living world. (Marcello, 2008) Montero’s work was around the calling and listening patterns in zoosemiotics, 96 and the relationship with the ecoacoustics 97 of a place. We can clearly see the relationship 94 !Some! of! Montero’s! recordings! can! be! accessed! here:! https://soundcloud.com/manricomontero!! 95 !Barbieri,!Marcello.!2008.!“A!new!understanding!of!life.”!Naturwissenschaften-95.!pp.!577-599.! Retrieved!December!29,!2019:!https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-008-0368-x!! 96 !Zoosemiotics!is!a!part!of!biosemiotics!that!focuses!on!the!semiotic!study!of!how!animals!use! and!create!for!use!signs,!animal!forms!of!knowing.!It!differs!from!other!animal!communication! fields! in! that! it! includes! semiotics! shared! by! animals! and! humans,! and! cross-species! communications,!which!ties!back!to!Krause’s!theory!and!Information!Bearing!Elements!in!shared! soundscapes.! Further! reading! on! this! subject! specifically! can!be! found! here:! Martinelli,! D.! &! Lehto,! O.! (Eds.)! (2009).! Specialissue:- Zoosemiotics.- SignSystemsStudies37(3/4):! G.! Kaplan,! Animals!and!music:!Between!cultural!definitions!and!sensory!evidence,!423–453;!K.!Kleisner,!M.! Stella,!monsters!we!met,!monsters!we!made:!On!the!parallel!emergence!of!phenotypic!similarity! under!domestication!454–476;!S.!Pain,!From!biorhetorics!to!zoorhetorics,!498–508;!K.!Tüür,!Bird! sounds! in! nature! writing:! Human! perspective! on! animal! communication,! 580–613;! E.! Vladimirova,!Sign!activity!of!mammals!as!means!of!ecological!adaptation,!614–636;!C.!Brentari! Konrad!Lorenz’s!epistemological!criticism!towards!Jakob!von!Uexküll,!637–660).! 97 !Ecoacoustics! investigates! the! ecological! role! of! sounds,! using! long! term! monitoring,! habitat! health,!biodiversity!assessment,!soundscape!conversation,!and!ecosystem!management.!Further! Reading!on!this!discipline!can!be!found!here:!Farina,!A.!(2018)!“Perspectives!in!ecoacoustics:!A! contribution! to! a! defining! discipline.”! JournalofEcoacoustics.! Retrieved! August! 28,! 2020:! 86 from this to Krause’s theories of early human’s relationship with listening to place forming our sense and language of music. Listening to place forming our sense of Place. We can see, and hear, how listening to our changing soundscapes can help us perceive and process Climate Change. Climate Change was the more publicly used term when I began the earliest work on the question of: What can we gather from sounding the past? There is a literal side to that question–we gather. We search and research and go out and record and edit and archive, and perhaps share. We collect, towards a hope of recollection, and the hope that within that we might perceive what has changed. But what then? Do we want to consider what that means, what compels us to think and feel further? Compelling artistic works that use these recordings to raise consciousness of the problem, to evoke emotion and care and transfer informative context can provoke thought, research, action, and change. Now some refer to it as Climate Crisis, and it is past subtle changes. For many species and ecologies, it’s not a whisper, but a bang before a silencing. The date is right there, as are the recordings. We all witness, in our backyards and through media, all the bangs and silencings. Sometimes we feel bad, or scared, or any of the spectrum of feelings that are appropriately associated with the devastation of our world. But still the hyperobject, this affect only lasts so long. As biodiversity professor Kevin Gaston explains, “humans seem innately better able to detect the complete loss of an environmental feature than its progressive change.” 98 (Gaston, 2011) Timothy Morton employed the term hyperobject in The Ecological Thought, to describe “objects” that are massively spread through time and space, so that our perception and specific framing of them is defied. (Morten, 2010, p. 19) Plutonium is an example of a hyperobject, existing on a timescale we can’t comprehend. (p. 19) Global warming is a primary example of a hyperobject. Hyperobjects are also places artists often work in; places that have trouble being perceived, the complexity of a place that contains multitudes. (Morton, 2016, p. 12) Morten writes about place in Dark Ecology, “Place has a strange loop form because place deeply involves time. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325998314_Perspectives_in_ecoacoustics_A_contrib ution_to_defining_a_discipline/citation/download!! 98 !Gaston,!Kevin.!2011.!“Common!Ecology”,!in!BioScience,!Volume!61,!Issue!5,!May.!pp.!354-362.! Retrieved!on!January!10,!2019:!!https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.5.4! 87 Place doesn’t stay still, but bends and twists: place is a twist you can’t iron out of the fabric of things.” (Morton, 2016, p. 11) Affective artistic works that place these recordings in a context, that make moving artistic works out of them, that create an experience that sits and stays with the one experiencing, this might create something that pushes from experience to thought to action. Recently there was even a New York Times article about composer Erik Ian Walker’s work in collaboration with The Climate Music Project, “Climate”, 99 which uses scientific data points sonified. Sonification uses non-speech audio to express information. It utilizes and assigns characteristics and qualities to data, such as temporal, spatial, frequency resolution, and amplitude. With auditory perception, it can be possible to as well use that information to create an affective and even emotional composition with the relationships between what the data is addressing, allowing a deeper access and information exchange with the audience. And of course, sometimes that just fails. I will expand on sonification at a later section in this chapter. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida refers to the ghost of the King for Hamlet as a thing of mourning, of trying to make remains present, in their place (archives). This thing, “works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the “spirit of the spirit” is work.” (composition) (Derrida, 1994, pp. 9) It works as simultaneously a repetition and a first time (recording). “Staging for the end of history (presentation and representation). Let us call it a hauntology” (1994, p. 10) II.4. Musique Concrète and the Acoustmatic, a sonic hauntology: In his introduction to The Audible Past, Jonathan Sterne explains his work towards a history of sound through tracing its technologies, and their historical significance, and through them we find an “archive on the nature and meaning of sound, hearing, and listening.” (Sterne, 2003, p. 7) Archiving was fundamental to 99 !Knuval,! Sheikh.! 2019.! “This! Is! What! Climate! Change! Sounds! Like.”! TheNewYorkTimes.! Retrieved!on!March!10,!2020:!https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/science/climate-changemusic-sound.html!! 88 imagining the project of developing sound recording in the late 19th century. However, he describes the recording of voices as a process like embalming, and even canning, where the “outside” of the sound is preserved, but its interiority–its cultural resonances, its intimate meaning, its bodily connections–are lost. And this causes a disconnect, a discomfort, a disembodiment. (2003, p. 12, 26) He seems to ask if it is possible to hear the hearing of others. But that sonic shell (and I do not think it is merely that), shifted into its new context, can embody a new interiority. Remember when inspired by phenomenology, Musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer first introduced the term “acousmatic” in the mid-1960s to describe the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause. In Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, (2014) Brain Kane writes of the power and use of the disembodied sound; sound separated from its object of emission in time, space, and place. (2014, pp. 75-79) He also points out that the acousmatic experience while allowing no visible access, still allows for striving to identify sources and recognition, which the mind will attempt. (pp. 24-25) Sound is “reduced” to the field of hearing, with the aid of mechanical reproduction and transmission. (Schaeffer, 1966, p. 93) Sound becomes a sound object when it loses that ability to signify source, and maintains its acousmatic status with reduced listening, where we may hold the ability to recognize source, but we’re taking the sound in as something separate from that. (1966, p. 268) < Figure 5 > This is the first major study of Schaeffer’s acousmatic theory since sound and cinema writer Michel Chion’s, Guide to Sound Objects, (2009) and Kane’s important challenge to the phenomenological stance. Kane finds the acousmatic ails when solely considering electronic music and prefers to define it as a technique that is not dependent on a particular audio technology or medium but splits the senses and makes “the undetermination of a sonic source by its effect palpable”. (Kane, 2009, p. 263). The acousmatic sound, in theory and practice, is integral to creative sound design, and I as well use the term to describe the separation in time and place of the sound and its object, whether the emitting object or recorder. Whether a recording of crickets slowed to sounding like a choir, a door slam repeated until pure abstracted rhythm, or the sound of a rain forest over a desert, the effect of that split can create substantial affect in listeners. 89 In the Introduction to the long-awaited English translation of Chion’s Sound, An Acoulogical Treatise, (2016) the translator James A. Steintrager describes the whole project as a “hauntology,” in reference to Derrida’s term, as a “science of sound objects that never fully cohere as such and for considerations that take off from musique concrète.” (2016, p. xx) I find this in agreement with this thesis position that recorded sound, as its own object, still carries traces of its original event, moment, and passage. Interestingly, hauntology became a term in music to describe the use of sampling, which is of course related to music concrète and the acousmatic. 100 “Sound, once heard, repeats forever in that which one dares not call memory (…) every sound can resound for all eternity in the present perfect of listening”. (Chion, pp. 29-30) The “present perfect” of listening is of course changeable, as our sonic perception is personal and relational, so goes our sonic memory. That memory, in its beautiful imperfection, changes the repeated sound with each recollection. Like a recorded sound repeated on loop, the mind with time perceives it differently. Like a recorded sound on recorded tape looped, the material of the medium itself wears with play, and the sound changes. Nothing is permanent, (re)presentation, (re)collection, (re)enactment are signaling their thing from the past, but also are that present. A “performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets”. (Derrida, 1994, p. 63) Hauntology is such an excellent word in reference to sound and its relationship with time, recording, and archives. The use here doesn’t seem too far from Derrida’s foundational use, from Toop’s descriptive use in Sinister Resonance, from Chion’s acousmatic use in Sound. And Derrida’s own words himself, “…what we call, to save time and space rather than just to make up a word, hauntology.” (1994, p. 63) Researchers and artists Jennifer Heuson and Kevin Allen propose there is knowledge to be gained by the un-linking of the ear and eye, that split of the senses. They propose “asynchronicity” as a challenging method for both anthropologists and experimental filmmakers to employ, a related but slightly different term from acousmatic, in that the sound doesn’t necessarily become its own sound object without a perceivable relationship to its source or original context, but separated from that visually it will hold some of the attributes as an acousmatic sound. (Allen & 100 !Music! theorist! Simon! Reynolds! adapted! the! term! in! the! mid-2000’s.! Reynolds,! Simon.! Retromania:-Pop-Culture’s-Addiction-to-Its-Own-Past.!New!York:!Faber!and!Faber,!2011.! 96 academic essay. I stressed that the call was very open in form, and began to receive less traditional forms of text and media. I decided to create a series-within-the-series of compilations with this work, and the next publications were part of the Wayback Sound Machine, A sonic constellation compilation, in three parts. Opening Part One, 105 researcher and sound artist Suzanne Thorpe, who was finishing her own PhD in sound studies and had studied under Pauline Oliveros, sent an eloquent score called “Sounding Time”: Sounding Time Listen for a sound you heard in the past Listen for a sound you will hear in the future Voice your past and future sounds now, alternating Repeat voicing for 85 seconds 106 Portuguese composer Diana Combo’s work, Desacordo, 107 departs from ethnographic recordings of rural Portugal from the 1970’s, made by Michel Giacometti for his TV series. Combo takes this archive and re-mixes, re-composes, and adds her own voice, disrupting time and geography, and adding a power–the Portuguese no longer just the subject. “In Desacordo the dead are resurrected, and the living might return to a time lost, from the sensation of being able to have been there, with those that were once alive and that Fado made forget.” (Combo, 2018) I was so taken with this project, I asked Combo if she could contribute to all three parts of the series, which also closes out with her work. Cellist Helena Espvall shares a film, Meglio’s, (Espvall, 2018) of her playing hauntingly to the Super 8 images of the reflective window of a long-closed woman’s department store, Meglio’s, in Philadelphia. The windows reflect the street, traffic, 105 !Colbert,!M.!ed.!2018.!“Wayback!Sound!Machine,!a!sonic!constellation!compilation.”!Sonic-Field.!! https://sonicfield.org/2018/12/wayback-sound-machine-a-sonic-constellation-compilationpart-1/!! 106 !Thorpe,!Suzanne.!2018.!“Sounding!Time.”!In,!“Wayback!Sound!Machine,!a!sonic!constellation! compilation.”!Sonic!Field.!Colbert,!M.!ed."Originally!composed!for!Pauline!Oliveros’!85!birthday! celebration!and!memorial.!The!event!was!curated!and!hosted!by!the!International!Institute!for! Critical!Studies!in!Improvisation,!June!1,!2017,!and!works!exhibited!at!the!Institute!for!Public!Life! and!Ideas,!McGill.! 107 !Colbert,!M.!ed.!2018.!“Wayback!Sound!Machine,!a!sonic!constellation!compilation,!Part!1.”! Sonic-Field.!!https://sonicfield.org/2018/12/wayback-sound-machine-a-sonic-constellationcompilation-part-1/! 97 cars, and people, of the time of recording. The mannequins, in their fashion of the time, look on, unseeing. Improving musician and poet, Bonnie Jones, who works with electronic sound and text, constructed, “And if I live a thousand lives I hope to remember one”, (Jones, 2018) from a live manipulated cassette player and six-minute looping player. The six minutes looped from the source cassette player are recordings from years of performances…recorded, rerecorded…the sound of audio feedback from the proximity of the two eventually takes over the process and event, as well as the personal archive recorded. 108 Multimedia artist Hilda Daniel’s beautiful and intense work, “Echolullia”, (Daniel, 2018) is a chorus of broken lullabies representing what is lost in collective trauma. The title is derived from “echolalia”, a term for the sound babies make in mimic of those they have heard, or the involuntary repetition of someone else’s words. The lullabies are sung by invited Mothers, who chose songs they had once sang to their own children. 109 (Daniel, 2018) Daria Baiocchi composed a work dedicated to Countess Constance Georgine Markievicz, who strongly opposed the 1916 abolition of Dublin Mean Time, and introduction of GMT. The flute in the work was composed to “give voice” to the countess, while rhythmic sounds recall a ticking clock. 110 (Baiocchi, 2018) Sound producer and theorist Joan Schuman, and Seth Guy who studies language, memory, and imagination at the intersection of audio-visual perception, collaborated on the work, “Intermix”. (Guy & Schuman, 2017) Guy would record on video him sounding his body with various objects, this is then sent to the collaborator who would describe vocally what they are experiencing on the video, and record that. Eventually the original videos are not shown at presentation, inviting the audience to imagine what it is the collaborator witnessed, through their descriptions. 111 Sound artist and researcher, Andrea Williams, who also studied under Pauline Oliveros, sent Riverfront Park Soundwalk, (Williams, 2016) which is a site-specific artist audio tour of the Hudson River in Troy, New York. It was made with the support of the 108 !Ibid.!! 109 !Ibid.! 110 !Colbert,!M.!2018.!“Wayback!Sound!Machine,!a!sonic!constellation!compilation,!Part!2.”!SonicField.!https://sonicfield.org/2019/02/wayback-sound-machine-a-sonic-constellationcompilation-part-2/!! 111 !Ibid.! 98 Rensselaer County Historical Society in 2016 and is ongoing; the map can be accessed via mobile phone. The participant has the choice of playing a sequence of audio files, or find geo-located sound files, guiding the participants on a route with, “field recordings creating past, present, and future scenarios, mixed with layers of musical elements and interviews with the public and water experts (recorded from 2014-2015) that overlay the actual surroundings as they walk. In the Riverfront Park Soundwalk, truth and fiction are sometimes blurred by local mythology. Stories told by residents reveal the beliefs held by the community that shape their connection to the waterways through generations.” 112 (Williams, 2016) Catherine Clover’s multidisciplinary practices speak to communication through voice and language, and the interplay between seeing and listening, and seeing and reading. Her, “Score for the arrival of the blackbird in southeastern Australia 1860”, (Clover, 2019) traces a path my own work in this project, Passagiera australis, (Colbert, 2013) was as well attempting to address. As was written about in the Birth section of Chapter Two, songbirds, like people, learn their voice from their parents, and that voice remains flexible their whole life, adapting their songs to new environments, like human language changes and adapts. “Blackbirds have only been singing in southeastern Australia since 1860, so their voices are relatively recent additions to the biophony.” (Clover, 2019) The birds needed to adapt quickly to find their Acoustic Niche. “– amongst the louder native birds such as parrots, wattlebirds, Australian magpies, butcherbirds and currawongs. As a result, in Melbourne today, the song of blackbirds is louder, shorter and slightly less elaborate than the song of blackbirds in London or Berlin, where the birds are native.” 113 (Clover, 2019) From Australia to the United States, Portugal to Singapore, and many places in-between, these artists and authors expressed their own understanding of the questions of sounding time. The exquisite closing essay from Samuel Hertz, “THE BIG BANG and what we left behind (or, hearing loss)”, 114 (Hertz, 2019) manages 112 !Colbert,!Maile.!2019.!“Wayback!Sound!Machine,!a!sonic!constellation!compilation,!Part!3.”! Sonic-Field.!https://sonicfield.org/2019/04/wayback-sound-machine-a-sonic-constellationcompilation-part-3/!! 113 !Ibid.!! 114 !Hertz,!Samuel.!2019.!“THE!BIG!BANG!and!what!we!left!behind!(or,!hearing!loss).”!WaybackSound-Machine,-a-constellation-of-sounding-time.!Colbert,!Maile!ed.! https://sonicfield.org/2019/07/the-big-bang-and-what-we-left-behind-or-hearing-loss-essayby-samuel-hertz/!! 99 remarkably to provoke and convey the sense of time and its tricks, and how artists use that. I wrote in my introduction: “How time passes, and how time is felt passing, how time is personal and ever changing its costumes and definitions. Within that what is a moment. Within that what is an event. What is shared, and with whom and what else. What is taken away. What might grow. What of all this is perceived.” (Colbert, 2019) He opens with a quote: How can sound or words transcribe this imperceptibly slow transformation occurring during every instant and that only an extremely attentive and alert eye can sometimes perceive, the movement of a leaf, a stalk, a flower propelled by the life that makes it grow. 115 The quote is from electronic music pioneer Éliane Radigue, who is asking us to imagine an “aesthetics of the infinitesimal”, a seeing and hearing that extends into the microscopic (Hertz, 2019) Moments that are ambivalent to impermanence in their scale and transitory nature. Hertz imagines this micro/macro lens as going beyond showing us what will be, but also what once was. Perhaps the relationship between the two. “Noticing with more clarity—and with greater magnitude—the forces and scales of precarity and disappearance. The range of disappearances I concern myself with involves the gradual occulting of presence: the slow leaks, the centuries-long fade-to-black. In this case, sonorous as well as biological disappearance, the change of soundscapes that accompanies drastic and destructive climate change.” (Hertz, 2019) The world never feels fallen, because we grow accustomed to the fall. 116 II.5.b. Sonic Rupture and Sonic Rapture, Towards a Sonic Ecosophy in Sound Design: II.5.b.i. Designing sound into our worldly soundscape 115 !Radigue,!Éliane.!2009.!“The!Mysterious!Power!of!the!Infinitesimal.”!Leonardo-Music-Journal!19! (December!2009).!pp.!47–49.!https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2009.19.47.! 116 !Hertz!quotes!from!Brooke!Jarvis.!Jarvis,!B.!2018.!“The!Insect!Apocalypse!Is!Here.”!The-NewYork-Times.!https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html!! 100 Across decades and disciplines, the term soundscape has changed, born out of and shaped by ecology over the years, describing a study of a soundscapes’ effects on its organisms and emphasis of ecological characteristics of sounds and their spatiotemporal patterns emerging from landscapes. 117 (Economou et al, 2016) Dr. Jordan Lacey, at the beginning of his book Sonic Rupture, (2016) acknowledges the importance and effectiveness of methodologies and practices introduced by the R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project (WSP) towards listening practices that connect us to our environments and bridge society and soundscape; such as soundwalks, sound mapping, and soundscape composition. At the same time, he expresses frustration with a field that is so critical of the urban soundscape, categorizing its noise as a place of bad health and habit. He states the WSP’s acoustic ecology as phenomenological, (Lacey, 2016, p. viii, 3) and thus focused on the human experience; he calls for an approach that considers Affect Theory, which he claims is more inclusive of other bodies’ experiences within a soundscape. (p. ix, 3-12) I appreciate this approach very much, but would ask in addition to keep as well the phenomenological, and therefore inward and outward experience and ecologies are considered together. 118 “By combining affect theory and acoustic ecology, I have come to consider noise as a material that has the potential to augment the imaginative capacities of the human body.” (Lacey, 2016, p. xi) Urban noise can indeed be harmful, physiologically and psychologically. Lacey is not disputing this, rather pointing out that all ecologies are affective, some are just more diverse (healthier) than others. (2016, p. 34) He proposes an urban network of sonic ruptures to create affective sonic ecologies, which would be as diversely affective as those found in nature. 119 (2016, p. 117 As! researched! by:! Ecomonmou,! C.,! Matsinos,! Y.G.,! Tsaligopoulos,! A.! 2016.! “The! interdisciplinary!Development!of!the!Term!“Soundscape”;!Tracing!its!Ecological!Roots.”!AEgeanJournalofEnvironmentalSciences- (AEJES),- Vol.2.! pp.! 11-23.! https://www.env.aegean.gr/wpcontent/uploads/2017/03/Matsinos-et-al_AEJES_2016.pdf! 118 !In!a!separate!discussion,!(August,!2020)!Lacey!also!noted!to!me!that!he!feels,!“phenomenology! isn’t! so! much! dismissed! by! Affect! Theory,! rather! pre-personal! affect! precedes! the! personal! phenomenological!experience;!where!affect!is!considered!a!plane!of!forces!and!intensities!that! precede! experience.! Phenomenological! possibilities! are! broadened! when! experience! occurs! without!judgment.”! 119 !He!notes!potential!only!becomes!actualized!for!humans!when!it!becomes!perceivable,!“passing! into!the!real!by!affecting!the!real”,!dynamically!and!continuously!affecting!the!real,!rendering!the! real!in!constant!movement.!Before!the!Earth!was!formed,!it! was!the!potential!for!Earth.!“The! Earth!itself!is!affective;!;!it!can!be!imagined!as!a!dynamic!globe!humming!with!potential,!out!of! which! all! biotic! and! abiotic! entities! emerge! in!a! process! of! creative!evolution.! Each! emergent! 101 50) Noise in our soundscapes is also something that much of the world’s human population does not have the luxury or privilege to escape. At the same time, noise in our soundscapes is something non-human urban populations as well do not have the privilege to escape, and are almost always of human-born sounds, such as homogenous sound makers like traffic and climate controllers. (2016, p. 40) Economically struggling areas are plagued with traffic from those who have the means for cars and homes outside of the city, or cars to escape the city when they want to. Industry is often placed near those who cannot raise a voice against it and its many pollutants, including sound. Lacey, as a sound artist, feels that art can have a positive effect on these soundscapes and those people who cannot escape them; he calls this “an affirmation of the power of creativity to alter its affects”. (Lacey, 2016, p. ix) Lacey proposes sound installations as urban public art to create networks of sonic ruptures in homogenous urban soundscapes, producing diversity and a space for new experience and new thought. He calls these acts of affective politics, which could also be considered acts of counter-aurality. (Lacey, 2016, p. 1, 35) The rupture concept for Lacey was inspired by Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies (2008), which also alerts to the unhealth of homogenous environments, and introduces the term “ecosophy”, which consists of three ecological registers–the environmental, social relations, and human subjectivity. Guattari notes “at the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-signifying 120 rupture.” (Guattari, 2008, p. 19; Lacey, 2016, p. 16) Lacey takes this as providing possibilities for connection of the body (both social and individual) and the land, through sound works that disperse fixed, homogenous, everyday sounds (such as what a commuter may be exposed to at the same time and place day after day). This allows for changes to everyday existence to emerge, which might impact positively on social health and well-being. (2016, pp. 16-17) “Social ecosophy will consist in developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live (…) reconstructing the modalities of ‘group-being’, not only through ‘communicational’ interventions but through existential mutations driven by the motor of subjectivity.” (Guattari, 2008, p. 34) Guattari then calls for the entity! affects! (and! is! affected! by)! the! ecologies! in! which! they! are! enmeshed,! including! all! of! humanity’s!present!moments!(synthetic,!technological!and!urban).”!(Lacey,!2016,!p.!50)! 120 !As!in,!the!absence!of!signifiers.!(Guattari,!2008,!p.!19)! 102 implementation of “effective practices of experimentation.” (Guattari, 2008, pp. 3435) Referring to Rupture, Lacey quotes in his Introduction: Our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought. The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. 121 (O’Sullivan,!2006,!p.!2;!Lacey,!2016,!p.!1) Approaching the soundscape in much the same way one might design sound for a film, along with artistic addition, Lacey also proposes a method of Subtraction. Subtraction is not just about removing a dominant unwanted sound, but revealing sounds that may be masked by them, “bringing out attention to the moment.” (Lacey, 2016, p. 155) Methods such as subtraction have the benefit of application to urban soundscapes already being lived in, but as Lacey sites, the reality of a soundscape designer finding a way to achieve this usually renders them referring solely to the addition approach (with adding soundwalls and other shields, acoustic sculpture, etc.). (pp. 76-80) Urban planning, or any sort of social infrastructural planning, that considers sonic problems from past choices, especially found disproportionally in lower income communities, and hiring soundscape designers that consider the aural affects and impacts of these future communities, could be an example of a massively affective counter-aurality. We culturally accept and expect the lower income neighborhood’s soundscape of concrete reverberation, traffic, construction and industry, and emergency sirens. We even design our cinematic sound to reflect, amplify, and repeat the same; an example of Mirzoeff’s anaesthetics, we learn this is the sound of Urban. Lacey’s network of sonic ruptures could have the positive effects of enriching the soundscape of urban areas, and simultaneously calling attention to them. Lacey 121 !O’Sullivan,!Simon.!2006.!Art-Encounters-Deleuze-and-Guattari:-Thought-Beyond-Representation.! New!York:!Palgrave!Macmillan-! ! 103 sited the transformative experience of listening to these spaces, experiencing these spaces as an “affective sonic ecology”, (Lacey, 2016, p. 34) and allowing that information and influence to guide his work. “This was another pivotal point in the creative practice research process, when myself-as-musician and the city-as-music begin to interconnect as an ecological interrelationship, where the city plays me and I play it back.” (Lacey, 2016, p. 85) Enriching soundscape while calling attention to them, to what is there and what is missing, challenging ways of being in the world, disrupting our usual systems of knowledge and structures we may fall back on, and pushed to thought...this is what the Wayback Sound Machine strives for with its ruptures to time and archives. Cinematic soundscapes in current mainstream film formulas become homogenous in loudness, the characteristics of their design increasingly towards a sensational and expected affect, to be left in the theater when the film is over, perhaps even in mimic or symptom to what is happening in our urban and suburban soundscapes: anaesthetics. The attention and activation of the Wayback Sound Machine’s questions, concepts, and methods seek to also create affective sonic ecologies in creative sound design, and sonic ruptures in our sound archives. II.5.b.ii. Allowing our worldly sound into our sound design: 122 Guattari also writes on the connection of the social ecosophy to the mental ecosophy, which will, “lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the ‘mysteries’ of life and death. He states this will encourage us to finding “antidotes to mass-media”. (Guattari, 2008, p. 35) Considering the connections between his ecologies and ecosophies can be a method to consider the connections between listening to our soundscapes, and our counteraurality sound designs and affective sonic ecologies…connection as well as application. In the previous section we explored the concept of considering the sonic design of a soundscape, in this section I will flip that, and explore the soundscape in our cinematic sound design. I will explore, at times critically, the relationship of Werner Herzog’s films, and specifically their sonic elements, to the various biomes he shoots in, focusing on six of his films, almost all documentaries. Within this, we will 122 !Excerpts!of!the!following!sub-chapter!were!published!prior:!Colbert,!M.!(2017-2018)!"Cinema! e!Procura:!Uma!Natureza!no!Som!e!Visão!de!Werner!Herzog!/!Cinema!and!Seeking:!A!Nature!in! Werner! Herzog’s! Sound! and! Vision."! animalia! vegetalia! mineralia:! ecomedia,! ecocinema,! ecocriticism,!no.!IX,!2017-2018.!https://animaliavegetaliamineralia.org/ecocinema/!! 104 delve further into nature as place, and further on when comparing and considering filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s sound design and soundscapes in his films, we will also consider the sound of place and time. The launching point for the discussion about Herzog and his relationship to nature through sound is inspired from and follows the Fata Morgana interview article, Being Exposed to Nature: A Conversation with Werner Herzog. 123 (Dottorina, 2008) The importance towards giving, allowing, or amplifying voice to place is a theme throughout this thesis, and in that spirit, I want to speak of my own place in regard to this writing–part of my interest in critiquing Herzog’s work is my interest and respect for him as a filmmaker. The points I will be critiquing are, as I will discuss, very affective. Another way to put this is, they work on me in the way I believe the filmmaker means them to. But when this happens, I am simultaneously aware, and critical, because I also know what might be missing, what was not sounded, and I feel that is important to consider. This bridges into the second part of the chapter section where I discuss the work of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul 124 in comparison and contrast, as a filmmaker who does allow place and soundscape to speak, or gives or amplifies voice of place, and the ways in which this is successfully used in his work, especially towards aspects of magical realism which often brings in time, as this is usually explored in relation to a mixing of his own memories, stories, and mythologies of the place. These are two exceptional and prolific filmmakers working with sound in very different methods, and it seemed beneficial to the thesis to have a section of comparison and contrast. I will describe these methods, write critically about them and apply my recent research. Part One: We’re in Wisconsin, and the bank robbery went wrong. Bruno walks into an amusement arcade, empty of other humans and filled with animals in themed cages, trained to do a thing over and over again. A coin enters a slot, a rabbit 123 Dottorini,! Daniele! ed.! 2008,! 2016.! “Being! Exposed! to! Nature,! A! Conversation! with! Werner! Herzog.”!Cinema,-Thought,-Life:-Conversations-with-Fata-Morgana-(“Fata-Morgana”,-Nature,-No.-6,- 2008)-p.!127.!DOI:!10.1400/250648! 124 !According!to!Thai!naming!customs,!a!person!is!respectfully!addressed!by!their!given!name,! rather!than!surname,!and!so!I!will!refer!to!this!filmmaker!by!Apichatpong!from!here!on!out.! 105 “plays” piano. A coin enters a slot, a chicken dances…over and over, again and again. The room is filled with a maddening sound composition, made hysterical by the sonic take-over of harmonica and yodeling. When asked about this famous ending to his film Stroszek, (Herzog, 1977) Werner Herzog himself said he felt it was a powerful metaphor, but he couldn’t say what for. 125 His relationship with chickens, an oddly ongoing theme in many of his films, has often led to one of two streams of analysis– chickens represent the worst aspects of human nature, or chickens represent the most terrifying aspects of Nature. Two streams that rarely come together, and yet perhaps this is representative as to why Herzog felt his dancing chicken was a perfect metaphor, but for what he couldn’t say–perhaps an allowance for complexity to break the duality we often jump to in our organization of ecologies dealing with Us and Nature. Timothy Morton urges that we break from our romantic notions of Nature with his theories of a Dark Ecology, (2016) which he compares to film noir in form– where the protagonist may feel neutral in their assessments and investigation, until they realize they are implicate within it. (2016, p. 111) Morton might seem somewhat in-tune with Herzog’s assessment of Nature, stating often that a more relevant and realistic ecology–and ecological art–doesn’t view ecology through a “rose-colored glass”, but expects, accepts, and even thrives in the dark mess and mesh. But his philosophy on the subject would also apply to the pendulum swinging the other way and find critique in Herzog’s “Us versus Nature” statements. In fact, Morton does critique Herzog’s depiction of Treadwell’s perspective in Grizzly Man, (Herzog, 2005) stating his, “…view of animal indifference and cruelty is as mistaken as Treadwell’s view of animal sympathy”. (Morton, 2016, p. 75) Nature can be and has been defined as life, living, the physical world, the natural world, the material world, the universe, geology and wildlife, the kingdom of plants and animals, the wild, wilderness. The natural versus the artificial; humankind is part of nature, but often spoken of as separate. Many contemporary ecologists have sited this to being a large contributing factor to different ecological problems, and potential as well as ongoing disasters. Natura in Latin meant “birth”, and could also refer to essential qualities, an innate disposition. That is translated from the Greek 125 !Ebert,!Roger.!2002.!Stroszek-Review.!para.!11.!Retrieved!May!13,!2016:! https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stroszek-1977!! 112 film,” (Herzog, 2005) Herzog says at a moment when Treadwell is not speaking, keeping the soundscape still low behind him, a murmur from the past. “It’s the only thing I know. It’s the only thing I want to know,” (2005) Treadwell states with a smile. He goes to turn off the camera, then is for a moment sidetracked, clearly listening…for a moment just listening to his beloved land. Herzog’s closing monologue is over further footage Treadwell has taken, of the bears playing by the seaside. He leaves the soundscape once again in the background, allowing the past to speak with him in dialogue, allowing it to have a weight on his words of what is gone and what remains: “A thought becomes more and more clear, this (footage) is not so much a look at wild nature, as it is an insight into ourselves, into our nature.” (Herzog, 2005) This moment in the ending is a beautiful convergence of the two voices, and one of respect from Herzog’s side. Continuing a theme of limitation, the interviewer asks: Does cinema need to find an image which otherwise exceeds the limits of the visible, or is it something else? (Dottorini, 2008, p. 2) Sound with cinema can do that, does do that, pulling the immersive world outside the borders of the frame to surround us. Herzog answers: “Those images are about a search which is integral to cinema; I think. I think that through films we can transmit basic sensations. (…) I think that in some of the movies, it was about giving the audience the possibility to feel the interior spaces, the most invisible spaces.” (Dottorini, 2008, p. 3) I do not doubt that this is possible with cinema, and the cinematic sensorial experience, in fact part of my argument here is that cinematic sound with image transmits complex sensations, layered, many creating affect under a conscious level. This calls to mind again Steven Feld’s writing on the Kaluli “lift-up-and-oversounding”, the acceptance of the complexity of the soundscape and the information and sensations that brings us– “the soundscape evokes ‘insides’ sa, ‘underneath’ hego, and ‘reflections’ mama. These notions involve perceptions, changes of focus and frame, motions of interpretive access to meanings packed into layers of sensation…” (Feld, 1990, p. 266) The experience of listening to the external, translated in the internal–the filmmaker and sound designer must map out this path, scene-by-scene, sensation-by-sensation. The interviewer says: Nature as a limit. Herzog answers, “Certainly, but once we accept this, we also have to admit that, on this planet of ours, we can still 113 experience enormity, the vastness, of seemingly borderless space.” (Dottorini, 2008, p. 5) One can sense this urge and seeking with Herzog’s films, this expansion and outward motion towards a sensation of the world so large it could crush you with the weight its experience. He wants to capture this, and where he feels that comes up short, he wants to create this, and where that won’t do, he seeks others that seek the same. And sound does just this for cinema, expands out past the screen and visual borders, surrounds and enters. Sound can place us, when woven with story and image, in the jungle, under frozen worlds, in prehistoric caves. Sound transcends time and space, and sound can give meaning to and create Place. Herzog is a filmmaker that immediately comes to mind when asked to consider film and nature, and a filmmaker’s relationship to Nature. Clearly this thought is shared with the Fata Morgana interviewer. Another filmmaker that comes to my mind regarding these themes is Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and it is worthy and revealing to consider the two filmmakers together, and their different sonic approaches to landscape and soundscape. Part 2: In the interview, Herzog speaks of the insignificance to our story, that this is a natural limit. (Dottorini, 2008, p. 2) But cinema carves out a time and space to give significance to our stories. Herzog continues that from a distance our world is a “miniscule grain of sand”. (Dottorini, 2008, p. 5) But the whole of the world can be seen in a grain of sand, 131 and for me this represents the cinema that Apichatpong Weerasethakul creates, rendering the hyperobject of the world, into a new world that represents as a sort of heterotopia. Like in Foucault’s example of a mirror to describe this term, heterotopia, as a space that is both real and unreal, of this world but otherworldly, relating with the space around it as an object, yet a virtual image. 132 131 !“To!See!a!World...”!fragments!from!Auguries-of-Innocence:!! To-see-a-World-in-a-Grain-of-Sand-- And-a-Heaven-in-a-Wild-Flower,- -Hold-Infinity-in-the-palm-of-your-hand--- And-Eternity-in-an-hour.! 132 !Foucault,!Michel.!1984.!“Of!Other!Spaces:!Utopias!and!Heterotopias.”!Architecture! /Mouvement/!Continuité!October,!1984.!trans.!Jay!Miskowiec.!Retrieved!June!25,!2018:! https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf!!- 114 (Foucault, 1984, p. 3) Sound helps extend and connect the “object” of the screen, to the space of the audience. In the way Herzog’s films go outward, seeking sublime limits and borders to come up against in place unknown, unfamiliar, otherworldly– Apichatpong’s films have an intimacy of the internal, to the point at times uncanny. They create a space that feels known to the director; known so well, with such experience, their expression can also express internal states of the human within them–dreams, fantasy, and myth: magical realism. Place is known so well, so sensorially, its transmission to and through the screen and speaker to audience transcends the internal. Where Herzog is macro, Apichatpong is so supremely micro– whole worlds are seen in a grain of sand, and we are immersed in the soundscapes of his childhood, both memory and dreams. Apichatpong has said himself, often, that his audience should at times experience his films while asleep. When we sleep, sound continues to enter us and be processed, blending two states. We have no “ear-lid” to close off to the world. And this is the feeling we can get experiencing his 2006 film, Syndrome and a Century. (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) In the first half we are surrounded by the soundscape of his childhood, a hospital in rural Thailand, him having grown up with both parents’ physicians in such a setting. Allowing place to speak in cinema also allows and accepts complexity, and the film that was originally about his parents absorbed elements of location and his actors, weaving with his own memories. In an interview he said, “When I met the actors, when I found the location, there were other stories combined and added in. I try not to limit it. I allow it to flow whichever way it goes.” 133 (Pansittivorakul, 2006) The film begins aurally, carrying us with an ambient musical drone that blends and seems to transform into the sound of wind through the trees we look upon in the first visual shot. When we cut from the trees to character, there is no change in the soundscape, and it continues its strength to the next character, giving us the sense of listening to what they are listening to, connecting them through sound, so we are that much more embedded when they are spoken to, creating a strange sensation–the aural 133 !!Pansittivorakul,!Thunska.!2006.!“Conversation!with!Apichatpong!Weerasethakul,”!Criticine.! April!29,!2006.!!Retrieved!November!3,!2017:! http://www.criticine.com/interview_article.php?id=24!! 115 POV 134 of the characters spoken to, but the visual POV of the person asking the question. Chion calls this, point of audition (POA). (Chion, 1994. p. 90) At the point when we are allowed to pull back and see both characters interact with each other, and we are once again the audience, we also see that while we are in an interior, the windows are open to the exterior, and the sound of the exterior. This is a device that reoccurs often through Apichatpong’s films, the frame of the window from internal to external, the soundscape crossing that border, a mix. His architectural background may have led him to this relationship with space and place sounded–how sound crosses over, enters and immerses–whether the frame of a window, or the frame of a screen. Transformation through immersion itself goes back to the prehistoric–cave paintings, architecture and bizarre acoustic spaces and temples–audio and visual special effects already being used to create a metaphysical transformation and altered state. It is a utopian idea, transporting the observer into the image, nullifying the distance of the image space and intensifying illusion. (Grau, 2003, p. 348) Transformation relies on a comfort and letting go towards immersion. “The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past.” 135 (Krauss, pp. 30-44). We are comforted by perception of sameness, to a certain extent. The ‘uncanny valley’ concept in aesthetic acceptability is when a simulation of a human with a near-identical resemblance to the real arouses a feeling of unease or revulsion. 136 When graphed, there is a sudden drop after a climb of positive feeling, empathy, and acceptance that is correlated to the anthropomorphism of the simulated human. I will return to the aural uncanny valley in Chapter Three further on. 134 !A!“point-of-view”!(POV)!shot!in!cinema!is!a!shot!or!scene!that!shows!what!a!character!(the! subject)!is!looking!at,!represented!through!the!camera.!Sound!can!have!a!POV!as!well,!when!we! experience!what!a!character!is!listening!to,!which!is!often!in!conjunction!with!the!visual.!We!are! set!up!for!the!POV!by!seeing!the!character!listening,!which!is!exampled!in!the!prior!Herzog!scenes! written!about!in!this!thesis.!! 135 !Krauss,!Rosalind.!1976.!“Video:!The!Aesthetics!of!Narcissism”!in!October,-Vol.!1,!New!York! 136 !Masahiro! Mori! introduced! the! term! in! a! paper! from! 1970! from! the! Tokyo! Institute! of! Technology.!It!initially!was!published!in!a!small!journal!called,!Energy,!but!was!ignored!for!years.! The!complete!version!of!the!original!essay!can’t!be!found,!but!this!is!an!English!version!that!was! reviewed!and!authorized!by!Mori:! Mori,!M,!MacDorman,!K.F.,!and!Kageki,!N.!2012.!"The!Uncanny!Valley![From!the!Field],"!in!IEEERobotics-&-Automation-Magazine,!vol.!19,!no.!2,!pp.!98-100,!June!2012.!Retrieved!April!26,!2015:! doi:!10.1109/MRA.2012.2192811!! ! 116 In the short film Phantoms of Nabua, (2009) Apichatpong and sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr, whom Apichatpong works with often, reach a powerful conjunction of sound and image, using once again the theme of frame, expanding the macro and micro simultaneously. Once again, a vigorous effect of an aural uncanny valley, the emitting objects of what we witness on-screen visually–wind, wind in trees, night creatures sounding in the distance, and even the surprise of the ghostly lightning strikes–but with qualities different than what would be expected. Low fidelity, they sound re-recorded, perhaps when the actual re-scanning of the screen was happening. This deceptively simple choice creates an other-worldly state, a sense of distance and at the same time being under; dislocated as the information we are picking up from listening isn’t telling us where, but rather creating a new where, a where that exists outside our physical laws. The affect enhances the macro/micro sensation. In the end, the screen has burned, and we are left with sound, smoke, light, and a frame. The skeletons of production lay out before us–amongst many other themes, this is a film about filmmaking. It plays like a dream about filmmaking. Sleep and dreaming are reoccurring themes as well in films of Apichatpong. A description of the sensation of listening to the soundtrack to Phantoms of Nabua (2009) could be the experience of listening when close to asleep. In Cemetery of Splendor, (2015) the film opens with the aural POV of the sleeping soldiers. The screen is black, and we hear disembodied sounds, some impossible to place. The use of soundscape with dialogue throughout Cemetery of Splendor (2015) creates an unusual perspective, in conjunction with slow reveals in the narrative, sustains a continual dream-like state, but definitely not neutral. As the film moves forward, this allows an enhancement of a sense of accumulation, turning frenzy when the sleeping soldier’s lights spill out into the town. A closing shot at the end towards the sky, in it a paramecium floating, the macro and micro together, the external and internal, our world’s limits we can only dream and create out of. 117 Herzog wrote, “Mother Nature doesn’t call, does not speak to you.” 137 But you can listen, there is information there. You can allow and encourage your audience to listen. Now I will do nothing but listen… I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused or following, Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night… 138 II.5.b.iii. Sounding Our Crisis, Part 1: In 2011, the disastrous Tohoku earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan. Within its horrific footprint, several nuclear accidents affected hundreds of thousands of residents with radiation levels up to eight times what are considered normal. Many other radioactive hot spots were also found outside the evacuated radius, including within Tokyo. All over social networks, people posted photos, videos, and sound clips of their Geiger counters reading the radioactivity in their homes and neighborhoods. The process a Geiger counter uses is called sonification, a form of auditory display that uses non-speech audio to convey information. Sonification is an old technique– the Geiger counter dates to 1908–but only in the last decades is it becoming more spoken of and has begun to bridge areas in art and science. It is defined as nonspeech audio being used in a correlative manner to perceptualize data and convey information. 139 As I played a sound file from a friend of the above-normal readings in his kitchen in Tokyo, I was unnerved by the ominous, staticky click, like the chirping of some robotic insect, but recognized immediately with decades of cultural aural association. Nothing sounds like a Geiger counter, really, except a Geiger counter. It is a sound that hadn’t existed before it was created to signal danger. In fact, the entire event was sonically terrifying. Some of the most chilling recordings I heard from the 137 !Herzog,!Werner.!Minnesota-Declaration:-Lessons-of-Darkness,!sentence!number!10.!Walker!Arts! Center!Magazine.!Retrieved!February!3,!2015:! http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/1999/minnesota-declaration-truth-and-fact-in-docum!! 138 !Whitman,!Walt.!1819-1892.!“Song!of!Myself.”!Leaves-of-Grass.!! 139 !Kramer,!Gregory,!ed.!1994.!“Auditory!Display:!Sonification,!Audification,!and!Auditory! Interfaces.!Santa!Fe!Institute!Studies!in!the!Sciences!of!Complexity.!Proceedings!Volume!XVIII.! Reading,!MA:!Addison-Wesley.!Accessed:!November!12,!2019.! https://archive.org/details/auditorydisplays00greg/mode/2up?q=Kramer!! 118 underwater earthquake and the birth of the tsunami were picked up by the hydrophones of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s VENTS Program. The Tohoku earthquake was the largest sound they had ever picked up, though the hydrophone was located 1,448 kilometers away. 140 Using the seismic data from this same quake, audio programmer and artist Micah Frank used his creation “Tectonic”, (2016) a real-time seismic analysis and sound synthesis system based on parsed data collected from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) XML feed, mapped with Google Earth, and processed with Max/MSP, a visual programming language for multimedia, including sound, and Symbolic Sound’s sound design environment, Kyma, to sonify the sounds of the earth shifting and opening that fateful day. With “Tectonic”, sound is created in realtime by seismic activities as they occur across the globe. Using magnitude, elevation, time of day, and geographical coordinates, the data is mapped to synthetic spectrums and processed by granular, aggregate and subtractive synthesis. The result is: beautiful. The affect separate from its context is relaxing, pleasing, gentle sounding, quite pretty, until the jarring moment of what I can only image (as other information here is not provided) is the tremor itself, which sounds like a building alarm. 141 So is this more artistic and emotive approach effective in conveying the disaster, if that is even the point? Most comments on his publicly posted sound file range from “cool sounds” to “I’ll send you the remix when it’s done.” When compared to the hydrophonic recordings from the VENTS program, perhaps the use of data to sonify is too abstracted from the event itself. Or perhaps, like anything, it depends on the many elements that go into a work, such as the artist themselves, what they are capable of, mindful of, and paying attention to. Digital media artist Andrea Polli takes a different approach to sonification. During the 2007/2008 season Polli was on site in Antarctica conducting work through the National Science Foundation residency, working with scientists gathering weather and climate data. Here she created the project 90 Degrees South, (2007-2008) which 140 !NOAA!has!posted!a!video!of!the!recording!sped!up!16x!for!human!perception!on!their! YouTube!channel,!here:! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWDrZIucAQ&feature=plcp&context=C4c76cbcVDvjVQa1 PpcFMIdkGAZy08KSnJR0QSvkCc74iRDe7AGfQ%3D!! 141 !While!this!work!is!no!longer!on!his!website!or!Vimeo!page,!you!can!listen!to!the!audio!on! Frank’s!Soundcloud,!here:!https://soundcloud.com/micahfrank/earthquakes-off-the-east-coast!! 119 “aims to communicate both the aesthetic beauty and the scientific importance of Antarctica to global climate.” 142 (Polli, 2007) This project gave birth to the audio album, “Sonic Antarctica”, (2009) which uses field recordings, sonifications, and audifications (a technique involving direct translation of a data to an audio waveform) of the collected data. 143 I asked Andrea Polli in my chapter article, “The Sound of Disaster, Our Relationship to Sound in Danger”: (Colbert, 2014b) “How can sonification help us understand climate change?” 144 One thing that comes to mind is that sound and music can provoke an emotional (or at least affective) response that is not always possible through graphs and images. For example, I have used low, almost sub-aural sounds in data sonifications to promote a visceral response in the listener to various atmospheric events. . . I have worked with weather and air quality data in real time, both using on-site data or remote data. To become attuned to the remote data takes some time and quiet listening, to me it is like being in two places at once, for example in a gallery or online and at a remote site near the North Pole. (Polli, as cited in Colbert, 2014b) Recording on-site and working with the recordings of sites, UK artist Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places (2012) sought recordings from disaster hit areas like the Chernobyl exclusion zone in the Ukraine, the Caspian oil fields in Azerbaijan, the Chernobyl-fallout affected farmlands of Northern Wales, and the rivers of Eastern Turkey with their extensive, local climate altering dams. What is surprising and moving about these works is the strong human element, especially the lack of human presence and the evolving relationship of humans to these post-disaster soundscapes. Listening to some of Cusack’s recordings from Chernobyl, one might feel surprised to hear that iconic name attached to such rich and pastoral soundscapes. When we consider the massive industrial accident that killed thousands 142 !Documentation!of!the!Project!and!outcomes!can!be!found!on!Anrea!Polli’s-90-Degrees-South! (2007-2008)!project!site!here:!http://www.90degreessouth.org/!! 143 Polli,!Andrea.!2009.!Sonic-Antarctica.!Germany:!Gruenrekorder.! https://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=342!! ! 120 and created an exclusion zone of 30 kilometers (19 miles), some of us are compelled to imagine a wasteland with not a living creature in sight. But those like Cusack who have visited the area are met with quite a different experience, one we can share when listening to the recordings. Cusack says Chernobyl held the richest dawn bird choruses he has ever recorded, haunting full choruses of frogs and nightingales sound throughout the night. And again, we hear that iconic sound of the Geiger counter increasing its metallic chirp as Cusack walks toward an infamous radioactive hotspot, at one point it makes an eerie duet with a calling cuckoo. I asked Peter Cusack: “How has the sound of dangerous places surprised you?” (Colbert, 2014b) Dangerous places can be both sonically and visually compelling, even beautiful and atmospheric. There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between an aesthetic response and knowledge of the ‘danger,’ whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or geopolitical. (…) Many aspects of dangerous places are a surprise, mostly because one’s expectations are often wide of the mark, especially in the smaller details. However different places surprise one very differently. For example, the name ‘Chernobyl exclusion zone’ implies no one is there. Not so. Thousands still work at the site, some live there and some commute in every day (by rail, so trains are part of the soundscape). That many people also require restaurants, bars, administration and all the infrastructure of a small town. So, people and work sounds of all kinds are still to be heard around Chernobyl town and the nuclear sites. Some of the villagers, originally evacuated out, have returned bringing their sounds too – horses, chickens, carts, hand farming, traditional songs, modern day TV. The zone is also now a wildlife haven, and the sounds of the dawn and evening chorus of spring are intense. The vibrant recordings of wildlife show that many species, at least, are doing fine in the exclusion zone. (Cusack, as sited in Colbert, 2014b) 121 The contrast of a pleasingly full biophony to a location associated with danger can be a powerful contrast. In Gus Van Sant’s “Death” trilogy, with the films Gerry (2002), Elephant, (2003) and Last Days (2005), Van Sant and sound designer Leslie Shatz used the reverse of what we have come to expect from cinema sound to prepare us for disaster, de-familiarizing the world they create on screen. Van Sant utilizes recordings of soundscapes from Hildegard Westerkamp, whose work and research was written about in Chapter 1, in unexpected ways, playing with our anticipation. Again, taking in sound cues as information, we may classically expect ascending violins or a low building rumble to prepare us for the unfolding of something dangerous in cinema. A study even linked the most common types of “nonlinear vocalizations,” or sudden acoustic complexities and changes, used in horror movies soundtracks to aping the cries that many species use at times of distress. 145 Van Sant and Shatz decided in Elephant to use excerpts from Westerkamp’s stunning composition, “Beneath the Forest Floor”. (1992) As we follow a character down a school hallway in the aftermath of the initial shooting, our ears describe to us a place in a strange harmony, one out of context and in contrast with the world our eyes tell us we are experiencing. Westerkamp created the composition from her recordings of the British Columbian rain forests, old-growth forests with trees over a thousand years old, threatened by ever creeping clear cutting. The sounds from such growth seem to carry their time, which can feel so still compared to our quick life spans. In the film scene, the out of context and the confusion that plays on our perception, heightened with all sounds seemingly the same size and distance from us, give us a sense of the aural uncanny, and we feel prepared for something off, no matter how peaceful the sounds sound themselves. 146 This echoes the feeling of displacement and detachment of the characters from the world they embody. When a character on a screen isn’t speaking, they are listening, and so our perception is through their ears to what they are listening to; and if done well, we believe their world, even at its most otherworldly moments. This association is 145 !Blumstein,!D.!T.,!Davitian,!R.,!&!Kaye,!P.!D.!(2010).!Do!film!soundtracks!contain!nonlinear! analogues!to!influence!emotion?.!Biology-letters,!6(6),!751–754.! https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0333!! 146 !Ex.!from!3:33!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIyrd6G2790&feature=related! 128 The audience reported a feeling and consideration towards the heard and unheard. The affect was Big: earthquake, known sounds, sonified sounds, and Small: bird extinction, hidden sounds, amplified “silence”. At points the amplified silence in contrast, or after a sonified event, became Big. Expressions of a Future, biblical apocalypse and ecological apocalypse, fluctuated between each other and the Big and Small sonic affect. The performative experience shifted from the moment of putting the blindfold on, not only for myself as performer, but also for the audience watching. It is appropriate here to utilize an auto-ethnographical descriptive structure: my experience in this was less of a sensory erasure than a sharpening of other senses, and how this affected my relationship with the audience, as well as my relationship with the space on stage, with a shift of focus and a tuning between my sense of hearing and touch, and the perception of the space around me through them. Performance is primarily perceived as a visual act. Even when what is being performed is sonic, the key to what the audience is considering is what is in the space we call stage, the sound almost secondary in the sense of being attached to what is seen. What cinematic sound designers often work with to transfer meaning and emotion, and to extend past the screen–the acousmatic sound–Come Kingdom Come works with, in tandem with audience expectation in relationship to information given by sound in multiple ways. During the event I am describing, the blindfold became the wire connecting every circuit into a shared phenomenological circular flow. Come Kingdom Come (2012-2017) is an experimental opera concerning millennialism and apocalyptic thought and theory, beginning with an attempt at an exploratory comparison of this past turn of the millennium to its prior. What became more of an interest in the following years of performing it was its geography in time and space sonically formed and placed using various archival recordings of the before, during, and after-math of natural disasters and other catastrophic phenomena; the seismic activity of an earthquake, thunderous tsunami, VLF of a sun storm, the quiet of Chernobyl exclusion area decades after its disaster, endangered species of bird calling in the desert. The audio-visual performance begins in darkness with VLF (very low frequency) recordings of our magnetosphere surrounding the seated audience. 150 Images on the triptych of screens emerge one by one in a slow reveal of a 150 !Examples!from!NASA!can!be!accessed!and!listened!to!on!their!VLF!project!INSPIRE!site!here:! http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/inspire.html!! 129 technique of exposing the development process without a direct subject, developing but never fully arriving, seen but unseen. The sweeping sonic information usually outside of our hearing range made audible, from above our earthly air, surrounding and weaving with records of a time stamped and gone, and a place that became Event. The performance bookends with the bringing in of a live-feed of the electromagnetic current of the space, mixing in duet with the recorded VLF from the beginning, weaving past into present, and bringing us to a full but changed circle, that if mapped might resemble an Ouroboros. And so, this time it was performed blindfolded. In the beginning I stand, and I walk to the audience. With the blindfold, I had to walk slowly, stiffly. My audience told me the experience of this was unnerving for them on different levels. They could visually see my sight was not in use, and so they worried about my safety. I was carrying my VLF receiver, which is not immediately identifiable to most people, and since I built my own, it looks like a metal box with a few knobs, switches, and wires, with a very long whip antennae coming off one end. I would lightly run the antennae over them, at which point the sound would change to unearthly crackles and moans over the speaker system. Visually, a generic box such as this, in our times, is itself a frightening thing, I am always stopped at airport security to explain it. When in action a ghostly sound bearing no resemblance to the expected happens, and there is a complicated physiological and physiological affect with that asynchronicity. (Heuson & Allen, 2014, pp. 113-120) I felt, and could hear through intake of breath, shifting in seats, nervous muffled laughs-my audience. In turn, that had an effect on my movements, and therefore my performance. A dynamic environment of connection is formed, the artist as ecologist. (Youngblood, 1970, pp. 346-351) My audience and I, and between us a charged and changing ‘affective sonic ecology’, (Lacey, 2016, p. 33) each entity with unique emotive responses, in a shared field, affecting that field collectively, creating what Voegelin might call a ‘sonic life-world.’ (Voegelin, 2010, p. 12) < Figure 11 > What changed when blinded in consideration to the whole? Why did that small visual change create a large affect on the audience? What elements of this can be considered and used in future projects? This experience had me considering indepth the relationship between aural and visual, sound studies and visual studies, 130 visuality and aurality, in reference to the arts and artists. Visual culture can apply as an alternative and critique to European-biased practices in art history (Mirzoeff, 1998, p. XXX), and this thesis is working towards a consideration of both art and history, in relationship to a counter-aurality. “And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech.” (Rancière, 2004, p. 225) III.1.b. Nostalgia and place: (Passageira em Casa and Passageira australis) Returning to the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis and IBEs, we can take the theorized origins of a sense of composition and that relationship to sensible signals in our soundscapes, and apply this towards sound design, revealing information about listening, how we listen, what we listen for, and consider how that can be designed towards and used creatively. Within the practice-based research component to this work, aside from the previously mentioned performance, I have been working with three main case-study projects: Passageira em Casa (Colbert, 2012-2016) and Passageira australis (Colbert, 2013), 151 and Radio Terramoto, (Colbert & Costa, 2013-2015) which was written about previously. 152 In the same old work notebook where I found the note about sounding the past with Radio Terramoto, a few pages latter I read: “Passageira em Casa: Three Chapters. 1) Memória/Memory: Portugal 2) Tocar/Touch: Australia 3) Voltar/Return: New York”. The New York version is now set to be a living archive online, allowing return to anywhere and nowhere, living in a space that by its design defies and disrupts time and chronology. Remember that the Internet is also a Wayback Machine. What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that, what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design? Passageira em Casa (The Traveler at Home) begins to explore the notion of the Wayback Sound Machine with a sonic geography, similar in its use to Come Kingdom Come. Passageira em Casa is an intermedia and interdisciplinary performance inspired by the journey to define the concept of home. The narrative is a partially fictionalized and partially personalized 151 !http://www.mailecolbert.com/proj-passageira.html!! 152 !http://www.mailecolbert.com/proj-wayback.html! 131 account of a maritime history of Portugal, enacted by a dancer, vocal performer, live video, and live sound composition using field recordings and geo-specific sonic archival material that creates, extends, and weaves a geography through the narrative and space of the project. From a bird song dawn chorus in Lisbon to underwater seismic activity in the oceans to an orchestra of insect activity in the Pacific Islands, recordings along a maritime navigation route flow throughout the performance, giving a soundscape and sound-line to the narrative’s location, one that the dancer and audience follow together. With the theory in mind that soundscapes carry information–signal and symbol, materiality and metaphor–the theory follows that recordings will carry at least in part that information as well and following that those recordings could be used in sound design for transferring information and provoking affect in the experiences that would have a tie to the original scape and context of that sound. Affect theory, basically defined as the study of the biological portion and patterns of emotion, has been useful in studying and organizing this, 153 and led to working out a way to consider further dimension within the design. If we consider, as we did with Come Kingdom Come, the flow–from the production to the performer to the audience…from the audience to the performer, and here we designed the project to have that flow return to the production. Within this were smaller loops of affect between the performer and audience, which is to be expected in performance, but also between the dancer and the production. < Figure 12 > There are key moments in the project performance that also correspond to key locations on the stage, which the audience is designed to sit around rather than in front of. These locations on the stage are also geographic locations in the narrative, to be explored at specific times. Sound provides the primary affective loops I’m writing of here, but remember sound also provides the time and geography in the narrative. Specific sound recordings from geographic locations on the narrative’s timeline guide the dancer to where they need to be, like following constellations at sea, but with sound being a time medium, the designed soundscape also provides the time. Time felt is subjective, fluid and changeable, personal in that way–like sound perceived. I wanted to find a way to give the dancer a way to express their felt time and perceived sound, to give them a way to directly affect the elements of the work, based on the 153 !Tomkins,!S.!(1962)!Affect-Imagery-Consciousness.!New!York,!NY:!Springer.!(chap.!1)! 132 effect of what they perceived while performing. I also wanted to have a way to highlight how history is created, made story by those who have heard voices, who have power. I researched, designed, and spent many studio hours testing with the sound engineer and dancer a system, a kind of ecology, for Passageira em Casa’s premiere performance. Using a Kinect motion sensor, the dancer could trigger specific sounds and soundscapes using choreographed pose and gesture. From a known database of these sounds, it was her choice with movement what to play and when. These sections were accessed during the initial “voyage”, when her costume turns into a ship, which is also a screen on which navigation maps are projected. They were accessed again to her discretion later in the performance, when she felt “lost”. And again, to return “home”. The audience could see, hear, and feel her connection with the mediums, from her hitting the floor, to her commanding the soundscape. Their proximity and surrounding allowed her to always sense them in return and consider how to affect them further. What is the artist’s role in the archive and with sounding the past, and how can that strengthen a critical practice? How can these questions lead to a critical aurality, and a critical sound design? When I write that in Passageira em Casa, the designed soundscape “provides the time”, in the next variation this holds a double meaning of both time during the performance in the present, and as well the time corresponding to the narrative of the past. The more recent Australian version, Passageira australis explores sound in time, in relationship to space and place, towards a counter-aurality. < Figure 13 & 14 > Developed at the iAir residency at RMIT, Passageira australis holds a focus on the debate behind whether the Portuguese were the first Europeans to arrive in Australia, based on the 16th century Dieppe maps of Jave la Grande and the myth/history of the Mahogany Ship, the possible Portuguese caravel wreck that hasn’t yet been discovered, its story based on eyewitness accounts from the 19th century and 133 a missing ship from a Portuguese voyage from 1522. 154 The soundtrack reveals two sound-lines based on the impact on flora, fauna, and overall soundscape of both continents. The project’s soundscape functions as a Wayback Sound Machine exploring sonically these two timelines, and how they affect each through different points in time. A two-channel composition, different than stereo, one speaker represents Europe, the other Australia. As the dancer, our sailor, moves from one end of the space to the other, the sound in each channel is changed based on their approximate location to each continent. With this experience, my hope is the audience comes away thinking about the interconnectivity of the world, and how we impact the places we touch. III.2 Revival and re-enactment, another sonic hauntology and the aural uncanny: The aural uncanny valley: an excellent and descriptive example of this can be found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, (1979) where the sound design is the main element in transmitting an immersive science fiction narrative to its audience. We find ourselves towards the middle of the film within a tunnel in the Zone. The characters must go through, and while there is no visible threat, when a rock is thrown to test the environmental what returns to them is a soundscape active with various geographic information–the rock hits and emits a sound wet with reverb, the next bounce and hit is flat and close, the following sound appropriate to the scene, and yet following that is loud and fake. The same mix of aural cues is laid upon the characters voices and footsteps as well. Mostly we don’t notice, but we sense the place is off, there is something unpredictable, impossible to know about that tunnel, and this effect enhances our characters’ narrative and makes the science fiction of the place believable. We can step into this tunnel with them. We can still experience a sound environment that is “wrong” with the aural information telling us that it is “wrong”, but we can experience that as an aesthetic affect, as cinema culture and history with sound design as something hidden. The sound designer plays with the expectation and 154 !Trickett,! P.! 2007.! BeyondCapricorn,-HowPortugueseadventurers-discoveredandmappedAustralia-and-New-Zealand-250-years-before-Captain-Cook.!Adelaide:!East!St.!Publications.!p.195.! ISBN!978-0-9751145-9-9! 134 prediction of expected sound and sound quality in relationship to what we see, another form of sonic hauntology. Akritchalerm plays with this phenomenon. Returning to Apichatpong and the second half of Syndrome and a Century, (2006) we are forty years later and in an urban setting. We can sense we are in a bigger building–the windows are closed, and the hum of fluorescent lights and machinery mark a more sterile time and place, but the dialog and aural vs. visual POV is the same. Enough time has passed since the beginning of the first half for the audience, at least in the first viewing, to have an uncanny sense of almost-déjà vu. Eventually this sense is broken by the memory reorganizing itself, but that moment is enough to put us subconsciously on guard, with an expectation for the unexpected, a gentle and affective suspension. This allows an affective climactic point, uncanny working for the magical realism, when around one hour in we enter the basement of the hospital and encounter a basement soundscape whose sounds slowly seem “off”. We then cut to a scene of a triplegic person moving away from us down a hallway, each time he makes contact with the floor the sound of (what we will later learn to be) a tennis ball being hit against a wall–the sound of the scene drenched in irony, and an aural uncanny valley of timing, as if something went wrong on the Foley stage. The effect is fantastic and strange, playing with the audiences’ sonic expectation, mixing sonic information of space to create a new place and affect. In Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, (1961) space and time shift fluidly to create an uncanny and haunted Place, in part constructed actively by the audience, who are asked to piece together the non-linear narrative, as they wish. What the characters are perceiving in their Now, what they are remembering, or perhaps even imagining, weaves much like perception and memory itself. Or perhaps it is the haunting of the place itself: echoes of figures, time, and sound, at times repeating, as if stuck on a loop, at times even hinting at events of a future, past. Resnais said about Marienbad, “For me this film is an attempt, still very crude and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes.” 155 155 !Benayoun,!Robert.!2008.!“Alain!Resnais:!arpenteur!de!l'imaginaire,”!interview!in!Cahiers-duCinéma.!Paris:!Ramsay.!pp.!105–106! 135 When the film was prepared for a DVD release, Resnais chose an un-restored film soundtrack as an option to the restored version. He stated that choices were made with the sound based on the tools of the time, and acknowledged these carry their own sound of the time, that something gets lost when changed for the tools of the present. You lose the filmmaker’s voice, performance is deprived. For him even the music track should not be corrected. If a spot gets distorted by the materials of then, he felt correcting (erasing) these renders the music sounding dead. In the case of the haunting organ track for this film, that feels especially apparent. Interestingly, he is supportive of careful visual restoration, but feels at least the option for the original soundtrack should always be present. “It is better to respect the sound characteristics of the time.” 156 Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one… 157 When moments or statements are repeated, when a loop is perceived, the uncanny is triggered, a haunting unfolds. We question the voiceover: is he witnessing, or recalling, calling up and calling forth as he remembers, or is he himself stuck on a loop. The internal turmoil is sounded for us, like a secret between the soundtrack and the audience, which the picture is left in the dark about. “…sound once heard repeats forever in that which one dares not call memory.” (Chion, 2016, p. 29) Loops and repetition revealing inner workings are throughout the work of experimental filmmaker and animator Kelly Sears. Sears’ technique of animating selected parts of often still photos from the past creates a visual uncanny that her haunting soundtracks prepare then amplify, using learned aural film culture tropes in genres such as horror and science fiction to transform and translate the images. The slight movements play with our expectation of movement, and our perception struggles to categorize the characteristics and qualities–moving, or still, funny, or threatening. Sears works with newsreels, high school yearbooks, past beauty pageant 156 !From!the!companion!booklet!with!The!Criterion!Collection!DVD!release.! 157 !Resnais,! Alain.! LastYearatMarienbad.! France,! 1961.! This! film! and! quoted! voiceover,! in! conjunction! with! this! thesis! research,! inspired! a! project! and! writing! for! The! Leonardo! Music! Journal,!which!I!will!include!in!the!Annex,!pp.!xiv-xv,!exploring!through!science!fiction,!sound,! time,!and!archives.! 136 footage, first-aid handbooks, survival guides, yoga instruction manuals, and other archival sources claiming an authority to inform and guide. She reworks and restructures to collage a disorienting and unsteady sense of history, shifting the stories between the official and uncanny, the official and the occult. In Sears’ own words, these films recast “American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social and political legacies.” 158 The Drift (2007) opens with a vaguely oscillating tone, guiding us with intrigue but warning into a starry sky. Audible underneath, a roomtone locates us not drifting bodily in space, but inside something–we are in something with an engine, moving. The voice over begins, an urgent, gravely male voice reminiscent of a television detective film or a captain’s log, informing us, “It was space fever”, over archive images marketing a past lifestyle ideal, peppered with found family photos, the sound giving a darkness to the smiling faces. The voice over informs us in past tense the focus and desires of the people had shifted from things of the earth towards space. 159 An appropriately and affectively canned-sounding control room is shown, static with only its figures drifting in and out of locations in its space, on a loop. The added room ambience lends an eerie air and dimension. With the relatively minimal movement techniques Sears uses with primarily still images, the audio is a vital extension and expansion, and often as well translation, of the undercurrents of social, political, and psychological aspects to the use of these images. There is also translation of place, the images in space are grounded and tied to a soundtrack that without the visuals could be electronica, instead they act simultaneously as soundtrack and soundscape of the ship itself, the images of the spaceship from an era also obsessed with analog synthesizers creating other-worldly and futuristic atmospheres, so much of the audience is audio-visually, culturally prepared. The Drift is a mysterious draw, a beckoning from space. The engine sound becomes its siren song, when broadcasted (a theme throughout much of Sears’ work–the outwards of broadcast, and inwards of reception), it infects those who hear it, and give in to its call. 158 !From!Kelly!Sears!official!website:!http://www.kellysears.com! 159 !Quote!from!the!voice!over!on!The-Drift!(Sears,!2007).!This!film!and!others!of!Sears!can!be! found!generously!on!her!Vimeo!page:!https://vimeo.com/kellysears!! 137 The Body Besieged (2009) works with animated still images from yoga and workout instruction books to, “reveal bewitched and frenzied bodies (…) Women move through a possessed psychic space that distorts and mirrors some of our daily routines.” 160 Animating still images gives an aural freedom to play with the uncanny valley, there is not the audience preconceived expectation of sound, so any sound close to sync is made strange, whether in clear mimicry of how the visually depicted environment might sound, or playing with the acousmatic and asynchronous. Sears uses all these techniques to reveal and transmit past possible stories, alternative histories that haunt and critic our now or warn into our future. The moving bodies in The Body Besieged are locked in loops, amplified by the rhythmic soundtrack, they seem phantoms of a past broadcast we locked into, the sound semi-mechanical and punctuating their futile movements, repeated poses like clockwork. Sears cut figures out of archival films from the 1950’s of telephone operators and people on phones, mixing histories with events of that time and bringing it into the present in Voice on the Line (2009) to reflect on issues of national security and civil liberties like privacy, reflecting on how “technology can be used to shape our fears, desires, and how we feel connected.” 161 As the film opens up on a shot of a finger dialing a rotary phone, gently menacing radio-wave sound come to us, again with the haunting of a broadcast from the past, a transmission to us. This film uses moving images, but their backgrounds are replaced with looping wallpaper patterns reminiscent of avant-garde paint-on-film techniques, a section of these characters’ world seems to be revealing its celluloid material, breaking through. The figures movements are slightly off, not quite matching each other in this shared world, as if a different set of physics applies to each of them, the things holding them together are those haunting radio-waves, asynchronistic and acousmatic, guiding the uncanny affect to menace. When an office scene comes up, with an almost-possible office ambience of murmurs and machines, or the sound of buttons pushed on another phone, the affect is of two dimensions overlapping. The phone operators possess an irresistible resonance to their voices, becoming a Cold War era spy technique used by the government, who then can’t resist listening themselves, creating a beguiling feedback loop or transmission. “All of the conversations with operators were 160 !From!Sears’!description!of!her!film!on!her!Vimeo!page:!https://vimeo.com/kellysears!! 161 !Ibid.! 144 “there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes sound,” (Cage, 1967, p. 117) and describes how in the chamber he heard both his blood circulating as well as his nervous system operating. The concept of silence implies its opposite, demanding its presence within what we perceive as absence. (Sontag, 1969, p. IV). Even our memories persist an implied soundtrack if we take that time and focus with them; a memory of a childhood forest though biologically silent has a very specific wind heard through its trees, through its soundtrack. An attentive and critical ear can help us form a critical sound design when composing the past. In the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, there is a recording of the endangered or likely extinct bird, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, made by Doctor Author Allen in 1935. 169 There is a pause in the beginning of the track, a “silence” where we hear the sound of the recording medium itself, ghostly and crackling through time and wear, the medium for a moment speaks, an aural stamp of time. Through that trumpets the call of a bird gone, then its bill against a tree. More follow, it is not alone; at the time of the recording the bird was rare, but still not alone. In that time and technology, sound and image were still rarely married by medium, and there exists in archives bits and pieces of the history of this species-a photo here, an illustration there. I found a film that was shot the same year of this recording by Dr. Allen as well. 170 Submerged in a shroud of beautifully aged black and white grain, our ghost bird pecks at a tree silently. Separately. The library’s mission statement reads: Our mission is to collect and preserve recordings of each species' behavior and natural history, to facilitate the ability of others to collect and preserve such recordings, and to actively promote the use of these recordings for diverse purposes spanning scientific research, education, conservation, and the arts. 171 The arts, listed with the same import as scientific research, education, and conservation. Filmmaker Michael Gitlin, in the production of his film The Birdpeople, 169 !The!recording!can!be!accessed!and!heard!here!online!here:! http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/6784/campephilus-principalis-ivory-billed-woodpeckerunited-states-louisiana-arthur-allen! 170 !Also!on!the!media!library,!accessed!online!here:!https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/487450!!! 171 !The!mission!statement!can!be!read!on!the!about!page:!http://macaulaylibrary.org/about! 145 (2005) knew an audio recording would transfer within its experience sensory information to help guide his audience to feel and care for this woodpecker of the past. The Macaulay Library archive not only gave him that recording, but encouraged its use and context, writing: This film looks at birds and birders as curiosities—interweaving artistically rendered footage, sounds, and narrative: live birds and the people watching them; live birds and the people engaged in the scientific ritual of capturing and banding them; stuffed birds and the people who glean new knowledge from specimens. The tale of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker surfaces throughout in book passages, voiceovers of modern-day scientists, offbeat third-person commentary, and a foray into the field with a team of top birders looking for ivory-bills in the Pearl River area of Louisiana in 2002. 172 We watch Gitlin’s closing scene, and regardless of any thought we had prior on collecting and collections, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker comes to life for us as a voice of the past in contrast to the lifeless bodies also captured, once again, in front of us. The silent film speaks, blood and breath flow through that bird body. This is a voice from the past weaving through its many mausoleums, making a whole, a possible redemption, and a warning to the future. The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, is for a moment given presence, giving weight to its silence, made more than a statistic. An archive can give a sound: a voice to the past, a call to the present, some advice for the future…the artist can help guide this. < Figures 15 & 16 > Out of deep dreamless sleep I was woken, startled by a hollow resonance, a sudden impact of wood on wood. Was the sound an isolated auditory event within my consciousness — a moment of dream without narrative or duration — or was it a real sound from the physical world? The reverberation time was too long for the sound to have emanated from the bedroom. This would imply a sound coming from 172 !From!the!Cornell!Lab!of!Ornithology!website!page!on!the!film.!Retrieved!November!16,!2015:!! http://www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/featurepage/IBWO_movies! 146 somewhere else in the house, an echoing space, mysterious and distant. If that was the case, then I could only assume the presence of an intruder, unlikely as a possibility. The sound came from nowhere, belonged nowhere, so had no place in the world except through my description. (Toop, 2010, p. VII) Our experience of sound with moving image is both pre-reflective as well as an intentional reflective act towards meaning, utilizing imagination as well as perception. When sounding image from the past, our experience is also one of artistic inscriptions, and an author’s sensory instruction. < Figure 17 > In 1923 filmmakers Robert and Frances Flaherty brought their children to an island called Savai’i in Samoa to live a year’s time while they made their next feature film, after Nanook of the North, (1922) to be called Moana (1926). Like their film prior, and the film to come after, there are various staged and embellished elements to the film, leading it to be often called “docufiction”, though at the time of its screening the word “documentary” was for the first time applied to cinema in a review. In 1975, Monica Flaherty, who was three at the time of the film’s creation, returned to Savai’i with audio recording equipment and worked towards creating a soundtrack to her parents’ film, including recording the soundscapes of the very village they lived and shot in, and dubbing in dialogue and singing in Samoan. With the consultation of many anthropologists, linguists, and other filmmakers, as well as her own childhood memories of the place, Moana with Sound was finished in 1980. Sadly, the original film’s negative was gone, and her 16mm copy of a copy of the 35mm print was already degrading. (Close, 2016) It wasn’t until the 2014 New York Film Festival that a version that gave both aural and visual justice to the work would be screened, after much time and work from many people. The film opens with a quote from Frances Hubbard Flaherty, “Oh, if we could only take back with us the singing. Not the songs, but the singing”. There are always three tracks of audio present in the film’s duration. A track of the soundscape of the island expands, encircles, and immerges us–wind through trees, bird song, rustling in grass, and so on. Then a track of a scene’s main activity focuses us into the narrative, whether talking, an animal passing, or other in-the-frame 147 activity. The third track is reserved for traditional song, here and there throughout the film, giving us an emotional guidance and experience. The types of noises heard in this cut of "Moana" are so natural and believable that a layman wouldn't believe they were recorded five decades after the original capture of footage — and by a different person no less. The sounds heard as a few boys jump into the water, or as some women flatten the bark of a mulberry tree to fashion a dress, have been so accurately welded to the visuals -- in positioning and duration -- that the only logical way for Monica to obtain them would have been to recreate those scenes. (…) In general, sound adds immediacy to the images and changes the tone of several scenes completely. The images don't seem like exotic footage captured by a Western filmmaker sent to a faraway land; instead, it's like something is happening near us, and involving people just like us. (…) A famous sequence from the film depicts a snare. As the natives trap a boar, the beast screeches wildly and loudly, cries that are amplified and impossible to ignore in this cut. This is no longer a bemusing peek at a quaint ritual; it's a horrific scene that divides our sympathies. (Maheshwari, 2014) That sense of proximity, rather than the ethnographic film highlighting the Otherness, ruptures the time and space, creating a place with the audience to feel close to what they are experiencing. That nearness with the subjects pushes back against a sense of Other, working in this way as a counter-aurality. This is more than just a push towards a temporary empathy, this can be a lasting embodied collective experience to be reflected on time and time again. As cited above, our sympathies divide, we feel as well for the boar as it is real and close to us now as well, both with us in space and time, allowing more present feelings towards the subjects. Working with a silent film from the past, Monica Flaherty strove to give it its soundscape, give it and its subjects a voice. But the past is not always silent, and there are times it is crucial in the archive to make sure we are listening for that voice that is already there, and crucial when designing film sound to make sure it doesn’t get lost again but has the place and space to sound. 148 IV. 3. Sounding the past towards a future memory < Figure 18 > In cinema studies, sometimes films are broken down and divided into two forms, Realism and Formalism. Simply put, Realism strives to be like a slice of the real-world, like a window, while Formalism is more stylized in its film-world, like a canvas. Of course, dividing such a vast and varied art form into two categories is problematic and reductive, and an element of cinema that makes this clear immediately is when cinematic sound is considered. Cinematic sound almost always, unless intentionally designed not to, renders the screen a window. And whether diegetic or non-diegetic, it works to be a believed part of the film-world created– accepted and immersive, only calling attention to its form when necessary. When designing sound for the past, we need to remember that sound will be part of the believed world and be responsible to that. When working with sound from the past, we can also be responsible in allowing that voice to speak for itself in its new context as much as is possible and necessary. IV.3.a. Giving Voice versus Giving a Place to Listen: Irene Lusztig, The Motherhood Archives and Yours in Sisterhood The Motherhood Archives (2013) is a found footage assemblage of over 100 historic maternal education films that explores hidden histories of institutional motherhood and childbirth in the 20th century. While orphaned/archival visual materials are at the heart of the project, archival sound is equally central; the film’s meticulously assembled soundtrack-combining field recordings with archival and found sounds-was developed over years, intertwined at every stage with the visual assemblage, and is profoundly important to the ways that the film uses old and abandoned materials to generate new meanings, moods, and discourses. 173 In 2011 filmmaker Irene Lusztig contacted me about designing sound and composing for the project. She had spent several years buying discarded educational films on eBay and working in historical archives to amass an unusual and fascinating 173 !Colbert,!Maile.,!&!Irene!Lusztig.!2014.!“Sound!Designing!Motherhood:!Irene!Lusztig!&!Maile! Colbert! Open! the! Motherhood! Archives”.-SoundingOut!!Retrieved! February! 1,! 2016,! from! http://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/03/17/sound-designing-motherhood/! 149 collection of archival films aimed at teaching women how to be pregnant, give birth, and look after babies. The Motherhood Archives uses this extraordinary archival treasure trove to form a lyrical essay film excavating hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century, illuminating our changing narratives of maternal success and failure, and raising questions about our social and historical constructions of motherhood. I was immediately intrigued by her concept and construction process as well as her desire to work with sound design in a very collaborative manner at an earlier stage in the project than most filmmakers normally would. < Figure 19 > In a co-written article in conversational style, discussing the sound, Irene referenced my sound work for filmmaker Rebecca Baron’s film, How Little We Know of Our Neighbors. 174 “The sound in How Little We Know of Our Neighbors in particular does something with natural/unnatural that I was really interested in – field recordings that somehow become other kinds of things as they are layered, transformed, and processed. I think of myself as a documentary maker/artist who is invested in actuality, but not very invested in traditional documentary form, and I think your sound has similar investments and disinvestments. It begins with the sounds of the real world but takes those sounds to very unexpected places that are often quite far from their original context.” (Colbert & Lusztig, 2016) We spoke of the science fiction aspects to the film and its soundtrack, how science fiction can express anxieties about the future, technologies, and things we struggle to control. Our archives could be seen as an attempt to control the future by organizing and cataloging the past, forming a timeline and historic narrative. The Motherhood Archives problematizes this, provoking questions about its histories to consider other histories, the ones un-sounded. “So, science fiction feels like a sonic space that totally makes sense for negotiating these maternal anxieties. I’ve never made a film where the sound comes up so often in post-screening discussions, and generally the question is something like “why is the sound so dark / scary / anxietyprovoking?” It seems very specific to the subject of The Motherhood Archives” (Colbert & Lusztig, 2016) 174 !Baron,!Rebecca.!2005.!How-Little-We-Know-of-Our-Neighbors! 150 Sounds can be metaphor in conjunction to their paired visuals. Considering the work I had done on wombscapes, underwater sounds are a reoccurring theme in the film. “Soothing sound of running water muffles newborn cries to prevent the formation of what are called islands of memory.” (Lusztig, 2013) An interesting moment happens when the voice over mentions the use of water during a section on the early use of Twilight Sleep. 175 “That description of water literally being used to erase memory allows all the water sounds throughout the film to become a metaphor for the erasure of historical memory.” (Colbert & Lusztig, 2016) There is a power to working with “natural” recorded sound sources. Something comes through–a shadow carried from its initial source, the animal listening for that information. As a sound designer, each use becomes a version, still carrying initial source information, then again with further use. “For each sound–some of them going way back–I still remember the source, recording conditions, what was surrounding it (or rather what it was surrounding). They become symbols, but also memory triggers. Now some of them have changed and were saved with this project, so there are generations as well. And the historic archival sounds you (Lusztig) added to it, they come with their own history and memory; your film and their use in it is then added to that.” (Colbert & Lusztig, 2016) A living archive. IL: Speaking of archival sound, one of the most amazing (to me) moments in our collaboration was really close to the end when you sent me the end credit sound. We’ve actually never talked about this because as soon as you sent it I totally intuitively and immediately knew that it was perfect. The sound is a backwards transformation of the wax cylinder Chopin Waltz recording that is used earlier in the film during the pregnant ballet sequence. There’s something so brilliant about your instinct to bring back that very polite, restrained music at the end, but have it reversed – both because it turns something familiar and half-remembered on its head, but also because I think it says something about history that is so attuned to the way the film works. The film thinks about histories of childbirth, but the chronological 175 !Injections!of!morphine!and!scopolamine!were!used!in!the!early!twentieth!century!to!create!an! amnesic!but!conscious!state!during!childbirth,!with!the!idea!that!if!there!is!no!memory!of!the! pain,!the!pain!doesn’t!really!exist.!Its!use!was!abandoned!after!women!began!to!have!memories!of! the!trauma!around!its!use!years!later.! 151 structure is circular, not linear – which I think of as a kind of challenge to the conventional forward-marching progress narrative. History is always haunting the present, and history is always circular. It makes amazing and beautiful sense that this music that we’ve heard before returns at the end in this uncanny backwards form. (Colbert & Lusztig, 2016) A passive form of listening can be a submission to power. In sound design, sound moves you from within the frame to outside the frame, and there is a power in that, a power used often in the design for propaganda films to affect a large group of peoples’ attention, perspective, and emotion at the same time. In an early critique on the sound design for The Motherhood Archives, the audience felt they were pulled away from the cultured miracle-of-life feeling around pregnancy and motherhood, with the perceived dark place of the sound drawing them into a sterile, medical history instead. This was intended. There was a concern towards an exploitation of sense, and a need for a critical aurality, for “current sensory productions always respond to current sensory, social, and political problems.” (Heuson, 2015, p. 91) And this should be considered when using moving-image artifacts of the past. In designing the soundtrack, I worked towards a contrast against the original contexts of the films, many of which were propaganda. Just the separation from their archive didn’t carry the needed information and critique of their origin, the original intent still worked. For their new context, and to problematize their old, they needed the affect, they needed the artist. < Figure 20 > Lusztig’s next film, Yours in Sisterhood, (2018) works with archives in a very different way. Yours in Sisterhood is, “a collective portrait of feminist conversation now and forty years ago.” 176 Lusztig worked with an archive of letters to the editor of Ms. Magazine, the United States’ first mainstream feminist magazine, primarily from the 1970’s. Between 2015-2017, she travelled across the country, and filmed hundreds of people reading/performing the letters. The letters were written by women, men, even children, from all different backgrounds, all different sexual orientations, religions, racial, ethnic, physical ability, and political viewpoints. Working for so 176 !From! the! synopsis! of! the! film,! on! the! official! film! website,! which! can! be! found! here:! http://yoursinsisterhood.net/!! 152 many years with archives, Lusztig is acutely aware of the narratives that form and who has the power to form them, and is in constant and deep critical awareness about her role. The letters recall individual problems, collective problems, revelations, political struggles, “these 70’s letters are a powerful invocation of the second-wave feminism slogan, ‘the personal is political.’” 177 < Figure 21 > Hundreds of letters, the vast majority Lusztig chose did not get originally published. Private and personal, but meant for publication, with intention to be shared and voiced, sitting silently in an archive in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, where Lusztig spent her summer of 2014 going through box after box. What struck her was that many of the issues that were written about in these letters, women and gender nonconforming people were still struggling with today. Guided by the location and content of a chosen letter, Lusztig would send a call for readers out to the area, and those that responded often did so as something in the letters either hit home or hit hard. They would have a chance for a personal response expressing that after their reading. The project asks: “What might be revealed in the complicated and slippery space of inviting strangers to act out and respond to 1970s feminism in 2017? What roles does conversation, talking, listening, and embodying have to play in building new spaces of political action? Which bodies and voices are excluded from mainstream feminism and how can we create new, more inclusive feminisms? Is it possible to create a space of feminist listening that is capacious and generous enough 177 !From! the! director’s! statement! on! film! website.! “The! personal! is! political”,! also! sometimes! referred!to!as,!“The!private!is!political”,!has!an!interesting!relationship!with!archives!as!well!as! filmmaking.!Chanted!at!protests,!especially!during!the!second-wave!feminism!movement!in!the! States,!it!speaks!to!the!relationship!between!personal!experience!and!socio-political!structures,! for!example!to!challenge!cultured!norms!such!as!the!nuclear!family!structure.!The!original!author! of!the!quote!is,!rather!than!disputed,!declined!by!multiple!feminist!figures!of!the!time,!such!as! Carol!Hanisch!(whose!1969!essay!is!titled!“The!Personal!is!Political”),!Shulamith!Firestone,!Robin! Morgan,!and!others,!rendering!the!quote!a!collective!statement.!Two!goals!of!the!statement!are! an!opening!up!of!what!are!considered!private!or!social!matters!towards!political!analysis!and! discussion,! and! investigation! of! systemic! oppression! towards! women! beginning! in! the! home.! "The!personal!reflects!the!political!status!quo!(with!the!implication!that!the!personal!should!be! examined!to!provide!insight!into!the!political);!the!personal!serves!the!political!status!quo;!one! can! make! personal! choices! in! response! to! or! protest! against! the! political! status! quo;! ...! one's! personal!choices!reveal!or!reflect!one's!personal!politics;!one!should!make!personal!choices!that! are! consistent! with! one's! personal! politics;! personal! life! and! personal! politics! are! indistinguishable.”! Rust,! Paula! C.! 1995.! -Bisexualityandthechallengetolesbianpolitics:- Sex,- loyalty,-and-revolution.!New!York:!New!York!University!Press.!pp329! 153 to include both radical and more conservative voices—a space that can hold both identification and disagreement? What kind of cinematic form can contain the temporality of an urgency that is not emergent? And what can we learn from the archive about using feminist strategies to deal with global crisis?” 178 Lusztig agreed that there was a relationship with my own thesis and questions, and so agreed that in designing the sound for the film, I could as well work with the Wayback Sound Machine methods and concepts. Early attempts had me thinking of the time of the letters initial writing, and the people who wrote them. I started to build an archive of the sound of recording material, both audio and audio-visual (such as VHS tape, and studio camera silences) to layer in in conjunction with the soundscapes during the moments of transition between readers, and moments they weren’t speaking. Lusztig and I worked back and forth on this, she continuously would say something was off, but she couldn’t place what that was. I was so locked into my own research; I frustratingly could not figure out what she was referring to. We finally decided to give up and start from the beginning again, and I stripped the film of all the sonic time work I had designed. After a pause, we met to discuss and attempt another path, and Lusztig expressed something revealing. She said she needed the film to be contemporary, its present needs to be clear for the critique of “nothing has changed really” to come through. This project wasn’t about the past, it was about how these voices from the past could still voice the same concerns and issue today, many of which were currently getting worse again (referring specifically to the United States under Trump). The issues themselves were going back in time, the film needed to read present to spotlight that. The sound work from the past I had done was placing the sense of the film out of the now and into the then. In an interesting way, in this case, it was working too well. The Wayback Sound Machine didn’t work on a practical level for this case study, but its questions did bring up important issues for the film. If we run through the project’s original schema, 179 it works as a tool. The key question asks, “What can we gather from sounding the past, and within that, what is the relationship between soundscape and sound design?” What past is Yours in Sisterhood trying to sound? The sound of voices that weren’t giving a 178 !From!the!director’s!statement:!http://yoursinsisterhood.net/directors-statement/!! 179 !The!original!schema!can!be!found!in!the!Annex,!pp.!iv-vi.!