A Cultural History of Sound, Memory, and the Senses

Joy Damousi, Paula Hamilton, Joy Damousi, Paula Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367264093
• eBook ISBN: 9781315445304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

The past 20 years have witnessed a turn towards the sensuous, particularly the aural, as a viable space for critical exploration in History and other Humanities disciplines. This has been informed by a heightened awareness of the role that the senses play in shaping modern identity and understanding of place; and increasingly, how the senses are central to the memory of past experiences and their representation. The result has been a broadening of our historical imagination, which has previously taken the visual for granted and ignored the other senses. Considering how crucial the auditory aspect of life has been, a shift from seeing to hearing past societies offers a further perspective for examining the complexity of historical events and experiences. Historians in many fields have begun to listen to the past, developing new arguments about the history and the memory of sensory experience. This volume builds on scholarship produced over the last twenty years and explores these dimensions by coupling the history of sound and the senses in distinctive ways: through a study of the sound of violence; the sound of voice mediated by technologies and the expression of memory through the senses. Though sound is the most developed field in the study of the sensorium, many argue that each of the senses should not be studied in isolation from each other, and for this reason, the final section incorporates material which emphasizes the sense as relational.

1
Sound Studies Today

Where Are We Going?¹

Bruce Johnson

The Contemporary Soundscape

In December 2009 a young student attending his first university party in London found himself crowded against a bass speaker. He said to a friend, ‘My heart feels funny. I think the bass is affecting me. Oh God, I feel very weird. My heart is beating so fast.’ Minutes later he collapsed and died. Cause of death was recorded as Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome (SADS), and, according to a medical spokesperson, possibly attributable to ‘a lot of loud noise.’² This is a dramatic recognition of the unprecedented power of the contemporary everyday soundscape. In specific terms, I believe the medico was wrong about volume as the fatal parameter, but that it was pitch,³ but for the moment we can say that it certainly underscores the contemporary importance of sound studies.

The power of sound is recognized as far back as human records take us. The Greek Orpheus and the Finnish Väinämöinen are two of many characters from mythology who, at a central moment in their narratives, become engaged in lethal singing contests. In Biblical times, Jericho was brought down by sound, and the Biblical God is always a sonic presence and almost never seen. In Elizabethan England, travellers arriving from the provinces to London heard the city before they saw it, and Londoners themselves complained of repetitive music in public spaces, a cry that echoes through to the present.⁴

But with the emergence of modernity, the soundscape has changed so radically that we can chart the history of modernity specifically through the changing politics of the soundscape, the changing status of noise, sound and ways of conceptualizing sonicity. One unequivocally distinguishing feature of modernity is the changing soundscape. The modern soundscape is distinguished by the level and complexity of constructed sound. The sounds of nature are still with us in pretty much the forms they have always been. But the sounds constructed by human beings have transformed the acoustic environment. From the late nineteenth century, two areas of technological development produced an unprecedented change in that environment: the sounds of technologies and technologized sounds.⁵ For the first of these we can blame industrialization, which produced machinery that drowned out the voices of its human operators, and which was documented extensively by Victorian novelists from Charles Dickens through Elizabeth Gaskell to Thomas Hardy. We can conveniently date the advent of the second, technologized sound, from 1877 with the patent issued for sound recordings, from which emerged the prolific and disparate world of sounds mediated by modern technologies: radio, movies, television, telephonics, electronically amplified musical instruments—to the world of sound digitization ranging from new recording technologies to personal stereos.

World War I provides a useful watershed moment for both of these developments. Technologized sound became pervasive in many forms, from military communications systems to the portable phonograph, which a surprising number of servicemen were able to haul about with them. And it was also the war in which the single most frequent category of trauma reported by men in the trenches was the noise of military technology, a flood in which all sense of individual identity was drowned.⁶ World War I utterly transformed the sonic imaginary, ushering in a century in which everyday life was inundated by constructed sound, from the almost subliminal hum of mains electricity and air conditioners, road and rail traffic, to the impulse sounds of machinery and piped music, and the shriek of jet aircraft. As Futurist Luigi Russolo, in The Art of Noises, 1913, declared extravagantly, in the nineteenth century, ‘with the invention of the machine, Noise was born,’⁷ and while he and his circle embraced it as the sound of the future, it would become one of the greatest threats to human welfare of its time. At the end of the twentieth century, a Commission of the European Communities reported: ‘Present economic estimates of the annual damage in the EU due to environmental noise range from EUR 13 billion to 38 billion. Elements that contribute are a reduction of housing prices, medical costs, reduced possibilities of land use and cost of lost labour days.’⁸

Sound Studies: A Historical Overview

The advent of sound studies is thus very much a product of the material culture of the modern world. The early history of soundscape studies reflects the growing awareness of what is distinctive about the modern sound-scape. R. Murray Schafer’s 1977 benchmark study, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, includes essays on the history of the soundscape with comparisons between the pre-modern and the modern sonic environments. His foundational work in the 1960s was conducted with the World Soundscape Project, which included Hildegarde Westerkamp and Barry Truax, whose Handbook of Acoustic Ecology of 1978, was, I believe, the first of its kind. One of the earliest collections outside the World Soundscape Project was the 1994 Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo, edited by Finnish scholar Helmi Järviluoma who, with Greg Wagstaff, also published the 2002 book Soundscape Studies and Their Methods. Järviluoma has built on the foundations set down by the World Soundscape Project and Schafer, including by revisiting and extending his original field locations to examine changes in the decades since the original World Soundscape Project. The results were published in 2009, as Acoustic Environments in Change, edited by Helmi Järviluoma, Meri Kyto, Barry Truax, Heikki Uimonen and Noora Vikman, and also reprinting Schafer’s 1977 Five Village Soundscapes. Other significant scholars range across disciplines, as for example cultural historian Alain Corbin, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, science historian Jonathan Sterne and literary historian John Picker.⁹ Significant sound study institutions include the founding of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in 1993, which now has its own journal and annual conferences; and the establishment of CRESSON sound research centre in Grenoble, France, in 1998; there are similar centres including those in Trondheim, Norway and Lund, Sweden.

A number of the names I have mentioned remind us that this tradition seems to be stronger in some cultures than others. The World Soundscape team was Canadian; while Järviluoma, Kyto, Uimonen and Vikman are all Finnish researchers. There is also a very active sound studies community in Japan. Different communities have very different levels of sensitivity to sound, and this usefully foreshadows the central argument I want to make: that is, the importance of material cultures in our approaches to this field. As we bring sound studies into convergence with materiality, it is poised to become the most productive driver of a fundamental paradigm shift that is emerging in the study of social practices.

Acoustemology

Steven Feld coined the term ‘acoustemology,’ by which he means ‘knowing through sound.’¹⁰ It reminds us that the field of sound studies raises epistemological issues.

In the anglophone tradition, authority is embodied in information and knowledge conceived in terms of a visual order: perspective, vision/visionary, envisage/envision, point of view, discover, disclose, observation, speculation, illustration, demonstration, reflections, insights, second sight, revelation, theory (from the Greek word for ‘spectacle’). Our understanding of the modern era is based on the ‘Enlightenment,’ we study to ‘cast light on,’ to ‘light the path.’ Even in these first few pages of a chapter that is trying to favour sonic modes, I have used the following visual metaphors for knowledge and information: recognition, foreshadow, chart, distinguish, documented, reflects, examine. English is a language in which a musical performance is likely to be called ‘a reading,’ and the most respected music is scored for the eye. It is a language in which we often announce an idea with the words ‘apparently’ or ‘it appears that,’ and we ask our interlocutor ‘Do you see what I mean?,’ where a doctor about to probe and listen to the body begins by saying ‘Let’s take a look at you.’

By contrast, sonically embodied knowledge has become for us the object of suspicion and derision since the ascendancy of the scientific consciousness. In English, the complement of ‘Seeing is believing’ is the warning ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’ It is noteworthy how many of the following terms for aurally transmitted information arose, or forfeited their cultural capital, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: hearsay, gossip, tittle-tattle, sounding off, chatter, whining or moaning, Chinese whispers, rumour, lip service, scolding, nagging, blab, babble, prate, prattle. The English language does not have much positively charged space for auditory information: in his benchmark English Dictionary, Samuel Johnson explicitly declared that he would include no words unless they were in print, thus in effect banishing illiterate oral cultures from the anglophone community.¹¹ To be a meaningful member of the community of the English was to be able to read.

There is nothing natural or universal about this scopocentricity. I dwell on it for a moment because the point needs to be made that sound studies require a particular kind of ‘knowing’ that does not come easily to all cultures. The cultural study of sound is not simply a shift of interest from the visual to the sonic. It requires the cultivation of a particular phenomenology and its own conceptual modelling. It requires ideally nothing less than a change in epistemology. I became most strongly aware of this when I started to learn a language from a completely different language group, Finno-Ugric as opposed to Indo-European. In my case it was Finnish, and I found this to be a more hospitable medium for talking about sound because the language and culture are more sonocentric. This is related to history (oral tradition), climate (snowscapes), topography (deep forests) and demography; for example, half of the population of Finland lives no more than 200 metres from a forest and the rest not more than about 3.5 kilometres away.¹² Also implicated is something as elusive as national identity, which for the Finns is associated with silence, and polite citizenship with taciturnity. Like Japanese, the sonicity of the culture is inscribed in its language. Like all languages close to their oral sources, all Finnish words are sounded exactly as they are spelled; that is, there is a closer link between sound and orthography than in English. A few of many illustrations of its sonocentricity could include the way time is imagined: the timepiece that we call a ‘watch’ in English is called ‘kello’ in Finnish, which is also the word for ‘bell.’ As in so many languages, proverbial wisdoms are significant, and in Finnish these are notably sonic in orientation, including: ‘Respect the deep voice of experience’ and ‘Sitä kuusta kuuleminen jonka juurella asunto’—meaning that wisdom lies in listening to the roots of the fir tree next to your house. In English, we are likely to greet someone with the words ‘Nice to see you.’ In Finnish, a common formal greeting is ‘Mita kuluu’: ‘What do you hear?’ And in fact the word ‘kuluu’ also represents the notion of a community—a group that hears the same sounds. To be a meaningful member of the community of the Finns is to be able to hear: ‘Minä kuulun tänne’ (‘I hear in this place’) means ‘I belong here.’

There is a significant relationship between sound studies and the mediating influences of language itself. In brief, the English language happens not to be the language best equipped to discuss the complexities of sonic phenomenologies. I have suggested that this is partly because of its visual orientation, but also because modern English prose was largely shaped by the scopocentric scientific programme of the Royal Society. It ‘thinks’ best in terms of sharply visualized conceptual distinctions, which sonic phenomena often challenge, as I shall argue in a little more detail later.

Sound Studies and Cultural Theory

Over the last decade or two, one of the most conspicuous developments in sound studies has been its increasing appropriation by more general cultural theory. If we want to understand where sound studies is today, its relationship with cultural theory requires some discussion.

Cultural theory in anglophone academia emerged from the growing recognition of the ideologies underpinning scholarly ‘objectivity.’ My first disciplinary base was literary studies, where the ascendancy o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: Leaning In
• 1 Sound Studies Today: Where Are We Going?
• PART I Sound and Voice
• PART II Sound and Violence
• PART III Sensory Memories
• Contributors
• Index