Sonic Possible Worlds, Revised Edition

Hearing the Continuum of Sound

Salomé Voegelin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501367632
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

From its use in literary theory, film criticism and the discourse of games design, Salomé Voegelin expands 'possible world theory' to think the worlding of sound in music, in art and in the everyday. The modal logic of possible worlds, articulated principally via David K. Lewis and developed through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological life-worlds, creates a view on the invisible slices of the world and reflects on how to make them count, politically and aesthetically. How to make them thinkable and accessible as the possibility of the everyday and of art: to reach a new materialist understanding from the invisible and to develop an ear for the as yet inaudible. This revised edition continues Voegelin's exploration of the sonic possibility of the world into the sonic possibility and impossibility of the body. Listening to work by Áine O'Dwyer, Hannah Silva and Jocy de Oliveira, it considers sonic possible worlds' radical power to rethink normative constructions and to fabulate a different body from its sound: Hearing the Continuum Between Plural Bodies; between humans, humanoid aliens, monsters, vampires, plants, things and anything we have no name for yet but which a sonic philosophy might start to hear and call.

CHAPTER ONE

The landscape as sonic possible world

Fallen leaves

sound the rhythm of my walking as a recurrent surf. Each movement blends into the other. No single footsteps, just waves. I adjust my gait to its sound and deliberately exaggerate the stretched-out continuity. Searching for more pools of leaves I avoid naked pavements exposing my tread, preferring instead to stay in the shadow of my sound. It is a sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold. It sounds the idea of autumn as an “iconographic” sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation and thus is clearly not an icon at all; eschewing the concept of distance and idolatry. Instead the sonic emblem is subjective and reciprocal. I activate it and hear it sounding us together, as a socio-symbolic relationship that creates the time and place we are in not as an ideal but as a moment of coincidence, until the pavement turns grey and empty and on my footsteps pound the monotone of swept streets.

SOUNDWORDS.TUMBLR.COM October 08, 2011, 11:34 p.m.

We are in the acoustic environment and it is around us all the time, unavoidably and inexhaustibly here it is and here we are, as in a virtual embrace. Sound forms an extensive and mobile vicinity, fleeting and grasping all at once. We are in sound and simultaneously sound ourselves: we are in the acoustic environment through our listening to it that which we hear. In this way we complete each other as reciprocal hearer and heard. The acoustic environment is the world in sound and makes a sonic world. This world formlessly does what we think we see as a certain form.¹ It is built continually from sonic relationships of things and subjects thinging a contingent place. This is a timespace place in which we too are temporospatial things thinging intersubjectively with what we hear. We are in its midst, not necessarily at its center, but nevertheless embedded in its ephemeral materiality that shows us our own transitory self. Listening we are continually made aware of this fleeting subjectivity, and we are reminded also that the world is not only in front of us, the aim of our action, but that we inhabit it as a 360° environment, which sounds the result and consequence of our actions too. In this sense, listening affords us a different sense of the world and of ourselves living in this world; it affords a different relationship to time and space, objects and subjects and the way we live among them. It is this alternative sonic sense of the world and of ourselves in the world, and its consequence for the conception of reality, actuality, possibility, truth, and knowledge that I want to begin exploring in this first chapter by focusing on the landscape.

The landscape as sonic possible world explores the landscape through its sound, to hear it as an environment, a timespace place that does not present us with a vista but grants us access to the mobility of its own production. In this chapter I consider the everyday soundscape, soundscape compositions, phonographic recordings, fieldwork, and site-specific installations to explore the world sound makes when we respond to its formless and transitory demand. The suggestion is that the soundscape offers an alternative perspective on the landscape, producing new ideas on how it could be and how we could live in it as in a sonic world, and how therefore we could validate the reality of sound’s invisible formlessness in relation to the visible and formed actuality of the world. Listening allows us to focus on the invisible dynamics that are hidden beneath a visual perception and its linguistic organization. It gives us access to what is there if we look past the object into the complex plurality of its production; and it shows us the world through relationships and processes, reminding us of the ideological and aesthetic conditioning that determines any sensory engagement.

I agree with Tim Ingold’s assertion in his text Against Soundscape from 2007 that the acoustic environment is not really a soundscape in the etymological sense of the word: it is not a scape, a scenery, a place to look at from afar. I also concede that it is not a slice of the landscape that we can easily separate from its terrain, but that instead it “commingles” with all there is, producing my environment continually and contingently.² But this is where our agreement ends. To Ingold sound is not a thing thinging but a medium, a vehicle that transports something else, like wind transports leaves. It is, according to him, in the sky, “flying a kite,”³ among the clouds, that the true nature of sound lays, and unsurprisingly it is via musicology that he finds this lofty explanation. His auditory space sounds as music, in the sense of the spiritual and the beautiful sounds of the musical oeuvre: the Aeolian harp that sounds not in relation to the world but as an objective ideality removed from the vulgar humanity living down below. Celestial, it invites abandonment: “launching the body into sound,” rather than listening to understand the mundanity of the world and the earthly body inhabiting that world.⁴

Ingold’s meteorological identification of sound as wind and weather avoids the surface of the scape, the visual paradigm that holds sound in place, but it also avoids the relevance of the heard. While I agree that sound stays not in place, it is also not up in the air, but down below, underneath the visual surface, mobilizing what we see, invisibly and without light, unfolding the complex and fluid fragmentedness of what seems unified and scaped above.

Implicit, it seems, in his desire for a paradigm of sound as wind, moving all there is rather than being anything in itself, is a critique of art discourse that focuses on the object rather than on the process of perception. Ingold suggests that the landscape is only visible once we have rendered it visual by techniques such as painting or photography, which allow for a viewing apart from other sensory dimensions, and that similarly the landscape can only be audible when played back within an environment that deprives us of other stimuli, such as a darkened room. Without such “allegorical eyes” and ears, “the world we perceive is the same world, whatever path we take, and each of us perceives it as an undivided centre of activity and awareness.”⁵ This statement ignores the agency of the material and of the subject, and pays no attention to the cultural prejudices and hierarchies with which we approach and interpret the world. Not all senses participate equally in the production of what the world is: how its pragmatic actuality, the notion of the real we live by, is constructed, sold, and bought. Thus, while of course the soundscape has a vista, a smell, and even a touch, if we approach it via a sonic sensibility, we come to another path and find another “centre of activity and awareness” that reflects back to us the world shaped and filtered through listening and, in this process, illuminates the cultural ideologies that limit this sense and favor others.

It is the complex relationship of listening and reflection, recording and playback, not through an allegorical ear but as a simultaneous production, that makes apparent the ideological and cultural objectives which influence perception, and that renders the study of the soundscape vis-à-vis the landscape relevant: to explore one slice of the landscape, not in a darkened room, but in the complexity of its circumstance, to illuminate its reality and how it participates in the construction of an accepted actuality, which in truth is only one slice of the landscape too, but which by accident, ignorance, or ideology we take for the whole.

My disagreement with Ingold makes apparent why it is important to listen to the soundscape not as a medium but as a material reality, to hear below the surface of the visible other possibilities of what could be actual; and why we should focus on the acoustic environment and study its sounds, not to transport us elsewhere, but to understand what the here and now is about and how it is constructed. This exploration follows Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s search for a primacy of perception, his attempt to capture the things before their distortion by rationality and knowledge, and it also involves a criticism of art discourse that focuses on the artwork, the visual work and the musical piece, separate from its processes of production and perception. However, it does so not up in the air, apart from the political, social, and cultural environment of its production, but in the midst of it.

Listening as an innovative and generative practice, as a strategy of engagement that we employ deliberately to explore a different landscape other than the one framed by vision, and it is cultural vision that I refer to here, grants us access to another view on the world and on the subjects living in that world. It shows us the possibilities of sound, that which could be, or that which is, if only we listened. This chapter wants to initiate such a listening to the possibility of sound and begins its exploration with the soundscape as the sonic sphere that holds the most immediate relationship to notions of actuality, reality, truth, and possibility. It explores the world from the sound it makes and tries to talk about the consequences of this audition.

Such an exploration demands thoughtfulness about the language used to talk about this sonic world hidden in the depth of a visible actuality, to avoid holding it in a visual paradigm or forcing it in opposition to it, and it requires that we take care of the sensorial particularity of its material and our engagement with it. To achieve this we cannot afford a rigidity about what words mean etymologically but need to focus on what they come to mean contingently, and what they effect and create the meaning of by their own agency even. Listening needs a language that produces words, the material of articulation, to grasp the material of sound and build itself through the heard anew all the time. It needs a language that is aware of the philosophical traditions that it carries and which brought it forth, and which it still expresses deliberately and inadvertently through the structure and hierarchy of its words. This needs to be a language that is ready to subvert these traditions, neglecting good grammar and correct expression to find words that generate sound rather than stifle it.

Listening to the possibility of the landscape

Listening illuminates the undulating pool of sound that moves and shapes the landscape, to hear at its depth an alternative view of all it is and all it could be, forcing new consequences onto our living in the world. Writing about these illuminations aims to produce new insights about the part sound plays in the construction of the reality of the world, and how listening we take part in the actualization of the world as real. This effort does not contradict other soundscape studies and practices but hopes to contribute to their project: to complement their listening practices and add to their theoretical reflections. Unlike other soundscape studies or acoustic ecology projects, I am not focusing on a particular area, a particular terrain of economic, social, or political significance as does, for example, Peter Cusack in his exploration of dangerous places;⁶ I am not concerned with the collecting and studying of a species through its sounds as was the task of the naturalists Ludwig Koch and Albert Brand in the early part of the twentieth century; I am not tracking Barry Truax’s taxonomy of sound and do not aim to come to understand a culture or a society by its sound in an anthropological or ethnographic sense as, for example, Steven Feld and Veit Erlman are pursuing it; I am not engaged in the conservation of sounds and the soundscape as is the aim of many conservation groups and sound archivists worldwide; I do not focus on the idea of noise pollution, on good and bad sounds, nor do I directly propose a listening education as most seminally R. Murray Schafer put forward at the inauguration of the World Soundscape Project ...