Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds

An Exploration of Embodiments in Sound

Mickey Vallee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789813293267
• eBook ISBN:
  9789813293274
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science
• Index: Social Sciences

What makes a body of sound appear as an aesthetic object as well as a method for knowledge? In Sounding Bodies Sounding Worlds, Mickey Vallee argues that we must impose our sonic imagination onto the non-sonic, and embrace how we sound to ourselves, sound with our animal companions, and sound in very earth itself.  From the invention of the laryngoscope to the role of the spectrogram, from the call of the bird to the tumble of a rockslide, from the deep listening of environmental immersion to the computational listening of bioacoustics research, Vallee offers a wide range of cases to convincingly argue that all life shares in a continuous, embodied and ethical vibration. 

© The Author(s) 2020

M. ValleeSounding Bodies Sounding WorldsPalgrave Studies in Soundhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9327-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Sounding

Mickey Vallee¹

(1)

Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada

Mickey Vallee

End Abstract

How does a world sound? While diverse answers to this question emerge depending on perspective, I adopt a media theory approach here that frames an answer in the technologies that open onto objective discoveries about sounding worlds, along with the new intimacies between researchers and those fields. This book deploys some of those technologies in disparate ways to make its point—through laryngoscopes and vocal folds, databases and biodiversity, orangutans and grunts, nets and birds, rockslides and tourism. In short, the trans-species and transtechnological futures of sound become a method for understanding how we might build relations and communities that are trans-species, transtechnological, and transdisciplinary. Sound does not arrive without the infrastructure that anticipates its arrival, and as much as sound arrives to give us information about the system from which it emerges, it remains an integral part of how that system holds together. We cannot shut our bodies off to the vibrations that surround us. But we can turn our attention towards the direction of these vibrations and make sense of the material systems with which they resonate; they resonate at once in the technological objects of measure as well as in the objective reality that determines our interests.

What we do with sound is much less straightforward than what we do with images. Where images produce bodies that have defined edges and boundaries, sound conjoins bodies and bleeds much more readily between them—while images are fixed, sounds flow. Discovery in sound comes with a paradoxical abstract certainty: When a bird is identified, when a rattle in the breath is detected, when the grunt of an orangutan is discovered, when the algorithm detects a future pattern of biodiversity loss through the distribution of soundscapes—such a detection through sound produces palpable imaginaries of what we connect with. This book draws upon such examples to convey how a world sounds.

This book resonates with Jussi Parikka’s (2010) idea of an “ethological media theory,” which he claims “leads us to evaluate bodies not according to their innate, morphological essences but as expressions of certain movements, sensations, and interactions with their environments” (p. xxv). Intent on the generative capacity of technology to “sound out” the cultural meanings of research across the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities, this book offers a robust cultural theory of sounding, so-called by some sound studies scholars. Sounding encompasses the infrastructural labour that goes into the production of sound, and the mental attitude towards sound as a method for understanding acoustic embodiments in a wide range of circumstances—from human voices (Chapter 2), trans-species voices (Chapter 3), transacoustic communities (Chapter 4), data sound (Chapter 5), and geoacoustic vibrations (Chapter 6). Indeed, the range of technologies that accompany each of these contexts shows us that an acoustic embodiment is never only an abstract, but rather, also concrete and situated. The technologies pursued here make for a broad multisensory, multiscalar, perspective and pushes on the threshold of what sounds, a propagation between bodies, technology, science, and culture.

However, this book is also concerned with how listening has become compressed and displaced, assigned to nonhuman actors and technical assemblages, peripheral to the experiences of humans, but directly implicating them nonetheless; the infrastructure of audibility, a term that will be used throughout this book, now must include, along with human listeners, animal listeners and machine listeners, plant listeners and mountain listeners. If listening is usually placed at the centre of experience, here listening has become a computational category, like other modalities. But in being so, listening has also adopted new ethical dimensions regarding conservation and ethical trans-species relations. Sounding here is thus related to the practices around and through which sound is produced by both bodies and interrelationality, via the material production that underlies sounding—what I term infrastructures of audibility and imaginary organs.

Sounding: Infrastructures of Audibility and Imaginary Organs

The central theory of the book is one of sounding , and it is a theory which is bound by two concepts that traverse a range of case studies from the human body, to bioacoustics, to the vibrations of place. The theory of sounding points to two concepts that will be explicated throughout the book: infrastructures of audibility and imaginary organs. These will be explicated shortly, but first, a word on where my use of the term sounding comes from. Biological anthropologist and cultural theorist Stefan Helmreich’s (2015) use of the term sounding is intended to describe how we bring the unknowable into the limits of the knowable—how to bring things from outside our field of vision into view through sound, how to generate worlds. Such a term is generalizable enough that it accounts for how new technologies bring together new communities in vibration with one another, because they touch by approximation in vibration ; these may be interhuman communities (such as Deaf and Hearing communities) and interspecies communities (researcher and animal), but also extra-human communities (plant and sun rays).

Helmreich (2015) writes that sounding is an imaginative device that intends to capture the entanglements of scientific research and cultural formations: The basis of this formation is the propagation and persistence of life. Sounding is thus situated, concrete—an actualization. As such, sounding is radically empirical and resists overly theorizing ventures. This means that sounding is a method that interrogates objects in the world and is especially useful for gaining closeness and proximity to them. In particular, Helmreich writes that sound is more than a colloquial experience in that it resonates. As such, the meaning links back to the etymological roots of the English sund, meaning sea, implying something infused with deep sounds. Thus, as an experiential concept, sounding helps us understand the experience of sound as opposed to sound as an event or a phenomenon itself. Instead, it invokes the collective phenomena that go into the labour and the process of sounding; as we will see in many of the examples, sounding involves material and extramaterial labour, some of it quite visual, much of it markedly haptic.

Sounding means getting caught up in the excitement of multiple meanings in a sound, and of perceiving the meanings of sound in non-sonic or trans-sonic things (Chapter 4 addresses this in terms of a transacoustic community ). It also takes into account the ambivalences of the abstract and the material; examples and field trips are as much abstract...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Sounding
• 2. Sounding Voice
• 3. Sounding Between Bodies
• 4. Sounding Ecologies
• 5. Sounding Data
• 6. Sounding Place
• 7. Conclusion: Sounding Worlds
• Back Matter