Memory, Space and Sound

Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson, John Richardson, Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson, John Richardson, Bruce Johnson, Kari Kallioniemi

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783206025
• eBook ISBN: 9781783206049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Memory, Space and Sound presents a collection of essays from scholars in a range of disciplines that together explore the social, spatial and temporal contexts that shape different forms of music and sonic practice. The contributors deploy different theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches from musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural history, media studies and cultural studies as they analyse an array of examples, including live performances, music festivals, audiovisual material and much more.
 

Chapter 1

Introduction

Johannes Brusila, Bruce Johnson and John Richardson

Cultural researchers over the past couple of decades have increasingly grappled with the conundrum of how sound, and music in particular, becomes meaningful, regardless of background and disciplinary affiliation. The answer for many has been to situate sounds and their corresponding social and cultural activities within the contexts of space and memory. This triangular relationship has become a key issue in many fields of music research, promising to open up neglected areas of inquiry as well as creating linkages between interests that might previously have been regarded as unconnected; for example, acoustics, film music studies, soundscape studies, sociological theories of space, heritage and memory studies.

Technological developments have made formerly temporally and spatially distant sonic phenomena a part of our present culture in unforeseen ways, many of which are explored in this collection. Technology impinges on our subject in other ways, too. Not only are digital technologies transforming the landscape of our everyday social interactions when it comes to sound and music (Castells 1996; Bull 2000; Richardson and Gorbman 2013; Vernallis, Herzog and Richardson 2013), but they also offer increasingly sophisticated tools for understanding how sound, far from being easily separable from the surrounding physical and discursive world, is closely interconnected with it. There is no such thing as a neutral acoustic environment – one that is not conditioned in some way by an enveloping physical space, which in turn exists by dint of social actions and interactions. How we listen to sounds, with reference to the framing environment or bracketing it out, is thus a matter of choice – one made either unwittingly or with conscious reference to the social norms and conventions that inform the actions and responses we consider appropriate and meaningful. Once we couple sounds and their intrinsic situation-dependency with the memories of those who produce, perceive and respond to them, the plot thickens considerably. These relationships are the ones we choose to navigate, with a view to offering, in the totality of this collection, new insights on a range of topics related to these core themes.

In this book we present a multidisciplinary approach to studying how sound becomes meaningful in relation to time and place. Collectively, the essays endeavour to show how sounds, most frequently their musical forms, are located in actual and symbolic auditory spaces and how they are encoded as part of our cultural and social memory. We highlight relevant theoretical and empirical issues with a particular focus on cultural and social memory, space and place. Drawing on musicology and ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural history, media and cultural studies and other relevant approaches, the themes are explored through analyses of a wide range of examples, including performances, audiovisual material and the Internet. This enquiry in relation to both space and memory produces a synthesis of the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of cultural analysis.

Memory

According to an old axiom attributed to the influential Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, ‘all history is contemporary history’. This is certainly true when it comes to cultural studies of memory over the past few decades, during which there has been a growing historiographical and sociological interest in how the past is understood. Memories are not only individual, but collective, cultural and social (Halbwachs 1992; Assmann 1995, 2011). The past is present in various sites of memory, where cultural memories are crystallized (Boym 2001; Nora 1989). From a musicological perspective, it is interesting to study how our personal musical memories and culturally institutionalized memories construct our ideas of the past. After all, music has a unique power in acts of memory, to bring to consciousness events we had forgotten, to reclaim the past, to activate collective memory, and in doing so regenerate the most powerful sense of community and to laminate more firmly the present over the past.

Research on memory accomplishes much the same thing by sidelining the fictionalizing or reconstructive narratives of traditional histories in favour of the alternative, often more close-up-oriented stories that have emerged in writing on historiography, Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical approaches to discourses, microhistory (e.g. Ginzburg 1980, 1983), critical studies of social groups (including the history of women and postcolonial history), research on autobiography, material culture and ‘the social life of things’ (e.g. Appadurai 1988) and archaeology in the traditional sense (as in Assmann’s writing). Writing on collective memory and cultural memory has more in common with all of the above areas of inquiry than traditional historical research. While a common misapprehension is that memories are fleeting and inconsequential, in contrast to the assumed hard facts of historical textbooks, research in these fields provides compelling evidence that the reverse might be the case: the first-hand accounts of cultural actors – which we find in documents, recollections and personal reflections – often convey more direct and reliable information about experiences across and of history than official accounts. Memories are often, moreover, closely bound up to the world of material objects and social spaces. These are not peripheral by-products of history but affectively loaded crystallizations that offer windows onto the past and the present.

Memory is implicated also with a wide range of contemporary practices where music is circulated in material and immaterial forms. For a long period of time, music was understood to be an abstract art and the material dimensions of music were largely neglected; but during the past couple of decades, musicologists have also become interested in the relationship between the material culture of music and its cultural meanings (e.g. Brusila 2009). Equally important insights into music have been gained by viewing it as a creative activity, so new research is revealing the various ways in which it can be approached in terms of its distinctive ‘thingness’ – as something that can be preserved, owned, exchanged and appropriated. Questions have been raised about how music is preserved as sonic phenomena, material objects and individual and social memories. Music has often been archived as scores for aesthetic, functional and symbolic reasons, but simultaneously it has continued to exist as emotional memories, creative practices and social activities. Now, there is a growing interest for studying the ways in which music is preserved both at public or institutional museums and archives and at the private or individual level in, for example, private collections and recollections (see, e.g., Cohen et al. 2014, and the Australian project Popular Music and Cultural Memory). An interest in the past has also become more important for the music industry, which, as a part of the current ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011), invests in nostalgia, revivals and reissues of previous decades. The development of digital technology has made musics of the past present in today’s media, not least the Internet, in both material and immaterial forms that to a growing extent break old physical boundaries.

Space

The questioning of the idea of ‘autonomous music’ and the increasing recognition that ‘context’ is as important as ‘text’ have brought forward the recognition that, far from being ‘inherent’, musical meanings are largely discursively constructed in dynamic interaction with musical sounds situated in physically concrete places and culturally constructed framing spaces. The notion of ‘framing’ has been around for some time, in Gregory Bateson’s ecological view of human (and non-human) thought systems and interactions (Bateson 1972:183−198), Erving Goffman’s theory of ‘frame analysis’ (1974), Derrida’s deconstruction and, more recently, Mieke Bal’s (2002) ideas about how cultural frames of reference shape our experiences of art. Broadly speaking, what unites these theories is the conviction that frames are understood as ‘determining the type of “sense” that will be accorded everything within the frame’ (Goffman 1961:20). Derrida and Bal add to this accumulation of knowledge the provocative idea that frames connect with general systems of knowledge that define also what falls outside the frame of reference (see also Richardson 2015). Where we experience music is crucial in several ways. It largely conditions the ‘semiotics’ of the music: the meanings and values we conventionally attach to it. Music made in one place simply has a different valorization from the same music made in another space.

Music has often been contextualized according to locality: in music history often according to nations; in ethnomusicology based on small-scale social groupings that live in a certain place or region; in popular music studies in relation to, for example, certain urban areas. Influences from, for example, cultural studies and cultural geography have also made music researchers question simplified notions of locality; for example, separation of physical place from socially constructed space (Giddens 1990), and the increasing scope and intensity of global and transnational processes, which has led to a ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989:240). Simultaneously, technological development has changed the ways in which music is produced, disseminated and consumed spatially and geographically. Digital technology and Internet have created new ways of territorializing, deterritorializing and reterritorializing local communities through musical practices (e.g. Brusila 2010). However, sound technologies have not simply provided new conduits for music; they have of course also changed it (e.g. Katz 2010). The infinite reproducibility of music that can be achieved by digitization and the portability afforded by various forms of personal sound systems mean that music may now be experienced by millions in completely different spaces, each of which will be a crucial factor in forming its meanings.

While much of the research on popular music genres in particular has focused on urban spaces and geographies (e.g. Krims 2007), one cannot take for granted that theorizations of urban spaces are the only relevant models. This might explain why researchers working in more sparsely populated regions have taken such a keen interest in fields like soundscape studies and ecomusicology. Some of the defining questions in ecocritical research on music in fact come back to issues of spatial mapping, both within music and beyond its boundaries. Generally speaking, ecocritical research correlates an environmental or non-human frame of reference with a human and cultural one, thereby allowing the emergence of a more expansive perspective on familiar issues (Richardson 2015).

Space is routinely assumed to be something we experience visually, but of course information about space and place is communicated also in sounds. Since the invention of the phonograph, sound recordings have captured and mediated sonic spaces. Research on music technology is now beginning to take this sort of information just as seriously as aspects of music such as structure, form and melody were taken in the past. Musicologists (e.g. Tagg 2000; Richardson 2011: 219−223; Moore 2012:29−44) have asked how the relative positioning of elements in the mix – what Allan Moore calls the ‘soundbox’ – inflects our perceptions of performers and the ‘messages’ they put across – about intimate or distanced, interactional or individualistic modes of performance and so on. Readings of this kind can provide valuable insights into the social functions and position (in a broader sense) of performers and their listeners when combined with other analytical means. Just as sonically delineated space frames and configures experiences of ethnic and racialized space, so it is also a factor in social categories like class, language, age, generation and gender. Moving across ethnic and social spaces requires sensitivity to the notions of authenticity within the different audience cultures. For example, Third World musicians who enter the world music market must apply to their new audience’s sonic ideas of ‘the West and the Rest’ and of world music as ‘local music, not from here’ (Brusila 2003).

Sound

The emergence of the systematic study of sound as a cultural phenomenon rather than as an object of scientific interest may be traced back to the work of R. Murray Schafer’s benchmark study The Tuning of the World (Schafer 1977). His foundational work in the 1960s was conducted with the World Soundscape Project, which included Hildegard Westerkamp, and Barry Truax who authored the Handbook of Acoustic Ecology (Truax 1978/1999). One of the earliest collections outside the World Soundscape Project was the 1994 Soundscapes: Essays on Vroom and Moo (Järviluoma 1994), edited by Finnish scholar Helmi Järviluoma who, with Greg Wagstaff, also published the book Soundscape Studies and Their Methods (Järviluoma and Wagstaff 2002). Järviluoma has built on the foundations set down by the World Soundscape Project and Schafer, the results published as Acoustic Environments in Change (Järviluoma et al. 2009). Other work in the field confirms its interdisciplinary range, including, for example, that of cultural historian Alain Corbin (1999), ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2012), science historian Jonathan Sterne (2013) and literary historian John Picker (2013). Significant institutionalizations of sound studies 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 Grenobles, France, in 1998.

In the twenty-first century, the status of sound studies has increasingly been validated by ‘handbook’ or ‘encyclopaedia’ compilations that proclaim the interdisciplinary compass of the field. These include The Auditory Culture Reader (Bull and Back 2003), Aural Cultures (Drobnick 2004), Hearing Cultures (Erlmann 2004), The Sound Studies Reader (Sterne 2012), Sound Studies (Bull 2013), as well as more specialized texts as The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900−1933 (Thompson 2004), Hearing History (Smith 2010), Sound: A Reader in Theatrical Practice (Brown 2010) and The Sound Handbook (Crook 2012) (for an overview of the state and directions of sound studies, see Johnson forthcoming).

One pattern gradually emerging in this literature is an appreciation of the convergence of the intellectual and the material in auditory cognition, as exemplified in one of the most recent collections, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Finch and Bijsterveld 2012), with contributions ranging through cognitive studies, acoustic engineering, physiology, ecology, geography and neuroscience. This research has also been one of the most powerful drivers in problematizing the separation between music and sound, and by extension, music and social practice. Sonic phenomena in general are now recognized to be important elements in our understanding of not only aesthetic objects as such, but also art, our environment and the connections between human beings and technology.

As in the case of this collection, a substantial section of that field deals with music, perhaps the most semiotically complex form of anthropogenic sound. Indeed, it is the overlap between soundscape studies and music that has helped to problematize the latter term. For the more conservative branches of musicology, at least until the late 1980s, the idea of ‘music’ was often taken as a given, and studied with a focus on musical works and the study of classical scores. For a great many reasons associated with influences from, for example, ethnomusicology and general changes in intellectual and material culture, the perspectives have widened within music research, leading to a more generous and instructive understanding of the importance of context in addition to text, and raising ontological and epistemological questions regarding the nature and function of music. Resituating music within the larger sonic environment, for example, enlarges our understanding of its social role, as well as the importance of the senses, theories of cognition and technology (see, e.g., Birdsall and Enns 2008). Indeed, the very opposition of text and context is also increasingly problematized in general in recent humanities research, which interrogates the underlying assumptions and corresponding social practices that hold these and other concepts in place rather than taking them as something given or natural (see Bal 2002; Richardson 2015).

Musicology and ethnomusicology are therefore expanding to include ear-opening new perspectives, while interdisciplinary collaborations and mixed methods approaches to the study of music cultures have brought valuable new insights on music and its relations to surrounding cultural forms and practices. A notable example is the emergence of audiovisual studies, among which film studies are of special significance. Studies of film music have expanded understanding of musical meaning and affect and how they operate, in particular helping to conceptually resituate music within contexts as disparate as narratology, cultural theory, sound engineering and semiotics (see, e.g., Chion 2009; Tagg 2012). Much of the recent research on film music and other audiovisual uses of music – in gaming, music videos and live perfo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I: Memory
• Part II: Space
• Part III: Sound
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover