Listening to Noise and Silence

Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

Salomé Voegelin

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781441143389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Listening to Noise and Silence engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salomé Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility.
A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow.
Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. Listening to Noise and Silence broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.

1
Listening

This chapter explores listening, not as a physiological fact but as an act of engaging with the world. It is in the engagement with the world rather than in its perception that the world and myself within it are constituted, and it is the sensorial mode of that engagement that determines my constitution and that of the world.

Every sensory interaction relates back to us not the object/phenomenon perceived, but that object/phenomenon filtered, shaped and produced by the sense employed in its perception. At the same time this sense outlines and fills the perceiving body, which in its perception shapes and produces his sensory self. Whereby the senses employed are always already ideologically and aesthetically determined, bringing their own influence to perception, the perceptual object and the perceptual subject. It is a matter then of accepting the a priori influence while working towards a listening in spite rather than because of it. The task is to suspend, as much as possible, ideas of genre, category, purpose and art historical context, to achieve a hearing that is the material heard, now, contingently and individually. This suspension does not mean a disregard for the artistic context or intention, nor is it frivolous and lazy. Rather it means appreciating the artistic context and intention through the practice of listening rather than as a description and limitation of hearing. This practice follows Theodor W. Adorno’s call for philosophical interpretations that,

… answer the questions of a pre-given reality each time, through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of which has its control in the disappearance of the question.¹

It is perception as interpretation that knows that to hear the work/the sound is to invent it in listening to the sensory material rather than to recognize its contemporary and historical context. Such listening will produce the artistic context of the work/the sound in its innovative perception rather than through the expectation of an a priori reality. This phantasmagoric practice does not make listening inexact or irrelevant since it is based on the rigour and responsibility of perception.² To rely on the pre-given would in any event not make the perceived more valid. It would simply make it more certain within its own description. However, this also means that perception could only ever know the work to the degree to which it fulfils that certainty.

The ideology of a pragmatic visuality is the desire for the whole: to achieve the convenience of comprehension and knowledge through the distance and stability of the object. Such a visuality provides us with maps, traces, borders and certainties, whose consequence are communication and a sense of objectivity. The auditory engagement however, 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.

The difference lies, as Michel de Certeau points out, between the desire for the godlike view, the gnostic drive for total knowledge, satisfied from high above at a distance from the urban text, and the walking of the ‘Wandersmänner’ down below, producing the city blindly through their temporal and individual trajectories.³ In this sense listening is not a receptive mode but a method of exploration, a mode of ‘walking’ through the soundscape/the sound work. What I hear is discovered not received, and this discovery is generative, a fantasy: always different and subjective and continually, presently now.

An aesthetic and philosophy of sound art is based on this discovering drive. This is not a gnostic drive, but a drive to knowing. Knowing as past participle, always now, unfolding in the present, bringing with it the uncertainty of a fleeting understanding. Such a listening does not pursue the question of meaning, as a collective, total comprehension, but that of interpretation in the sense of a phantasmagoric, individual and contingent practice. This practice remains necessarily incomplete in relation to an objective totality but complete in its subjective contingency. Sound narrates, outlines and fills, but it 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. This ‘relationship’ is not between things but is the thing, is sound itself. Listening cannot contemplate the object/phenomenon heard separate from its audition because the object does not precede listening. Rather, the auditory is generated in the listening practice: in listening I am in sound, there can be no gap between the heard and hearing, I either hear it or I don’t, and what I perceive is what I hear. I can perceive a distance but that is a heard distance. The distance is what I hear here, not over-there. It does not signal a separation of objects or events but is the separation as perceived phenomenon.

The aesthetic subject in sound is defined by this fact of interaction with the auditory world. He is placed in the midst of its materiality, complicit with its production. The sounds of his footsteps are part of the auditory city he produces in his movements through it. His subject position is different from the viewing self, whose body is at a distance from the seen. The listener is entwined with the heard. His sense of the world and of himself is constituted in this bond.

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. This conception challenges both notions of objectivity and of subjectivity, and reconsiders the possibility and place of meaning, which situates the re-evaluation of all three at the centre of a philosophy of sound art.

This first chapter describes listening as an activity, an interactivity, that produces and invents and demands of the listener a complicity and commitment that rethinks existing philosophies of perception. By narrating listening to sound work and the acoustic environment it introduces the themes central to a philosophy of sound art: subjectivity, objectivity, communication, collective relations, meaning and sense making.

Being Honeyed

In 1948 Maurice Merleau-Ponty was commissioned by the French National radio to give seven audio-lectures on ‘The Development of Ideas’ to be broadcast as part of ‘The French Culture Hour’, on each Saturday between the 9th of October and the 13th of November. His series, which focused on the World of Perception, is kept in the archives of the Institut National de L’Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris and has also been published first in French, and now in an English translation, as a small booklet by Routledge.⁴ Here I will consider both my experience of the spoken causeries, listening to it by appointment at the National Archive and the statements of the written texts. In these lectures Merleau-Ponty considers the perception of the world not as a passive gazing at its a priori attributes but instates visual perception via modern painting and everyday objects an active role. Merleau-Ponty talks about painting and the artistic demand to see beyond the intellectual expectation of a representational reality into the perception of ‘a space in which we too are located’. Talking about painting since Cézanne he suggests:

The lazy viewer will see ‘errors of perspective’ here, while those who look closely will get the feel of a world in which no two objects are seen simultaneously, a world in which regions of space are separated by the time it takes to move our gaze from one to the other a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.⁵

In his descriptions he outlines a phenomenology of perception, a world and art perceived rather than known. He understands conventional, representational and perspectival painting to be polite in that it facilitates a single perception of what is in reality multi-layered and complex. To him such painting kills ‘their trembling life’ that is perpetually unfolding. Instead he prefers those works that deal with the emergence of being over time.⁶

What he means by this painterly emergence is clarified in his in 1945 written essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, where he articulates the doubt in the singular and habitual veracity of the seen as the prime motivator of the artist’s production. He suggests that Cézanne paints incessantly, again and again the landscape before him from the doubt in the referential and prespectival reality of the visible world. This doubt is suspended in the motility of painting out of which the landscape emerges rather than is represented by. He understands such paintings as ‘a drive to rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience’, and states that painters of that time refused the laws of perspective and instead struggled with the birth of the landscape, the thing, before them.⁷ They pushed the body into the mêlé of reality and it is through the bodily experience that that reality becomes real in all its complexity rather than as a detached and firm fact. However, in print his ideas retain the notion of a finished painting rather than the movement of unfolding that he attributes to the sensory material. It remains a description of a work that is the finished product of a complex, bodily engagement; it is not the bodily engagement itself.

What he writes about is the artist’s body, his doubt, his need to perpetually rework, to remain fleetingly certain, which evokes in me the certainty of his painting, validated by the painter’s struggle and hard work. Cézanne’s individual and ceaseless struggle against one point of view is the modernist aura of the painting as a manual fact.⁸ The painting remains certain as a painting that I can view from a distance, hanging heavy on the wall. I empathize intellectually but not physically. This is not my doubt being worked through here. It remains the painter’s. The multi-layered complexity becomes again one viewpoint in the perspective of the gallery. In the certainty of the museum’s context I understand rather than experience doubt. By contrast, through the spoken words of the broadcast the painting unfolds, refolds, from me, as an audio work. I hear and participate in the process of layers, distances, time and separations. The painting emerges over time in my ears. This is not to say that the written text or the painted image really represent a simple and certain unity. But their already-there-ness, their existence before my viewing them and the certainty of their published context, allows my vision to observe rather than participate in the complexity of their unfolding. The physical distance and autonomy of the work as image, as text, allows reading and shapes the interpretation of the read in its own image. This interpretation is the work in perception but this perception is spatial and brightly lit. By contrast, the dark serendipity of radio grants no room: its nearness and temporality is not that of my interpretation but that of its own unfolding, out of the dark into my ears, in the physical time of the broadcast. My ears perform the complexity of the work bodily and in some haste. The text as writing is the musical work, framed by convention; it allows entry to scrutinizing eyes that interpret it, while granting it the space for that interpretation. The issue here is not a distinction between music and sound art, but how both of them are listened to. This book includes the discussion of what conventionally could be termed musical works, but attempts to listen to them for the sound they make rather than their musical organization. Since, sound does not allow for an interpretation on top of its work-ness but is interpretation as all there is, temporal and contingent. It is the ‘unseen’ painting as it emerges from Merleau-Ponty’s voice that reveals the complex intersubjectivity of its experience. The text as voice is the bodily fragment of its sound, and the painting unfolding in that voice takes that body to meet mine in a dark and transient conduit. Here the painting is experienced in all its complexity rather than appreciated as a firm fact: trembling and in doubt it is the motility of being.

What I hear in Merleau-Ponty’s Causeries is not the body of the text but the body of Merleau-Ponty, whose complex unity, contingent, fragmented and doubtful, meets me in my listening. When, in another broadcast in the series, Merleau-Ponty explains the complex unity of perception through the yellow sourness of a lemon and the liquid stickiness of honey, it is from his voice, the bodily and transient sound of his appearance out of the darkness of the broadcast, that the lemon and honey get formed in my listening as uncertain and complex unities that reveal my own unsure intricacy.

This is the case with the quality of being-honeyed. Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape, and what is more, it reverses the roles, by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it.⁹

Being honeyed expresses the reciprocity of his phenomenological intersubjectivity. The honey can only be felt through my stickiness. It cannot be grasped as a remote object but comes to being in my honeyed-hands as a complex phenomenon of no certain shape but a demanding nature. While the text describes the process, the voice produces it. His voice becomes the honey that drips into my ears and engages me without taking certain shape; it remains a roving complexity that grasps me.

The paintings, sour lemons and sticky honey that Merleau-Ponty talks about in his radio broadcasts are imagined by the listeners, produced in their imagination, invented and tasted through their ears. My cheeks pull together and my saliva starts flowing to the sound of yellow juicy lemon-ness. The image of a lemon sums it up, the sound adds up: adding ever more complex layers that are the object as auditory phenomenon. The adding never reaches a totality but only a contingent realization, which is never ideal but remains the fantasy of Adorno’s interpretative process.

While the modernist painter grapples with the multi-perspectuality of the world, in listening I imagine the world: it emerges between his words from my imagination in which I am located. This is not an act of interpretation as much as the fantasy of my audition: it is not the modernist painting nor the golden honey but his voice, his body in his mouth meeting mine in my ears, that shapes the perceived in the sensory-motor action of my perception.

Merleau-Ponty talks about his world of perception in visual terms. The sensibility of his perception however is not that of vision. It is not vision that painting and philosophy has liberated from representation; it is sonic perception, which is free of the visual stranglehold on knowledge and experience. Sound does not describe but produces the object/phenomenon under consideration. It shares nothing of the totalizing ability of the visual. It does not deny visual reality but practises its own fleeting actuality, augmenting the seen through the heard. The sonic reality is intersubjective in that it does not exist without my being in it and I in turn only exist in my complicity with it; and it is generative in that it is the sensory-motor process of listening: presently producing one’s honeyed-ness from one’s position of listening centrifugally into the world.¹⁰

The listening subject invents, he practises an innovative listening that produces the world for him in a phenomenological sensory-motor action towards the heard, and his auditory self is part of the heard in reciprocal intersubjectivity. Listening as a critical motility practises Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a process of doubt: the critical listener himself is full of doubt about the heard, and doubtful in his complicity he needs to hear and hear again, to know himself as an intersubjective being in a sonic life-world.¹¹ The difficulty arises when this experiential, subjective world is measured and communicated in written language that pretends the objectivity and knowledge of the visual exchange. The transcript of the radio broadcasts gives me a description of the complexity of honey and lemons, the sounds of Merleau-Ponty’s voice binds me to honey’s sugary stickiness and the lemon’s sour flesh. This difference in my perceptual engagement highlights an aesthetic difference.

One intention of Listening is to unpack and articulate this distinction through listening to sound work and the everyday acoustic environment, to bring to light the consequences of a sonic perception and subjectivity as a philosophical experience. Another is to bring sounds’ particularity to bear on our notion of communication, language and shared meaning, and to celebrate experiential non-sense, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological sense that comes out of sensation rather than rationality and transgresses the collective through individual sense-making.

To Listen

Sounds constantly enter my ears, bounding around in there, declaring their interest even if I am not listening. As I walk through a busy urban street I try to ignore the ...