Amplifications

Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory

Paul Carter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501344480
• eBook ISBN: 9781501344497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Written by one of the most prominent thinkers in sound studies, Amplifications presents a perspective on sound narrated through the experiences of a sound artist and writer. A work of reflective philosophy, Amplifications sits at the intersection of history, creative practice, and sound studies, recounting this narrative through a series of themes (rattles, echoes, recordings, etc.). Carter offers a unique perspective on migratory poetics, bringing together his own compositions and life's works while using his personal narrative to frame larger theoretical questions about sound and migration.

ONE

Charms

In his book Wild Life in a Southern County Richard Jefferies describes the winter congregation of starlings: ‘On approaching it this apparent cloud is found to consist of thousands of starlings, the noise of whose calling to each other is indescribable: the country folk call it a “charm”, meaning a noise made up of innumerable lesser sounds, each interfering with the other.’¹ Growing up, an auditory charm of this kind enveloped me. The call of the birds must have come first, although my earliest memories suggest a concomitant disposition, as if my ear was attuned to their jargon. Certainly, I found it natural to assume they called to me particularly, to note their comings and goings, and orient myself to garden, orchard, path and field edge according to the signals resident in these different habitats. From the beginning, as it were, the approach was as important as the noise: if an atmosphere of birdsong seemed to ring the horizon, then the pathways I struck into its midst began to differentiate innumerable lesser sounds. Shortly after, there must have been a dawning conviction that the birds spoke to me. I detected a summons to hearken to their message. It could not be translated into a human tongue, nor was I absorbed in creating a world of private correspondences. The call was inherent in the performance, an act of spacing and timing that found me in its presence.

In the twenty-first century the social connotations of noise are generally negative. But the definitions of noise are as variable as its causes. Jefferies uses the word in a neutral way, and the amplification of his term to encompass the innumerable sounds produced by a host of different species is reasonable. I was immersed in an ocean of noises: sounds that were speaking to me impurely. Interference with their perfect reception was not due to outside intrusions: the intermittent hush of passing cars, the occasional electric telephone bell or the romping cadences of Barwick Green floating up the stairs from the kitchen radio. These signatures of the time and place belong to another story. Interference signified simply the impression of an indistinct congregation of sounds into a massing ensemble whose component parts could not be securely separated. It was as if all the frequencies of the radio were broadcasting at once, with the vital distinction that this composition was a movement form, the sea of sound I waded into when I went birdwatching a bow wave of birdsong breaking round me and trailing behind in forming and reforming wakes. It was also the sound I lay down to that seeped through the rafters and crowded mice-like along the littorals of sleeping and waking. This was consoling, and if I had been able to articulate why I felt consoled, I might have spoken of presentiment, a sense that the meaning of my existence was not to be confined by the prison house of language but ‘in the change of years, in the coil of things’; as the poet sang, I could look forward to ‘the clamour and rumour of life to be’.

Growing up a parish away from where Jefferies made his observations, we called the great flocks of starlings murmurations. The location of these varied from one winter to the next. A clue to their imminence was the sight of parties of between twenty and a hundred birds flying low and purposefully across the bare fields. Converging from all points of the compass, they must have been tuned in to a collective intelligence. At the appointed meeting place, they amalgamated spontaneously, rising like smoke from beyond the spinney, their waving columns opening, closing and reforming, black Northern Lights. Other species migrated into and out of the neighbourhood according to the seasons. But the starlings, whatever the foreign origins of their augmented numbers, behaved like a region unto themselves. Such murmurations – named as much for the great rush of air caused by thousands of wings beating as for their excited calls – staged a kind of creation. Their Moebius-strip formations could for an instant be the ruin of a pavilion. Next, rounding invisible corners, rearing up and splitting apart, they seemed deployed against an unseen enemy. Such choreographies took back the landscape, mimicking a topology before topography; they disclosed an elemental unity lost with the property division of the land and its enclosure. Then by a miracle of instantaneous chain reaction, they were gone, poured over the edge of the wood – the concentration of their noise conveyed to us as the purest interference.

They respatialized the creation of significant sounds. Their molecular involutions anticipated the shifting pitches of Ionisation, the hyperbolic paraboloids of the Philips Pavilion (where, again, Varèse perceived spatialized sound) – a cultural genealogy discovered later, of course. As a bird term, ‘murmuration’ is said to have been popularized by W. H. Auden and Mervyn Peake, but in my grandfather’s vocabulary the word had already been domesticated. In any case the onomatopoeic allure of the word offered me a key to a new world where sound and sense remained fused. In its more general sense, ‘murmuration’ referred to a movement of the lips without speaking. It described sub-vocalic sighs or low cries emitted almost without thinking, a kind of self-absorption made audible, as if an inner speech were haemorrhaging. Scaled up to the congregation of the crowd, it was to spread a rumour. Through its onomatopoeic veil, I heard the natural origins of language: the ‘ur’ sound, its repetition marking the beginning of rhythm, the affixed ‘m’ and the ‘mur’ sound capturing, like our word ‘mum’, the double movement of sound towards speech and the withdrawal from speech – not everyday language, then, not exactly, but, maybe, the possibility of an origin of poetry in certain sounding kinetic gestures. These noisy formations spoke their name; the poet’s invention – the imitative rendering of their moving masses with a word – was a translator to their country.

Like crowds, murmurations were exceptional. Ordinarily, the starling appeared on its own, a denizen of chimney pots as the bird books might say, its untidy straw nest tucked under slates. In this guise, too, it appealed to me. Unlike the sturdy song thrush, the avuncular blackbird or the melancholy robin, the peculiar avocation of the starling was mimicry. Perched atop the television aerial outside my window, or on any nearby prominence, it merrily channelled the neighbourhood: embedded in a matrix of chirrups, squeals, whistled glissandos, chicken clucks and other sub-vocalic cries were tinny quotations of birdsong, the pheasant’s klaxon, the dunnock’s cobwebbed dew cadence, even the convolutions of the avuncular blackbird. In my childhood I have few memories of human speech; excavating later strata of communication I find evidence of territories of silence, and I suppose that they lie over yet deeper reaches of emotional desertion, forgotten or unregistered not least because they left no audible impression. An early intuition of isolation was ‘Solus’. Mercifully left unwritten, this apologia pro vita sua cast me as an Elizabethan actor: the reader was meant to find the paradox of an actor doomed to have no company on the stage autobiographically poignant. Had I known it, the Irish meaning of the term would have offered a richer theme: solus (of sound: ‘clear’). In any case, the dialogues people appeared to conduct was a mystery: how did one get into that country? On what frequency was small talk conducted?

Here the starling was a leader in communication. Busily improvising a patter entirely made up of borrowed phrases, he seemed bristling with self-confidence. Not for him the labour of solitary composition; he found his inspiration on the street and in the field. His meta-communication was disarming; an ironist without cynicism, he riffed on the sound events of the everyday with all appearance of sincerity. He chirruped and chattered about talking as such; turning the dial of his radio, indifferent to what he broadcast, he imagined a community, a universe of voices assembled in a new arrangement. Parodying the sound identities of the neighbourhood, he nevertheless stood up strange and serious: his uplifted head like a rapt avian orant, his spangled throat with its little beard quivering, he opened his lemon-yellow dagger beak in prayer to the sky. But such reveries were easily abjured: at the smallest distraction, he was gone, speeding like an arrow down to the fields. The starling overcame the problem of not having a language of one’s own. ‘Poetic reverie revives the world of original words. All the beings of the world begin to speak by the name they bear. … One word leads to another. The words of the world want to make sentences. … The poet listens and repeats. The voice of the poet is a voice of the world,’ the wise Gaston Bachelard had written, but the starling seemed to disprove this.² The theory of proper names was deconstructed: What had the blackbird’s song really to do with the blackbird when it could be played on another instrument? (And besides, learnt from other blackbirds, wasn’t its traditionalism unimaginative rather than archetypal?)

The starling had evidently learnt how to listen with interest. He gave back to mimicry a good name by insisting that accurate reproduction was not inconsistent with innovation. Like the ancient rhapsode stitching together a new song from old fragments, strictly speaking, inventing nothing, he improvised a composition that borrowed what was around and harmonized it. It was as if he had trained himself to be unprepared, the composition and the performance being indistinguishable. Everyone might hear something of themselves there, but hear it strangely mingled. A voice that belonged to no one might be recognized, a primordial echo of the place from which the voice came, coming back to us through the interference pattern of the starling’s song. In his unframed responses I had the impression the country as a whole heard its own voice. Bachelard’s phenomenology need not be set aside. As the wheeling murmurations seemed to recover ancient volumes of air, where trees, clouds, wind and light articulated a single volumetric manifold, so the individual rapper on the rooftop reversed the historical fragmentation of sound into species, into narrow melodic territories and unique timbral identities, giving voice instead to what allowed these acoustic coastlines to lie together, the pan-sonic hollow, the all-resounding oceanic in-between, the auditorium in common that alone made sense of place.

How conscious these reveries could have been when I was thirteen or fourteen I leave to the psychologists. What is indisputable, though, is that the first poem I can remember committing to typewriter was called ‘The Starling’. I can visualize the typeface more easily than the words but from the circumstantial evidence I believe this poem would have represented a modest manifesto. In the absence of stories in the family, a phenomenon to come back to, I was an eager collector of other people’s stories, whose manner of speaking (as much as the matter) I parroted as accurately as possible in my handwritten transcriptions. Old people’s stories attracted me the most and when I elicited their personal histories of life and death, their manner of speaking brought distant events close, individual nuances of accent, expression or gesture communicating what words could not convey. ‘Intonation: an intention which has become sound’, Marina Tsvetayeva wrote to Pasternak, and in the modest kitchens and parlours where I conducted my precocious home town interviews I already knew that an accurate transcription would be inaccurate unless it could also put into words the intentions behind the words.³ To mimic their narratives accurately, to bring over their intention, demanded an attention to context. There was no speech without another, even if one of the interlocutors was not necessarily human. The chimes of the mantelpiece clock, the lifting of the latch, the cat purring: these incidental noises counterpointed what was said, solicited and heeded as stage directions that saved the voice from coming out of the absolute void.

‘The most horrible thing in the cosmos’, another great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, used to say, ‘is absolute quiet’: ‘She loved the noise coming from the courtyard: one person beating rugs, another calling the children home, car doors banging, dogs barking ... . She laughed at those writers who tried to isolate themselves from the sounds of life going on beside them.’⁴ These sounds of life infiltrated speech. To convey the living voice, the enactment of what was intended, this sounding environment had somehow to be notated. What was said was surrounded by what was heard, and mediating this relay was listening, an attention to what cues the rhythms of the sound universe might offer. The story told of old times but was telling because of the auditory consciousness that shaped it. It may be that my sample was biased. As Methodists, my relatives and neighbours favoured inward speech, and approaching the denouement of some painful recollection, they were likely to trail away into what I would now call murmuration. The current of feeling still rolled the smaller pebbles along the bed of the stream but the surface of the water had resumed its glasslike smoothness: audible in this withdrawal was an essential rhythm, something like saying the rosary. As the tide of speech withdrew into this cave of inwardness, something like a hum or distant ululation was detectable, affecting but not to be written down.

Here, definitely, was a poetic task. If the ear witness was not to be an auditory voyeur, he had to find a way to make the murmuration articulate. Not only a rhythm, pulmonary, coronary, but also contrapuntal with the sound environment that was our constant companion, a basso ostinato climbed up and down the hills and vales of feeling, shadowing conscious thought like a whispering daimon or double. Akhmatova, it appears, knew how to hum:

When she was ‘composing poetry’ the process never let up for a moment: suddenly, while someone was speaking to her, or she was reading a book, or writing a letter, or eating, she would half-sing, half-mutter, ‘hum’ the almost unrecognisable vowels and consonants of the incipient lines, which had already found their rhythm. This humming was her outward expression of the constant vibration of poetry, which the ordinary ear cannot detect. Or, it was the transformation of chaos into poetic cosmos.

Naturally, my awareness of what was happening when I observed the descent of speech into the surd state of murmur was far less developed but I like to think that even then I would have recognized my vocation in Alexander Blok’s poetic summons ‘to free sounds from their native anarchic element; to bring these sounds into harmony and give them form; to introduce this harmony into the outside world’,⁵ even if I assumed that the sounds in question were environmental rather than human.

These reveries on the border of speech coexisted shortly with more scientific registration techniques. The advent of the early portable reel-to-reel tape recorder promised to resolve the problem of rendition by simply securing an accurate sound image. The budding poet continued to face the challenge of reproducing speech patterns in a way that conveyed the intention of the sound, but was freed of the responsibility to play oral historian or ethnolinguist. The difficulties of making decent sound recordings were legion, and instructive. Despite the promise of isolating and preserving individual bird songs in the manner of a Ludwig Koch, the microphone placed in nature made audible for the first time noise, not in Jefferies’s sense, but in a new non-contrapuntal way. In relation to our binaural attention and capacity to discriminate between hearing and listening, the microphone hooked over a fence or crouched in the mouth of a window is low-fidelity. For, unlike the human ear, it can hear but not listen; hence, any interruption to the pure signal associated with its perfect recall sounds like noise. Its high-fidelity rendition of wind, of rain on nearby leaves, of the intermittent hush of passing vehicles or of human voices indiscreetly raised in its neighbourhood, together with its indiscriminate registration of any unpredictable sound event, identifies as noise all that comes between us and what we intended to hear. Noise in this context is not simply any sound signal that interferes with the clarity of the recording: it’s bad timing as the same interfering sound might, a few minutes later, become of interest, and then, instead of fearing its interruption, we await it, counting the silence and soliciting it to speak.

One day my father communicated certain folk intelligence garnered at the local pub: a nightingale was to be heard singing at Knighton Crossing. Our expedition to hear this remains in my memory as one of the more poignant gestures towards a communication that, really, to the end of his life, remained unconsummated. Late enough for the lanes to be shrouded, although the twilight lingered, he drove me into the Vale of the White Horse to the estimated spot; we rolled down the windows and settled to listen. However, no plangent cadences issued from the coppice or lane. Other sounds were registered but that famous songster remained dumb, a failed solicitation that I came to regard superstitiously, as if the way to my father’s heart was doomed to be a dead end. Recording a nightingale came about by an entirely different route, and at a different place in the nearby Thames valley. But the results were poor. Our singer exhibited the behaviour described by the naturalists (not, I thought, without a hint of disapproval), for he skulked deep in the woodland canopy, making it difficult to guess where he m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Prolude
• 1 Charms
• 2 Returns
• 3 Rattles
• 4 Sirens
• 5 Echoes
• 6 Recordings
• 7 Voices
• 8 Callings
• Collect
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright