Sound Works

A Cultural Theory of Sound Design

Holger Schulze

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501373732
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501330247
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Digital Media

What is sound design? What is its function in the early 21st century and into the future?

Sound Works examines these questions in four parts: Part 1, "Why This Sound?", presents an overview of the modern history of sound design. Part 2 is highly visual and provides a glance onto a sound designer's workbench and the current state of "Sonic Labor." Part 3 uses cultural analysis to explore our contemporary "Living with Sounds." The final and fourth part then proposes a series of anthropological and political interpretations of how "Sound Works" today.

This book is not a manual on sound design; it instead argues for a cultural theory of sound design for sound designers and sound artists, for clients who commission a sound design and for researchers in the fields of sound studies, design research, and cultural studies

PART ONE

Why That Sound?

Annoyance and Excitement by Design

1

Working

Functional sounds in everyday life

Everyday sounds

When you turned on this computer—you are quite probably reading this book on—you had to listen to disjointed system sounds, start up chimes, alert noises, and auditory warning signals, perhaps accompanied by your favorite music in the background or on your headphones. Earlier today, when entering the building you work in, maybe you involuntarily set off the security alarm and the guards quickly materialized looking as if they would beat you up if you did not instantly produce your electronic identification card. Later, as you made a cup of coffee in the kitchen at work—or at home again—the automated (or humanly operated) coffee/espresso machine emanated a wide range of hissing, beeping, and crumbling noises. While drinking this pleasurable—and also quite functional—hot liquid you perhaps read a newspaper article about sound torture. And when you entered a subway station later on the same day, certain sounds announced almost every action taking place, escorted by sounds from various phones and game consoles. In bed at night you might have problems to fall asleep for all the annoying sounds coming from the traffic outside or the air conditioning system filling your rooms with its noise, hum, and resonance. This is everday life for you, for me, definitely not for all citizens on this planet, but for a lot.

Everyday life, these two supposedly tiny if not unimpressive words, imply a myriad of individual and idiosyncratic experiences in every single moment of every single hour on every single given day. An incoming message is being notified to me with a clicking signal sound by a social network I am logged into right now. Everyday life as such is unimaginable and hence it carries an unimaginable load of discourses, of academic discussions, of disagreement, and evermore diversifying approaches concerning the experience of the everyday (Pink 2012). So: What notion of the everyday is being used in this study? And on top, if this term really is of any use in academic discourse, what notion of life is being used here? In the back, the water heater signals with one distinct darker sound the end of the heating process. Implicitly, the concept of everyday life refers to its counter concept, the concept of the special and extraordinary, the rare, maybe even heterotopian moments in the lives of you or me. Special moments are what apparently many are seeking for, all the time, all their lives, also regarding sound design or of sound art. The special, extraordinary, and unusual of sound can be found in advanced high-end gadgets, in progressive concept studies, and highly elaborate performance settings for Neue Musik or Klangkunst. I tone down the volume as the streaming service sends its regular commercials. Such efforts to create auditory extravaganza manage with great joy and incredibly generous refinement to push the borders of what is technologically possible and what is desirable or digestible for potential listeners. These exciting developments of new sonic experiences and surprising aesthetics in sound they intend and succeed to educate you or me in listening as they represent the most radical outposts of sonic aesthetics: basic research in sound. Erratic subbass movements, subtle results and fusions of granular synthesis operations, unexpectedly joyful transitions of chords into melodies, put together out of fragmented layers of samples, glitches and clicks, oscillators and tone generators, mutually dependent and crafted in order to provide the most extremist, spatialized and at the same time haptic and kinesthetic sonic experience. Maybe a form of an expanded site-specific rhythmanalysis (Schulze 2018: 213)? Another social network I am logged into right now signals an incoming message with yet another, more melodic clicking sound.

At times, the trickle-down theory of sonic aesthetics can be observed: when new technological apparatuses and software inventions for crafting sounds begin as advanced developments of sound laboratories until they are finally assigned their successful and intensely monetarized place in the contemporary economy of sound—be it in popular music smash hits, in ubiquitous sound branding for kitchen appliances or all sorts of consumer electronics, in game sounds, the functional sounds of car navigation, or in the sounds of an amusement park. Yet, in most of the cases of newly developed auditory extravaganza this trickling down of aesthetics simply does not take place. Groundbreaking and deeply disturbing, erratic developments in sound do not actually dominate the lives of citizens in mediated societies en masse, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, seventy-five years (or so) in one’s life. I can hear the traffic sounds outside dying down; the traffic light slows them down. Therefore, the focus of this book on sound design does not lie on basic or advanced research in sound generation or composition; the focus of this book lies on the often rather mediocre, malfunctioning, or even horrible sounds, the sound signals, sound designs, and functional sounds that as a matter of fact do dominate your everyday and my everynight. In these moments and listening situations everyday life becomes a radical concept to focus on. It is the immanent situation most of the humanoid creatures on earth are enveloped in on every single moment in our lives.

The aforementioned citizens in heavily mediatized and networked societies can be considered a major type of listener to and user of sound designs, a type that matters. You swipe your card and you get granted access to your workplace. But if one normalizes this specific (or any certain) type of listener one surely ignores a wide array of other, maybe as important and as influential, examples of listeners that do not fit into this well-known and well-established pattern of a rather monolithic, a general concept of life as known to Western cultures: the concept of a male, white, well-educated, aristocratic-oligarchic, heterosexual, not bodily impaired lifeform, of employees and voters, of taxpayers and men and women living in heteronormative family institutions. I can hear myself typing, the acoustic feedback of my keyboard is just mechanic. To the contrary, this streamlined and idealized concept of life needs to be considered as thoroughly weird as it does nowhere on earth exist in exactly this normalized form. It is as such a pure imaginary, a representation of a social desire for normalization rather than a description of an actual lifeform on earth. Or in the words of the experimental psychologists Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan:

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies [are] the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010)

As soon as one abandons such an idealized and normative concept of “The Human” as this WEIRD Human, one is confronted with the surprising multiplicity of everyday lives in all their idiosyncratic richness, variety, and weirdness, between boredom and ecstasy, routine and surprise: potential listeners to these everyday sounds represent a multiplicity of erratic, plastic, and unforeseeably strange and alien ways of behaving, living, and appearing. This richness of the everyday, all the details of experiences and affects, of situations and plasticities, of interpretations and imaginations, of materializations and dissociations, is the foundation of this study in radical empiricism (James 1912). In the background, the hard drive, already some years old now, turns and makes its turning sounds audible. The material culture of designing sound and of living with designed sound is, hence, being explored in this study foremost in reference to specific, tiny, and ordinary situations of working on and living with sound. The traffic outside is running more loudly again. Starting with the everyday task of playing around with some rather arbitrarily generated sonic material, sketches and drafts for sound designs; the sudden urge to explicate a sound design idea in first tentative metaphors and phrases to a close colleague or a trustworthy project partner; the impromptu presentation of a first sketch in front of a group of selected people from the client in a rather unusual if not uncomfortable and inappropriate environment. On the ground of this specific and experiential reality and of its massive material impact the designed sound can be researched.

This radical focus on everyday situations of sonic labor leaves idealized listening situations and idealized concepts of genius designers way behind. It also leaves behind certain assumptions of ahistorically fixed meanings and culturally invariant messages in instrumental arrangements, in tonal progressions, or in rhythmic sequences. I can hear an old, 8-bit-ringtone in the distance. Static notions and systems of semiotics are suddenly rendered ahistoric and inappropriate—situated perception and activity, momentary impulses and accumulated training take control. Is this somehow the ancient Nokia-ringtone, cut, reduced, and designed from the Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega written in 1902 (Gopinath 2013)? With the notion of everyday life and its everyday sounds this study refers to situations in individual lives that are not marked as special. In contrast such situations do often remain invisible, or one tends to forget for instance what exactly you or I did experience while taking the usual subway line on, for instance, that very Tuesday to our offices—or how one reacted as a colleague or a romantic partner or a good friend called while you were having lunch that one other Thursday—for example. The repeatability and the invisibility of everyday life experiences seem to make it incredibly hard to research in this field. Don’t we prefer to remember all those strangely outstanding moments like this one weirdly unpleasant instance, or that one beautifully exciting encounter with a new acquaintance. All these extraordinary experiences though are the exact opposite to everyday life.

At this point the radical and rather unexpected impact of situations in everyday life becomes clearly audible: the gray and blurry background of one’s everyday life is not faded out but put at the center of one’s attention, on full volume, with almost unbearable loudness through the full bandwidth of all frequency bands. At the center of this study are not those nicely framing narrations of individual ambitions by sound designers in presenting the finest products of their efforts as the outcome of an always successful, never failing, always enjoyable, and never horribly devastating practice in a glorious way; this shall be the rightful domain of product presentations, of pitches and press releases to acquire new clients and customers. Instead, at the center of this study is the actual, the often humiliatingly banal, the dirty, and also confusing work environment and the not seldomly rather destructively erratic workflow in design projects involving sound design—as well as the erratic and strange, dissociated and unpredictable listening situations, the moments of misuse and misunderstanding, of disappropriation and of distortion in listening, in encountering, and in using sound design on a daily basis. I can hear the timer clock on the oven beeping from the kitchen.

All of this might sound rather disappointing, bleak, if not disenchanting for someone maybe hopeful to start a career in this promising and inspiring field of profession. But it is exactly in such bleak and disenchanted hours and days, working overtime, under working conditions of bricolage and imposture, where sound design actually is done. In these situations of disappointment, maybe boredom, surely repetition and routine the lives of producers and listeners of sound design unfold: in these many, these thousands and millions of hours, functional sounds occupy everyday life. I live among bleeps, you are punished by buzzers, we all are pinched and perforated by the affirming or denying sound signals of contemporary, sonified surveillance societies. This radical dystopia of contemporary social developments seems to be implied in the contemporary trajectories of sound design: for if one is restrained in this world of limited sonic experience then one is living under the rule of surveillance: a Panacousticon (cf. Chapter 14).

The dialectics of functionality

Sound designers get together in a workshop, on a regular basis. Doing a workshop has become part of developing a new sound design concept, reworking an existing or crafting a first tentative prototype for a sound design. One of the workshops I attended was aimed at developing a cross-platform and company-wide sound logo covering kitchen appliances, personal computer gadgets, mobile phone services, and even automotive navigation systems; and very soon, quicker than expected, the designers, musicians, accountants, and engineers engaged in a discussion that we could encounter in future workshops also: a discussion about the core criteria of an adequate, an aesthetically satisfying, and at the same time successful design. Very early, therefore, in our research it became quite clear that—in order to provide an appropriate foundation for our work on actual labor conditions and work processes in sound design—we would have to address also fundamental questions of design such as: What approaches to conceptualizing and designing sound could sound designers potentially rely on? Musical aesthetics? Sound art experiments? Usage studies? Psychoacoustics? The knowledge of auditory cognition? And, much more importantly: on what approaches to designing or conceptualizing sound do many of the sound designers we met actually rely on?

Compared to the fields of visual studies or of literary studies the field of design research is still rather in its nascent state (Mareis, Joost, and Kimpel 2010; Mareis, Held, and Joost 2013). However, a number of highly influential and prolific theories and publications can be identified that many designers rely on. In these approaches one can indeed discover generative elements for actual products of design in general. Be it the approach of affordances (Gibson 1977; Gaver 1991), of design patterns (Alexander 1977), of design research (Simon 1969; Laurel 2003; Cross 2007), or design thinking (Schön 1983; Sachse and Specker 1999; Lawson 2006; Plattner, Meinel, and Leifer 2010). All these approaches claim to provide tools for designers in order to structure, to reflect, to compare, and finally to improve their individual working processes. The process of designing is being commodified: articulation of a deep wish to make this process more controllable and more fitting to neighboring working processes, for example, in the sciences or in industry. In order to better understand the process of designing sound, it could hence be promising to not do the common but the unsuspected: not to expand only sound theories into sound design theories—but also to transfer design theories into sound design theories.

There are two intriguing and continuously influential approaches we will be focusing on in this study: the concept of a pattern language (Alexander 1977) and the concept of affordances (Gibson 1977; Gaver 1991). Starting with the first concept, the main questions of Christopher Alexander, mathematician and professor for architecture at Harvard University, in his design theory was: How is it possible to design—originally in architecture—in a way that presents coherent, exhaustive and consequential solutions to general problems in design? How can design leave some rather erratic efforts of imagination and trial and error behind and rely finally on empirically known examples from the past and their certain achievements concerning beauty and practicality in order to systematically present a so-called language for basic design solutions or design ideas? The 253 patterns proposed by Alexander include:

1. INDEPENDENT REGIONS … 2. THE DISTRIBUTION OF TOWNS 3. CITY COUNTRY FINGERS 4. AGRICULTURAL VALLEYS 5. LACE OF COUNTRY STREETS … 127. INTIMACY GRADIENT 128. INDOOR SUNLIGHT 129. COMMON AREAS AT THE HEART 130. ENTRANCE ROOM 131. THE FLOW THROUGH ROOMS 132. SHORT PASSAGES 133. STAIRCASE AS A STAGE 134. ZEN VIEW 135. TAPESTRY OF LIGHT AND DARK … 249. ORNAMENT 250. WARM COLORS 251. DIFFERENT CHAIRS 252. POOLS OF LIGHT 253. THINGS FROM YOUR LIFE.

A remarkably exhaustive list. The patterns themselves are presented as a breathtakingly normative utopia of the thoroughly designed world: the whole earth shall be designed responsibly and thoughtfully. Pattern no. 130 “ENTRANCE ROOM,” for instance, is outlined as:

This pattern gives the entrances their detailed shape, their shape and body and three dimensions, and helps complete the form begun by car connection (113), and the private terrace on the street (140). (Alexander 1977: 623)

As in this example, the elements of design are presented as connected to each other and they seem to follow an intrinsically unraveling logic in the writings of Christopher Alexander. This approach, therefore, creates a language-like blueprint for design; needless to say: mainly in the limits of the hegemonic Western idea of a house and a habitat, though exemplified with cases from all over the world. But in these limits of a certain bourgeois and Western lifestyle the patterns by Alexander indulge in the joyfully detailed practical knowledge of everyday usage: “1. The relationship of windows to the entrance … 2. The need for shelter outside the door … 3. The subtleties of saying goodbye … 4. Shelf near the entrance … 5. Interior of the entrance room … 6. Coats, shoes, children’s bikes” (Alexander 1977: 623–625). The very minuscule practicalities of everyday life enter the design process. Take for instance Alexander’s analytical narration of the “subtleties of saying goodbye,” a truly moving and elucidating, almost ethnographical sketch. An applied cultural theory, full of practical knowledge and the humor of someone who enjoys the details of the everyday:

When hosts and guests are saying goodbye, the lack of a clearly marked “goodbye” point can easily lead to endless “Well, we really must be going now,” and then further conversations lingering on, over and over again. (a) Once they have finally decided to go, people try to leave without hesitation. (b) People try to make their goodbye as nonabrupt as possible and seek a comfortable break. Give the entrance room, therefore, a clearly defined area, at least 20 square feet, outside the front door, raised with a natural threshold—perhaps a railing, or a low wall, or a step—between it and the visitors’ cars. (Alexander 1977: 624)

Here the experiential knowledge of everyday behavior, of anthropological inclinations and inhibitions, obsessions and fears becomes the foundation for inventing design solutions—for a certain Western lifestyle that assumes itself being cosmopolitan and global. This foundation in actual actions and desires of Western citizens connects Alexander’s approach to the second approach mentioned earlier, James J. Gibson’s concept of affordance (Gibson 1977) as a perceptual theory—especially in its expansion by William Gaver into a theory of technological affordances (Gaver 1991). This concept of affordance is originally a descriptive concept from the natural sciences, transferred into technology studies. Gibson summarizes the natural science approach of affordances as follows:

The medium, substances, surfaces, objects, places, and other animals have affordances for a given animal. They offer benefits or injury, life or death. This is why they need to be perceived. The possibilities of the environment and the way of life of the animal go together inseparably. The environment constrains what the animal can do, and the concept of a niche in ecology reflects this fact. Within limits, the human animal can alter the affordances of the environment but is still the creature of his or her situation. (Gibson 1977: 143)

These general reflections on the anthropology of perception are applied on the design of devices and interfaces by William Gaver then in the following way:

The notion of affordances is appealing in its direct approach towards the factors of perception and action that make interfaces easy to learn and use. As a means for analyzing technologies, affordances should be useful in exploring the psychological claims inherent in artifacts and the rationale of designs. More generally, considering affordances explicitly in design may help suggest ways to im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Why That Sound? Annoyance and Excitement by Design
• Part 2: Sonic Labor: Statements, Situations, and Cases With illustrations by Julia Krause
• Part 3: Living With Sound: The Semiotics and Mediology of Sonic Signs Written in collaboration with Carla J. Maier
• Part 4: Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design
• References
• Index
• Imprint