Weird sound

I really enjoyed this recording of a fascintaing discussion, on the under theorised notion of the Weird, with writer China Miéville. Thanks to René Wolf, at the marvellous Backdoor Broadcasting Corporation, for pushing it my way!

The talk rarely veers from the Weird as literary genre - its authors, monsters, tropes, protocols etc - to discuss its ramifications for politics, which is a shame because I really wanted to hear his thoughts on its applicability to areas outside literature. Specifically I’m interested in the possibility of a rigorously weird sound. A few times he mentions an affect peculiar to weird fiction that results from an encounter with the abcanny - some utterly confounding, unthinkable “thing like nothing ever seen before”. At one point, speaking about Lovecraft, Miéville suggests that this indescribability comes paradoxically from a surplus of description: "an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature [...] A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings." The Weird then is an excessively detailed assemblage of unusually cohering component parts. If there is a factual audio analogue to this fictional Weird assemblage it is noise.

Noise evades meaning through a surfeit of meaning and in its richness and complexity it can present us with sounds the like of which we’ve never heard before. Thinking about urban soundscapes and the potential for encountering weird sound there I remembered a weird sounding word – sharawadji. The term comes from the work of urban sound research dream team: CRESSON and designates the spontaneous combination of everyday sound objects in an unexpectedly beautiful composition. It’s rare, I’ve never heard it, but is it Weird?

“This exotic term, introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century by travellers returning from China, designates ‘the beauty that occurs with no discernable order or arrangement’. When Chinese people visit a beautiful garden that strikes their imagination because of its absence of design, it is commonly said that its ‘sharawadji is admirable’. This virtual order, imperceptible but present, produces fascination and is breathtaking. The sharawadji effect is unexpected and transports us elsewhere, beyond the strict representation of things, out of context. In this brutally present confusion we lose both sense and our sense.”

In this short description we encounter the failure of representation and understanding, sudden rupture, and loss of sense. It’s a less ecstatic Weird – no-one’s going to lose their mind after hearing sharawadji - but it’s one perhaps closer to the sublimity of Miéville’s own new Weird fiction. Anyway, have a listen - Miéville is an erudite and eloquent guide to the weird worlds of weird fiction. I’ve got a long reading list to start working through now.

Instrumentarium

The concept instrumentarium comes from the work of a multi-disciplinary team of sound researchers organized around the centre du recherche sur l’espace urbain at the National School of Architecture in Grenoble, France. (CRESSON) Elaborated in their collectively authored work A l’ecoute de l’environment (translated into English as: Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (2005)) the notion attempts to capture the sense of the city as a "reservoir of sound possibility". There are three important terms that delineate the possible here:

The sound source: any object that may make a sound in the city.

Urban space: the medial space through which sound travels from source to listener: "applied acoustics shows how space, volume, shape and materials all determine the propagation of sounds. But urban zoning, the layout of road systems, traffic maps, and the distribution of socioeconomic activities can also offer other efficient possibilities for sound information or interpretation to citizens."

The individual listener: sound phenomena are actively ‘shaped’ by subjectivity: “the physical signal is under a perceptive distortion, a selection of information and an attribution of significance that depends on the abilities, psychology, culture and social background of the listener. “

Different combinations of these general terms lead to different sound perceptions. And so when they say the instrumentarium is a "reservoir of sonic possibility", they mean that it is in possession of innumerable potential configurations of these three terms. The instrumentarium does not itself refer to a way of listening but it does imply one, one at odds with the old model of passive receipt and alternatively based on the listener’s active intervention in the circumstantial causes that actualize sonic phenomena.

‘Sound comes to the rescue of thought…’ But thought must reluctantly return the favour: some more reading notes on Sonic Warfare

At the core of the book lies a univocal ontology that undermines much extant theorising on sound. The principal claim is that all entities are composed of vibration - to not vibrate is to not exist. Stability occurs only at the level of perception, beneath perception, at the molecular and sub molecular level, matter is in constant flux and this flux is rhythmical.

Vibration, rhythm, concepts traditionally associated with the study of sound are here re-purposed and employed in ontological argument. I’m going to concentrate on a specific consequence of this re-deployment namely the repercussions for any metaphysics of sound (understood here as any theory attempting to grasp what those specific, audible vibrations, we call sound are). For Goodman sound is but a thin, audible slice of a much vaster vibrational spectrum and so we’re advised to move beyond theories of sound that place the listening subject at their centre and make human audition critical in theorising sound’s being. A prominent proponent of such phenomenological thinking is Pierre Schaeffer for whom sound’s essence - the sound object - is largely determined by the listening subject. Accordingly it is not what or how a sound sounds but what the subject does to it when listening that determines its essential nature. What sonic idealism fails to account for, in Goodman’s useful neologism, is unsound - those vibrations that lie beyond the threshold of human perception but are none-the-less affective. This poses a significant problem to any theory of sound - are vibrations, felt but not heard, sound? And if so how do we account for it when models of perception cannot?

Goodman’s solution is a non-anthropocentric ecology of affects where one entity (human or otherwise) affects another with its vibration. Internal vibrations, at a singular threshold, spill out into the world and reach other entities. This occurs prior to the division of subject and object and so prior to perception. An example lifted from Brain Massumi’s work on the affective sensorium: a car screeches dangerously towards you and, before you have recognised the sensation as sound, your body leaps out of harm’s way. Here the primary vibration startles and excites before the sound is meaningful. While sympathetic to Goodman’s attempt to problemetize and widen the limits of auditory experience, he is too hasty in the tout court rejection of anthropocentrism. Metaphysics of sound have long placed the human at their centre because sound is in part a human phenomenon. This isn’t to say, with the strict phenomenologists, that listening is essential to the existence of sound, but rather that it is in part a product of a very human relation to vibration. From the perspective of a theory attempting to grasp a human centred phenomena - sound - it seems retrogressive to remove the human subject. This has long been a challenge to any attempt at sonic realism: how do we understand sounds as independent objects (or events) when they are, at least partially, reliant upon human audition for there nature? Goodman’s rejection of anthropocentrism may also be troublesome for his own ecology of affects. Does not unsound have a specifically human quota? Is there not a range, albeit larger than that of audition, within which a vibration can affect the human body? And wouldn’t it be wise to start mapping this?

Another way around the unsound problem is to propose a non-Schaefferian sound object dichotomously composed of sound and unsound. Stretching Goodman’s notion a fair bit, unsound here would designate a sound object`s primary, vibrational qualities. Not just infra and ultra sonics but all transmitted (air bound) vibrations would be unsound. This dimension of the sound object would only be open to mathematical elaboration. Sound for its part would be the result of human interaction with unsound and emergent via affect, perception or an admixture of both.

Ways of Listening #1: Reductive Listening (Pierre Schaeffer)

Select a sound, the sound of a cough, a mobile phone text alert, the sound of a single spoken word, any sound. Close your eyes, try to forget that it is the sound of something or that it means something and focus on the sound itself. Become obsessed with the sound, record it, play it back, do it again and again. Change it, use some free audio-edit software from the internet to add effects, reverb, echo and so on. Stretch it, bend it, slow it down, speed it up, make as many changes as you can. Save them. Listen to the modified sound, one file after the other. Maintain focus on the sound and notice invariant qualities existing across the different files. These properties belong to the sound object - the essence of the sound - and you have just listened to it.

That’s not all, the sound object has a strangely mute side. In perceiving the invariant properties of the sound object, in recognising the sound object across a variety of manifestations you have created it. You have given it its unity, the foundation of its earthly subsistence. What began as an eminently realist enterprise, to uncover the essential nature of sound itself, turns out to be idealist. Lesson learnt? You can’t listen to the sonic real? Not quite, only one part is accessible via perception, that part that comes from our (very real) relation to the real sound. The sound object is henceforth split in two: there are the primary (mathematic) properties of frequency, wavelength, amplitude and so on, and their corresponding secondary (sonorous) qualities of pitch, loudness etc that we perceive. Each modification that you made before thus created a new sound object.

If you'd like to read a more detailed account of Schaeffer's reductive listening than this glib outburst take a look at Brian Kane's more scholarly essay.

Sonic Warfare: reading notes.

Currently reading and enjoying Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare. More than anything I like the way it thinks sound in terms of vibration - terms that lie beyond the current, fairly lacklustre philosophy of sound. My intention is to engage more deeply with the book's metaphysics, particularly the idea of a virtual unsound, but for now here are some of my expanding reading notes.

Chp. 8 Sonic Affect vs Sonic Effect

What's the difference between the sonic effect and sonic affect?

First - what is a sonic effect?

It is the product of a number of researchers working out of the Centre for research on sonic space & urban environment at the University of Grenoble. Their work is distilled into the book Sonic Experience edited by Jean Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue. There are various effects – drone, ubiquity, filter and so on. But they all share the same general structure, diagrammatically the sonic effect is:

The effect is the totality of what is shown above. It is the sounding object; the environmental influences shaping and forming the sound spatially - which is the subject of audio-architecture; the positioning and speed of movement of the listening subject; and finally the cultural and aesthetic priorities that determine how a sound is interpreted. Language offers a good example of this kind of determination. Everyone who can hear can hear a word, but how you determine the meaning of that word is dependent upon your cultural upbringing. It is this last part that I have had most difficulty with - how do you rigorously think an audio-culture? Isn’t that too broad a thing to be of any use?

Anyway, what’s the difference?

Affects are immediate responses to vibrational stimuli, they precede the delineation of subject and object, phenomenological notions that the effect is grounded on.

They are the products of two differing things: sounds have effects and vibrations have affects. Vibrations may be heard, but may also be beyond the threshold of perception. And so an affect can occur without any sound. Is the term experience suitable for thinking about affect? Are affects subjectless experiences?

In Harman’s terms – affect is an ontological concept as it refers to the make-up of every being (is Goodman going to develop this idea that everything is composed of vibrations?) And effect is metaphysical in that it discusses only a particular type of being – sounds (the sonic effect is an alternative theory to the objet sonore and the soundscape). This raises the question of the possibility of sonic realism for me in an admittedly rather vague and undetermined way – how can you think sound independently of anyone hearing it?

Finally - they have different relations to causality. The effect has a situational or contextual or even occasional cause (must re-read Harman on cause). The cause of the effect is not simply the sounding object, but additionally the space it sounds in and through, the subjects positioning and the culture of the individual listener. All these factors shape and to a degree cause the effect. I’m not sure what the cause of the affect is. The affect seems to function in part by not having a cause – where’s this feeling coming from? Affects appear to dissociate from the cause. What is this process of dissociation? How is the affected implicated?

So what is Goodman’s problem with effects?

Simply that human audition is given primacy. He calls CRESSON on their correlationism. And not it seems from some ontological argument but from its inadequacy in accounting for ‘post-cybernetic warfare’, which I’m not sure I get yet. He’s right though - integral to the theory of sonic effects is the correlation between sounds and listeners. Sonic effect cannot be a realist concept. (Unless, can we think it in terms of a series of Latourian translations?) He does however like the encompassing evental structure of the effect. The way the body is implicated in the production of sound effects as much as the medium, environment, sounding object and so on. This is for him (and me) a welcome development of the outdated idea of an isolated listening subject.

Unabashed sound

I went down to the recent collective listening event at the ICA. The idea, that a group gather (historically in a gallery but it doesn’t have to be one), sit and listen carefully to an extended audio piece at reasonably high volume and afterwards discuss the work and their responses to it, is one that has caught my imagination so I wanted to write something about it here. The event’s organiser: theorist and music critic Mark Fisher, outlines a genealogy of his thinking on collective listening here.

The piece or ‘audio essay’ as it was termed on the night was The Latecomers (1969) by Canadian pianist and radio artist Glenn Gould which is the second part of his Solitude Trilogy and focuses upon life in Newfoundland . The work begins with the overwhelming noise of crashing waves and the North Atlantic Ocean, in various degrees of agitation, is present for the duration. At the forefront are fragments of speech: at least 10 Newfoundlanders, mostly male but of differing age, discuss their lives and the place they live them. There are amusing anecdotes, fond memories, childhood songs, lucid descriptions, personal histories, and lots of ideas. Ideas on politics, economics, change, community, modernisation, urbanisation, leaving and isolation. Although these ideas are often conflicted there didn’t appear on first listening to be any dialectical ordering of the fragments. What slowly emerges is a sense of the singularity of Newfoundland as an environment, and a distant intimacy with those who live there. And despite its focus on Newfoundland at a very specific historic juncture – the period in the 1950s and 60s when the provincial government, keen to reduce the cost of providing dispersed public services, encouraged outport communities to urbanize - the piece has universal signification in its treatment of being-in-the-world. The way we relate to place; what it means to love the place you live and how we relate to the past when building a future.

The Latecomers is a challenging listen: the immutable ocean often masks the spoken content and at times, when the voices are contrapuntally posed, a practice pioneered by Gould, it’s nigh-on impossible to make out what’s being said. In addition, as Fisher says in the piece linked to above, simply “being asked to concentrate on something for such a sustained length of time poses a challenge.”

Listening together helps overcome this challenge in a number of ways. First, and simply, the fact that someone else has chosen this work, considers it worthy of close listening, and has been troubled to organise, promote and deliver an event to present it, coupled with the presence of numerous others, leads to nervous anticipation, a build up towards something assumed special. Even before the playback, you’re ready to listen. Second, the social rules associated with public consumption help create conditions commodious to concentrated listening. For example, there were no rude disruptions from mobile phones, how many people turn their phones off when listening at home? Third, listening with others aids concentration: although Gould’s work was the dominant stimulus in the room, there were extraneous sounds, audible responses to the piece: chuckles, deep inhalations and so on. When not affected in the same way I found myself, determined not to miss out again, return to the work with increased concentration. In this way listening with others increased my individual receptivity.

Finally, listening together means you can talk about it afterwards. Feelings and ideas insinuated can be collaboratively teased out, elaborated and examined. As Lena points out in her review , the day’s discussion floundered a bit on the meaning and emotional import of Gould’s work. Lena’s suspicion that people were inattentively hearing as opposed to actively listening is well founded - listening is an acquired skill and our culture ill-equips us for it. Future collective listening events will give attendees a chance to develop and hone listening skills on challenging material, with practice we’ll get better at listening and better at talking about the wealth that it brings.

Listening to listening

In her book Deep Listening Pauline Oliveros provides a simple and useful distinction with which to begin thinking about listening:



"To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically."



Here, rather than being synonymous terms, hearing and listening differ markedly. The first describes an automatic response to external stimuli: the conversion of physical sound waves into the neural signals that result in raw sensation. As such it's continuous, unconscious and occurrs whether awake, drowsy or in deep slumber. The second involves actively directing conscious attention towards sound, its acoustic properties, and the meanings, ideas and emotions embedded there-in.



This distinction finds a metaphysics in Bergson's subtractive model of perception, which is expertly elucidated by Meillassoux during the course of his essay on Deleuze for Collapse III. Here matter is thought as a vast collection of images whose interaction is governed by the constant laws of nature. Accordingly perception is the relation between an image or set of images and the unusual image that is the human body. The relation is one of impoverishment, as Meillassoux puts it:


"The living is not primarily the emergence of the power of interested choice, but the emergence of the power of a massive disinterest in the real to the profit of certain rare segments of the latter, which constitutes the whole of perception."



Perception reduces the infinite complexity of the material world to a few 'rare segments' via two radically discriminatory selections, the first made by the body, the second by the mind. In audition, the body effectively 'chooses' to hear certain sounds - those of a particular amplitude and frequency, and not others - those that fall outside the perceptible ranges. The 'physical means' that comprise hearing for Oliveros omit more sounds than they permit.


But what happens to those sounds we do hear? Heard sound provides the material for a second subtractive selection. This choice is made by consciously attending to a specific sound or group of sounds, again at the cost of others. The 'Cocktail Party Effect' theorised by researchers organised around CRESSON is an everyday example of these choices. A soiree attendee's attention is drawn to a voluble exchange occurring on the room's other side; they actively choose this conversation as the object of listening and the general clamour remains just heard. The example speaks of the localising power of concentrated listening, the observable fact that it can ignore so much sound.


The 'Profit' accrued by the diminutive bit of reality listened to is, for Bergson, generated by the labour of memory. It's memory that guides our decision on what to listen to. Let's say for example that the conversation our lonely socialite tunes-in to involves his ex-girlfriend. She's openly expounding her theory of 'where it all went wrong'. Here it is the listener's personal history that has drawn him to these sounds in the first place and furthermore it is his memory that enables him to understand the language of what is being said. So where the first choice, that of hearing, is biologically determined and as equally distributed as the human body, the second, that of listening, is socio-culturally determined and as diverse as world cultures are. Cross-cultural Listening practices differ in two ways: firstly, by the listened to sounds: different peoples consider different sounds significant; and secondly by the meanings attributed to those sounds.