Young English

The British Library has launched a new webpage featuring some of their recordings of children's games and songs from the last century. Just had a cursory listen and it sounds great.

"The website is the culmination of a two year project in which we’ve been digitising previously unheard and unseen collections including the internationally renowned ‘Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs’ and the ‘Damian Webb/Pitt Rivers Collection’ with support from the AHRC Beyond Text programme. These collections feature audio recordings and photographs made between the 1960s and the 1980s. If, like me, you grew up in that period you’ll hear many familiar though long-forgotten playground rhymes with nostalgia and a Proustian sense of recollection."

Here is a more contemporary recording.

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.

Flush

This recording was taken with an omni-directional mic mounted with Blue-Tac to the underside of my parent's toilet cistern lid.

Brecht on radio

"As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers."

undrFM presents:

Borderlands, a weekly radio show exploring the outer reaches of recorded sound - experimental music, electro-acoustic composition, phonography and radiophonic art - begins this Tuesday morning at 1am (6am GMT) on CHRY. The centre piece of the inaugural show will be an oft forgotten masterpiece of popular modernism: Glen Gould’s radio documentary The Latecomers.

As the weeks go by I'll be using this blog as a respository and archive for the shows.

‘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.

Borderlands

I've just had word that my proposal for a regular experimental music, sound and radio show - Borderlands - has been approved by the CHRY programming committee. Needless to say, I'm delighted by this and will post more details as and when they emerge.

Scripts for the Pageant Mix

New label Blackest Ever Black have put together a singular mix of the jarring music inspiring their output. In their words:

"This mixtape aims to give some sense of the predilections and prejudices that stirred Blackest Ever Black into being. Most of its content is drawn from the 1980s - not a conscious choice, but rather a natural result of favouring music of real character, imagination and volatility. Music to make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading, and which can be expressed in a single, simple command: you must change your life."

Listen here.