The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen

The Bloomsbury
Handbook
of Sonic
Methodologies
ii
The Bloomsbury
Handbook
of Sonic
Methodologies
Edited by Michael Bull
and Marcel Cobussen
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2021
Copyright © by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen, 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bull, Michael, 1952- editor. | Cobussen, Marcel, 1962- editor.
Title: The Bloomsbury handbook of sonic methodologies /
edited by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen.
Description: New York City : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “An interdisciplinary overview of the variety of sonic
methodologies used by sound scholars and artists based on contemporary
theories and empirical analyses”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036716 (print) | LCCN 2020036717 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501338755 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501338762 (epub) |
ISBN 9781501338779 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Sound–Research. | Interdisciplinary research.
Classification: LCC QC226 .B46 2020 (print) | LCC QC226 (ebook) | DDC 534–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036716
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036717
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3875-5

ePDF: 978-1-5013-3877-9
eBook: 978-1-5013-3876-2
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Contents
List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xvii
Introduction
Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen 1
Part I Disciplines, Methodologies, Epistemologies

1 Introduction to Part I: Sounds Inscribed onto the Face –
Rethinking Sonic Connections through Time, Space, and
Cognition
Michael Bull 17
2 Sonic Methodologies in Anthropology
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier 35
3 Sonic Methodologies by Way of Deconstruction
Naomi Waltham-Smith 57
4 Nature’s Music: Sonic Methodologies in the Study
of Environmental Biology
Wouter Halfwerk 75
5 Hearing With: Researching the Histories of Sonic
Encounter
James G. Mansell 93
6 Sonic Methodologies in Urban Studies
Christabel Stirling 115
7 Sound and Pedagogy: Taking Podcasting into the
Classroom
Neil Verma 141
vi Contents
8 Sonic Methodologies in Literature

Justin St. Clair 155
9 Sonic Materialism and/as Method
Tyler Shoemaker 169
10 Sonic Methodology in Philosophy
Elvira Di Bona 187
11 Sonic Methodologies in Science and Technology
Studies
Joeri Bruyninckx and Alexandra Supper 201
12 The Sonic Environment in Urban Planning,
Environmental Assessment and Management
A. Lex Brown 217
13 Sonic Methodologies in Medicine
Jos J. Eggermont 235
14 Soundscape as Methodology in Psychoacoustics and
Noise Management
André Fiebig and Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp 253
15 Sonic Methodologies of Sound
Salomé Voegelin 269
Part II Sound Arts, Musics, Spaces

16 Introduction to Part II: Art – Research – Method
Marcel Cobussen 283
17 Ambulatory Sound-Making: Rewriting,
Reappropriating, ‘Presencing’ Auditory Spaces
Elena Biserna 297
18 Sound Installations for the Production of
Atmosphere as a Limited Field of Sounds
Jordan Lacey 315
Contents vii
19 Fragile Devices: Improvisation as an Interdisciplinary

Research Methodology
Rebecca Caines 325
20 ‘The Music Comes from Me’: Sound as
Auto-Ethnography
Darla Crispin 341
21 Sound beyond Representation: Experimental
Performance Practices in Music
Lucia D’Errico 357
22 Performing Centrifugal Sound
G Douglas Barrett 369
23 How to Cut Up a Record?
Paul Nataraj 383
24 Directing Listening: Sound Design Methods from
Film to Site-Responsive Sonic Art
Ben Byrne 397
25 Sound, Space, and Pneumatic Valves: Using
Pneumatic Valves as Sound Sources to Create
Spatial Environments
Edwin van der Heide 407
26 The Overheard: An Attuning Approach to Sound
Art and Design in Public Spaces
Marie Højlund, Jonas R. Kirkegaard, Michael Sonne
Kristensen, and Morten Riis 423
27 Sound on Sound: Considerations for the Use of
Sonic Methods in Ethnographic Fieldwork inside the
Recording Studio
Paul Thompson 437
28 Ecological Sound Art
Jonathan Gilmurray 449
29 Hydrophonic Fields
Jana Winderen interviewed by Stefan Helmreich 459
viii Contents
30 Melt Me into the Ocean: Sounds from Submarine

Spaces
Yolande Harris 469
31 Attentive Listening in Lo-Fi Soundscapes:
Some Notes on the Development of Sound Art
Methodologies in Vietnam
Stefan Östersjö and Nguyễn Thanh Thủy 481
Part III Geographies, Politics, Histories

32 Introduction to Part III: Listening as Method
Marcel Cobussen 499
33 Auditory Diagramming: A Research/Design Practice
Alex Arteaga 511
34 Close Listening: Approaches to Research on Colonial
Sound Archives
Anette Hoffmann 529
35 Sonic Feminisms: Doing Gender in Neoliberal Times
Marie Thompson 543
36 Sound as City Maker: Developing a Participatory-
Collaborative Process to Work with Sound as
an Urban Resource; the Case of Mr. Visserplein
(Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Edda Bild, Michiel Huijsman, and Renate Zentschnig 557
37 Dropping Down Low: Online Soundmaps, Critique,
Genealogies, Alternatives
Angus Carlyle 581
38 Listening as Methodological Tool: Sounding
Soundwalking Methods
John L. Drever 599
Contents ix
39 Sounding Wild Spaces: Inclusive Map-Making

through Multispecies Listening across Scales
Alice Eldridge, Jonathan Carruthers-Jones,
and Roger Norum 615
40 The Emergence of Voices in an Indian Bus Stand: An
Ethnographic and Acoustic Approach
Christine Guillebaud 633
41 Historical Sounds: A Case Study
Aimée Boutin 647
42 Sonic Writing
Holger Schulze 659
43 Silence of Mauá: An Atmospheric Ethnography of
Urban Sounds
Jean-Paul Thibaud 671
44 Sound Design Methodologies: Between Artistic
Inspiration and Academic Perspiration
Nicolas Misdariis and Daniel Hug 685
45 Listening to the 2001 Argentine Crisis:
Soundscapes of Protest, Music, and Sound Art
Violeta Nigro Giunta 705
46 The Sound System of the State: Critical Listening as
Performative Resistance
Tom Tlalim 719
47 Sonifications Sometimes Behave So Strangely
Paul Vickers 733
48 The Conflicting Sounds of Urban Regeneration in
Liverpool
Jacqueline Waldock 745
49 Ethnographies Sounded on What? Methodologies,
Sounds and Experiences in Cairo
Vincent Battesti 755
x Contents
50 Podcast Preservation and the Noise of Saved

Sounds
Jeremy Wade Morris 779
51 The Earview as a Border Epistemology: An Analytical
and Pedagogical Proposition for Design
Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira 795
52 Hacking Composition: Dialogues with Musical
Machines
Ezra J. Teboul 807
Index 821
Illustrations
Figures
4.1 Sonograms of different species. A cricket, a frog, and
two birds, one with a simple song and the other with a
complex song 77
4.2 Sonogram of an Andean solitaire (M. ralloides) that
demonstates the two-voice phenomenon 83
4.3 Sonograms of a recording made with a microphone
and a laser-Doppler vibrometer 83
5.1 Photograph of an RAC ‘Quiet’ road sign in
Darlington 95
5.2 Front cover of a booklet of positive thoughts to be
recited silently in time with the chimes of Big Ben
at 9.00 p.m. 97
5.3 Section of an advertisement for the Underwood
Noiseless Typewriter 101
5.4 Cadbury’s ‘Silent Theatre Box’ editorial 102
5.5 Cover of leaflet announcing the Darlington

Quiet Town Experiment 107
5.6 Logo of the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment 108
5.7 Detail from ‘Do you have a noisy gnome in your

home?’ leaflet 110
5.8 Image entitled ‘Noise reading being taken on a
building site’ 111
xii Illustrations
6.1 Chris’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 132
6.2 Ali’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 133
6.3 Martin’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 134
13.1 The sound conduction pathway in the human ear 245
13.2 Cross section of the cochlea showing the location of

the organ of Corti containing the outer and inner hair
cells from which the spiral ganglion cells leave 246
13.3 Frequency-specific click-evoked otoacoustic emission
waveforms obtained from the human ear 246
13.4
Auditory brainstem response sources
in the brainstem 247
13.5 Three examples of a comparison between behavioural
audiograms and audiograms based on auditory
brainstem response – threshold responses 248
13.6 Auditory brainstem responses (ABR) and obligatory
auditory evoked potentials (AEP) on a logarithmic
timescale 248
14.1 The perceptual construct of a soundscape
according to ISO 12913–1 255
14.2 Types of soundscape studies and their main actors 256
14.3 Methods and instruments frequently applied in

soundscape studies 257
14.4 Assessments of loudness of eight sites repeatedly
visited by different soundwalk groups over several
years 263
14.5 Assessments of unpleasantness of eight sites
repeatedly visited by different soundwalk groups
over several years 263
Illustrations xiii
14.6 Unpleasantness group judgements over measured

loudness values according to ISO 532–1 (left) and over
LAeq-values in decibels (dB)(A) (right) 264
17.1 Scratch Orchestra, Richmond Journey, 1969,
programme 306
17.2 Scratch Orchestra, Richmond Journey, 1969,
map with the itinerary 307
17.3 Elana Mann, Take a Stand Marching Band,
documentation of the Los Angeles May Day march,
1st May 2017 309
17.4 Elana Mann, Take a Stand Marching Band,
documentation of the Los Angeles May Day march,
1st May 2017 310
23.1 ‘Popcorn’, La Strana Società – inscribed record
by Paul Nataraj 390
25.1 The pneumatic valve used in Pneumatic Sound Field 410
25.2 P neumatic Sound Field during DEAF07, Museum

Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2007 412
25.3 S chwingungen – Schwebungen, bonn hoeren,
Bonn, 2015 417
26.1 Screenshot from The Overheard website 427
26.2 Forest Megaphones by Birgit Öigus 429
26.3 The memorial monument at Mindeparken, Aarhus 430
36.1 Visualization of the process of ‘Crowdsourcing

Mr. Visserplein’ with its three core parts 561
36.2 Historical photograph of Mr. Visserplein, 1983 563
36.3 Mr. Visserplein, aerial photograph, February 2016 563
36.4 Self-guided soundwalk: trajectory (left) and walk

(right) 565
xiv Illustrations
36.5 Space-use-sound model 566
36.6 Workshop 1 on characterizing the space, use,

and sound of Mr. Visserplein 568
36.7 Square redesign proposals 569
36.8
Workshop 2 on visualizations and auralizations of
square redesign proposals 570
36.9
‘Geluid als stadmaker’ event attendees on the
augmented soundwalk 570
36.10 Project exhibition: banners 571
36.11 ‘Geluid als stadmaker’ – event brochure 572
39.1
Research study site at Abisko National Park showing
the walking transect (black) and waypoints (numbered
crosses) and the river (white) running into lake
Torneträsk 622
39.2 Schematic of proposed conceptual framework
detailing co-design of mixed methods approach
to inclusive wilderness mapping 624
40.1 Buses at Saktan Tampuran, 2015–2016 638
40.2a
Sonogram of the main vendor making the
utterance ‘Palakkad’ 639
40.2b
Sonogram focused on utterance B 640
40.3
Sonogram of the main vendor making the
utterance ‘Peecheedam’, while the two secondary
vendors call ‘Kuntakulam’ and ‘Palakkad’ 642
40.4 A multiple-configuration sonogram with
seven vendors 643
43.1 A view of Condominío Barão de Mauá 672
44.1 Image of the minute-repeater device and its

physical model 691
Illustrations xv
44.2 Functional scheme of the prototyped sound synthesis

engine: a wavetable synthesis with four parallel
buffers whose frequency and gain are driven by the
vehicle’s speed 694
44.3 (a) Two ‘wizards’, performing their interaction
mock-up. (b) Live try-out and exchange with some
participants 697
45.1 Score of Luciano Azzigotti’s International Errorista 713
45.2 Buenos Aires Sonora, Mayo, los sonidos de la Plaza

(2003), press release 714
49.1 Ahmed Wahdan, Giza, Cairo, Egypt p.m. 756
49.2
Workshop open on the street, al-Gamaliyya, Cairo,
Egypt, 28 November 2016, 3.30 p.m. 758
49.3 In the street of Gamaliyya, Cairo, Egypt,
28 November 2016, 3.00 p.m. 761
49.4
Part of a loud sound system unpacked for a birth
celebration (subu‘), Bashtīil, Cairo, Egypt,
18 November 2016, 4.30 p.m. 765
49.5
Promenade on a bridge over the Nile, Downtown,
Cairo, Egypt, 3 November 2016, 5.00 p.m. 771
50.1 Two sound waves from different podcasts, indicating
different levels of production, editing, and mastering
for each 788
52.1
The inside of the oscillator box, containing one Hex
Schmitt Trigger, 74C14 chip 812
52.2 The oscillator box connected to the mixer circuit
components using a ribbon connector attached to
fishing weights for The Royal Touch set-up 813
xvi Illustrations
Tables
14.1
Methodical Aspects of a Soundwalk Method 260
36.1
Characterization of Mr. Visserplein in
Terms of Space, Use, and Sound 564
39.1 Data Types Associated With Each of the Surveys
Carried Out in Abisko National Park 622
Contributors
G Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication at Salisbury University.
Vincent Battesti is a researcher in social anthropology at the CNRS. Website: https://vbat.org.
Edda Bild is a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Information Studies, McGill University.
Elena Biserna is associate researcher at PRISM (AMU /CNRS) and TEAMeD (Université
Paris 8).
Aimée Boutin is Professor of French at Florida State University.
Lex Brown is Professor Emeritus in environmental planning, Griffith University.
Joeri Bruyninckx is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Maastricht

University.
Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex.
Ben Byrne is a Senior Lecturer, Digital Media at RMIT University.
Rebecca Caines is an Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Programs, University of

Regina.
Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape at the University of the Arts, London.
Marcel Cobussen is Full Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy at Leiden
University.
Darla Crispin is Vice Rector for Research & Artistic Development at the Norwegian
Academy of Music (NMH), Oslo.
Jonathan Curruther-Jones is a Marie Skłodowska Curie doctoral research fellow at the
University of Leeds.
Lucia D’Errico is a postdoc fellow at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium).
Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist and educator.
Elvira Di Bona is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Turin.
John Drever is Professor of Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art at Goldsmiths, London.
Jos J. Eggermont is Emeritus Professor at the University of Calgary.

xviii Contributors
Alice Eldridge is a Lecturer in Music and Music Technology at the University of Sussex.
André Fiebig is a visiting professor at the Technical University of Berlin.
Jonathan Gilmurray is a sound artist, writer and lecturer.
Violeta Nigro Giunta is a PhD candidate at the CRAL-EHESS, Paris.
Christine Guillebaud is a research fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific
Research (CNRS).
Wouter Halfwerk is an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit.
Yolande Harris teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Edwin van der Heide is an artist who runs his own studio and is part-time lecturer and
researcher at Leiden University.
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT.
Anette Hoffmann is Lise Meitner fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.
Marie Højlund is an Assistant Professor in Sound Studies at Aarhus University.
Daniel Hug lectures at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland.
Michiel Huijsman is an artist, researcher and independent curator based in Amsterdam.
Jordan Lacey is Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Jonas R. Kirkegaard is an Associate Lecturer at the Sonic College, Denmark.
Michael Sonne Kristensen lectures at the Sonic College, Denmark.
James G. Mansell is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham.
Nicolas Misdariis is head of the Ircam STMS Lab / Sound Perception & Design team.
Jeremy Morris is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.
Paul Nataraj is a sound artist, writer, podcast producer and music researcher.
Roger Norum is a social anthropologist who works among communities in the Arctic and
Asia.
Stefan Östersjö is Professor of Musical Performance and Head at Luleå University of

Technology.
Morten Riis is an Associate Professor in electronic music composition at the Royal

Academy of Music, Aarhus, Denmark.
Justin St. Clair is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Alabama.
Contributors xix
Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp is a Professor of Psychoacoustics and Noise Effects recently

retired from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany.
Holger Schulze is Full Professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen.
Tyler Shoemaker is a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Christabel Stirling is a musical ethnographer and sound studies researcher and visiting
lecturer at the University of Westminster.
Alexandra Supper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Society Studies at

Maastricht University.
Ezra J. Teboul is an artist and researcher. More information is available at

redthunderaudio.com.
Jean-Paul Thibaud, sociologist, is CNRS senior researcher at Cresson (https://aau.archi.

fr/cresson).
Tom Tlalim is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Winchester.
Marie Thompson is a Lecturer in music at The Open University, UK.
Paul Thompson has worked as a professional recording engineer for over ten years, in and
around Liverpool.
Nguyễn Thanh Thủy is a leading Vietnamese zither player and holds a teaching position at
the Vietnam National Academy of Music.
Neil Verma is Assistant Professor of sound studies at Northwestern University.
Paul Vickers is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computational

Perceptualisation at Northumbria University in Newcastle.
Salomé Voegelin is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication,

University of the Arts London. www.salomevoegelin.net
Jacqueline Waldock is researcher at the University of Liverpool.
Jana Winderen is an artist who currently lives and works in Oslo, Norway.
Renate Zentschnig is currently working on Urban Sound Lab, a long-term participatory

sound project in Amsterdam Zuid.
xx
Introduction
Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen
Like many such endeavours, this general introduction is written after all else has been
completed – the beginning comes at the end. The editors had not foreseen how a certain
contingency might arise to completely upend daily life, such as the development of a
global pandemic that has now surrounded their working and living environments. So this
introduction to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies is carried out as a
virtual dialogue between the two editors – one in the UK, the other in the Netherlands.
In addition to this general introduction there are introductions for the three parts that
comprise this book, the first written by Michael Bull and the second and third written by
Marcel Cobussen. The editors had already decided that these three part introductions were
to function as ‘interventions’ rather than as traditional overviews of contents, a common
format that so often goes unread by those browsing through volumes such as this.
The two editors – joined by, among others, their interests in philosophy and football
(not the same teams) – come from differing trajectories and backgrounds. Marcel was
educated at the Rotterdam Conservatory and worked for over fifteen years as a professional
(jazz) pianist and teacher before he changed his focus to cultural studies and (Continental)
philosophy and became a Professor at Leiden University, primarily supervising artistic
researchers, thereby combining his experiences in both the academic and the art world.
Michael, whose first degree was in philosophy and sociology, initially had a career in adult
education before branching out to establish and run a jazz club in Central London. At the
age of forty he took a risky ‘leap of faith,’ re-entering the academy to write a doctorate in the
Sociology Department of Goldsmiths College on the use of Walkmans. The rest, they say, is
history!
This book is somewhat larger than the editors had initially anticipated, with over fifty
chapters deriving from scholars working in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Both editors agreed in not wishing the volume to represent a descriptive catalogue of a wide
range of methods used by all of the contributors. Rather, they actively encouraged authors to
critically reflect upon their own use of methods within their own research, thereby explicating
their own theoretical assumptions whilst also describing ‘how’ they carried out their research.
This provides the volume – uniquely, when it comes to great tomes on methodology – with a
theoretical and empirical precision that will be both instructive and interesting to read.
2 The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies
Marcel
The history of this book goes back to November 2016. Michael and I were meeting for
breakfast in the restaurant of a hotel in Leiden, The Netherlands, as I had organized a
conference there and he was one of the invited speakers. At a certain moment Michael
introduced his idea to begin collecting a bunch of essays on the relationship between sound
studies and methodology or on the various methods that are used among sound scholars
and sound artists. At first this seemed like a rather limited topic, only interesting for die-
hard academics. However, taking into consideration that there is perhaps not one single
academic discipline that is not dealing with sound in one way or another and realizing
that all these disciplines have their own ways of organizing their research strategies, it
soon became clear that presenting a rather broad overview of all the different methods
in which sound is either the subject of research, or indeed the methodical medium itself,
seemed like a challenging idea that could result in exciting and valuable material for almost
everyone interested in and dealing with sound. Hence, our joint project started off as an
endeavour to map the many and various practices and methodical strategies through which
corpuses of knowledge, experience, intuition, prehension, and engagement are established,
disestablished, and reestablished, thereby tracing the constitutive role of methodical
processes in the construction of knowledge related to or based on sound.
Reading through the book now, I am amazed by the breadth of research being done
on and through sound, the range of sonic and physical spaces explored, the amount of
methodological diversity, and the variety of disciplines in which sound has somehow
found its place, either as a research object or as a research method. What this Handbook
makes clear is that methods function in thoroughly heterogeneous assemblages, consisting
of discourses, institutions, regulatory decisions, and scientific traditions (Barad 2007: 63).
Nevertheless, one criticism of sound studies has recently come from ethnomusicologist
Gavin Steingo, who has argued that the southern hemisphere – perhaps with the exception
of Australia – has often been neglected in sonic research. Do you think we have addressed
this issue fully in the present volume?
Michael
Whilst I am in broad agreement with Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes, the editors of Remapping
Sound Studies (2019), over their critique of sound studies as being overly Eurocentric, I
think the reasons for this are both institutional and historically situated. That is not to say
that these issues are in any way solved. I am pleased that the contents of our Handbook
were already decided by the time I had read Steingo and Sykes’s critique as I think we
have gone at least as far as they have gone in their volume in relation to the sounds of the
South. This leaves open the question as to how one might go further than this. To begin by
summarizing their critique, they argue, quite convincingly, that, historically, sound studies
(let’s leave aside for the moment what this demarcation of the subject might mean) has
Introduction 3
not sufficiently covered the sounds of the South with all of the conceptual, theoretical,
and methodological limitations and consequences that this might imply. They argue for
the need of a ‘new cartography of global modernity for sound studies’. In pursuit of this
they provide excellent alternative contents for an imaginary southern sound studies reader
together with twelve chapters investigating various facets of the sounds of the South.
So, to the historical nature and meaning of the claim of southern exclusion. This is where
I am most in tune with their critique although this agreement also depends upon what we
might mean by the term sound studies. Let me explain. I was introduced to the grandly
termed World Forum of Acoustic Ecology just over twenty years ago after being invited
to give a talk at their conference in Dartmoor in the UK. The setting was impressive and I
would wake at the crack of dawn in order to attend listening exercises with the wonderful
Pauline Oliveros. Whilst at the conference, I skimmed through the literature relating to the
World Soundscape Project, perplexed that it appeared to refer to work carried out only in
Canada (Vancouver) and Finland. A start for sure. I don’t want to go into the theoretical
limitations of the movement (I allude to them in my introduction to section one of this
book) but merely to point out that the intellectual pioneers of the movement such as R.
Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, and others, despite their wonderful
work, conceptual and methodological, came with their attendant Western intellectual
baggage, like many of us. My own take on the sonic was largely urbanist and one of the
issues in the urban West was postcolonialism in all of its forms. I worked in a department
with Paul Gilroy and attended lectures given by Stuart Hall, Edward Said, James Baldwin,
and many others on race and colonialism. This was miles away intellectually from the
interests of the World Soundscape Project at that time. But since then it has been precisely
in the interdisciplinary coming together of sonic research that this volume attests to, that
a more global approach to the sonic is being realized – with the political, economic, and
institutional challenges duly noted by many of the contributors to this Handbook.
Steingo and Sykes themselves recognized their critique as a partial one – that there
exists a paradox at the heart of their book, namely that all of the contributors to their
volume, whilst researching the South, worked in music and ethnomusicology departments
of North American universities. There were no voices of those working and living in the
South, although Steingo is himself South African. This is not meant as a criticism – merely
as a statement of where we are. Whilst our volume is wonderfully ‘global’ in reach, most of
the work is written within institutions of the wealthy West, where the money and power
largely resides. It is difficult to redress the imbalance of southern voices as it is difficult to
decide in advance what they will want to write about and research or how they will theorize
their own voices.
Marcel
Let me just add a few sentences to yours, Michael. First of all, I am happy to see that our
Handbook does, at least, include studies from South Africa, South America, and Vietnam
and ethnographic research done in Egypt, India, and Brazil, although I readily admit
that more geographical areas and different cultural approaches could have been covered,
especially within Africa and Asia.
On the other hand, in my capacity as editor-in-chief of The Journal of Sonic Studies I
can say that we have published special issues on sound studies, soundscapes, and sound
art in Southeast Asia as well as Latin America (and are planning future issues on Africa
and Russia). What became clear from these two issues is that the contributors – mainly
based and working in these areas – did not employ significantly different theoretical
frameworks or methodical tools as compared to their Western colleagues. We had eagerly
hoped for new approaches, for new concepts, or to discover and become acquainted
with important authors unknown in the West (or North), but this happened only very
sparsely.1 Of course this principally says a lot about the dominance of Western scholarly
discourses, perhaps most clearly evident in the hardly questioned and pervasive use of
the English language.
With regard to this Handbook, however, the main issue for us, of course, was not so
much geographical coverage (or, for that matter, gender, age, or ethnicity) as to present and
critically reflect on a wide variety of methodical tools used in various disciplines. In other
words, perhaps it is time to be a bit more precise about the question of what this volume
set out to achieve.
Michael
Yes, I agree with your point here, Marcel, about the slow rate of change within the writings
of the South. I experienced something very similar when I founded, with David Howes,
our journal Senses and Society in 2003. We had expected radical changes in methodologies,
theoretical overviews, and subject matter, but these came very gradually over the years. So
perhaps we simply have to be more patient.
So, the aim of the book was to bring together theoreticians and practitioners who either
work in sound or are interested in the sonic to reflect upon both the role of sound in their
chosen discipline(s) and indeed to reflect methodologically upon their sonic practices. We
had understood that in the widely proliferating subject of sound studies there had been no
work trying to draw in the issues and problems surrounding how we actually research the
sonic – whether that be in the hard sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, or the arts.
Marcel
I think it is immediately necessary to add something here, in order to avoid any
misunderstanding, and that is that researching the sonic is of course only one side of the
coin. Several chapters in this book present, as their central topic, how through recording,
processing, and listening to sounds or our sonic environments, new knowledge can be
gained, new experiences are possible, unfamiliar worlds can be discovered – knowledge,
Introduction 5
experiences, and worlds that in themselves are not necessarily audible. Although not
included in our book, I am thinking of the work done by, for example, Bernie Krause,
Andrea Polli, David Dunn, Åsa Stjerna, and so many others, who through their sound
artworks and projects, make people aware of climate change, ecological issues, or specific
natural features. Take, for example, the Electrical Walks by the German sound artist
Christina Kubisch: she equips her audience with specially designed headphones that pick
up the infra- and ultrasounds of magnetic fields present in our environment and transposes
them into frequencies that can be registered by our ears, thereby making people aware
of the continuous exposure to frequencies that, although in principle inaudible, do affect
their functioning, their neurological system, and (therefore) their well-being.
Perhaps more so than visual or textual information, sound can expose its audience to
(gradual) transformations taking place over longer periods of time, as it is itself time based.
Besides – as Jon Gilmurray touches upon in his contribution to this volume – applying
the sonic as a methodical tool can give us an ‘enhanced understanding’ of certain topics
or events, as sound appeals not only to the cognitive and the rational but also gives space
for associations, imaginations, and speculation as alternative forms of knowing. Or think
of ‘sonic journalism’, a term coined by sound artist Peter Cusack and defined by him as
‘the idea that all sound, including non–speech, gives information about places and events
and that listening provides valuable insights different from, but complimentary to, visual
images and language’ (Cusack 2011). Sonic journalism, Cusack continues, can, for example,
transmit ‘a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere, and timing’, thus adding substantially
to our understanding of events and issues (Cusack 2011).
What might become clear from these examples is that sound is not a passive element
waiting to be investigated by researchers; sound has its own, specific possibilities for
agency.2 A performative approach to sound and an embodied engagement with sonic
matter is an important and even necessary supplement to already established scholarly
methods: knowledge can also be gained from a methodology that has a direct material
engagement with sound, with sound as a matter that matters. In short, I think the volume
somehow responds to the methodological dualism implied in the following quote:
We identify two broad methodological strands: sonic ethnographies, which rely on both
conventionally written and more-than-textual representations of sonic qualities: and
soundscape studies, which encompass a wide range of methods, including field recording,
sound mapping, and sound walks.
(Gallagher and Prior 2014: 272)
Doing and thinking, diffracting3 and reflecting, experimenting and theorizing are dynamic
practices that play a constitutive role in our relation to sound or in our relation to the
world through the sonic; they are material-discursive practices and methodological tools
through which the interactions between sound and human as well as nonhuman beings
can be explored and produced. (What I try to achieve by connecting the material and the
discursive with this hyphen, is to disrupt the alleged ontological difference between theory
and practice: as much as theorizing is a [material] practice, practice is always permeated by
theory, by conceptualizations, by reflection.)
So, providing a space where people coming from the hard sciences, social sciences,
humanities, and the arts can encounter one another; providing a space where philosophical
reflections, analyses of concrete artistic interventions, historical overviews, and attention
for human and nonhuman agents intersect; providing a space where the discursive and the
material, the theoretical and the practical are no longer regarded as antagonisms – if these
were some of the objectives we also had in mind, does this mean that we are permitted to
be pleased with this volume?
Michael
Yes, Marcel, I like your description of the way in which the methodological tools in the
book provide a platform for an ‘enhanced understanding’ of the role of sound filtered
through a set of interdisciplinary ‘encounters’. Too often, the academy pays lip service to
interdisciplinarity whilst locking us into our intellectual silos – this issue confronts us
every day when we have to decide where to publish our work, be it an anthropological, a
history, or a music journal rather than, say, a sound studies journal. If you permit me a bit
of a personal anecdote here that sheds a little light on my interest in ‘interdisciplinarity’ but
also importantly into the ‘multisensory’ which I think our volume also succeeds in. I first
came across these barriers when at school. As a teenager I didn’t know very much about
university other than wanting to attend one. Nobody in my family had been to university
and I didn’t know that my teachers had to write a reference supporting my application.
During my A level studies I had chopped and changed subjects – from mathematics to art
for example – and had not been a particularly obedient student. My personal statement
was full of my interest in art and twentieth-century French philosophical thought as well
as my love of football and so on. I remember my art teacher who had to compile my school
reference telling me, ‘Michael, I don’t think you’ll get an offer from a university. You see,
I think you’re a bit of an intellectual dabbler.’ This struck me then as both a complement
and criticism – breadth but not enough depth! As it turned out I did get a university offer,
but only one – after all how many do you need! But I recount this experience to highlight
the deep suspicion of interdisciplinarity within areas of the academy. This suspicion of
interdisciplinarity of Enlightenment ‘cultivation’ (in German Bildung) runs deep. This is
why my discovery of the Frankfurt School and their archetypal interdisciplinary project
has been so influential to me as indeed was their embrace of the multisensory investigation
of experience as early as the 1930s, as this quote from Horkheimer illustrates:
The objects we perceive in our surroundings – cities, villages, fields and woods – bear
the mark of having been worked upon by man. It is not only in clothing and appearance,
in outward form and emotional make up that men are the products of history. Even the
way they see and hear is inseparable from the social life process, as it has evolved over the
millennia. The facts, which our senses present to us, are socially pre-formed in two ways:
through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character
of the perceiving organ.
(Horkheimer 1972: 200)
Introduction 7
So this sensory sensibility is significant methodologically; indeed it is a challenge to our

understanding of experience and the contribution that the sonic makes towards it, both
historically and in terms of the present. I will give just one illustrative example. Five years
ago I wrote a large research proposal submitted to a UK Research Council on Sensory
Borders within Europe. This was before the refugee crisis really took hold in Europe. The
idea was to research multiple European entry points using a range of sensory methodologies
as migrants went through the various entry procedures, both legal and social. The aim was
holistic – incorporating sound, vision, taste, smell, and touch. The idea behind this was
that researching any one sense would be inadequate: how are we to understand the present
repressive visual regime in France with reference to the forbidding of the wearing of the
Burka within a context of sensory colonialism/orientalism? Of course this prohibition not
only has a visual component but also is connected to the sounds of Islam (speech, prayers,
and music) and to its supposed touch and smells (foods and social rituals); taken together
they orientate attitudes towards the Muslim ‘other’ in European culture. So, reading
through our edited volume I am pleased with both its interdisciplinary scope and in its
engagement with the multisensory nature of experience.
As for myself whom I would describe as an ‘urbanist’ I have been amazed, and indeed
have learnt a lot, by the breadth of sonic spaces and places covered in this book. Reading
through it one gets a feeling of sonic vertigo – or at least I do. Sound in space is covered
throughout the three sections and from the sciences, arts, and social sciences – a veritable
cornucopia of coming together, from the oceans of the world to the music clubs of London,
from the northern climes of Norway to the bustling sounds of Cairo, from hacking as a
creative musical act to the role sound plays in medical practice and research, from the
drongo warning a meerkat of a nearby predator by making a specific call to podcasts as a
relatively new way of providing knowledge.
Now that we are all in coronavirus lockdown the soundscapes of many of the cities of the
world are transformed. There are already databases recording these sonic (and by extension
physical) transformations. What, I wonder, will we make of these transformations in years
to come? The other day, in the UK, we were all encouraged to come to the front door of our
homes and clap for the efforts of the medical staff in hospitals caring for those who were
infected by the virus. As we walked out of our door we could hear the clapping of people
in the neighbourhood – clear, as no sound of traffic interrupted the sounds. We, rather
than clapping our hands, struck our metal kitchen utensils – metal on metal, much to the
embarrassment of our son. These scenes were relayed across the country – a participatory
sonic social transmitted nationally and globally, active, yet nevertheless ideological for
the majority of those hospital workers in the UK who had not been given the protective
clothing required for their own safety. We were – and simultaneously were not – all in the
same boat. The UK prime minister and other ‘notables’ were all tested for the coronavirus
whilst the doctors treating them were not: our clapping was simultaneously ‘hollow’ and
‘heartwarming’.
For now I would like to focus upon the heartwarming sonic. We had viewed on our
television sets and on the internet many people up and down Italy and then France and
Spain singing, clapping, and playing musical instruments from their balconies. Confined
to their homes the sonic carried beyond the empty streets into the opened windowed
apartments; in this sense all of those making ‘noise’ felt in the same boat and the sense
of community passed through the walls of isolation within which they lived. For those
southern European towns and cities in which the bustle of outside life is so significant, the
sonic transformation of their cities and towns was all the more apparent than for those of
us huddled up in London, Manchester, or Birmingham. On looking at the silent streets
of Rome I was reminded of Carlo Levi’s description of the festival of San Giovanni in the
Piazza Navona in the 1950s:
Even if you never leave your home, stay shut up in your room, never look out of the
window […] a convict, a monk, or an invalid, even the blind, in Rome, cannot help but
notice festivals […]. From afar, you can sense a sort of throbbing and shrilling in the air.
The closer you get to Piazza Navona, the greater this throbbing becomes, growing little
by little, into a vague, thunderous din; and, as if by some piece of magic, as you are swept
into the crowd, it seems as if there is a rushing river in the broad lake of the piazza […].
Everyone has a whistle and everyone is blowing into their own, trying to drown out the
others […] I grew more and more to be part of the crowd. I realized that the sound issuing
from my little instrument was enveloping me like a compact atmosphere, as if within an
invisible suit of armor […]. United like some great swarm beneath this cupola of sound
and separated from one another by a personal resonating diaphragm […] the crowd flowed
around the stalls of toys and candy floss.
(Levy 2004: 29–30)
Now the Roman crowds are dispersed into their own homes – the sonic rhythm of the
street interrupted, the street silent. The whistles, singing, and playing reconfigure the
physical presence of the street, not alone together as Levi describes but together alone – a
reversal or collapsing of the sonic duality of city and countryside.
Maybe we are existing in a temporary sonic limbo where we all live in the quietude
redolent of the countryside so loved by the acoustic ecology movement where we can all
hear one another clapping our hands.
Marcel
What you make clear here, Michael – at least the way I hear you – is how important
sound is as a political instrument, as a medium to express togetherness and solidarity
(as well as separation and protest), as a tool to establish and disestablish identity. Sound
is always more than sound; it immediately exceeds the sonic, the audible, the sonorous,
and oscillates between sense and the sensorial (see Nancy 2007). How does sound do
this? How does it work? How does sound matter as a topic and as a method? These are
difficult questions for me, first of all because the methodical was never the main point of
attention in my research. Somehow, I always felt uncomfortable when I had to react to
questions about my research methods, and my standard answer became: reading books,
listening to music and sound art, and then engaging in some critical reflection. I had
Introduction 9
the same reservations when asking my PhD students, for example, about the way they
intended to organize their research. Perhaps it has something to do with my rather long
and ongoing interest in deconstruction. In ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ Jacques Derrida
was very explicit about it: ‘Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed
into one.’ Even stronger: ‘It is not enough to say that deconstruction could not be reduced
to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures’
(Derrida 1988: 3, my emphasis). The main reason Derrida so vehemently opposed the
reduction of deconstruction to a reading method at the service of in-depth analyses and
critical reflections is that ‘deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the
deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or even of modernity’ (4). As
most of my work is still deeply influenced by Derrida’s thinking, I have always resisted
the idea that I somehow (should) choose a set of rules and procedures to investigate
sound and music; instead I try to be as responsive and perceptive as possible to what
these sounds and music are telling me.4 In that sense I always search for a methodology
that is responsive, responsible, and attentive to the specificity of the sonic material under
investigation – an attitude that Hans-Georg Gadamer would perhaps call ‘objective’ –
dynamically de-framing and reframing the method, aiming more for methodological
creativity than methodological pluralism.
However, even if a real dialogue between subject and object, between researcher and
research object were possible, a dialogue in which subjects do not control the object, for
example by determining the research method, both subject and object are involved in
a process amidst many other agents. In my opinion, attention for the sonic can benefit
from a post-humanist account in which any practice should not be considered a human-
based activity but a (re)configuration of the world through which meanings, differences,
and systems are enacted. As historian and literary scholar Hayden White makes clear in
Tropics of Discourse, no escape is possible from certain predeterminations that exceed
the individual or personal level: narrative modes (aesthetics), explanatory models
(epistemology), ideological backgrounds (ethics), and the various ‘schools’ within one
discipline (institutionalization) – conflicting as they might be sometimes – affect the way
scholars and artists somehow organize their research, from the initial research question,
hypothesis, or mere topic, to the methodology, analyses, critical reflections, choice of case
studies, and ultimate outcomes (White 1978: 66–72).
To confine myself to the topic of this book: specific methods provide the lenses through
which we view or, better, construct something that we call sound, the sonic, sonic ambiance,
music, or auditory culture. Sounds do not have an independent existence separate from,
for example, the material and theoretical methodical tools that are used. And although
these tools are constantly open to rearrangements, rearticulations, reworkings, and
recontextualizations, using one specific method necessarily means excluding others,
which does affect the outcomes. The nature of the observed phenomenon changes with
corresponding changes in the methodical tools being applied. Methods actively contribute
to the sonic events that scholars try (in vain) to capture in words – different interactions
produce different events, although I would like to stress once more that the materiality of
these phenomena is not a given nor simply an effect of human agency.
Before passing the baton again, however, I would like to come back to this concept of
‘diffraction’ once more, introduced above in the way it is used by Haraway, here in a quote
from Karen Barad:
Unlike methods of reading one text or set or ideas against another, where one set serves as a
fixed frame of reference, diffraction involves reading insights through one another in ways
that help illuminate differences as they emerge: how different differences get made, what gets
excluded, and how those exclusions matter.
(Barad 2007: 30)
The good thing about handbooks like ours is that various ways of approaching a topic and
organizing a research strategy obviously, though not deliberately, disclose the pros and
cons of each research method. Perhaps Barad’s diffraction doesn’t always work within one
chapter or within the work of one scholar, but by simply reading more than just a few texts
from this Handbook, it will soon become clear what the methodical differences are, how one
method necessarily excludes certain benefits of another, and how methodological choices
directly affect the way a topic is perceived, presented, and produced. The diffraction will
thus take place in the act of reading, in the mind and attitude of the reader. Contradictions,
counterarguments, antagonisms (or agonisms), discrepancies, etc. are not to be avoided in
such a handbook; they constitute its richness.
Michael
Yes Marcel, for me it is both a question of ‘anti-foundationalism’ and ‘mediation’. As you
know, for me it is a matter of how we might understand ‘dialectics’, from which I take
Theodor Adorno’s recognition of it as ‘the consistent consciousness of non-identity’
(Adorno 1973: 5). I also realize that many of the books that I might refer to are lying in
my university office – out of reach. But luckily, my dog-eared copy of Adorno’s Minima
Moralia is to hand. In his aphorism (what a method!) ‘Antithesis’ he states,
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than the others and misusing
his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his
own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little
the image is a substitute of true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum
of the bourgeois within him. The detached observer is as much entangled as the active
participant.
(Adorno 1974: 26)
Underlying this observation is the status of the ‘non-identical’ and the status of the
speculative relation between subject and object. Yet of course Adorno’s epistemology was
materialistic whilst recognizing that no ‘object’ is merely given – because, as you say, any
object is there only in relation to a subject – and that all objects are historical and cultural
and thereby provisional.
Introduction 11
What has always drawn me to Adorno’s dialectics is his base level of human suffering
as a material base, ‘the need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering
is objectivity that weighs upon the subject’ (Adorno 1973: 17–18). This negative is
articulated rather simply by Barrington Moor Jr who claimed that human misery was more
easily understood than human happiness with its vast cultural, historical, and individual
variations. The contributors to this volume do a pretty good job of steering away from the
Charybdis and Scylla of methodological positivism and idealism. Positivism and idealism
are somewhat joined in a dream of unmediated experience. From the work of Bishop
Berkeley who believed that the world was there only by virtue of it being perceived; a
mimetic fantasy, reality was identical to the retina of the eye. This form of idealism was
replicated in the work of Jean Baudrillard, of course, in his treatment of the first Gulf War
as real only on the ‘screen’ of the observer. The notion of pure description also lies at the
theoretical-methodological heart of phenomenology deriving from Edmund Husserl who
believed you could bracket out the cultural elements of knowledge to look upon (and by
extension hear) what you experienced untainted by those artefacts – pure consciousness
untethered from the world. The dream of unmediated knowledge thus takes a major place in
the pantheon of Western knowledge claims. Something which we grapple with in this book
and from which, historically, scholars of the sonic have drifted into like everybody else.
Sonic positivism was embodied in the early use of the phonograph by ethnographers.
The attractiveness of being able to fix, transpose, and transport sound arose with the
phonograph in the late nineteenth century. Erica Brady (1999) estimated that fourteen
thousand cylinder recordings of North American Native Americans were made by
ethnologists between 1890 and 1935 – these cylinders kept in many museums and university
departments are both a testament to the cultural value attached to ‘collecting’ history (what
could be better than archiving the dying sounds of a culture for future reference in order to
gain a clearer understanding of lost worlds?) and to the positivism and colonial mentality
hidden within these sonic documents. At the time these recordings were considered to be
accurate representations of that which was recorded. Yet for the most part, recorders of
these interviews and the sounds of rituals and so on failed to mention how the material
was gathered. The recordings we now understand represented a ‘fetishization’ of the sonic,
a ‘false objectivity’. These recordings were blind to all forms of nonverbal contextualization
embedded in and acting beyond the recorded sound – the physicality of the culture in its
ritualistic and material form. Also hidden from ‘view’ was the asymmetrical power relation
embodied in the ethnographic encounter. Lest we think that these concerns merely deal
with the ‘past’ I am reminded of a presentation given just a few years ago at a conference
in London concerning the relation between music and the emotions. I was listening to a
presentation with an impressive use of visual material that charted the playing of chord
sequences to subjects who had been wired up so as to display patterns of physiological
response to the changing chord sequences. These researchers had been given a large
research grant to do this research. As I listened to this, an uneasy feeling crept over me as I
remembered all those terrible experiments carried out on women in the 1950s to measure
sexual response – the hidden misogyny lost on the researchers. Towards the end of the
presentation the young researcher proclaimed with some pride that the physiological
response of the subjects to these changing chord sequences was similar to those who took
pleasure in eating a good meal and to those responses of those engaging in sex. My initial
response was that any methodology that couldn’t tell the difference between listening to
music, eating food, or engaging in sexual activity didn’t seem particularly useful. The talk
was part of a number of research presentations that had the ostensibly noble pursuit of the
role of sound in the reduction of suffering of those who were in the final days of life. Yet,
they merely posited both the objective meaning of music and the objectification of human
responses to it. The philosopher Roger Scruton, now sadly dead himself, looked at me in
alarm, saying he would sooner drop down dead than suffer the torture of music imposed
upon him in his final moments of life!
So where does this get us methodologically? Returning to Adorno’s take on human
suffering in relation to the above, I am reminded of the diary of a very brave French woman
in the Second World War, Agnes Humbert. An active member of the Parisian Resistance,
Humbert was captured and imprisoned. Whilst in prison, amongst many of her sonic
experiences – she was in solitary confinement and only heard the sounds of others – she
writes; ‘Yesterday I heard the screams of a man being tortured. When the screams died
down, they were followed by deep, throaty laughter. All day I have been haunted by these
two sounds: screams and laughter. I don’t know which was more terrible. The laughter, I
think’ (Humbert 2008: 97). The experience unspeakable – I have merely read these words,
it was Humbert who experienced them. Their meaning individual, historical, contextual –
the screams real – everything else variable – mediated for our own purposes?
Michael and Marcel

What will you gain or discover by reading this book? And how have we organized the
content? First, we would like to state once again that this is not a straightforward methods
book in which methodologies are divorced from the theoretical, institutional, disciplinary,
and cultural contexts within which they are used. This book is ‘situated’. It teaches by
example, and by example here means with attention to context, attention to research
methods and types of knowledge that are specific to a given situation, accounting for the
agencies of the researcher, the object of study, and how the research has been executed. Part
I provides a theoretical overview as to how researchers have studied or ‘used’ sound within
each discipline. For example, how historians have studied sound, how anthropologists,
biologists, and urban scholars have studied sound, but also how sound is used in medicine,
in ethnography, in sociology, and so on. The volume, in a unique way, also traverses the
historically formed intellectual division of labour that we tend to inhabit by intermittently
crossing the divide between the arts, humanities, the social and the hard sciences and
their treatment of sound. In Parts II and III the reader is taken through a wide array of
sonic research that critically contextualizes the methods that have been employed. Part
II consists largely of (descriptions of) artistic research projects, that is, research done by
Introduction 13
artists in which the methodical tools such as field recordings, soundwalks, improvisation
exercises, or musical performances are deployed in order to gain knowledge about, for
example, environmental issues, social behaviour, musical and musicological developments,
or the well-being of humans and nonhumans. Part III is mainly dedicated to concrete case
studies in which sound is the lens through which non-sonic issues are studied. Methods are
presented which serve to increase attention for sonic events (for example in public urban
spaces but also within the musical domain) and propositions are made for rethinking and
transforming the relation between language and sound as well as how sounds can have an
impact on design methods.
So we have come to the end of our virtual dialogue, an endeavour which has been as
pleasurable as the putting together of this rather massive book. We would like to thank our
Bloomsbury editor, Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, who has supported us as this book grew ever
larger.
Notes
1. I should add, straight away, that several contributions to these issues did, however,
reveal different emphases. The issue on Southeast Asia made clear how extensive the
sonic differences are between rural and urban areas in these countries; and within the
issue on Latin America many authors accentuated the political significance of making
sound. Additionally, both issues introduced their readers to an invaluable variety of field
recordings and sound art from those regions.
2. It is, among others, Karen Barad who propagates and defends an emancipation of
‘matter’ as an independent and important agent: ‘What compels the belief that we have a
direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things
represented? How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter? Why are
language and culture granted their own agency and historicity, while matter is figured
as passive and immutable or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from
language and culture?’ (Barad 2007: 132).
3. According to Donna Haraway (1992: 300) diffraction is a ‘mapping of interference, not
of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where
differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear.’ The word
‘diffraction’ was first coined in 1660 by the Italian scientist Francesco Maria Grimaldi and
refers to the ways waves – also sound waves – combine, overlap, bend, and spread when
they encounter obstacles or slits. As such I think the concept works well in relation to
sound studies and sonic methodologies.
4. Of course the word ‘try’ should be understood here in an actively passive sense. Being
susceptible or receptive to ‘the other’ – in this case sound – requires a certain amount of
passivity. Yet it is necessary to prepare for it, and this asks for a deliberate and conscious
effort. So, even though this attitude escapes all programming, it is certainly no inertia.
Derrida called it ‘invention’ because one gets ready, one makes a step destined to let the
other come, come in.
References
Adorno, Theodor (1973). Negative Dialectics. New York: Seabury Press.
Adorno, Theodor (1974). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London: New Left
Books.
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Brady, Erica (1999). A Spiral Way: How the Phonograph Changed Ethnography. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
Cusack, Peter (2011). ‘Sounds from Dangerous Places’. Available online: https://www.sounds-
from-dangerous-places.org/ (accessed 28 June 2020).
Derrida, Jacques (1988). ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’. In David Wood and Robert Bernasconi
(eds), Derrida and Différance, 1–5. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Gallagher, Michael and Jonathan Prior (2014). ‘Sonic Geographies: Exploring Phonographic
Models’. Progress in Human Geography 38 (2): 267–284.
Haraway, Donna (1992). ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for
Inappropriate/d Others’. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (eds),
Cultural Studies, 295–337. New York: Routledge.
Horkheimer, Max (1972). Critical Theory, Selected Essays. New York: Herder and Herder.
Humbert, Agnes (2008). Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France. London: Bloomsbury Press.
Levy, Carlo (2004). Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita. London: John Wiley.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007). Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Steingo, Gavin and Jim Sykes (eds) (2019). Remapping Sound Studies. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
White, Haydn (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Part I
Disciplines, Methodologies,
Epistemologies
16
1
Introduction to Part I: Sounds
Inscribed onto the Face –
Rethinking Sonic Connections
through Time, Space, and
Cognition
Michael Bull
Theodor Adorno once commented that everything was related to everything else. Adorno
was approaching connectivity from a Marxist perspective, but the same statement might
also refer to the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons. Of course, the appropriate
question might be what is the nature of this connectivity; what cultural, political, and
economic values and understandings are embedded in any attempt at connectivity? These
are also questions of epistemology and methodology as the fifteen chapters in this section
testify to. Scholars investigating the sonic ‘abstract out’, as do all other scholars – the
written testimony, the sound of the aircraft flying above, the beat of the heart that a doctor
listens to, the morning chorus of birds that we might be lucky enough to wake to, the
sounds within a London music venue or on an urban street, the squelch of mud beneath
our feet. This abstracting out is followed by a reassembling, a reconnecting that enables
us to situate and extrapolate from that which we have abstracted out from. The sound
of the heart beat which the doctor listens to and interprets, reconnects to the history
of the technology; this in turn connects the sounds of the hospital ward to the daily
rhythms of those inhabiting the ward and contextualizes the silence of those who suffered
in those same wards one hundred years ago during the First World War. A listening
filtered through the repressive masculine stereotypes enforced by both men and women
of the time representing an ideology of a ‘stiff upper lip’ that masks the internalized
screams of patients (Sterne 2003; Rice 2013; Carden-Coyne 2014). The nature of this
connecting and reconnecting is frequently informed by the shifting sands of disciplinary
interests that we tend to inhabit despite the frequent protestations of multidisciplinarity;
the ethnomusicologist, sociologist, sound artist, urban designer, medical researcher,

historian, literary theorist, and so on each listen out within their disciplinary domain.
And then there is sound studies itself. Jonathan Sterne recently commented that sound
studies should ‘be grounded in a sense of its own partiality, its authors’ and readers’
knowledge that all the key terms we might use to describe and analyze sound belong to
multiple traditions, and are under debate’ (Sterne 2012: 4). In order to achieve this critical
self-evaluation Sterne replicates C. Wright-Mills’s invitation to sociologists in the 1960s
to exercise their ‘sociological imagination’ by invoking sound scholars to cultivate their
own ‘sonic imaginations’ in order to ‘rework culture through the development of new
narratives, new histories, new technologies, and new alternatives’ (Sterne 2012: 6). In
tune with Sterne’s directive the rest of this Introduction will interrogate and question a
range of received knowledge within sound studies as to the nature of sonic connections
through time, space, and cognition. This will be broken down into a simple question:
when does a sound begin and when does it end? In doing so I attempt to shed ‘light’ upon
the possibilities and potential for traversing traditional subject boundaries whilst also
questioning a range of historical material used in the analysis of sound and by extension
an epistemology of sound which informs much of the work we carry out in sound studies.
The analysis will focus primarily upon examples drawn from the First World War – a
war in which all of those who experienced it are now dead and for which almost no
sounds survive other than the sweet strains of the songs of the time materialized in
shellac, living testimony of the complex relationship that exists between entertainment,
sentimentality, longing, and propaganda (Brooks, Bashford, and Magee 2019). Writings
on the First World War continue to be subject to a ‘heterophonia’ of competing sonic
streams that live on in contemporary accounts. It is also a war interrogated by all of the
disciplines noted above, and many more besides. This Introduction will ‘trace’ a series of
sonic connections within the First World War and beyond. In doing so the ‘trace’ will act
as both an epistemological and methodological tool. The connections to be made are not
unified or holistic but rather prismatic whereby the sonic is refracted through disparate
historical and cultural material producing a range of ‘soundways’ defined by R. C. Rath
as ‘paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices and techniques’ (Rath 2003:
2). These traces might be understood as a web moving simultaneously in many directions
and times. The use of the term is an adaptation from Ernst Bloch’s method of writing
in Traces (2006). In this work Bloch often begins a trace by drawing upon a childhood
experience before extending his observations through tracing the initial thought through
a wide range of cultural experiences and examples. In reviewing Bloch’s work Benjamin
Korstvedt describes the method as ‘to stimulate an imaginatively critical, questioning,
even questing, attitude that can read clues and signs from ordinary lived experience in
ways that reveal the mutually determining relationship between existential and social
being’ (Korstvedt 2007). Adorno, in a nuanced critique of Bloch, describes his use of
the method thus: ‘These experiences are no more esoteric than whatever it was about
the sound of Christmas bells which moved us so profoundly and which we never wholly
outgrow: the feeling that this can’t be all, that there must be something more than just the
here and now’ (Adorno 1980: 97).
Introduction to Part I 19
In the following trace I begin not with Christmas bells but with the sound of boots
sinking into mud one hundred years ago, before moving on to connect these sounds,
and by extension silences, as embedded in a solitary object whose materiality will be
imaginatively listened to so that we might hear both the silences and sounds contained
within it. The object is a 100-year-old blue wooden park bench displayed in Sidcup, Kent.
Its only distinguishing feature are the words ‘FOR WOUNDED SOLDIERS ONLY’ written
in large white letters on its back. This singular park bench in turn leads to a range of
reflections concerning the duration and spaces of sounds, silences, and the very materiality
of the sonic, before finally concluding with two sonic commemorations of war, We’re Here
Because We’re Here (2016), which commemorated the first day of the Battle of the Somme
in which 26,000 young men lost their lives, and a sound installation commissioned by the
Imperial War Museum, London entitled Coda to Coda (2018), which recreates the moment
that the guns of war were silenced on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh
month on the Western Front in 1918.
The sounds of mud under feet

Data can begin anywhere, abstracted from the labyrinthine nature of the world. Much of
our sonic evidence from the First World War comes in the form of written or otherwise
recorded testimonies from those who experienced it. Testimony is a contested concept
and is here subjected to a cultural, political, and sonic critique filtered through the present
analysis. Who is it that is engaged in the saying and who is interpreting the words? Much
has been made of the partiality of many of these testimonies, from the war poetry of Wilfred
Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to the novels of Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, David
Jones, and many others; partial in terms of the class and educational nature of these writers
which, it is suggested, contribute to an overplaying of the despair of war (Hynes 1992; Fussell
2013; Winter 2014). This critique itself can be contested, as indeed I do here, by drawing
upon alternative voices of the war in the form of diaries never meant to have been read or
published. For example, the diaries of James McCudden, the air ace who shot down fifty-
seven aircraft and who was killed in 1918, who left school at fourteen and had never written
a word before he put pen to paper whilst fighting. His diaries, like so many others, were
published posthumously. McCudden’s journals, like many other working-class accounts,
do not diverge greatly from those written by their well-known, ‘educated’, and illustrious
counterparts. Furthermore, these ‘private’ reflections are not subject to the interpersonal
mores of a ‘stiff upper lip’ that resonates through so much existing audiovisual testimonies
of those who survived the war and who were interviewed often fifty years after the end of
the war. And then there were those who had not even this voice, who, whilst surviving the
war, remained silent – those many thousands who suffered facial disfigurement.
Memory and testimony traces shift in time – personally, socially, and politically;
middle-aged grandchildren of those who fought in the war are now in turn rewriting
and reimagining aspects of that conflict. I have just returned from the premiere of the
Sam Mendes movie 1917 dedicated to his grandfather Alfred Mendes who recounted his
wartime experiences to Mendes many years ago; 2018 saw the release of Peter Jackson’s
documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old, dedicated to his serving grandfather Sgt
William Jackson, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of the war. These films
will be analysed fully elsewhere, but Jackson’s film is noted for its recreation of black-and-
white original film footage into painstaking and effective colour, but also for employing
forensic speech specialists to decode the speech of troops and for employing actors to
speak these words in his film – thus adding a novel take on giving combatants a voice and
endowing the film with a heightened sense of ‘realism’ (Bull 2019). The present sonic trace
follows the example of personal testimony some fifty years distant.
I am sifting through family photographs that my mother had kept and have come
across a photograph I remember taking as a teenager. It is a photograph of my Corsican
grandfather taken in his home high up in the Corsican mountains, taken in the 1960s.
As I look at this photograph I have a Marcel Proust moment: the sounds of the French
chanteur Jean Ferrat singing ‘La Montaigne’ comes flooding back to me. The song is being
played on a portable record player outside the house and is accompanying my cousin’s
morning physical exercise routine. The front door is open and the warm sweet smell of
eucalyptus wafts through the door from the huge tree in front of the house. I remember
sitting on a chair; my grandfather, Pepe, is recounting his wartime experiences, primarily
those at the Battle of Verdun where he was an infantryman (Poilu), to his rapt grandson –
myself. His was a story of the hardships of life in the trenches, told by so many; the cold,
the interminable rain, the terrible conditions in the trenches that killed as many as the
incessant shelling, the stench of decaying bodies, rats, and human excrement, the sound of
the squelching of mud as his boots sunk into one, two feet of mud. He looked at me with
his large, open, farmers face and I paraphrase, ‘Michael, there was one sound worse than
the squelching of the mud. It was when there was no sound of mud. We were treading on
the dead laying beneath us. Treading on the faces of the dead!’ He still had nightmares
of this desecration, as indeed did I after he told me this. He never returned to Northern
France. Brought up a devout Catholic, he lost his faith during the war and on returning
home when the local priest told him that he should carry out confession, to put into words
that which he had done, my grandfather punched him to the floor and never set foot in
a church again, even on his own death. The memory of this encounter has stayed with
me. There are many corroborating accounts of soldiers treading on the decaying bodies of
the dead in the trenches along with all of the other atrocities that troops encountered in
Northern France and elsewhere. My grandfather lived these experiences fifty years after
having survived them and passed them on to me where they now reappear, mediated on
these pages, abstracted out from the flow of time and now reconnected, at once personal,
intimate, familial, historical, and cultural.
What does this Proustian moment of recollection tell us about the question of when
does a sound begin and when does it end? Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes have recently
argued that we need to ‘reconceptualise sonic history as a nonlinear process that is fraught
with cultural frictions’ (Steingo and Sykes 2019: 11). This Proustian moment and, indeed,
my grandfather’s recollection are both non-linear. Ernst Bloch concurs in arguing for non-
synchronous, ‘not all people exist in the same now. They do so only externally, by virtue
of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at
the same time with others’ (Bloch 1977: 22). The nature of this non-synchronism might
be cognitive, individual, cultural, and historical. Bloch’s French compatriot, the historian
Marc Bloch, a trooper in the First World War, and a member of the French Resistance in
the Second World War where he died after being brutally tortured by the Nazis, points to
both the abstracting out of ‘memories’ and to their persistence, their reoccurrence after the
drift of years:
I shall never forget the 10th of September, 1914. Even so, my recollections of that day are not
altogether precise. Above all they are poorly articulated, a discontinuous series of images,
vivid in themselves but badly arranged like a reel of a movie film that showed here and there
large gaps and the unintended reversal of certain scenes.
(Bloch 1980: 89)
Twenty years later, during the occupation of Paris he wrote:

Ever since the Argonne in 1914, the buzzing sound of bullets has become stamped on the
grey matter of my brain as on the wax of a phonograph record, a melody instantly recalled
by simply pushing a button; too, even after twenty-one years, my ear still retains the ability
to estimate by its sound the trajectory and probable target of a shell.
(Bloch 1980: 41)
The time and nature of war produces its own configuration of time – sonic and otherwise,
both non-synchronic and linear as Walter Benjamin recognized ‘a generation that had
gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape
where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force
field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body’ (Benjamin 2002:
144). The linearity lies in the development of the technologies of destruction experienced
non-synchronistically. And the cultural frictions – my peasant grandfather possessed no
political vote like the majority of those who fought, their bodies owned by the state to do
with them as it chose, their bodies ‘matter’ like the shells that killed them, their voices
often reduced to humour, parody, and cynicism as expressed in the reinterpretation of
songs of the time and their lyrics. Song has remained an ever present ‘we’ in theatres of war
with troops frequently subverting the lyrics of popular wartime songs, replacing them with
their own dystopian or sexually explicit lyrics (Sweeney 2001). In the 1932 French movie
Wooden Crosses, the troops sing, ‘they tell us we’ll be getting bronze crosses [medals] but
all we get are wooden crosses’ to be placed on their graves. No commercial discs were made
of these sonic transgressions at the time. The voices of propaganda continued to drown out
the voices of wartime experience, silencing them, with their simple, unambiguous, dulcet
yet ‘patriotic’ tones of ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’.
The sonic connection – non-synchronous, contingent – leads from my grandfather’s
wartime account to a blue park bench. It moves from the dead soldiers trodden
underfoot to the surviving facially disfigured soldier; to their treatment, silencing,
their lifelong trauma and its political and technological antecedents that prefigure the
split second in which their faces were disfigured and traumatized. What then are
the sonic connections between the blue park bench, the injuries, the treatments, the
technologies of destruction and personal narratives, memories, testimonies of those
who sat on benches like these? These sonically inflected questions are not merely sonic
but also epistemological, methodological, historical, economic, political, and aesthetic
questions.
The blue park bench and sounds etched

onto the faces
My grandfather, like so many others, was witness to the indescribable. Whilst he might
have trembled at the thought and experience of treading on the remains of the dead, he
would have also witnessed all kinds of injuries, some fatal, some not. This trace now moves
from the faces of the dead to those who lived with the consequences of often catastrophic
facial injuries. The power of the disfigured face as cultural stigma is well documented
culturally and historically yet remains largely absent in accounts of the First World War
(Gilman 2014). Yet facial injuries were a common occurrence in the First World War; in
the UK alone over 60,000 troops were treated for such injuries, often in specialist medical
units. These injuries were caused by a variety of factors: war time terrain, the nature of the
conflict, and the destructive power of the weaponry used. The destruction wrought thus
produced swift developments in surgical techniques, modes of medical intervention and
the development of plastic surgery in efforts to ameliorate the destructive power of the
weapons used on all sides. Many victims of head wounds died instantly but their survival
rates were higher than those injured in the stomach, 90 per cent of whom never made it
alive to a hospital. Whilst the grave nature of many of their injuries were instantaneous,
their screams of pain would often last for many hours for all to hear. Their futures often
inscribed with the sound of their nightmares, their pain uttered through years of surgery,
their speech stifled through the destruction of mouths, tongues, and windpipes, their
eating thus sonically transformed as this trooper’s written record describes: ‘It was several
months after leaving hospital before I regained my speech, and not for a couple of years
later could I speak plainly or eat solid food’ (Bamji 2017: 38). The words fail to convey
the trauma and duration of the experience. But what is it that I am describing here? The
following two graphic descriptions suffice. The first is of an injury sustained by shelling,
the second from a bullet. The speed and sharpness of shell fragments often caused
catastrophic disfiguring injuries. Woods Hutchinson, a US war doctor stated that whilst
‘a bullet would go completely through the face from side to side, and perhaps break one
jaw or put out an eye, a shell splinter will often shear away the whole lower half of the face,
leaving the tongue hanging down on the chest, or tear away an eye, all the front of the
upper jaw and teeth’ (Hutchinson 1918: 227).
Equally Louis Barthas kept a detailed diary through his four years of war, describing an
adjacent soldiers’ facial injuries in graphic detail:
Another soldier who was crawling up suddenly leapt up and fell right in the middle of us, but
we were frozen with horror. This man had almost no face left. An explosive bullet had blown
up in his mouth, blasting out his cheeks, ripping out his tongue (a piece of which hung
down), and shattering his jaws, and blood poured copiously from these horrible wounds
[…] finally we were able to get him to a first-aid station.
(Barthas 2014: 43–4)
How then should we understand the sonic nature of these descriptions? I propose that we
think of these soldiers as having the sounds of their trauma etched onto their faces much
like music was etched onto the shellac of the discs of the time, thereby interrogating the
connections between materialism, sound, and experience. Perhaps we need to move beyond
the sonically literal, beyond mere ‘vibrations’ towards new connections; epistemological,
cultural, sensory, technological, and political in order to question when a sound begins
and when it ends by using the example of these soldiers? The literalness of vibrations as
an epistemological sonic starting point has already been questioned by Mark Grimshaw
and Tom Garner (2015), but I do not wish to replace one starting point with another: the
sonic imaginary should broaden out our understanding of sonic duration, not replace the
literalness of vibrations.
How sound is understood is an issue of sonic duration, but it is also about how we
conceive of and draw boundaries around the sonic. The gun discharges, the sound
is instantaneous as it impacts the soldiers face – a mere fraction of a second. Artillery
shells took longer to arrive and were subject to intense conjecture by troops as to where
they might land – troops developed a sonic skillset that sometimes might ameliorate the
contingency of their survival (Daughtry 2015). Why separate the immediacy of sonic
duration – the split second – from that which went before and from that which comes later?
There exists the shifting soundscape of the battlefield, the strategic and policy meetings of
those designing and planning the weapons to be used, representing an alternative, hidden
range of soundscapes, and there are the munition factories that make these weapons of
destruction, indeed a sonic mobilization of a whole country.
A tobacco factory had turned to making shells, a gramophone works was making shell fuse,
and a magneto-maker, a piano factory, and a coach-builder had turned to the manufacture
of one or another kind of munitions […]. Similar conversions were happening around the
nation, such that the whole country is one seething munition factory.
(Woollacott 1994: 28)
Questions surrounding how this might be discretely conceptualized are ones of personal
recollection, military history, and strategic interpretation; of military technology and
the development of killing weapons – the long-range rifle, the aeroplane able to drop
bombs onto troops below, the machine gun, and so on. Does the sound of a delayed fuse
seventeen-inch shell originate in its design, manufacture or the values that underpin it?
The momentary sound and impact of a shell on human flesh can be traced back to its
sonic design, innovation, and production – a political, economic, and cultural conveyor
belt of death. Where might such an analysis lead? If you were Theodor Adorno or Max
Horkheimer the question might take you back to the origins of Western culture, to Homer’s
Odyssey and the dialectic of enlightenment, sonically inflected? These issues will be dealt
with in greater depth in a later publication but suffice to say at what such an analysis of
sonic antecedents and consequences might draw upon. These epistemological questions
are intimately connected to a range of methodological concerns and by extension to an
imaginative interdisciplinary connectivity.
Just as the written testimony of war veterans might tell us more about the nature of
gender stereotypes of the time than the ‘actual’ experience of war, so written documents
might point to the extension of our understanding of sonic design embedded in the
individual experience of war and its destructiveness. Written manuals concerning the
design, development, and manufacture of a wide array of weaponry was common even
during the prosecution of the First World War. Pride of place goes to the writings of
Douglas T. Hamilton who became the ‘high priest’ of the technological manufacture of
death through a series of manuals written during the war that describe in minute detail
the production techniques of weaponry and the measurement of their destructive power.
His books are also distinct for the length of their titles; for example his 1916 treatise
on shell manufacture is entitled, High-Explosive Shell Manufacture: A Comprehensive
Treatise on the Forging, Machining and Heat-Treatment of High-Explosive Shells and the
Manufacture of Cartridge Cases, Primers, and Fuses, Giving Complete Directions for Tool
Equipment and Methods of Setting. His books are exemplary examples of detailed and
functional analysis of how the weapons of destruction are designed so as to successfully
achieve optimum results: ‘High explosive shrapnel shell combines the principles of both
the high explosive shell with the common shrapnel shell […]. It detonates upon impact,
causing considerable damage, and is capable of destroying the shield in protecting a field
gun’ (Hamilton 1916: 46).
Whilst in 1914, 50 per cent of 75mm shells used were loaded with shrapnel, troops
didn’t have metal helmets to give them any protection until early 1916. Design preceded
protection.
This shell [the British 18 pounder] is set off by what is known as the delay action fuse.
This allows the shell to penetrate fortifications or earth works before it is detonated, and,
consequently, enables the explosion to have a much more destructive effect than if it took
place instantaneously upon impact.
(Hamilton 1916: 7)
Hamilton also produced an inventory of the cost of each bullet, shell, rifle, and cannon.
For example, a Lee-Enfield rifle used by the British army cost $20 in 1914 with its bullets a
mere few cents each.
Just as it is possible to trace the sound of the shell back in time, so sound does not cease
on impact. I suggest that sound is transformed, traduced onto the disfigured face that bears
its sonic scars for all to ‘see’, comment on, hide from, or avoid, thus breaking down the
binary between sound and vision. Indeed the sonic is fully embodied. These sonic scars
were both embodied and materialized, manifest facially not just on the face but on the
psyche, with sonic time disassembled, frozen, returned. Body and cognition both ‘in tune’
yet out of tune. The cognitive, in the form of shell shock becoming visible in the bodily
movement of those who suffered thus. Just as sound moves backwards on the ‘production
line of death’ so it moves forwards into the personal and social narratives of victims, etched
into their psyches and faces.
Whilst sonic trauma was both visible (facial disfigurement, bodily movement) and
invisible (cognitive impairment), the invisible, in the form of shell shock or other
psychological trauma, was often preferred to the overtly visible. Yet the psychological
effects of continual exposure to the conditions experienced by troops in the First World
War were recognized at the time. Grafton Elliot Smith, a serving doctor, argued as early as
1917 that:
Before this epoch of trench warfare very few people have been called upon to suppress fear
continually for a very long period of time […] harrowing sight and sounds, disgust and nausea
at the happenings in the trenches […]. Frequently the assaults made upon him nowadays are
impersonal, undiscriminating and unpredictable, as in the case of heavy shelling […]. The
noise of the bursting shells, the premonitory sounds of approaching missiles during exciting
periods of waiting, and the sight of those injured in his vicinity whom he cannot help, all
assail him, while at the same time he may be fighting desperately within himself. Finally,
he may collapse when a shell bursts near him though he need not necessarily be injured by
actual contact with particles of the bursting missile.
(Elliot Smith 1917: 8)
The lasting implications of trauma were also recognized:

Loss of memory, insomnia, terrifying dreams, pains, emotional instability, diminution
of self-confidence and self-control, attacks of unconscious or changed consciousness
sometimes accompanied by convulsive movements resembling those characteristic of
epileptic fits, incapacity to understand any but the simplest matters, obsessive thoughts,
usually of the gloomiest and most painful kind, even in some cases hallucinations and
incipient delusions – make life for some of their victims a veritable hell.
(Elliot Smith 1917: 13)
The consequences of the etching of sound onto the victim’s face were experienced in many
settings, from the individual’s psyche to the everyday, to the social spaces they would move
through to the hospital ward. Sound manifests itself in the medical procedures undertaken
to repair that which technology had damaged or destroyed together with a range of
gendered sonic expectations and performances carried out by both patients and staff. The
year 1916 saw the development of inter-tracheal anaesthesia, which replaced chloroform
and ether, making it possible to operate in sterile environments for longer and enabling
more effective treatment for those whose windpipes had been blown away. For those with
facial or throat wounds the silences were prolonged and intensely painful. Whilst medical
procedures had made rapid advances in the First World War, Paul Alverdes, a German war
veteran, who had part of his throat shot out in the war, described the pre-1916 listening
procedures necessary for doctors to sometimes operate on the facially disfigured:
It was next to impossible for a surgeon to operate on a patient’s face or throat if a gas mask
was in use for controlling the anaesthetic – the surgeon performing the procedure would
need to be able to hear the patient’s breathing at all times – so no anaesthetic. The patients
referred to this as ‘the healing torture’.
(Alverdes 2017: 16)
Through these treatments, often lasting years, the hospital wards which treated the
wounded were frequently full of ‘the groans and screams’ which penetrated the minds
and bodies of those who treated them. Nevertheless, complex ‘codes of silence’ within
hospital wards were operationalized both by the soldiers who experienced pain and
suffering and the female nurses who managed the hospital wards. Patients, including
the facially disfigured, were encouraged to display high levels of cheerfulness – ‘happy
though wounded’. One nurse treating the wounded on the hospital wards commented
that she experienced the ‘very spirit of suffering, [in hospital wards] the silence is full of it’
(Carden-Coyne 2014: 324).
So, in returning to our blue park bench in Sidcup and to the facially disfigured soldiers
who sat on this bench, we might ask why these blue benches were inscribed with the
words ‘FOR WOUNDED SOLDIERS ONLY’ painted onto their back? Silence is inscribed
into this park bench. All those that once sat on these benches, their face or throats in
tatters, are dead of course, silent as indeed many were silent in their lives. Sidcup, like
many other towns in the UK, strongly supported the war. The inhabitants had flocked
to the local cinema in 1917, the same year as the hospitals opened their doors to those
disfigured as a result of it, to watch the first war documentary The Battle of the Somme,
universally congratulated at the time for its gritty ‘realism’. Equally, Sidcup, like so many
other towns, had possessed its ‘white feather’ brigades of women who would plant white
feathers on those men they thought were shirking their responsibility to go to war. A
silent rebuke embodying a repressive sonic masculinity. We might surmise that the
physical effects of war were not as ‘attractive’ to those citizens as the gritty reality of the
silent screen. Indeed ‘the town’s residents petitioned for the men to be excluded from
the town’ (Bamji 2017: 142). As a consequence of this, the local council and hospital
reached a compromise whereby the words written on the park bench would warn the
people of Sidcup to ‘look away’ at the horrors that would confront them if they were to
look at those sitting on the bench. The ‘realism’ embodied by long-lasting injuries both
physical and mental proved problematic for many civilians. The bench was the first stage
of their public invisibility and indeed silence. Even those with minor facial disfigurements
were not permitted to return to the trenches as it was thought that the uninjured did not
want to see what they might become. Their silence manifest on these park benches both
personal and interpersonal were mirrored in their experiences on the hospital wards and
operating theatres. The gendered expectations and performances of both patients and
staff sometimes mirrored those who walked past the blue benches. The silencing of those
who suffered in their everyday lives was replicated by their silencing in the hospital wards
of the time. On the wards of the Queen Mary Hospital mirrors were not allowed so that
the facially injured should not look at the destruction wrought upon their faces – their
own ‘blue bench’.
The sounds of silence and the silence of

sounds
Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around.
—John Cage
Since John Cage we have recognized that silence is elusive. Even in anechoic chambers, if
we listen intently, we can hear ourselves – our blood pumping, the embodiment of sound
within environmental ‘silence’ – if we choose to or have the skill to listen thus. When
audiences first listened intently to 4ʹ33˝ they became aware of an array of environmental
sounds. They experienced sound as any bourgeois audience might – from a Beethoven
concert conducted by Toscanini to that of Varèse conducted by Stokowski – in rapt
attentive silence, yet in the process, paradoxically, they became attentive to the world and
also to themselves. Music became sound just as sound became music, yet irredeemably
bourgeois nevertheless. Yet the Cagean approach to sound, and therefore silence, remains
merely one possibility within cultures of listening. Cage’s ‘change of mind’ paradoxically
returns us to the dualism so loved within Western culture of mind and body. In choosing to
reorientate ourselves to the sounds of the world and, by extension, to ourselves – the blood
pumping through our veins – an analytical puritanism creeps in. Yet one more literalism
within the study of sound. Cage’s anechoic chamber is mind listening to body after all.
A personal dualism unlike that of his audience who, after all, were listening primarily
to the world. If we were to take a bodily approach to sound and silence, a somatic one,
sometimes preconscious but not necessarily so, in which emotion and fear, cognitive to be
sure, play their role in the phenomenology of sonic experience, then a range of ‘different’
silences might be discovered that challenge us methodologically. Returning to the silences
of the First World War, many soldiers became deaf due to the sonic destruction of their
hearing, the physical result of sonic assault. Yet many also became mute, unable to speak
at all despite no physical injury. Others suffered from aphonia and dysphonia, products
of what we today would refer to as forms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Their sensory
system shut down with modes of speech and hearing crowded out by trauma, the result
of many experiences coupled with temperament – sounds, sights, fear, tension, time, and
exhaustion. Just as the mind can attend to sounds, so the emotions can block those sounds
out. In discussion with those who have experienced the sudden death of loved ones, they
frequently mention the silence of death – the waking up in the middle of the night alone,
the feeling of deathly silence; they do not hear the clock ticking, the feet shuffling, the
heart beating. The push against the resistant door produces no sound with death lying on
its other side. The mind crowds out sound in a personal, temporary silence. This silence
need not merely be a private and enclosed silence, it can also be a public silence. On
visiting Auschwitz, the site of so much human suffering, its historical soundscape different
from the fields of Verdun or the domestic bathroom, visitors sometimes (but not always)
mention the deathly silence of the site. They do not hear the sounds of the birds flying
overhead or the subdued voices of others. Silence works in tandem to sound, follows it, and
is frequently out of time with it.
Culturally silence often becomes a form of social invisibility – the Native Indians of
America had no voice in the nineteenth century, remaining unrecognized by Murray
Schafer in his description of the sonic richness of the settler trains arrival in American
Frontier towns that entailed the death of Native American livelihoods, lands, and much
more besides.
By comparison with the sounds of modern transportation, those of the trains were rich
and characteristic: the whistle, the bell, the slow chuffing of the engine at the start […]. The
sound of travel have deep mysteries […]. The train whistle was the most important sound in
the frontier town, the solo announcement of contact with the outside world.
(Schafer 1977: 81)
Equally, the slaves portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), with the
rhythmic clinking of the chains around their feet and necks, brutalized in order to fuel
the industrialization of those profiting from their misery, are ‘heard’ in Britain as ‘railway
spine’, caused by the continuous vibration of the trains they travelled on and complained
about (Trower 2012). The sonic draws us in closely to the immediacy of experience, to
the here and now: sound juxtaposed with deadly cultural silences produces its own sonic
dialectic. The parochial cultural norms of those who listen to the sounds that are merely
around them, that do not seek connections beyond the here and now of sonic vibrations, is
a dominant and continuing trope of Western sonic culture.
We need not look so far for examples of ‘silencing’ in the First World War. Whilst
browsing through the sonic records in the Imperial War Museum in London and listening
to the BBC radio and television archives of interviews with those who fought in the First
World War, one might be struck by their similarity. These interviews carried out many
years after the soldiers’ wartime experiences appear to embody a specific ideology, that of
the ‘stiff upper lip’. After a period of over fifty years when these accounts were recorded,
they remain selective, presented, and conform to an internalized embodiment of an
ideologically charged masculinity; one in which the war is described as ‘bad’ but ‘not that
bad’. Whilst the ideology of suffering ‘in silence’ had lost much of its ideological justification
by the 1960s and 1970s when these interviews occurred – it was an era of the Vietnam War
after all – it nevertheless remained buried in the psyches of these old troopers. Their sonic
testimonies become simultaneously ‘authentic’ and ‘misleading’. The words do not speak
merely for themselves but are embodied in a set of cultural values existing in and out of
their time.
Yet all these words are spoken by those whose faces, if not their psyches, remained ‘intact’.
Their ‘silences’, an internalization of pain and suffering, also preclude the literal silencing
of others, not so lucky. This is a silencing not only of the dead but of those unfortunate
men who sat on our blue park benches in Sidcup and elsewhere. In the search for ‘silences’,
obscured by the words spoken, there is the silence of the facially disfigured. There is no
existing testimony given by the disfigured, either on tape or on television, and very rarely
in written diaries. Existing accounts are written by doctors and nurses, not the victims
themselves. It is as if they never existed, a continuing thorn in the sonic testimonies of the
First World War. If we listen we can only ‘hear’ the silence of the disfigured. The silence
greeting the facially disfigured was merely an extreme that faced those who had merely lost
arms or legs. These unfortunates received a portion of a disability pension, their poverty
resulting in the presence of many soldiers needing to beg in the streets of UK cities. The
facially disfigured received 100 per cent disability pensions – the state willing to do almost
anything to keep them off the streets.
Beyond the hospital wards of the First World War silence was represented both as
a form of ‘turning away’ and as a respectful commemoration that has remained to the
present day. Cultural silences remain inscribed into contemporary wartime memorials,
their sonic connections extending into the past, their lineages traced from ideologies of
the First World War, embodied in the sonic aesthetics of contemporary commemoration.
We’re Here Because We’re Here to Coda

to Coda: Listening to the silences of
commemoration
It is to the sounds and silences of contemporary First World War commemorations that
I now turn in order to discuss the persistence of both a sonic turning away coupled with
politically sensitive forms of silence embedded within commemoration.
I begin with Jeremy Deller’s We’re Here Because We’re Here which commemorated the
100th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 2016, a day in
which 26,000 troops were killed. The commemoration was nationwide consisting of 1,600
volunteers moving through everyday sites, often transit sites, like those experienced by
soldiers of the day – railway stations and so on – dressed as First World War troopers. Each
soldier represented one trooper who had been killed on that first day of battle; they carried
small cards with the details of that one soldier: their age, family, regiment, and death; and if
approached, they would silently hand out the white card with the details of the dead soldier
whom they were representing. This moving memorial (many were moved) chimes with the
directive of Henri Barbusse, the writer of the first novel depicting the horror of the First
World War from the viewpoint of a serving soldier, when talking of those who had fallen
that, ‘the only acceptable attitude, in our view, to bring to their tombs, as one comrade
put it, is “impeccable silence”. At least, if we do not speak their name, no one else should
dare to do so’ (Barbusse 2009 quoted in Winter 2014: 182). Deller, in constructing the
day’s commemoration, had been influenced by stories deriving from the war of relatives
believing that they had seen their dead loved ones walking the streets of London and
elsewhere. Death was invisible for many of these relatives with no repatriation of bodies
or indeed no remaining body at all. Deller’s memorial was largely silent. On film taken on
the day it is possible to hear the thud of the soldiers boots as they marched and mingled
in with the normal city sounds of railway stations, people talking, and information system
announcements. This ‘silence’ was periodically shattered as the ‘troops’ suddenly broke
out into song – ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, sang to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. This
was the song that some of the soldiers sang on that day one hundred years ago, soldiers
who had no voice in the geopolitics of the time. In their renditioning of the song we hear
a trace of sonic irony and futility unrecognized in the popular songs of the time in which
the sonic manufacture of propaganda is all that remains on shellac in the form of ‘Keep
the Home Fires Burning’ and ‘Pack up your Troubles’. The singing of ‘We’re Here Because
We’re Here’ signposts an alternative soundscape to the sonic propaganda of music at the
time listened to both by troops and families. No commercial discs were made of these sonic
transgressions at the time. The voices of propaganda continued to drown out the voices
of wartime experience with their simple, unambiguous, dulcet yet ‘patriotic’ tones. At
the end of the day Deller’s ‘troops’ marched around in opposing concentric circles before
whatever audience existed, visually illustrating the meaninglessness of their deaths, before
giving out a short, shattering, collective roar of pain, not much longer than the sound
that an approaching shell might have taken before it killed them on the battlefield. The
technologies of death intertwined literally and philosophically with the flesh of its victims.
After this final roar of the voice the participants dispersed silently into the night as if they
had never existed.
Deller describes himself as a conceptual artist, not a sound artist, but We’re Here Because
We’re Here uses silence, sound, and vision equally and to powerful effect. To the sound
recordist measuring the sounds of the urban environment, the piece would go largely
unnoticed. The power of the piece resides in its audiovisual presence that remains on
multiple YouTube feeds.
Two years later I am sitting in the Imperial War Museum in London, headphones over
my ears and hands over the headphones. I am listening to and ‘feeling’ Coda to Coda, a
sound piece lasting a little over a minute commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to
commemorate the final sounds of the First World War on the Western Front. As I listen
there is the ‘lifelike’ sound of a variety of shells whistling through the air before exploding,
then slowly fading away to be replaced by the sounds of bird calls before silence. By placing
my hands over my head, I also experience sonic vibrations deriving from the piece. As a
sound piece the aesthetics work well. It is ‘as if ’ we are eavesdropping in on a momentous
historical occasion. In addition to the aesthetics of the piece, reminiscent of the ending of
the 1930s American movie All Quiet on the Western Front, the designers were attentive to
the ‘realism’ of the tape through the use of original sound pressure impulses used on the
front that assessed the direction and distance from which shells were fired along the front.
The equipment measured the time it took for the sound impulses to reach the front.
The sound ranging equipment used six tuned low frequency microphones arranged in a wide
arc behind the allied lines. The microphones were connected to a string galvanometer at a
forward listening position. A low frequency signal picked up by one of these microphones
would move a thin wire in the galvanometer and cast a shadow onto a piece of moving film
[…] to create a visual recording of these sound impulses.
(‘Making a New World: Armistice Soundwave’ 2018)
Recordings of appropriate gunfire were used to interpret the sound and intensity of
shelling with the simulation of shock waves through vibrations that the listener within the
Imperial War Museum could experience. Will Worsley, director and principal composer
of Coda to Coda, stated that ‘we hope that our audio interpretation of sound ranging
techniques […] enables visitors to project themselves into that moment in history and gain
an understanding of what the end of the First World War may have sounded like’ (‘Making
a New World: Armistice Soundwave’ 2018). Yet as I listen to the piece I am overcome with
a sense of unease. I look around; others, primarily young and eager, are at desks listening
intently to what I have just listened to. We are surrounded by the material artefacts of
the war housed in the museum dedicated to the memory of that war. The sound of Coda
to Coda was not that loud – it cannot be, or else our ears would suffer damage. Equally,
the sonic vibrations of the shells could be felt, but not that much. Sonic ‘realism’ remains
a myth of course, and so we are left with aesthetics and perhaps the imagination. Yet it
is something else about the soundscape that I have listened to that is troubling me. The
material inscription of the final sounds of war, transformed from the materiality of the
paper into the sound that I have just listened to, appears as too ‘literal’. The joining of ‘sonic
realism’ or ‘sonic fidelity’ to aesthetics is equally impressive and troubling. The sounds
that I listen to through the headphones bear little resemblance to the sounds of gunfire on
that day. What could replicate the sonic intensity of such an experience as described by an
American Red Cross volunteer in 1916 of a shell landing 200 metres away from him:
There was a sound like the roar of an express train, coming nearer at tremendous speed with
a loud singing, wailing noise. It kept on coming and I wondered when it would ever burst.
Then when it seemed right on top of us, it did, with a shattering crash that made the earth
tremble. It was terrible. The concussion felt like a blow in the face, the stomach and all over;
it was like being struck unexpectedly by a huge wave in the ocean.
(Alexander 2010: 2)
Whilst listening to Coda to Coda I am reminded of a statement made by a serving trooper

in the First World War after he had watched The Battle of the Somme at the cinema in
1917. The film had been lauded for its realistic depiction of the war, using only original
war footage. The deficit ‘realism’ of The Battle of the Somme was apparent to the trooper.
On being asked about the film’s realism, he answered: ‘Yes … about as like as a silhouette
is like a real person, or as a dream is like a waking experience. There is so much left
out’ (Reeves 1997: 16). The materiality of sonic representations of war, whilst shadow-
like in themselves, might nevertheless remain constructive and informative. Yet there
is something else troubling me about Coda to Coda. Its soundscape is contextual,
geographically specific, but more worrying, as we listen to the dying sounds of the war
and the rebirth of nature through the sound of birdsong – a common trope of the time
and subsequently – is that there is one sound that is omitted: the sounds of the troops who
were there, who experienced and suffered. We hear no voices, merely bird song and then
silence. In Coda to Coda the shadowy realism of the sonic is mingled with an aesthetic
silencing of those who experienced the war as the sounds of war die away to be replaced
by the sounds of nature. Just as the troops are silenced in Coda to Coda, so one hundred
years before, the facially disfigured patients in the hospital in Sidcup were silenced in the
recording of history and in the turning away of those who walked past.
This Introduction has sought out new ways to conceptualize how sonic connections
might be approached, researched, and understood. In doing so it has questioned how we
deal with a variety of historical testimonies but also with contemporary sound works that
both subvert or confirm ideologies entrenched in past accounts. The graphic descriptions
of those who suffered or died in the First World War and who are memorialized in film,
print, and sound art are not meant as blanket pronouncements, but rather as an opening
of disciplinary and methodological doors. The authors of this rather large first section
do likewise. They produce a rich tableau of sonic connectivity amidst a dizzying array of
methodologies and methodological issues, from music venues in London to the innovative
use of digital audio in the classrooms of America; from the soundscapes of urban cultures
to reflections upon the very nature of sonic methodologies that are ‘merely’ written down;
from the innovative use of sonic methodologies to understand the past to the ‘oral tradition’
rooted in the heart of literature; from the philosophical grasp of auditory experience
to the intervention of environmental planning of urban spaces that many of us inhabit;
from listening to the sounds of nature to reflecting upon the materiality of those sounds.
Materiality and culture surface as topics of discussion and investigation in many of these
chapters, as medical, scientific, and technical investigations extending to those embedded
in the cultures examined in anthropology, history, and urban culture and beyond.
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2
Sonic Methodologies in
Anthropology
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier
The volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), edited by
James Clifford and George Marcus launched a series of groundbreaking criticisms about
the discipline of anthropology. The critics targeted the ways in which anthropologists
traditionally conducted fieldwork and wrote ethnographies. More specifically, the volume
emphasized the necessity of including a polyphony of voices in ethnographic writing,
and encouraged ethnographers to think in terms of fragmentation, incompleteness, non-
linearity, and partial truth. Importantly, it also raised the issue of reflexivity, that is, the
anthropologist’s own subjectivity. This challenged notions of objectivity associated with
the ethnographic enterprise. Also, the volume addressed the issues of representation and
the temporality of ethnographic accounts, which tended to position ‘the other’ as not
living in the same time frame as the researcher (Fabian 1983). These marked a shift in the
‘anthropological imagination’ with the world no longer perceived as complete and coherent
but rather fragmented and ambiguous (MacDougall 2005: 244).
In Writing Culture, Clifford argued that anthropology should give more attention to
expressive speech and gesture instead of focusing on a detached ‘observing eye’. Following
this line of thought, he asked: ‘But what about the ethnographic ear?’ (Clifford 1986: 12).
Similarly, Johannes Fabian who also contributed to the debates surrounding the ‘crisis of
representation’, encouraged anthropologists to think about ethnography – anthropologists’
methodological strategy of choice – as primarily about speaking and listening rather
than observing. In comparison to visually oriented approaches – observation, participant
observation – metaphors that point to sonic methodologies emphasize a temporal process,
and demand coelvaness, which refers here to the idea of sharing a common time and space
with the research participants (Fabian 1983). Despite this courageous call for sonic ways
of engaging and representing ethnographic experiences, the writer’s voice still pervades in
anthropology (Erlmann 2004: 1). In fact, until the 1990s, anthropologists largely turned
a deaf ear to the potential of sounds to broaden their avenues of research (Calzadilla and
Marcus 2006; Marcus 2010). Yet, it would not be exaggerated to argue that we are currently
witnessing a ‘resurgence of the ear’ within the discipline (Erlmann 2004), and that
anthropology is contributing in meaningful ways to the exploration of the sound world.
It is generally understood that the ‘anthropology of sound’ considers all sound-related

dimensions (noise, music, voice, silence, etc.) as significant elements of research and
analysis. This chapter concentrates on the extramusical phenomena and elements that are
included in the ‘anthropology of sound’. Hence, it does not dedicate much attention to music
per se, although many of the methodological strategies mentioned in this chapter could
also apply to the discipline of ethnomusicology. Interestingly, and quite contradictorily,
the ‘anthropology of sound’ also shares many connections with visual anthropology as
both subdisciplines have similar concerns for recording and editing, and both generate
conversations about the issues of representation, creativity, and imagination, among other
things (Boudreault-Fournier 2016a).
In investigating sounds through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists propose an
attentive listening to the everyday in addition to exploring, from an in-depth perspective,
how sounds are entangled in the lives and practices of listeners. Furthermore, sounds offer
a cultural and historical contextualization of auditory perception, and encourage delving
into sonic phenomena, textures, and events as social and cultural constructs. Indeed,
anthropology is not alone in giving serious consideration to how sounds relate to social
and cultural life, and to considering the context in which listening practices take place.
This explains why the ‘anthropology of sound’, or the ‘anthropology in sound’ (Feld 1996),
is fundamentally interdisciplinary.
This chapter sheds light on the methodological strategies developed and adapted by
anthropologists who are interested in the sonic dimensions of social and everyday life. In
order to provide a general landscape of the methods employed by anthropologists, this
chapter is divided in two sections. The first section explores six epistemological approaches
– soundscape, relational ontology, the senses, sound and space, arts-based research and
collaboration, and ethnographic film-making – that have a deep impact on how sounds
became part of the anthropological project and, by extension, how methodologies were
developed to engage with emerging questions and challenges that relate to the sound
world. These six approaches are not mutually exclusive but complement each other. The
second section develops four concrete methodological components of an ethnographic
approach attentive to sounds – listening, recording, editing, and representation (following
the conversation in Feld and Brenneis 2004: 461).
Ethnographic fieldwork – the anthropological method par excellence – is broadly
understood as a research approach that necessitates long-term involvement with a group,
collective, or community in order to ultimately ‘speak nearby’ instead of ‘speaking about’
as pointed out by Trinh T. Minh-ha in her film Reassemblage (1982), produced during
her fieldwork in Senegal. Ethnographic fieldwork is guided by strict ethical concerns and
aims, using methods such as simple observation, participant observation, and interviewing
(among others), to investigate a research question or interest. It is now generally
understood that ethnography refers to ‘a reflexive and experiential process through which
academic and applied understanding, knowing and knowledge are produced’ (Pink 2015:
4). Finally, projects are increasingly developed in collaboration or with the involvement of
participants ‘in the field’, and sound-related projects contribute to anthropology’s recent
interdisciplinary dynamism.
Sonic Methodologies in Anthropology 37
Epistemological approaches to the sound

world in anthropology
Soundscape
Despite a few exceptions (for instance, Feld [1982] 1990; Helmreich 2007; Rice 2008), the
concept of soundscape has not had as much impact in anthropology as it has had in other
disciplines, particularly in sound studies, but also in arts, cultural studies, urban planning,
and communication. R. Murray Schafer defines the concept of soundscape as ‘any acoustic
field of study’ and any ‘events heard, not objects seen’ (Schafer [1977] 1994: 8, emphasis
in the original). Although from an anthropological point of view, the term soundscape
as understood by Schafer offers possibilities of considering the cultural nature of sound,
existing methodologies that allow us to think about the sound world, and exploring
material spaces of performances (Samuels et al. 2010: 330), the concept has been criticized
by anthropologists (among others) for representing a utopian and romantic-ecological-
environmentalist vision of sound, especially in relation to the urban space which Schafer
most often associates with noise pollution. Among the oft-cited critics, Tim Ingold
emphasizes how the concept of soundscape proposes a model that separates hearing from
the other senses. Furthermore, Schafer’s approach presents sound as a landscape that is
admired from a distance without engaging with debates on agency and issues of perception
(Ingold 2007; Helmreich 2010; Eisenberg 2015; Feld 2015a). Finally, Schafer’s perspective
is reminiscent of ‘salvage ethnography’, associated with the work of famous anthropologist
Franz Boas, which focused on preserving, describing, and recording cultural forms
threatened with extinction over time. Similarly, Schafer and his team focused on collecting
‘non-contaminated’ sounds before noise pollution and to collect recordings in a repository
of ‘endangered sounds’.
In spite of this, Schafer’s concept inspired – and still inspires – social scientists to pay
attention to sound material in their fields of investigation and to come up with different
understandings of the term soundscape. For example, historian Emily Thompson, who
explores the emergence of the modern sound through delving into a sonic history of
architecture during the post-Fordist era, defines soundscape as ‘an auditory or aural
landscape […] simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that
environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’
(Thompson 2002: 1). Stefan Helmreich (2007) described the experience of sound under
water – not immediately perceptible to human ear – as ‘soundstate’. And Alain Corbin (1998)
deals with the presence – then the disappearance – of bells in the soundscape of the French
countryside in the nineteenth century, evoking a rich sensory landscape in transformation.
Schafer’s work also influenced in one way or another several anthropologists working with
sound, including Steven Feld, who made several recordings of bells in Europe and Africa
(Feld 2002; 2004a; 2004b; 2005). More recently, Andrew Eisenberg (2013) discusses the
politics of sound in Mombasa Old Town in Kenya by engaging with the multiple layers of
an ‘Islamic soundscape’.
There are two ways of understanding the concept of soundscape, which speak to the
methodological approaches adopted by anthropologists. First of all, there are the layers of
sounds that surround us in everyday life and that make up the sonic world, for example
when we take a walk in a busy market or in a forest. Secondly, there are the soundscapes
that we create or alter voluntarily. As Schafer ([1977] 1994: 205) explains, we can all
guide the orchestras that perform the soundscapes of this world, and we can also help
reduce noise pollution. Thus, we can transform the soundscapes that surround us by
creating more harmonic spaces that are receptive to the complexity of the sounds. For
example, we may decide not to use air conditioning at home to reduce noise pollution or,
as Schafer did, we may compose an original symphony, which is also a strategy, albeit a
more substantial one, for transforming the soundscape of our everyday life. According to
Schafer, noise is considered the enemy of sound and that is why we must try to eliminate
it. Yet, the anthropological perspective on what distinguishes ‘sound’ from ‘noise’ is based
on cultural, contextual, and even personal criteria rather than universal principles. By
attempting to embed noise-related phenomena within cultural and social contexts, it is
therefore possible to generate reflections that go beyond mere criticism and the rejection
of sounds ‘we do not like’.
Also, ethnographic research on noise from an infrastructural and ethnomusicological
point of view encourages the emergence of conversations about how sounds circulate
(or not) through certain networks, and how this influences creative forms of listening
as well as generates unique sonic aesthetics (Larkin 2008; Novak 2013; Eisenberg 2013;
Steingo 2016; Boudreault-Fournier, forthcoming). A contextual approach to noise pushes
anthropologists to develop multisited ethnographic fieldwork that ‘follows the sounds’ as
they circulate through various networks and infrastructures.
To go back to Schafer’s invitation to take part in the composition of the soundscapes
of this world, it remains a bold, if not courageous, invitation from the perspective of
anthropologists who often situate themselves within a social sciences approach (rather than
from an arts discipline). Yet, sound processing and editing, as well as arts-based research
and collaboration with sound artists, stimulate new ways of imagining the ethnographic
enterprise. From this, new conversations emerge about the role and impact of the
anthropologists while conducting fieldwork (discussed below). Directly or indirectly,
the concept of soundscape as developed by Schafer influenced many anthropologists to
consider sound as a significant element of ethnographic research – something they should
pay attention to – and to consider sound recording as a serious aspect of ethnographic
fieldwork.
Relational ontology
During a conversation with Donald Brenneis, the ethnomusicologist, linguist, and
anthropologist Steven Feld (Feld and Brenneis 2004) remembers the first paper he wrote
while he was studying under the supervision of Alan P. Merriam at Indiana University. His
paper was a response to the book The Anthropology of Music (1964), written by Merriam
himself. Feld explains that two questions were at the base of the argument developed in his
essay at the time, questions that still guide his anthropological approach today: What about
an anthropology of sound? What about ethnographies that are tape recordings? (Feld and
Brenneis 2004: 463). It was this shift of perspective towards listening and recording that led
Feld to delve into the ‘anthropology of sound’ and into what he later called an ‘anthropology
in sound’ (Feld 1996).
During his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, Feld described the songs
performed by the Kaluli people of Bosavi as adaptations of the tropical forest in which
they lived, but it was much more than that. By training his ears to the ways in which people
produce and perceive sounds, Feld realized that the songs performed by the Kaluli people
were vocal cartographies of the rainforest, and that they were sung from the point of view
of the birds that represented the Kaluli people’s dead ancestors. To immerse himself in
the phenomenology of perception, body, place, and voice, he had to explore a different
ontological approach. For example, rather than considering trails at ground level, he
transposed himself into the skin of birds to understand the poetics of over-river airways
(Feld [1982] 1990; 2015a). His reflections, fueled by recordings (Feld 1991; more below
on recordings), generated a relational approach to the sound domain that responded to
Schafer’s fundamental shortcomings (Feld 1994; 1996).
In the same conversation with Brenneis mentioned before, Feld explained that ‘an
ethnography should include what it is that people hear every day’ (Feld and Brenneis
2004: 462), what he came to refer to as ‘acoustemology’ (Feld 1996), a fusion between
acoustics and epistemology, to refer to the primacy of sound and listening as a modality
of knowledge and of being in the world. Based on a relational ontology, the concept of
acoustemology transmits the idea that we learn not through an acquired form of knowledge
but through a cumulative and interactive process based on participatory and interactive
experiences (Sterne 2012: 13–14). Feld was inspired by the concept of soundscape, but he
also dissociated himself from it. In comparison with soundscape as developed by Schafer,
who takes sound as an indicator of how humans live in their environment, acoustemology
is relational, situated, fluid, reflexive, and contextual; it is the study of sound as a way of
knowing. Acoustemology contrasts with the impression of rigidity, distance, and division
of the senses associated with soundscape.
The essence of relationality embedded in acoustemology inspired many anthropologists
to pursue how we learn from interacting with a specific sound world, positing that listening
involves a form of knowledge that is relational and based on the awareness of our acoustic
presence. For instance, Thomas Porcello draws on acoustemology to refer to the impact
of technologies in the mediation of sensation and sound experiences. He came to refer to
this as ‘techoustemology’. The empirical experience of sound consumption through the
use of technologies (radio, recorded music, electric musical instruments, television, video
games, etc.) is embedded within a cultural and social space and, in a historical period,
associated with perceptions of listening (Porcello 2005: 270). Andrew Eisenberg (2013)
explores the acoustemology of Muslim citizenship in Kenya, and Tom Rice (2003) delves
into the ‘soundselves’, the acoustemology of the self in relation to the experience of care in
the hospital environment.
Senses
The music historian and sound scholar Veit Erlmann argues that until recently,
anthropologists have generally approached the senses as texts to be read. As a consequence,
few ethnographies have engaged with the domain of sound and ‘actual listening practices’
(Erlmann 2004: 2). Yet, ethnographies focusing on the senses and on embodied sensorial
perceptions, including hearing and listening, contributed to a ‘sensory turn’ from the 1990s
onward (Stoller 1989; Taussig 1993; Howes 2003, 2019a; Rice 2008, 2013). As part of this
growing interest for the senses, Lucien Castaing-Taylor founded the Sensory Ethnography
Lab at Harvard University in 2006 and David Howes founded the Centre for Sensory Studies
at Concordia University, which have contributed to emphasizing the multisensoriality of
the ethnographic process (Pink 2015).
In giving attention to the sensorial world, some anthropologists propose to destabilize
the hegemony of the visual often associated with Western culture (Stoller 1989; Howes
1991; Bull and Back 2003), while others point out that ‘subterranean histories’ have always
confronted the presumption of ocularcentrism associated with modernity (Hirschkind
2006; Samuels et al. 2010). Indeed, there might be a form of anti-visualism associated with
the anthropology of the senses (Rice 2008; Eisenberg 2015). Yet, the objective is not to
argue that hearing should take priority over the other senses in proposing a sono-centric
approach (Bull and Back 2003; Sterne 2003; Erlmann 2004; Feld 2015a) but to think of
sound as part of a set of sensations that remain at the centre of the relational experiences
defining the ethnographic project.
Two more or less defined branches have come out with strength from this ‘sensory turn’
and have encouraged the emergence of new paths in academic debates: an ‘anthropology
of the senses’ branch associated with the work of David Howes and followers; and ‘sensory
anthropology’ aligning with the work of Tim Ingold and Sarah Pink, among others.
The two branches division is arbitrary but it still helps to indicate a general idea of how
anthropologists tend to approach the senses from a methodological perspective.
Following an anthropology of the senses type of approach, Paul Stoller (1997) encourages
anthropologists to develop a ‘sensuous scholarship’ that confronts the sensual constitutions
of local epistemologies. This implies that each culture should be approached on its own
sensory terms and that anthropologists should consider from a comparative perspective
each culture’s own ‘ways of sensing’ (Howes and Classen 2013). Scholars associated with
the ‘anthropology of the senses’ tend to argue that ‘senses are made, not given’, that sensory
values are embedded within a social and cultural context, and that they are socially
conditioned, which implies that sensorial perception is not simply a psychophysical
phenomenon (Howes 2019b). Also, following Howes, although the senses should be
understood as complementing each other, they may work in conflict. Therefore, ‘perception
is best understood in terms of performance rather than psychophysics’ (Howes 2019b). In
contrast, indebted to the ecological psychology of James J. Gibson and the phenomenology
of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ingold does not engage with a cultural construction or
collective representation of the senses. He bases his exploration of sensorial perception
on psychophysics and how people listen, touch, taste, etc. and his perceptual approach
corresponds to the sensorial anthropology branch mentioned above. Along with Ingold,
Pink argues for a ‘sensory anthropology’ that encourages ethnographers to think about
‘how people sense the world’, in comparison to ‘ways of sensing the world’ as characterizing
the ‘anthropology of the senses’ branch. In her book Doing Sensory Ethnography, Pink
proposes various methodological approaches to develop sensorial ethnographies:
The experiencing, knowing and emplaced body is […] central to the idea of a sensory
ethnography. Ethnographic practice entails our multisensorial embodied engagements with
others (perhaps through participation in activities or exploring their understandings in
part verbally) and their social, material, discursive and sensory environments. It moreover
requires us to reflect on these engagements, to conceptualise their meanings theoretically
and to seek ways to communicate the relatedness of experiential and intellectual meanings
to others.
(Pink 2015: 18)
To reflect on our own engagement requires a reflexive approach to our own bodily
experiences as social scientists, a call that echoes the debate launched by the edited volume
Writing Culture, mentioned above. Pink places verbal communication, and more specifically
interviewing, as a key ‘social, sensorial and affective’ method to better understand other
people’s sensory categories (Pink 2015: 76). To conduct research about the senses, including
hearing, however, anthropologists need to think in terms of multisensory ethnographic
projects (Feld 1996). This implies that anthropologists should consider sonic ways to share
experiences and interpretations emerging from ethnographies conducted in sound.
Sound and space

Sound is inherently spatial. It is also positional, which means that one’s location in an
environment affects how one perceives sounds. In terms of human experience, ‘sound is
constitutive of space, just as space is constitutive of sound’ (Eisenberg 2015: 194). A space
is thus perceived, facilitated and imagined as a site of experience and experiment ‘for
thinking relations between bodies, concepts, and materials of various kinds’ (McCormack
2008: 7). Derek McCormack uses the term ‘thinking-space’ to refer to an encounter with
a site where space is conceived and generated. Echoing Michel de Certeau, McCormack
provides examples of actions such as walking, dancing, writing, and we could add
listening, as techniques to encourage anthropologists to develop ‘thinking-space’ as a
process. In other words, space is not just there to be discovered by the researcher, rather, it
is a relational engagement or an acoustemology of place. Through listening and recording
practices anthropologists are encouraged to co-constitute a sense of space (Westerkamp
2002; Pink 2015).
Therefore, conducting research ‘in the field’ includes a sonic awareness of the
surrounding environment that speaks to a ‘cultured’ sonic interpretation of space. For
instance, Eisenberg describes the Old City of Mombasa, where vocal performances
including sermons and religious songs in multiple languages – Arabic, Swahili, English –
are heard as a ‘multiaccentual public space’ (Eisenberg 2013, 2015). These sermons mark
spatial territories and neighbourhoods and contribute to building the Muslim citizenship
of the Kenyan coast. Eisenberg adopts a ‘participant audition’1 method to explore the
Islamic soundscape, and more specifically the multiple boundaries that characterize
Mombasa as a heterogenous city. He argues that participant audition ‘calls for attention
to sonic spatialities not only as multiple but also as overlapping and mutually mediating’
(Eisenberg 2015: 200).
In a different geographic location, the anthropologist Martijn Oosterbaan also pays
attention to the charismatic cacophony, or multiple layering of sounds, created by different
groups in a favela in Rio de Janeiro, including Pentecostal churches and partygoers listening
to funk. Through amplified music that communicates a ‘politics of presence’, the different
groups build the boundaries of their territories. Hence, music reproduces group identities
in the favela city-space, making audible the power struggles of the neighbourhood and the
positions occupied by its inhabitants (Oosterbaan 2009: 85).
When conducting research in the field, anthropologists navigate inside layers of sounds,
at the same time as they reflect on the social and political questions that emerge from the
research. When adopting attentive listening practices, sonic perceptions of a space generate
ethnographic reflections about boundaries, identities, and politics of presence that shape
the city and other social territories (LaBelle 2010) such as the ‘sensory home’ (Pink 2004),
museums (Zisiou 2011; Bubaris 2014), hospitals (Rice 2013), and ancient sites (Devereux
2001; Reznikoff 2006; Blesser and Salter 2007). Ethnographers conducting ‘anthropology in
sound’ may pay attention to controlled sonic spaces, for example recording studios, which
are said to inform modern epistemologies of sound (Born 2013; see also Thompson, in
this volume), and even mediate social spaces and aesthetics (Meintjes 2003). In adopting a
‘fresh ear’ and in being receptive to other sonic materialities, alternative layers of meanings
and interpretations often emerge. Social spaces such as churches (Blesser and Salter
2007) and shopping centres (Sterne 1997; LaBelle 2010) reveal intentional religious and
capitalist architectonics respectively. Ultimately, auditory spatial awareness ‘is more than
just the ability to detect that space has changed sounds, it includes as well the emotional
and behavioral experience of space’ (Blesser and Salter 2007: 11). Indeed, ‘it is difficult to
identify any work of sound studies that does not deal in some way with space’ (Eisenberg
2015: 195, emphasis in the original). Thus, anthropologists and sound scholars contribute
to the particularization of social spaces by delving into broader questions of politics,
identity, performance, and aesthetics.
Arts-based research and collaboration

Despite the fact that anthropology has ‘largely treated the work of sound artists as
tangential to its enterprise’ (Samuels et al. 2010: 334), sound art does attract the attention of
anthropologists who wish to push the boundaries of more conventional forms of conducting
and understanding ethnographic fieldwork and explore novel ways of engaging with the
sound world. Anthropologists sometimes borrow from methodologies associated with the
arts, often referred to as ‘research-creation’ or ‘arts-based research’ (Boudreault-Fournier
2016b). They may also collaborate with sound artists for the realization of joint projects.
Collaborations between artists and anthropologists who combine their efforts to design and
implement an art work that is also part of a research venture contribute to the exploration
of novel approaches to ethnographic fieldwork (Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010, 2013). In
this context, the process of recording sounds and editing them into original compositions
can be conceived as part of a practice of ethnography and can reveal layers of meanings
that are not necessarily attainable through more traditional ethnographic methods (Drever
2002; Boudreault-Fournier 2012, 2016a, b; Boudreault-Fournier and Wees 2017).
The Displace 1.0 (2011) and 2.0 (2012) performances by artists Chris Salter and
TeZ together with anthropologist David Howes are examples of artist-anthropologist
initiatives that combine approaches to create an installation and a performance aimed
at stimulating sensorial experiments. In an interview about the experiment Displace
2.0: Performative Sensory Environment, Salter explains that the ‘critical aim is to design
large performative environments that hybridize cultures and begin to develop the
aesthetic potential of the non-visual senses’ in order ‘to see if we could start a dialogue
between sensory anthropology and the design of new kinds of so-called “multimodal”
[…] environments’ (Bertolotti n.d.: n.p.). Similarly, Howes (2019a) expresses that the
‘performative sensory environments’ created through the Displace 1.0 installation, ‘sought
to disrupt conventional habits of perception by rearranging the senses and thereby open a
crack in the Western sensorium’.
Other examples of collaborations include Steven Feld, who worked with artist Virginia
Ryan on a multimedia installation called the Castaways Project, inspired by the West Africa
coastline (Ryan and Feld 2007). The project redefined the boundaries between art and
anthropology, and proposed a multisensorial way of engaging with memories and the legacy
of slavery (see Virginia Ryan Virtual Artist n.d.). Another collaboration, between Feld
and Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist Nii Otoo Annan, gave birth to an experimental CD
called Bufo Variations (Annan and Feld 2008; see also Feld 2015b). Felds’s methodological
approach consisted of a mix of playback techniques (that he borrowed from anthropologist
and film-maker Jean Rouch), dialogic editing, and conversations with Annan about ‘his
listening practices, his sonic knowing, his acoustemological way of hearing’ (Feld 2015b:
94). Feld referred to this last methodological strategy as ‘listening to histories of listening’.
In attempting to explore how listening is embedded into forms of learning and practicing,
the dialogic nature of listening emerges and connects with the relational ontology principle
of acoustemology.
Ethnographic film-making
Many people forget that cinema is as much about sound as it is about images. Michel
Chion (1994) defines the false impression that sound is ‘invisible’ or unnecessary to
the cinematographic experience as ‘audiovisual illusion’. Ethnographic films are usually
characterized by low budgets, small teams, and handheld cameras, based on fieldwork and
guided by ethical considerations. Very few ethnographic or documentary film-makers have
paid serious attention to sound, be it in practice – from a methodological or theoretical

perspective – or in the considerations of the sonic dimensions as contributing to a film
narrative (Jeffrey Ruoff [1992] and Paul Henley [2007] are rare exceptions).
The history of the ethnographic film is tightly woven with that of the discipline of
anthropology on the one hand, and technological developments on the other. Most notably,
the invention of shoulder cameras and synchronized sound in the 1960s – permitting
sound to be recorded simultaneously with the images – allowed for greater flexibility of
movement and filmic possibilities. With this innovation, it became more common to
see and hear participants in a film dialoguing or responding to the camera (for example
Chronicle of a Summer [1961] by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin) rather than having voice-
over comments by a ‘narrator god’ (for example The Hunters [1957] by John Marshall and
Robert Gardner). Australians David and Judith MacDougall also helped pave the way for
an approach that encouraged the use of subtitles rather than voice-overs in order to hear
the intonation of the vocal exchanges (Grimshaw 2008).
But essentially, sounds in ethnographic films are still deemed as secondary to images,
and music added in the editing suite is often regarded with a suspicious eye (Henley 2007).
The French anthropologist-film-maker Jean Rouch went as far as describing music added
to images in the editing suite as the ‘opium of cinema’. That is because observational film
– a genre of ethnographic film – is thought to engage with the everyday, captured by the
camera in the most non-obtrusive way possible. Still today, the ‘frank admission of the
manipulation of the sound-track sits rather uncomfortably with the empirical rhetoric
not just of observational cinema but with most contemporary modes of ethnographic
documentary-making’ (Henley 2007: 57).
Without denying that sound manipulation might not best fit with the aesthetics of
observational ethnographic film, Henley recognizes that the design of a soundtrack could
contribute to the thickness of ethnographic description (Geertz 1973; Samuels et al. 2010).
This thickness is in the representation of space and place. In other words, carefully recorded
environmental sounds and a soundtrack designed in the editing suite can contribute to
better communicating a sense of place and, according to Henley, does so in three main
ways: thickening ethnographic description, enhancing the spectator’s understanding, and
proposing new interpretations of the film’s subject matter (Henley 2007: 56).
In using sounds more creatively and effectively in ethnographic film-making, ‘visual’
anthropologists contribute not only to enhancing the experience of the audience but
also provide new forms of engagement with listening, design, aesthetics, composition,
and collaboration (for example Boudreault-Fournier and Diamanti 2018). Recently,
the American Anthropologist journal relaunched its ‘Visual Anthropology’ section as
‘Multimodal Anthropologies’, defined as ‘an umbrella term which encompasses all the
audio-visual affordances of contemporary media’ (Collins, Durrington, and Gill 2017).
Multimodal anthropology invites ethnographers to work across multiple media and
also to develop collaborative work, engaging in public anthropology ‘through a field of
differentially linked media platforms’ (Collins, Durrington, and Gill 2017: 142). Sound
(recording) is one element among others that are combined in a composite of media with
an emphasis on the ‘processes of knowledge production’ instead of the final product (a
book, a film, etc.). Growing from visual anthropology, ‘modal approaches’ go further than
just the visual, in also using the other senses and media to build innovative ways in which
anthropology could be increasingly engaged with the public in the near future.
Ethnographic fieldwork
Conducting ethnographic fieldwork has traditionally been equated with long-term
immersion in a cultural setting other than the one to which the anthropologist is
accustomed. The obligation to conduct empirical research in a different cultural setting
than the ethnographer’s own is not expected anymore. Yet, the idea of immersion is still
implicit in how ethnographic fieldwork is imagined and taught in graduate programmes.
This immersion ideally involves a long and intensive commitment during which the
anthropologist is expected to learn the language (among other things) and acquire a sense
of the multiple dimensions entangled in the exploration of an original research question.
In describing his first days of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Feld expresses feelings of
displacement and confusion during his sudden immersion in another cultural setting:
The first day I was there, within two hours of arriving in the village, we hear sung weeping.
Somebody had died. They [Bambi and Buck Schieffelin] said, ‘Get your tape recorder.’ I
didn’t understand the language. I didn’t know anything! So here I am, wham! With big Bagra
[tape recorder] and headphones and microphone sitting among all these people who were
weeping. I just sort of closed my eyes and listened and realized that I could easily spend a
year trying to figure out the first sounds I was hearing.
(Feld and Brenneis 2004: 464)
Therefore, participant observation is imagined as a form of experience during which the

ethnographer is ‘soaked in’ a cultural context in which he or she will live for a long period
of time (one year is usually expected for a PhD student).
Based on his unique fieldwork in a submarine called Alvin, which descends deep down
to the ocean floor of the Juan the Fuca Ridge located on the Pacific Northwest coast of
North America, the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich developed a powerful critique of
the idea of cultural immersion. His work shows that ‘doing anthropology in sound’ (Feld
1996) can generate epistemological and methodological debates about the nature of
ethnographic fieldwork – a reflection that can be applied beyond sound related projects.
More specifically, Helmreich puts forward the term ‘transduction’, to refer to both the
process of transmuting one medium into another. In the case of the submarine, there is a
transfer from the medium of water to the medium of air. He also defines the anthropological
project to encompass a ‘transduced sensing’ that permits cultural immersion (Helmreich
2007: 622, 2009).
As Helmreich dives into the darkness, his attention is captured by the sounds of the
deep ocean, perceptible by human ears thanks to a process of transduction afforded by
the submarine’s apparatuses. This vessel, which both acts like a bubble and a cyborg,
allows the anthropologist to experience a sense of immersion within another sensorial
environment. As mentioned above, Helmreich draws a fascinating parallel between the

electric transduction of the submarine’s machinery and the role of the anthropologist.
This comparison also allows him to articulate a critique of the concept of immersion.
More specifically, Helmreich argues that to ‘think transductively is […] also to consider
ethnography itself as transduction – and the ethnographer as a kind of transducer’
(Helmreich 2007: 633). In comparison with the concept of immersion, which presumes
‘dissolving into’ or ‘becoming one with’, transduction is a process that can tune us into
disjuncture, resistance, and distortion (Helmreich 2007). Transduction emphasizes
the process of transformation from one form of energy (in a broad sense) to another.
Similarly, ethnographers act as transducers when they convert their sensorial experiences
of fieldwork into digestible ethnographic accounts – which often take the shape of written
texts. Helmreich is cautious about arguing that transduction could be applied to all
forms of ethnographic enterprise. Yet his call to consider the potential for a transductive
ethnography ‘in sound’ can certainly apply to research on media, infrastructure, sonic
controlled spaces such as recording studios (Meintjes 2003; Theberge 2004), and
ethnographic epistemologies of the senses (Helmreich 2007).
The work of Helmreich on transduction shows that paying attention to sounds while
conducting fieldwork can generate in-depth epistemological and methodological reflections
that impact the discipline of anthropology at a theoretical level as well as the nature of its
empirical approach. While recognizing the critique of immersion developed by Helmreich,
we also need to acknowledge that ethnographic fieldwork remains anthropology’s
methodological strength. Based on long-term relationships as well as direct and embodied
experiences, ethnographic fieldwork is a – mostly – qualitative methodological approach
that allows for in-depth engagement with everyday life, especially the particular and the
sensorial. In order to contribute to a ‘sounded anthropology’ (Samuels et al. 2010) and
to train our ‘ethnographic ear’ (Erlmann 2004), the rest of this chapter will delve into the
ethnographic enterprise with a focus on sonic practices. In order to do so, I will discuss
four dimensions – listening, recording, editing, and representation – identified by Feld as
fundamental to thinking about an ethnography of sound (Feld and Brenneis 2004).
Listening
Listening is an art to be cultivated, which implies that it takes time and practice to refine our
hearing sensitivities and our sound awareness. Schafer (1994) proposes various techniques
to sharpen our ears to the sounds that surround us. Exercises to improve listening include:
stop making sounds for a while, not talking for a whole day, meditating by focusing on
a specific sound, and/or soundwalking. He explains that a soundwalk is more than just
a walk because it involves careful listening to sounds throughout the journey. Schafer
proposes the use of a guide and a map on which one can annotate the different sounds
encountered while wandering in a territory, but there are many ways one can think about
conducting a soundwalk.
Composer and environmentalist Hildegard Westerkamp also firmly believes in
the power of soundwalks because ‘in opening our ears, we can open our minds’ (‘How
Opening Our Ears Can Open Our Minds: Hildegard Westerkamp’ 2017). As mentioned,
soundwalks may take different forms, but for Westerkamp, the essential remains the
same: a designated person guides the walk during which participants, in silence, must
pay close attention to the sounds that surround them. The journey may include listening
stops, instructions, moments of mediation and appreciation, and added audible elements.
Westerkamp explains:
Instructions given before soundwalks are a tool to enable deeper listening. They are always
simple and don’t change much. The experiences of the participating listeners, however,
are always different. The main and only instruction is to walk together without speaking.
Everything else is said to make sure that all questions are answered, and everyone feels safe
to allow a total immersion into the listening.
(Westerkamp 2017: 151)
Once the soundwalk is over, the guide discusses participants’ experiences. Westerkamp
notes that the group conversation is
an essential ingredient of a soundwalk experience […] because it brings to consciousness the
real significance of such a listening process. It gives an invaluable opportunity to compare
what was heard and noticed, what was significant for participants, what was not and why,
which parts of the walk impressed the most and so on. The variety of responses highlights
how complex our listening perception really is.
(Westerkamp 2017: 155)
Interestingly, soundwalking stimulates the senses and encourages an increased awareness

of sounds. But, as Westerkamp points out, one needs to reflect on how to think and express
it. The concept of deep listening, whether in the context of a soundwalk or when an
ethnographer pays close attention to the presence of sounds in a specific space, can refer to
the process of attuning ‘our ears to listen again to the multiple layers of meaning potentially
embedded in the same sound’ (Bull and Back 2003: 4, my emphasis). But more than agile
listening, as Westerkamp reminds us, deep listening also involves ‘practices of dialogue and
procedures for investigation, transposition, and interpretation’ (4).
Attuning our ears may serve diverse purposes and we may adopt varied forms of listening
in different contexts and situations. For instance, a piano tuner, a bird song enthusiast, a self-
taught musician, an employee working in an industry, an ecologist, and an anthropologist,
do not necessarily listen attentively for the same reasons. As part of his ethnographic
research on sounds in hospital settings, Tom Rice (2013) defines the stethoscope as ‘an
autobiographical object’, and his methodological listening approach as ‘stethoscopic’
(Rice 2008). More specifically, in using a stethoscope to listen to patients’ bodies, Rice
experimented with the subtleties involved in medical listening practices. Interestingly, the
stethoscope also facilitated his relationships with medical specialists (Harris 2015; Pink
2015: 105). David Novak (2013), who conducted research on noise music in Japan, argues
that listening is a form of circulation and that it should be approached as an active and
creative practice. In observing how listeners react in particular affective-volitional ways
to an Islamic sermon, which he qualifies as an ‘ethical performance’, Charles Hirschkind
(2006) also emphasizes that listening is active and participatory. As suggested by Rice’s
fieldwork experience in a hospital setting, the technique of listening can be used during
ethnographic research as a way to facilitate conversation with participants. Listening to
recordings can also trigger memories and stories associated with the past (Harris 2015).
Through sonic elicitation, such conversations can further prompt research participants to
talk about their ways of sonic knowing and can teach us about ‘how to be an ethnographer
listener’ (Feld and Brenneis 2004). Feld used recording as a form of sonic-elicitation to
stimulate conversation among the Kaluli people. While playing back recordings to small
groups of people and inviting them to listen, he also stimulated conversations about the
interpretations of sounds. In referring to the production of his album Voices of the Rainforest,
Feld explains how the participation of the Bosavi through sonic elicitation was key to
his ethnographic listening approach because he better understood what sounds meant
for them. Through listening, he also received their input on how to edit the recording, a
technique he refers to as dialogic editing. Again, Feld needs to be quoted at length:
So I had three cassette players in the bush. I would record tracks on the Nagra and then
transfer them onto cassettes. And then, I would sit with people and listen to the cassettes and
invite my listeners to scroll the knobs on the cassettes. It was an ethnoaesthetic negotiation,
trying to work with Bosavi people to understand how they listened, how they heard the
dimensionality of forest sound, how they would balance a mix of birds, water, cicadas,
voices, and so forth.
Listening is then a method to cultivate, and it can also become a method of ethnographic
exploration to deepen our sonic approach as well as reflect on the nature of recordings.
Recording
Jonathan Sterne (2003) argues against the idea that recording devices promote a
disorienting effect on our senses. On the contrary, a fundamental feature of sound
recording and composition is intensive listening, both directly with our ears and via the
microphone, a process that immerses creator and listener in their environment, fostering
increased spatial awareness. In soundscape composition, ‘knowledge of specific contexts
shapes the composer’s work and invokes the listener’s knowledge of those contexts […] at
the intersections of the listener’s associations, memories and imaginations related to that
place’ (Eylul Iscen 2014: 127). Anthropologists who use an audio recorder interact with the
environment in a particular way; they move cautiously as the senses awaken. That is because
recording involves special attention to where one stands. It is about detecting the sound
details that one wants to collect. Anthropologists conducting fieldwork through sound shift
their attention to what surrounds them when recording a sound. They become more aware
of their presence, the sounds that emanate from their body and the movements they make,
more so as it is difficult to eliminate the presence of the anthropologist who records even
with the use of a unidirectional microphone. Therefore, the process of recording provides
an opportunity to develop a reflexive sensory approach, as it creates routes to multisensorial
knowing (Pink 2004). Thanks to the recording device, anthropologists experience a place
through their bodies and their senses. Intensive listening practices during the process
of recording fully immerse anthropologists in their environment, fostering an increased
spatial awareness.
Despite the fact that the publication of sound recordings is not that common among
ethnographers, recording is conceived as a fundamental practice for anthropologists.
Notably, Feld argued that ‘recordings always seemed to me an important alternative as
a form of ethnographic practice’ (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 462). This implies that sound
recording becomes a strategy to connect with research participants, and also considers
how the ethnographer can reflect on their own listening practices and sensitivities. Yet as
the writer and artist Paul Carter (2004) highlights, recordings do not only mimic or echo
the environment in which the participants live, as for example in the rainforest recordings
collected by Feld. Recordings are full of noises, disruptions, technological, and historical
traces, and the place and context in which they are played often add another layer of sonic
disruption and cultural discontinuity. More than just a mnemonic device, recordings offer
the possibility to reflect critically and reflexively on the positionality of the anthropologist;
they encourage a careful and multisensorial engagement with place, and stimulate a
dialogue about what listening means and for whom.
Editing
The process of editing sounds and images into original compositions and clips should be
conceived as part of the practice of ethnography, as it is the case with writing (Drever
2002; Feld and Brenneis 2004; Boudreault-Fournier 2012, 2017). Recording and editing
soundscapes or sound clips can shape and transform our understanding and representation
of a space. In other words, editing a field recording becomes a process through which
the ethnographer is making sense of the data of a specific place. The ethnographer is
involved in transducing (to echo Helmreich’s term) their ethnographic experiences into a
narrative, a story, or a sonic representation. The use of the sound recorder and the editing
techniques need to be approached as a creative process, ‘which requires craft and editing
and articulation just like writing’, and if not, ‘little will happen of an interesting sort in the
anthropology of sound’ (Feld and Brenneis 2004: 471). As a response, it can be argued that
both editing sounds and writing are processes of synthesis and creative production. Of
course, and as mentioned in relation to ethnographic films, there is a certain discomfort,
still prevalent in anthropology, with the idea of constructing meaning through the
manipulation, transformation, and staging of data. This is even more relevant with sound,
which is often perceived as a rather abstract medium. Yet, it could be argued that sound
compositions are highlighting ‘people’s sensory experiences and mental worlds in more
expressive and relational ways’ (Eylul Iscen 2014: 127), and provide greater freedom to
explore the issue of imagination (Boudreault-Fournier and Wees 2017). In borrowing
from arts-based research approaches, anthropologists can explore the dimension of sound
processing and editing, often missing from anthropological accounts, in transparent
and productive ways (Boudreault-Fournier and Wees 2017). Sound opens new avenues
of sensing, experiencing, and learning that cannot be compared to the visual and/or the
written. Sound presents opportunities to anthropologists to other ways of knowing and
sharing that include the creative and reflective potential of the editing process.
Representation
Sound recording and editing can take various forms, from oral storytelling to recorded
soundwalks, sonic documentaries, and podcasts. Walter Gershon proposed a ‘sonic
ethnography’, which he defines as ‘the sounded representation of “data” collected and
analyzed over the course of an ethnographic study’ (Gershon 2013). Gershon conducted
fieldwork with a fifth-grade classroom, and adopted a methodology based on collaborative
sound recording and editing to explore how songwriting might alleviate racial and gender
gaps in science education. One of his outputs is a piece made of various sonic layers,
including a beat track, with students rapping and interacting with the teachers and the
ethnographer himself (‘ResoundingScience’ 2013). In Gershon’s piece, sound is both used
as a research methodology and as a tool of dissemination and representation.
Like any ethnography, sonic methodologies (including sonic ethnography, sonic
elicitation, etc.) are an act of interpretation. They involve selective listening, a specific
collection of sound clips, as well as the construction of a narrative. The ethnographer and
research participants may be involved in the process of selecting, editing, and creating a
sound piece that will represent the voices of the ones who are implicated. The presence
of the ethnographer is always embedded in sonic representations (as in any other
ethnographic texts) and it is the role of the researcher to adopt a transparent and reflexive
position when recording and editing sound clips. Issues of power relations, marginality,
and silencing may emerge as present or absent in sonic forms of representation and they
should be acknowledged. Writing ethnographies remains the most common practice used
by anthropologists to express and translate ethnographic experiences. Yet, conducting
anthropology in sound should also imply the production of sonic outputs such as sound
installations and performances, recordings, and podcasts providing multisensorial
engagements with ethnographic research. Sonic forms of representation offer novel
strategies of learning and sharing ethnographic knowledge at the same time as they
stimulate new conversation about the nature of ethnographic fieldwork itself.
Unfortunately, little inquiry has been conducted into the ethics of participatory modes of
researching through listening, Gershon being an exception. As mentioned by the historian
Anna Harris (2015), most of the research on the ethics of using sonic participatory
methodological approaches in ethnographic and historical research has focused on the
repatriation of sound archives to indigenous communities (Hennessy 2009; Reddy and
Sonneborn 2013). Producing and sharing recordings, soundscapes, and clips (among
other media) position the ‘anthropology in sound’ as an effective methodological approach
that generates forms of knowing, teaching, and transmitting that are complementary
to, and certainly as valuable as the written text, which is still the dominant medium in
anthropological research. It is time for anthropologists to keep their ears open to other
forms of knowing and sensing the world.
Conclusion
Following the concept of acoustemology developed by one of the main pioneers of the
anthropology of sound, Steven Feld, sonic methodologies in anthropology are characterized
by an ontological model that is fundamentally relational and that relies on first-hand
sensorial experiences. Active listening is required to generate dialogues and exchanges
based on fieldwork and multisensorial encounters. Conducting ethnographic fieldwork in
sound involves being present with the research participants and sharing the same temporal
and spatial dimensions, to paraphrase Johannes Fabian’s work.
Therefore, what defines the discipline’s sonic methodologies is its emphasis on
ethnographic fieldwork as a method of experiencing the sounds present in the environment,
as well as the ethnographer’s involvement in transducing their own empirical encounters.
As suggested in this chapter, in addition to including active listening practices, ethnographic
fieldwork should also involve creative engagements with sounds through recording and
editing techniques. James Clifford might not have thought about the opportunities afforded
by sounds to reshuffle the ethnographic project when he asked, thirty years ago: ‘But what
about the ethnographic ear?’ Yet, ethnographers are increasingly engaged in refining their
ears in creative ways to engage with emerging questions and concerns.
The six epistemological approaches developed here – soundscape, relational ontology,
the senses, sound and space, arts-based research and collaboration, and ethnographic
film-making – guide the exploration of the sonic world in anthropology. They impact the
selection of methodological strategies for specific research questions, and much clearly
remains to be said about the sonic methodologies adopted by anthropologists to explore
topics such as voice and storytelling, digital media, technological mediation, and innovative
pedagogical strategies. The use of sonic methodologies in anthropological research invites
interdisciplinarity and draws on other fields of study, including art, music, communication,
and history, to build a dynamic line of inquiry that is committed to empirical ways of
knowing. In ethnographic fieldwork, these methodologies are typically applied to
generating locally embedded explorations of sonic worlds. This highlights the necessity of
delving into sound while considering the cultural, social, and historical contexts in which
sounds take place. Situated, detailed exploration of soundscapes allow anthropologists to
engage with social and cultural issues through taking different vantage points within the
nested, co-occurring spaces created by sound at scale, close or expanded. Through careful
listening to the world around us, the anthropologists’ methodologies are both refined and
expanded by researching in sound; an empowering response to a fast-moving world.
Note
1. Similar to participant observation but from an auditory perspective, participant audition
implies the adoption of in-depth listening practices and careful attention to the multiple
layers of sounds that circulate – sometimes in conflict – in an urban landscape.
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3
Sonic Methodologies by Way of
Deconstruction
Naomi Waltham-Smith
Methods of invention
Folded and tucked inside Jacques Derrida’s own published copy of Psyché: Inventions de
l’autre in his personal library, now housed at Princeton University, are photocopies of
pages from two French music dictionaries. On the two folded sheets, there are lines in the
margins alongside parts of the entries on ‘Invention’ – some straight, some double tram
lines, some more of a squiggle. While one cannot say with absolute certainty that Derrida
made all of these marks, they appear to be in the same hand, made by the same pen, and
they are broadly consistent with the shape of other such marginalia in other volumes in
his library. On one of the sheets, there are other annotations for other entries of the pages
that have clearly been photocopied, which leads one to conclude that Derrida most likely
added the marginalia against the entries on ‘Inventions’ and ‘Inventions Musicales’ having
copied these particular pages with the specific notion of invention in mind – perhaps
while revisiting his own text. Whether these marks represent traces of his thinking in any
meaningful sense and at what point is much harder to say.
Taken collectively (though not without a couple of exceptions), the annotations suggest
an interest in the structural aspects of Bach’s inventions, in the way in which they expose
their rhythmic and melodic material according to a harmonic unfolding, and also in their
deployment of technical contrapuntal devices. For both entries, Derrida’s marginalia point
to the typical tonal scheme of a double exposition of thematic material in the tonic and
dominant followed by a series of episodes and middle entries culminating in a final entry
in the tonic. For one entry, Derrida puts double lines against the final sentence, which
reads: ‘The writing of these didactic pieces is more often than not canonic because Johann
Sebastian Bach’s goal [but] was to demonstrate to his students all the resources of the learned
style, of which canonic imitation forms the essential framework.’ In the other entry from
Larousse de la musique (1957), he underlines the more nuanced interpretation that ‘these
Inventions do not have an exclusively didactic goal [but]; they surpass it’. He puts a further
line against the end of the entry which develops this point, arguing that Bach’s ‘genius’ lies
in ‘reus[ing] the most beautiful discoveries of the art of polyphony and demonstrat[ing]
the variety of effects that can be spun out of dry and mathematical formulas’.
This chimes with Derrida’s paleonymic reuse of the notion of genius in the collection’s
titular essay, ‘Psyche: The Invention of the Other’, to describe the intervention of an
unexpectedly new invention that comes from the other (paleonymy itself, of course, being
one such invention of Derrida): ‘There is no invention without the intervention of what
was once called genius’ (Derrida 2007: 418). But in the same breath he warns that the
‘brilliant flash of Witz’ cannot be accounted for by ‘a restricted economy of différance’.
Derrida’s reinvented genius is concerned not with the possibilities of invention – the finds
or discoveries (trouvailles) that Bach uncovers in the repository of the learned contrapuntal
style – but with ‘the invention of the impossible’, understood as a double genitive, inventing
what is impossible and the invention that comes only from the hand of the impossible – a
chance even ‘beyond the incalculable as a still possible calculus’ (418). And yet, Derrida’s
annotations suggest that he is also to some extent stopped short by the technical rigour
of Bach’s inventions which precisely are calculable, teachable even – by what might be
described as their mathematical, systematic, even methodical elements. Specifically,
these draw attention to the way in which Bachian invention is not so much opposed to
methodical composition but rather represents its limit, raising its status and credibility to a
pinnacle (ses plus hautes lettres de noblesse), as one of the dictionaries puts it. These copied
pages and their marginalia thus show Derrida turning to the musical inventions of Bach as
a way to reflect on a certain abiding tension in his own thought between the unconditional
incalculable and conditional calculation. A careful reading of Derrida’s writings over the
duration of his career shows that, far from advocating a messianic deferral in favour of the
absolutely other, he insists that any unconditional ‘worthy of the name’ (digne de ce nom)
can only come in the conditioned and conditional acts done in its name.1 Thus Derrida will
say that any decision – a category he associates with the event of invention and chance –
must follow a law [loi] or a prescription, a rule. It must be able to be of the order of what is
calculable or programmable, for example as an act of equity. But if the act simply consists in
applying a rule, of enacting a program of effecting a calculation, we might say that it is legal
[…] but we would be wrong to say that the decision was just. Quite simply because in that
there was no decision.
(Derrida 2001: 251, translation modified, emphasis in the original)
Perhaps it is the case that Bach offers, for Derrida, a glimpse of the more or less tight
interlacing of calculation and the incalculable – of method and invention.
Sound in deconstruction
Why do I dwell on these folded pieces of paper from Derrida’s library? Why focus on the
notion of musical invention underscored there? It might seem as if I were suggesting that
musical invention provided a template – a method even – for deconstruction. Indeed, in
the essay ‘What Remains of Music’ in Psyche, Derrida discovers, via reflections on Roger
Sonic Methodologies by Way of Deconstruction 59
Laporte’s Fugue and Supplément of 1970 and 1973 respectively, a certain affinity between
music, specifically rhythm, and his notion of écriture as an exteriority or relation to the
other that compromises any interiority or inner voice from the outset. Commenting on a
lengthy quotation from Laporte, Derrida proposes:
This reinscription of the blank of writing has an essential relation to music and rhythm.
Rhythm counts more than all the themes it carries off and relaunches and scans constantly.
That is why, instead of an inventory […] of all the ‘themes’ that Fugue fugues and Supplément
supplements (the fugue and the supplement are at once the title, the form, and the theme of
this musical transport of writing), instead of drawing up a false list of themes treated (the
signature, the privilege of the psychoanalytic, metaphor […] etc.), I will briefly mark, so as
to send one back as quickly as possible to the text itself, if one can still say that, the affinity
between the muscle or the ‘rhythmic beat of a blank’ (these are almost the last words of
Supplément) and the rest.
(Derrida 2007: 88–89)
Despite certain statements that suggest a privileging of aphonia over the sonorous, it
would be mistaken to conclude that Derrida straightforwardly eschews sound for silence,
since the effort of what has come to be known as deconstruction is not simply to invert
oppositions, such as that between voice and writing, but, moreover, to put oppositionality
itself in question. As I argue elsewhere, Derrida’s thought entails less a departure from or a
destruction of the phonē than it does its paleonymic reinvention (Waltham-Smith 2021: ch.
3). If the grammatological project involves a generalization of writing beyond its narrow
or vulgar concept, this notion of archi-écriture is inextricably caught up with the sounding
voice, as he explains in the context of a joint interview with Hélène Cixous:
Those who do not read me reproach me at times for playing writing against the voice, as if to
reduce it to silence. In truth, I proposed a reelaboration and a generalization of the concept
of writing, of text or of trace. Orality is also the inscription [frayage] of a trace.
(Derrida 2005: 1)
Notwithstanding these remarks – no doubt to some extent encouraged by Cixous’s own

solicitousness towards aurality – Derrideans have remained suspicious of or/aurality.
Exemplary of this tendency is a chapter of David Wills’s Inanimations devoted to Cixous’s
habit of inserting unusually large white spaces in the middle of sentences or, alternatively,
of compressing words so that they run on together as if without breaths between them
(Wills 2016: 11–52). It is probably fair to say that Wills’s reading remains scrupulously
faithful to a certain Derrida who in Of Grammatology links the spacing of différance to
Mallarmé – faithful to the letter, one might say. His focus is on how these striking blank
spaces – Mallarmé’s ‘les “blancs” frappent’ – wean writing off its subordination to sound, in
this case to being nothing more than the dictation of the breath. In an article on Derrida’s
recently discovered Geschlecht III, Rodrigo Therezo assimilates these Mallarmean blancs
to the silent Grundton that Martin Heidegger discerns as the foundation of Trakl’s poetry,
while also acknowledging that this silence is problematic for Derrida. ‘All would be well
and good with Heidegger’s metaphorical emphasis on silence’, writes Therezo (2018: 253),
except for the fact that this fundamental tone is inextricable from the unity of the German
language and hence from a philosophical nationalism. There is enough in this text and
in Derrida’s writings more generally to suggest a more dispersive, disseminated account
of idiom rather than one gathered into a stultifying unity – one that would not so much
be ‘bleached’, as Therezo wonders (2018: 259), as it would sound altogether otherwise. Or
maybe it would be a bleached sound, whatever that might be (I will have to come back
to this).
In another interview, Derrida gives a striking account of the kind of interweaving
of gathering and dissemination, of binding and loosening, he thinks is eclipsed by
metaphysical unity – striking because the image he uses is diverted by way of a sonic
metaphor, specifically the sound of thousands of voices and their myriad rhythms and
intonations as they travel great distances over telephone lines (Derrida 2002: 29–30). The
metaphor of the telephone, telephony as metaphoricity – these themes will detain us later.
For now, I want to note that this remarkable passage stands out against a more pervasive
hesitation in relation to the sonorous. There is no wholehearted embrace of the sonorous
in Derrida’s work and he is certainly not a writer on sound and music in the way that
Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, or even Alain
Badiou have all been. On several occasions, Derrida has spoken of the multiple voices in
his texts, especially women’s voices (cf. Derrida 1995: 394),2 but there are also times when
he echoes a long tradition going back to Plato of thinking of music and sound as that
which lies outside philosophy and thus of according them either condemnation for their
irrationality and barbarity or reverence for their sublimity. A little shy of writing expressly
about music, when asked in an interview if he was tempted to write on the multiplicity of
voices in music, Derrida replied:
I wonder if philosophy […] has not meant the repression of music or song. Philosophy
cannot, as such, let the song resonate in some way … I do not write about these voices […]
I try to let them speak […]. The music of voices, if there is any, I do not sign it […] first of
all I listen to it.
Interviewer: So, let’s listen.
JD: Let’s listen.
(Derrida 1995: 394–395, emphasis in the original)
Cixous maintains that this hospitality of listening that Derrida gives to these multifarious
voices, human and animal, is precisely a buttress against the rise of nationalisms and racisms
(Cixous 2009b: 53). Metaphysics, by contrast, makes common purpose with exclusionary
regimes insofar as it seeks to suppress this multiplicity by appropriating it – by making
method out of madness, so to speak. This is the argument that Derrida advances by way of
the motif of listening in ‘Tympan’, in a passage that merits citing at length in order to grasp
the full effect of its metaphorics of resonance, vibration, and percussion.
If philosophy has always intended, from its point of view, to maintain its relation with the
nonphilosophical […] if it has constituted itself according to this purposive entente with its
outside, if it has always intended to hear itself speak [entendue à parler], in the same language,
of itself and of something else, can one, strictly speaking, determine a nonphilosophical place,
a place of exteriority or alterity from which one might still treat [trait] of philosophy? Is there
any ruse not belonging to reason to prevent philosophy from still speaking of itself, from
borrowing its categories from the logos of the other, by affecting itself [s’affectant] without
delay, on the domestic page of its own tympanum (still the muffled drum, the tympanon,
the cloth stretched taut in order to take its beating, to amortize impressions, to make the
types (typoi) resonate, to balance the striking pressure of the typtein, between the inside
and the outside), with heterogeneous percussion? Can one violently penetrate philosophy’s
field of listening without its immediately […] making the penetration resonate within itself,
appropriating the emission for itself, familiarly communicating it to itself between the inner
and middle ear […]. In other words, can one puncture the tympanum of a philosopher and
still be heard and understood by him?
(Derrida 1990: xii, emphasis in the original)
In this colourful passage, listening becomes a metaphor for the operation of philosophy in
its relation to the nonphilosophical, to its outside – an outside here figured as a violently
percussive sound. And yet, Derrida wonders whether this sound would have to be so
violent as to rupture philosophy’s eardrum, rendering it unable to hear, if it is to avoid
being made to sing philosophy’s own tune? Either way, the sonorous is what goes unheard
by philosophy. Derrida makes a very similar point in the discussion of Laporte in ‘Psyche’:
Fugue musics. The irreducibility of the musical here does not stem from any melocentrism.
And I will try later to relate this unheard-of musical effect to a remainder unassimilable by
any possible discourse, that is by all philosophical presentation in general.
(Derrida 2007: 88)
The metaphorics of aurality operates in multiple ways in deconstructive thought. In this

passage, sound represents inassimilable exteriority and heterogenous difference, and
listening functions as a metaphor for philosophy’s appropriative desire. Sound figures as
the limit to philosophy’s drive to mastery and sovereignty, for it threatens its integrity and
self-identity by penetration. It is not only its force but, moreover, sound’s resistance to
containment, its wayward dispersion – its ‘promiscuity’, as Brandon LaBelle (2010: xxvi)
puts it – that disrupts the sovereignty of philosophy. But we ought also to recognize that,
especially in appeals to a sonic turn within the humanities, the sonorous is often ontologized
as a principle of dispersion and multiplication. I argue that this hypostatization of sonic
difference repeats the metaphysical gesture of appropriation and containment. As much as
sound is a figure for the unheard outside of philosophy, it is also, as resonant dispersal, a
way of metamorphizing philosophy’s overflowing its own bounds in the direction of the
other. As Derrida never tires of repeating, there is nothing more philosophical than this
overflowing (Derrida 2019: 71).
But is sound nothing more, for deconstructive or post structuralist thought, than
a figure of the eminently philosophical overflowing of conceptuality and hence of
philosophy’s own limits? And what would it mean for the question of sonic methodologies
to think sound as philosophy’s own de-limiting? If the sonorous provides rhetorical
figures for what spreads out, disperses, vibrates, wanders in multiple directions, and
beats against itself – in short, if these figures point to what is anything but systemmatic
or methodological – in what sense can we speak of sonic methodologies? This line of
questioning suggests that sonic methodologies would only be methodological to the

extent that they transgress any methodologism. Or it might imply a methodology whose
rigour and unity are defined only by its stance against method.
Derrida, though, will also warn us that this overflowing of limits, for which sound is a
metaphor, is at once a matter of constraint: ‘Each time there is overflow, it resembles what
is overflowed, overflowing remains in affinity with what is overflowed, affined and I’ll even
say confined to what is overflowed’ (Derrida 2019: 86, emphasis in the original). If sound
is what threatens to perforate and overflow (philosophical) method, it also then retains
a certain affinity with (philosophical) thought and the methodological character of (its)
thinking about method. For this reason, then, this apparent paradox of sonic methodologies
poses some fascinating challenges for thinking about method and methodology today –
challenges which, I would argue, deconstruction is well suited to address. What I have
hoped to indicate is that, notwithstanding the reputation that poststructuralism has for
privileging language, textuality, and writing in particular, its deconstructive variants offer
just as many, if not more, possibilities for thinking about the sonorous as phenomenology
or the new materialisms. If, despite suspecting the voice, deconstruction is unthinkable
without a certain solicitation of the sonorous, it is necessary, furthermore, to resist the
temptation to reduce the role of sound in the writings of Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe,
Cixous, Avital Ronell, and Peter Szendy, among others, to nothing more than a metaphor
for the working out of philosophical-methodological questions.
Against this reduction, the sonorous works in these texts to unsettle the very metaphorics
to which it appears to fall prey. This is to no small degree because the distinction between
figurative metaphor and the (proper) method for which it supposedly substitutes is
unsustainable, for method, as Derrida shows, is already metaphorical. Method, and
not just philosophy’s, turns out to be metaphorical insofar as its generalizability to
different situations relies upon an analogical transference or transposition. A metaphor
for (philosophical) method is thus a re-marking of method. Sound – as method and as
metaphor – is able to get at the metaphoricity of metaphor, at the substitutability that makes
metaphor at once possible and slippery. It both promises to replace the metaphorics that
is coextensive with metaphysics and at the same time exposes philosophy as something
that has been replacing and displacing itself from the outset, like a vibration. To grasp
more rigorously (more methodically?) what might be at stake in a deconstructive notion
of sonic methodologies where sound is not reducible to a metaphor for philosophy’s self-
deconstruction, it is therefore necessary first to make a detour via a discussion of Derrida’s
arguments about method and its relationship with metaphor.
A detour via method

One of the greatest challenges to this task is Derrida’s suspicion of method. What could a
body of thought have to say about sonic methodologies when, at first blush, it appears to rest
upon a rejection of philosophical methodologism – the teleology at work in metaphysics
and in the practice of hermeneutics? Derrida famously denied that deconstruction was
another method, despite what the anglophone reception of his thought seemed to suggest.
And yet it might also with justification be said that he never stopped writing about method.
His texts are littered with what can be characterized as quasi-methodological remarks to
reflect the precautions that he always takes with this notion of method. Derrida devotes
considerable time especially to reflections on the method that is reading. There is a
recognizable Derridean quality of thought – a type of reading, as he describes it in Geschlecht
III – that lends itself to a certain synthesizing, formalizing, even systematic gesture, as
Geoffrey Bennington’s work has shown; and yet, in the book that they wrote together,
Derrida’s contribution remains distrustful of even this cautious formalization. The method
of deconstruction, ‘if there is any’ (s’il y en a) – both a way of doing deconstruction and the
concept of method that deconstruction produces – consists as much in a deconstruction of
method, which is to say in an event or invention of method. As Derrida puts it in ‘Psyche’,
For a deconstructive operation, possibility is rather the danger, the danger of becoming an
available set of rule-governed procedures, methods, accessible approaches. The interest
of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certain experience of the
impossible: that is […] of the other – the experience of the other as the invention of the
impossible, in other words, as the only possible invention.
(Derrida 2007: 15, emphasis in the original)
In other words, it is the possibilization of method that deconstruction resists. It disrupts

the idea of method as something of which one is capable, which one can possess and
master, which can be made present. This is why, from a Derridean standpoint, method
is something that only ever takes shape in the process of its practice. Deconstruction,
if it can be called a method, is something that does not exist outside its taking place in
a text and hence in a singular event. It is neither preformed nor separable as something
distinct after the fact. Method, however, as Derrida recognizes, is not an entirely one-time
thing. By definition, it is repeatable, yet open to unanticipated modification and strictly
impossible in(ter)ventions. Derrida develops this sense of method’s hospitality to the
impossible by noting that method is a meta-hodos, that is, the pursuit or following of a
way or path. When he says that dissemination admits of ‘no method’ (pas de méthode), he
plays on this homonym in French which also means step (Derrida 1981: 271). Rejecting
any teleological conception of method – of progressing from beginning to end, or from
simple to complex, for example – Derrida nonetheless continues to think of method by
way of the figure of the path (hodos), albeit one that is circuitous rather than straightened
or narrowed. With another homonym, he quips: ‘We here note a point/lack of method
[point de méthode]: this does not rule out a certain marching order [une certaine marche
à suivre – literally ‘a walk to follow’]’ (271). Derrida frequently describes this way as a via
rupta or voie frayée, a path that has to be opened or cleared by being broken or beaten, and
I would suggest that we hear in this breach an echo of the violent noise that threatens to
rupture philosophy’s eardrum.
Following a path that Heidegger had already opened, Derrida notes that for the Greeks
hodos also had the sense of perversion or going astray and that, with regard to every
methodology, Heidegger thus allows that any Denkweg (path of thought) is liable to be
an Irrweg (errancy or aberrance). From this emerges Derrida’s notion of destinerrance in
The Post Card, according to which it is necessarily possible that a letter will not arrive at
its destination or, thinking now of his exchanges with Cixous, that a telephone call will go
unanswered or be misdirected. The recently published Geschlecht III, which tackles some
quasi-methodological or ‘pre- or a-methodological precautions’, as Derrida phrases it here
(2018: 43),3 reveals the proximity of Derrida’s thinking to Heidegger’s problematization of
method. Moreover, in this text, unlike the discussions of method alongside René Descartes
or Baruch Spinoza in his 1981–1982 seminar, ‘La langue et le discours de la méthode’, for
example, or the famous section on ‘The Question of Method’ in Of Grammatology, sonic
metaphors assume a striking significance as a way of pointing to and destabilizing the
presuppositions of traditional methodology. To begin the approach towards the question
of sonic methodologies – and you can see already that this will have been a roundabout
path carried off track by multiple diversions – it would be necessary to follow the trajectory
of the detour in Derrida’s thinking as it winds its way from the texts of 1967 to Rogues and
the beastly steps of the final seminar of 2001–2002. This journey can only here be sketched
out incompletely, in fits and starts, jumping from one moment to another, but that will
allow me to test the hypothesis of method’s inventive singularity. Otherwise put, is there a
systematic thought, even a methodology, of diversion in Derrida’s writings? And is there a
methodical role that sound plays on this course?
The figure of wandering or diversion is already present in the passage from Of
Grammatology, which approaches the question of method via the notion of an ex-orbitant
reading:
Starting from this point of exteriority [in relation to the totality of the age of logocentrism],
a certain deconstruction of that totality which is also a traced path, of that orb (orbis)
which is also orbitary (orbita), might be broached. The first gesture of this departure and
this deconstruction, although subject to a certain historical necessity, cannot be given
methodological or logical intraorbitary assurances.
(Derrida 1974: 161–162)
This departure, which appears to be radically empiricist, ‘proceeds like a wandering thought
on the possibility of itinerary and of method’. And yet it only appears to be empiricist, for
this empiricism ends up destroying itself in the process.
To exceed the metaphysical orb is an attempt to get out of the orbit (orbita), to think the
entirety of the classical conceptual oppositions, particularly the one within which the value
of empiricism is held: the opposition of philosophy and nonphilosophy, another name for
empiricism, for this incapability to sustain on one’s own and to the limit the coherence of
one’s own discourse.
(Derrida 1974: 162)
Five years later in ‘Tympan’, as we have seen, this empirical outside of philosophy will
explicitly be figured as sonorous. So, if reading is to be ex-orbitant – or extra-vagant, as
Derrida will have it in Geschlecht III – it will require that it breach the ear of philosophical
methodologism. What this means for listening becomes clearer in Geschlecht III, where
Derrida will want to distinguish a destinerrant reading from a certain Heideggerian hearing
that, insofar as it adheres to a long tradition of phonocentrism, blunts the radicality of his
own warnings against method and methodologism. Geschlecht III announces its task, at
least in part, as a reflection on Heidegger’s method of reading Trakl and sets about asking
a series of questions ‘beyond method’ (d’outre méthode): about the paths that Heidegger
takes which may not yet or no longer be methods, about the rhythm of his step on such
paths, and about the relationship his reading has to traditional methodologies and bodies
of knowledge. As Heidegger confesses, his approach to reading is wayward. In Derrida’s
words, it moves via ‘abrupt jumps, leaps, and zigzags’ such that it is unclear whether these
‘singular ruptures’ are the result of careful calculation or come by surprise (Derrida 2018:
35). Rather than a systematic investigation or methodical interpretation of Trakl’s poetry,
Heidegger picks out verses from poems according to a ‘metonymic sliding [glissement
métonymique]’ (83).
On the basis of this haphazard reading, Derrida aims to ‘generalize’ and ‘problematize’
a ‘type’ of Heideggerian reading where type does not surrender to the notions of model,
procedure, or method, but instead points to typing, to the impression and strike of
inscription, that is, to the Schlag in Geschlecht. Even though Derrida suggests that he is
not primarily referring here to the tympan, what he has to say about typing and iterability
recalls the argument he advanced in ‘Tympan’ about the doubling effects of the printing
press’s hammer. Typing, Derrida proposes, is never a single stroke or hammer but always a
matter of over-typing – a double blow – and this is the quasi-palimpsestic effect he seeks to
achieve by allowing his reading to re-mark Heidegger’s.
It is important to hold onto the sonic metaphor that is indirectly brought into play
here with the reference to the tympan, notwithstanding Derrida’s desire to distinguish the
thought of Geschlecht from the sense of typing developed in the earlier essay. I argue this is in
no small part because the difference that Derrida will locate between Heidegger’s blows and
their Derridean over-typing hinges once more on a sonic metaphor. Heidegger’s reflections
on the arbitrary path that he takes, with its unexpected leaps from one poem to another,
are not exactly methodological, Derrida argues, insofar as they warn against method and
against the very methodologism that would reproach Heidegger for being capricious and
improvisatory. They can only be described therefore as ‘pre- or a-methodological’ to the
extent that they retreat from the discourses and knowledges that ground their authority in
method. The question is: what authorizes the leaps and metonymic transitions from one
place to another in Trakl’s poems, if not some kind of method? Derrida’s (over-)reading
reveals that Heidegger’s is not as radical in its waywardness as it might claim to be. The
answer turns out to be a certain kind of listening. Underpinning all of Trakl’s different
poems, gathering all the different places into a single place, is a singular resonance, a unique
consonance or unison (einzige Einklang) whose unity stems from what Heidegger calls the
silent fundamental or tonic (Grundton), which spreads out like the ripple of a wave to all
the individual poems. It is the unity of this tone, which gathers difference together in a
single place, that permits the various interpretative leaps and metonymic transitions of
Heidegger’s seemingly haphazard method of reading. It guides the choice of specific poems
and verses because Heidegger ‘allows himself to be oriented by “the hearing” (l’entente) or
“precursive listening” (précursive écoute)’ to this tone in its unity. The method-without-
methodologism of Heidegger’s reading is thus revealed to be both far less radical than he
claims and also to hinge on a sonic or aural methodology – that is, a path that passes, is
diverted, by way of the sonorous and whose very detours are directed by sound. Except
that Heidegger’s fundamental tone does not sound but remains absolutely unspoken,
a soundless sonority. While one might think that this attunement to the silent voice of
being would be welcomed by the author of Voice and Phenomenon, this is significantly
complicated in Geschlecht III by the association Heidegger makes between the silent
fundamental tone and the German idiom. The linguistic and philosophical nationalism
of this unifying silence poses insurmountable difficulties for Derrida who must therefore
insist on reading over Heidegger, in the sense of printing over but also perhaps in the sense
of speaking over or listening past.
This over-reading should, I want to argue, be understood not simply as replacing or
displacing but, moreover, as intensifying or exacerbating reading, as reading more and
more to the point of exhaustion. We might then speak, instead of Heidegger’s precursory
aural attunement to the unity of the fundamental, of an over-hearing that would splinter
and shatter that purported unity. I promised earlier to return to Therezo’s suggestion that
this unity be bleached. For him, this involves a turn from the aural to the visual via the
insertion of blank spaces between the letters, a standard, though now obsolete, German
typographical practice (sperren) for showing emphasis. Therezo wonders whether this
graphic dimension allows one ‘to see more easily – and not so much hear’ the divisibility
and spacing that is the condition of (im)possibility of the place and, by extension, of any
method (Therezo 2018: 258, emphasis in the original).4 This emphasis on aphonic textuality
and its spacing is closely aligned with Derrida’s own thinking. That having been said, the
difficulty with this turn away from sound is that it overlooks Derrida’s own observation in
Rogues that any turning away from or turning one’s back on is always also a turning back
or return (Derrida 2005). What I want to suggest, then, is that the unity and abhorrent
nationalism of Heidegger’s silence (in every sense) is shattered only via a turn back to
aurality, which would necessarily involve aurality turning around and about itself to then
return to itself, diverting and deviating from itself, taking a bypath, another path to bypass
itself, and hence to get past itself, to overtake and ‘exceed itself ’ (dépasser), to overstep and
thereby to override and overhear itself by analogy with overprinting.
The notion of overhearing that I am proposing here is very close to what Peter Szendy has
described as surécoute: a power of overhearing that, in striving towards a total surveillance,
always comes up against a deaf point. As Szendy acknowledges, this follows from the
Derridean understanding of the quasi-transcendental as a condition of (im)possibility that
is both inside and outside the field it makes possible (Szendy 2016: xi). I want, though, to
extend Szendy’s notion of overhearing by associating it explicitly with the idea of an usure
of the ear, its wearing out and exhaustion through overuse. Impossibility is not simply a
structural, positive condition but, moreover, the effect of an intensification and an excess
through which hearing destroys itself. This follows Derrida’s characterization of différance
in Of Grammatology as something that strives to expand without constraint but which
necessarily limits its own expansion precisely in order to preserve itself. Later in his life,
Derrida would describe this self-destructive tendency as autoimmunity – as a power that

turns (back) on itself. In this over-hearing there is not simply wandering or diversion but
also an irreducible, originary perversion of listening. If listening is that which is always
already drifting away from the straight and narrow, in what sense can one speak of sonic
methodologies? This is the destination away from which we keep twisting and turning.
Telephonic metaphoricity
One final detour, then. And this is where the idea of bleaching also comes into play as a way
to think how the question of method is entangled with that of metaphor. In the well-known
essay ‘White Mythology’, Derrida describes the operation of metaphor, according to its
traditional philosophical definition, as a process of bleaching: through repeated usage, like
the face of a coin, metaphor loses its concrete, particular quality as it enters into linguistic
currency, becoming transferrable and fungible (Derrida 1990: 210). As Derrida is at pains
to point out in his response to Paul Ricœur’s (mis)reading of this essay, ‘The Retrait of
Metaphor’, metaphor cannot be reduced to the former sense of usure as becoming worn-
out but must also be understood as a kind of usury which, through multiplication and
transfer to myriad contexts, produces a surplus value of meaning (Derrida 2007: 56). And
it is also a metaphor that implies a continuist presupposition: the history of a metaphor
appears essentially not as a displacement with breaks, as reinscriptions in a heterogenous
system, mutations, separations without origin, but rather as a progressive erosion (Derrida
1990: 215). In other words, the path usure takes is too direct and unbroken. This wearing
out is too methodical. Even though Derrida settles on privileging the figure of economy
in ‘White Mythology’ and leaves the figure of the path – of Heidegger’s Weg zur Sprache –
in the background, ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’ begins with a meditation on the circulation
and transport that metaphor shares with method. Shifting modes of transport (from
automobile to ship), Derrida speaks metaphorically of metaphor by way of the figures
of ‘drifting, skidding, or sideslipping [dérapage]’ before suggesting that metaphor only
‘withdraws’ (retrait) at the moment that it overextends and overflows itself.
Derrida immediately associates this overflowing with re-marking and re-turning,
with the trait or stroke’s ‘re-tracing’ (re-trait) itself, and hence we can see that usure in
its usuriousness chimes with the overprinting of the tympan – and, by extension or
metaphorical displacement, we might say, with philosophy’s eardrum being over-beaten
(almost) by sound. If the path is a figure or metaphor, it is also the case that metaphor is
itself a figure of displacement, a meta-hodos or circuitous path. As Derrida argues in ‘La
langue et le discours de la méthode’, ‘metaphor itself, if one can say that, is a way [chemin],
a way followed by a displacement of sense or words, of discourse. One even speaks,
metaphorically, it is said, of the vehicle of a metaphor’ (Derrida 1983: 40). What is more,
‘all method presupposes a certain metaphoricity not only insofar as it is itself a certain
practice of the way […] but also to the extent that a method calls upon the analogical
transposition of the rules or procedures it puts forward’ (40–41). At the same time Derrida
resists the reduction of the way to a metaphor, preferring instead to speak of the ‘motif ’
of the path. He warns that doing so would be to believe that one could master a figure by
means of rhetorical technique without recognizing that rhetoric only emerged on the basis
of a kind of thinking itself determined as a way. What metaphor cannot think is its own
metaphoricity – the very drift and errancy that makes metaphorical transport (im)possible.
Such precipitation of rhetoric ultimately fixes the errancy and drift of the path. We
see something similar in the burgeoning field of sound studies where there is a tendency
to ontologize the difference and dissemination of sound – as vibration or resonance, for
instance – and it is precisely this hypostatization of sound, which threatens to stifle all that
might be radical about the sonic turn, that deconstruction resists. One way to avoid this
destination would perhaps be to multiply and criss-cross the passages of metaphor. A third
figure that Derrida deploys in ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’ is suggestive for this purpose.
He invokes Heidegger’s word Geflecht (network or braid) to speak here, as he does in
several other places, notably in The Truth in Painting and Negotiations, of an ‘interlacing
[entrelacement]’ of threads, which are neither completely loose nor absolutely tied up but
more or less tightly bound.
In the remarkable passage from Negotiations mentioned earlier and in his exchanges
with Cixous, this motif of writing as interlaced and entangled paths drifts through another
series of metaphorical guises: from knots (another nautical metaphor) to the sounds of
voices carried over telephone lines under the sea.
There is a word that keeps coming back to me, and the image of the knot. Negotiation as a
knot, as the work of the knot. In the knot of negotiation there are different rhythms, different
forces, different differential vibrations of time and rhythm. The word knot came to me, and
the image of a rope. A rope with an entanglement, a rope made up of several strands knotted
together. The rope exists. One imagines computers with little wires, wires where things pass
very quickly, wires where things pass very slowly: negotiation is placed along all of these
wires. And things pass, information passes, or it does not pass, as with the telephone. Also,
cables that pass under the sea and thousands of voices with intonations, that is, with different
and entangled tensions. Negotiation is like a rope and an interminable number of wires
moving or quivering with different speeds or intensities.
(Derrida 2009: 29–30)
What, though, would motivate a turn to telephony if it is yet another metaphor for the
transport or displacement of which metaphor and method are also figures, albeit one
transferred to the sonic sphere? I want by way of conclusion to explore what value the
metaphorics of telephony might have for theorizing the relationship between philosophical
ways of thinking and specifically sonic methods and methodologies. I also want to suggest
that the figure of telephony allows us to see how the type of thinking that goes by the
name of deconstruction is itself a sonic methodology. Telephony exhibits in sonorous form
the kind of typographical spacing marked by the white spaces between letters. Carrying
sounds over long distances, with calls at risk of going unanswered or being misdirected,
the telephone spaces and displaces the phonē of metaphysics. This deconstructive sense of
telephony comes to the fore in Derrida’s reflections on Joyce, whose writing often wants
to be read aloud and thereby elicits a reading acutely solicitous of sound and hearing.
In ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ to underscore the originarily telephonic quality of speech as a

paradigm for the deconstruction of sovereignty, Derrida quips: ‘In the beginning was the
telephone’ (Derrida 2013: 51). Derrida locates an originary ‘telephonic technē […] at work
within the voice’ long before the invention of such technology that disturbs the Husserlian
circuit of hearing-oneself-speak: ‘A mental telephony which, inscribing the far, distance,
différance, and spacing in the phōnē, at the same time institutes, prohibits, and disrupts the
so-called monologue’ (52).
And yet it is far from trivial that deconstruction, as a way of thinking, has its material
conditions in telegraphic and telephonic communications technologies. The postcard and
its possibilities were thematized in the book of that title, but Derrida’s thinking late in his life
on power and sovereignty cannot be divorced from the medium via which it is elaborated.
As we learn in Derrida’s H. C. for Life, together with Cixous’s Insister of Jacques Derrida and
her novel Hyperdream, much of their intellectual exchange was conducted over the phone
in the double sense that they frequently conversed and debated philosophical issues by
telephone (Cixous even speaks of the importance for her of merely knowing that she could
call him and of those imagined phone calls) and also that they disagreed over telephony
and its power (Derrida 2006; Cixous 2007, 2009a).
One of these fault lines has to do with the telephone’s function as a lifeline, although it
would transpire in the novel written after Derrida’s death – itself something of a lifeline to
hold onto her friend – that it was more a case of crossed wires. If the telephone line is like
an ‘umbilical cord of life or death’, Derrida points out in the Death Penalty seminar that
it represents a divine or otherwise sovereign power to decide over life and death (Derrida
2014: 49). The telephone links the death-row prisoner to the governor who can exercise
executive sovereign power to grant a last-minute pardon, thus leaving life ‘suspended’
from the telephone line (139). The telephone is not incidental to Derrida’s argument but
rather structures the analysis of the death penalty as that which seeks to pin down the
unpredictable, chancy, evental – as it were inventive – element of living. By fixing and thus
mastering the contingency of death, which is precisely what makes life capable of surprise,
it strives to make life more rigorous, more methodical.
If held in one hand, the tēle introduces différance and spacing in the phonē, in the
other hand or at the other end of the line, this receptivity to the other exposes the ear to
the sovereign command, to the possibility of being penetrated by and of incorporating
the superegoic voice of the parent, the law, the state, or the university. In his reading of
Nietzsche’s fifth lecture from On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, for example,
Derrida suggests that ‘the umbilical cord of the university […] has you by the ear’ (Derrida
1985: 35). It ‘dictates to you what you are writing’ (and Derrida has always suspected
dictation of subordinating writing to the voice), thereby keeping you on a ‘leash’, tied to
the ‘paternal belly of the State […] like one of those Bic ballpoints attached by a little chain
in the post office’ (Derrida 2014: 36). In the Death Penalty seminar, the motif of telephony
also leads to the romantic notion that music has a connection to the divine unrivalled
among the arts, rising above sensuousness. Nietzsche, for instance, puts the musician
on the telephone with God, who ‘speaks metaphysics’, making him a ‘ventriloquist’ and
‘mouthpiece’ of the sovereign beyond. It makes the distant immediately close. ‘As if the
telephone then became portable and cellular’, remarks Derrida somewhat enigmatically;
‘telephony is metaphysics’ (Derrida 2014: 146). In this way the metaphor of telephony is
associated with the theme of wandering and of the errant step.
In the 1995–1996 seminar on hostility and hospitality, the mother tongue is likened
to that ‘most mobile of telephones’ by which the home and the proper may be carried
around with us and whose infinite mobility in this way turns into its opposite, resisting
mobilities insofar as it moves around with me (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 91).
Hearing-oneself-speak is
the most mobile of mobiles, because the most immobile, the zero-point of all mobile
telephones, the absolute ground of all displacements; and it is why we think we are carrying
it away, as we say, with each step [pas], on the soles of our shoes. But always while being
separated from oneself like this, while never being quits with that which, leaving oneself, by
the same step never stops quitting its place of origin.
(Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000: 91–93)
The fantasy of telephony as absolute immobility and sovereignty, however, is only possible
because language, like the telephone receiver, is a prosthesis and hence a dis/replacement
of human or/aurality. The telephone line is what breaches the inviolability of the home.
Equally, there is no proper home without the conditional hospitality of my deciding ‘to
invite whomever I wish to come into my home, first in my ear’ (Derrida and Dufourmantelle
2000: 51, my emphasis). The increasingly pervasive interception of telecommunications,
state surveillance, and censorship only serves to multiply this penetration of the proper –
which leads back to the issues at stake in ‘Tympan’.
This appeal to the figure of telephony aims to show that, far from being external to
philosophical ways of thinking (as irrational noise, the supposed sensible proper before
metaphorization) or a metaphor for the continuous, progressive erosion of the edge of the
philosophical path (as promiscuous vibration or untrammeled resonance), sound is the
prostheticity and technical supplementary that is philosophy’s condition of (im)possibility.
With its series of substitutions and displacements, transporting sound from one place to
another, telephony acts like a concatenation of discontinuous articulations that extend
inside philosophy. Following Avital Ronell’s extraordinary Telephone Book (1989), we can
say that sound has a telephonic relation to philosophy, rerouting ways of thinking through
its switchboard with all the possibilities for misdirection, mishearing, overhearing, or going
unanswered that this entails. It is in this sense that deconstruction might be described as a
sonic methodology.
At the same time, the figure of telephony cannot be elevated into a master or meta-
metaphor any more than sound can be a meta-method in opposition to speculative
hegemony. Foreshadowing ‘White Mythology’ by almost a decade, the early seminar on
Heidegger of 1964–1965 calls for a de-metaphorization or destruction of metaphor that
would not so much leave metaphor behind as it would expose the metaphoricity as such
of metaphor, which is to say the very force of re- and dis-placement that is its condition
of possibility. ‘It is not a matter of substituting one metaphor for another, which is the
very movement of language and history, but of thinking this movement as such, thinking
metaphor in metaphorizing it as such’ (Derrida 2016: 190).5
This task is not a philosophical one. If there is any method to it, it consists in the
destruction of metaphor by another metaphor, of replacing one at such great speed by
another, on the spot, one taking the place of the other, such that what is revealed is the
power of replacing taking place as such. Derrida finds in Cixous’s ‘art of replacement’ an
electric, telegraphic power of the ‘might’ (puisse), which, far from being any hypostatization
of the possible, is nothing but the event of the impossible. Again, this replacement is sonic.
It is the ‘eco-homonymy’ by which Cixous at great speed replaces the meanings of or even
subtly displaces phonemes (Derrida 2006: 73–74). If the destruction of metaphor happens
in Cixous’s é-cri-ture, it is by no means its only destination. As Derrida explains in the early
Heidegger seminar,
if by another metaphor one calls thinking this vigilance destroying metaphor while knowing
what it’s doing, there is no need to wonder where there is more thinking, in science,
metaphysics, poetry, and so on. There is thinking every time that this gesture occurs, in
what is called science, poetry, metaphysics or elsewhere.
(Derrida 2016: 190)
The same should be said of sonic methodologies, which know no proper place, only the
movement of drifting and skidding in their constant reinvention.
Notes
1. On this often misunderstood point, see the final chapter of Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter
1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (2016: esp. 269–271), and
Michael Naas’s Derrida from Now On (2008: 24–25), which Bennington cites.
2. See also Derrida’s text ‘Ants’ (2012: 41–42n22) where he is talking about hearing his own
voice in that of Cixous’s author when she describes the women who have lived their lives
in her and with whose tongues she has tasted the world.
3. Derrida is commenting on (and later quoting from) Heidegger’s ‘Language in the Poem:
A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work’, in On the Way to Language.
4. See also David Wills’s (2016) appeal to visible white spaces in his discussion of Cixous’s
idiosyncratic writing practices.
5. On the destruction of metaphor also see Mendoza-de Jesús 2017.
References
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Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press.
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by Ernest Pignon-Ernest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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In Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political, 41–54.
Derrida, Jacques (1974). Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press.
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Quaintance. In Gil Anidjar (ed.), Acts of Religion, 230–298. New York: Routledge.
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Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Herbrechter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Life, 111–152. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
74
4
Nature’s Music: Sonic
Methodologies in the Study of
Environmental Biology
Wouter Halfwerk
Introduction
Being in a tropical rainforest at night can be an overwhelming experience. Hundreds
of animals of all kinds are creating a cacophony of different sounds that can be at times
deafening to our ears. Frogs call from water puddles formed on the forest floor, crickets
chirp from the bushes, and owls hoot from branches. Experiencing early morning in a
temperate forest in spring time can be equally impressive. Dozens of birds of ten to twenty
different species can sing together to create the so-called dawn chorus (Slabbekoorn 2004).
Underwater it is no different: the sounds of a tropical coral reef are as diverse as those of a
rainforest (Montgomery et al. 2006).
Studying sounds in an evolutionary framework

All animals make use of sounds to either improve their survival chances or to increase their
reproductive success (Bradbury and Vehrencamp 2011). Some use sounds to communicate,
others to orient and find food, or to avoid predators (Stevens 2013). Songbirds sing to attract
a mate or to let neighbouring rivals know to stay away (Marler and Slabbekoorn 2004).
Frogs and crickets also advertise their readiness to mate by singing out loud (Gerhardt and
Huber 2002). But communication can have more than just a sexual function. For example,
sounds can be used to warn group members of potential danger, such as an approaching
predator, or to coordinate a group that is foraging or hunting together (Hollén, Bell, and
Radford 2008). Communication can even take place between different species, sometimes
in a way that is mutually beneficial, sometimes in a way that mainly benefits the producer
of the sound. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) are tropical songbirds that can often
be found in the vicinity of meerkats (Suricata suricatta). The drongo can warn a group of
meerkats of a nearby predator by making a specific call, and meerkats respond by fleeing
to cover (Flower, Gribble, and Ridley 2014). During the dry season, when food is scarce,
the drongo sometimes produces a false alarm, in particular when the meerkats have just
caught a prey. The meerkats flee and the drongo gets the prey. The drongo makes sure not
to cry wolf too often, so that the meerkats cannot risk ignoring its alarm calls (Flower,
Gribble, and Ridley 2014). In the end, both the drongo and meerkat benefit from one
another, but the rewards are not equally split.
Producing a sound that carries reliable information from sender to receiver also
plays a central role in evolutionary studies on sexual selection (Fitch and Hauser 2003).
When singing or calling to attract a potential mate, it is usually males that try to sound
as impressive as possible to prospecting females. Consequently, mating sounds are
usually loud in intensity or low in frequency. But mating sounds can also provide reliable
information on males. Females usually benefit from choosing a partner that can provide
valuable resources, such as a large territory or a good food patch. Larger males are usually
better at providing these resources as they outcompete smaller males. Females across a
wide range of species therefore show a clear preference to mate with a male that makes a
low-pitched and loud sound for good reasons: physical constraints keep small males from
sounding as low and loud as big ones (Gingras et al. 2013). However, males of some species
have found ways to trick females, as they have evolved structures that make them sound
bigger than they really are. Some frogs have extremely large lungs and vocal sacs (Halfwerk
et al. 2017), and some birds have extremely long trachea that are coiled up in their body
cavity (Fitch and Hauser 2003), all in order to produce acoustic cues that makes their
audience think they are big.
Conveying acoustic cues that (truthfully or not) represent the physical strength of
the sender is one way to impress an audience, however, many animals and in particular
songbirds have evolved extremely complex songs to make them more impressive.
Songbirds can produce elaborate songs made up of a vast array of particular elements.
Additionally, some species can even produce hundreds of distinct songs (see also Figure
4.1). Typically, in species with complex repertoires, females prefer males that sing the
most diverse and complex songs. Why females should prefer males with big repertoires
over males that have smaller repertoires is still a subject of debate (Kroodsma 2004). One
idea is that having a large repertoire requires being in good physical condition during
the critical learning phase, which is for many species when they are still in the nest and
depend on their parents for food. Therefore, if you sing complex songs, you come from a
high-quality family that has been able to provide sufficient resources during development
(Catchpole 1980). If there is some genetic variation that determines the quality of
raising young, it would benefit females to use information from the song to determine
the potential parenting quality of the male. Other hypotheses have focused more on a
perceptual explanation, for example that songs that are repeated time after time get boring
(as the brain habituates to the same perceptual input), and variable songs are simply more
attractive to listen to (Kroodsma 2004).
However, producing sounds does also come at certain costs. Many predators and
parasites rely on the sounds produced by their prey or hosts to detect and locate them. For
example, these sounds can be intentional, having evolved as a so-called ‘signal’ to serve a
Nature’s Music 77
Figure 4.1 Sonograms of different species. A cricket, a frog, and two birds, one with
a simple song and the other with a complex song. Note the different frequency scales
(in kilohertz) on the y-axis. The temporal scale (in seconds) is indicated by the bar in the
upper left panel.
specific communication function. Alternatively, sounds can be made unintentionally, as a

by-product of certain activities, for example the rustling sounds of insects walking among
leaves. Predators and parasites that eavesdrop on mating signals can in particular play
an important role in signal evolution. Some frogs suffer from predation of bats that have
evolved special hearing sensitivities to detect and localize them using the frog’s mating call
(Halfwerk et al. 2014). Predation by bats keeps these frogs from calling at high rates, high
amplitude or with high complexity, features that would otherwise make them favourable
to females. However, these bats are absent from areas with high levels of noise and light
pollution, for example urban environments. Not surprisingly, urban frogs that are released
from this predation risk create more extreme and thus more attractive calls than their
forest counterparts (Halfwerk et al. 2019).
Using sounds to locate and monitor animals and

their populations
Besides studying sounds related to ecological and evolutionary processes, they also provide
an easy way to locate species and monitor populations. Trained human observers can easily
use the acoustic activity of a species to determine its presence or absence in a certain area,
and even to estimate its local density. For many species, acoustic monitoring is the main
method to estimate their population size over time. These estimates are particularly accurate
for species that make sounds to advertise territorial occupancy, such as the majority of song
birds. The number of singing individual birds is thought to be a good representation of the
total number of individuals in a given area (Ralph, Droege, and Sauer 1995). Nowadays,
trained observers are more and more supplemented by automated recordings, which is
especially useful when studying rare species or species that produce sounds irregularly
(Acevedo and Villanueva‐Rivera 2006).
Automated recorders have become particularly useful in the past decade to study
animals that are otherwise hard to see, such as nocturnal mammals and birds. For example,
bat populations are frequently monitored with the use of ultrasonic automated set-ups
that can monitor their activity and identify different species throughout the night (Obrist,
Boesch, and Flückiger 2004).
A brief history of technologies used to

study natural sounds
The first attempts to capture sounds of nature were put on paper by musicians. Bird song was
the easiest to translate into a musical notation system, as most of their tones are relatively
pure and often harmonically related. One of the most famous examples of putting bird
song into quantifiable units comes from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s starling. Presumably,
Mozart kept a starling as a pet and was so touched by its song that he incorporated some of
the bird’s motives in his own music (West and King 1990).
Recording sounds
The scientific field of bioacoustics started when analogue sound recorders became
available. Driven by curiosity, the first naturalists who were eager to record animal sounds
hauled equipment with them on expeditions that are by today’s standards enormous. The
phonograph, invented in 1877, was the first equipment readily available to any researcher
on animal sounds. Most of the early phonographic setups used by the end of the nineteenth
century engraved the sound wave vibrations onto a rotating disc known as the ‘record’.
These records, or ‘vinyls’, were made of different sorts of material, such as tinfoil, wax-
coated cardboard, rubber, or shellac compound, and produced mixed results under
challenging field conditions. Some of these setups could be taken into the field, although it
often required researchers to caste their own ‘records’ using a mixture of ethanol, rubber or
shellac. Importantly, the phonographs and their later successors, the gramophones, could
also be used to playback sounds. This allowed researchers to start testing for the first time
what the biological functions of animal sounds were by broadcasting these sounds back to
the animals from which they were recorded (Fischer, Noser, and Hammerschmidt 2013).
Nature’s Music 79
Analysing sounds
Although sound recorders were available for some time, the field of bioacoustics really
kicked-off in the 1950s and 1960s when machines that could turn a sound wave into an
image containing spectral information became available (Marler 1955; Struhsaker 1967).
These Sonagraphs (e.g. from Kay Electric) made use of Fourier analysis, which divides a
sound into discrete frequency ranges and calculates both the amplitude and phase within
them (Marler and Tamura 1962). Fourier analysis could be used on a whole section of
sound, for example a frog call or bird song, with a length in the order of seconds. This
approach allowed researchers to determine the lowest and highest frequencies of a sound,
its peak frequency (defined as the frequency with the highest spectral energy), as well as its
harmonic structure. Nowadays, we refer to this way of visualization as a power-spectral-
density plot (or power spectrogram). This approach opened up all sorts of questions
related to animal communication, such as what ways are sounds produced as well as how
are sounds used? Dividing sounds into smaller time units, using discrete or fast Fourier
analysis algorithms, and plotting them on paper also allowed researchers to study how an
animal call or song changed its spectral properties over time. In the early days, most of
these Fourier analyses took hours if not days, depending on the length of the recordings.
Nowadays, these so-called spectrograms can be produced using a wide range of acoustic
software, such as Audacity or Raven, in milliseconds.
The first insights

Species can often look alike but sound rather different. Until the dawn of the field of
bioacoustics, most individuals that looked alike in terms of morphology and colour
patterns were considered to belong to the same species. Sound recording and analyses
led to the discovery that single species complexes often consisted of multiple species that
had previously gone unnoticed. In addition to the use of sounds for improved species
identification, sound recorders also led to the discovery of totally new species, in particular
nocturnal groups such as owls and frogs (Laiolo 2010).
Another major insight came from observations of the songs of birds that were recorded
in different areas. In the 1950s and 1960s, the ethologist Peter Marler compared sonograms
and found that birds that share a neighbourhood also share the same type of song (Marler
1955) whereas birds from different neighbourhoods had different songs (Marler and Tamura
1962). These ‘bird dialects’ reminded him of the subtle differences found between dialects
in human language. Subsequent studies revealed that these bird song dialects had very
abrupt boundaries. Some individuals that occupied a territory at these dialect boundaries
were found to sing the songs of both dialects, just like people at borders can often master
more than one language (Baptista 1977). Soon, researchers hypothesized that some bird
species have to learn how to sing their song during their lifetime, just as humans need
to learn their language. Subsequent isolation experiments revealed that songbirds, such
as chaffinches and zebra finches, need an adult tutor to copy their songs (Thorpe 1958).
Our closest relatives, the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla, do not show vocal production
learning. Songbirds have therefore become the dominant model to understand language
learning, including its neurobiological underpinnings and even grammatical structuring
(Nowicki and Searcy 2014). All because some field biologists decided to study songs of
wild birds.
Finally, and perhaps most amazingly, new recording technologies allowed for the
discovery of a totally new way of perceiving the world, namely echolocation. In the 1930s,
a professor of zoology at Harvard, Donald Griffin, hypothesized that bats make use of
acoustics for orientation, as they must use some special sense to orient in the pitch-dark
environment of a cave (Griffin 1944). He argued that bats produce a highly directional,
ultrasonic beam and rely on the returning echoes to know whether they are flying towards
an object or not. By using an ultrasonic sensitive condenser microphone coupled to
a cathode ray oscillograph, Griffin was able to document for the first time what type of
sounds bats produced during hunting and how they changed both the interval between
echolocation calls as well as the frequency components during a successful attack on an
insect prey (Griffin 1950).
Understanding the production and

perception of the sounds of nature
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer
is in the ear of the beholder. If trees would be able to perceive the sounds they make
themselves the answer to this philosophical question would be ‘yes’.
More biologically relevant are questions relating to how sounds are produced and
perceived by individuals of the same or different species, and how this production/
perception affects a species’ behaviour and ecological interactions. Although trees do
make sounds, sometimes even at moderate amplitude levels, like when poplar leaves are
moved by the wind, most people would agree that this sound production does not serve a
communicative function. However, plants, including trees, are sensitive to the vibrations
that can be induced by sounds; just think of a Venus flytrap that closes when sensitive hair
cells are touched by its insect prey. Sound waves can induce vibrations in plant structures,
for example along leaves and roots. Some of these cues can be used by plants to determine
where their root system should develop (Gagliano et al. 2017). When playing a tone of a
certain frequency that travels through the soil, pea plant (Pisum sativum) roots will grow
in the direction of the speaker, although it is still unclear why they do so. Another recent
and somewhat surprising finding demonstrates that plants can use vibrations produced
by caterpillars that chew on their leaves to induce a chemical defense (Appel and Cocroft
2014). Hypothetically, this defense mechanism could also be induced by broadcasting loud
sounds with similar frequency characteristics as the vibrations produced by caterpillars at
close range.
Nature’s Music 81
Mechanisms of sound perception

Compared to plant acoustical perception, researchers have a far better understanding
of the sounds produced and used by animals. For most vertebrates such as mammals,
amphibians, and even fish, it is clear that they have evolved pressure-sensitive structures
to detect sounds.
Most terrestrial vertebrates have an ear that is similar to ours, consisting of an eardrum
that is connected via one or more air or fluid-filled channels to a structure that contains
hair cells that function as neuronal receptors. There are however also important differences
in the morphological and neuronal structures used by vertebrates to process sounds,
which partly determines the range of sounds these animals can hear. For example, most
vertebrates have a single cluster of neuronal cells in their inner ear. Furthermore, most of
the sounds come in via the ear channels and are transduced via different membranes into
surface waves that travel along layers of vibration-sensitive hair cells. Frogs and toads on
the other hand have up to seven different nuclei in their inner ear that are sensitive to a
wide range of different stimuli, including sound waves that travel via the ground and via
their lungs (Lewis et al. 2001). Larger lungs lead to a more stretched body wall, which
means that more sound waves can be absorbed, culminating in a higher sensitivity to
sounds (Christensen-Dalsgaard 2005). Mammals have evolved inner ear bones to improve
the impedance between air and the fluid that fills the cochlea and thereby increase their
sensitivity. The morphology of the cochlea also differs substantially between the different
animal groups. Frogs lack a clear structure within and among the different groups of
hair cells, but mammals and birds have their hair cells organized tonotopically along a
long, thin membrane (Manley and Fay 2013). When a sound wave passes through the
cochlea, different frequencies induce hair cell movements at different positions along the
membrane. A longer membrane means that a wider range of frequencies can be detected
or that a better spectral resolution can be achieved. The cochlea in birds is stretched out,
whereas in mammals it is curled up, allowing for a longer length and possibly a wider range
of frequencies that can be perceived. Not surprisingly, mammals have evolved acoustic
perceptual systems that are sensitive over an amazingly broad range of frequencies, ranging
from the infrasound range used by elephants for their communication to the ultrasound
range used by whales, dolphins, and bats to hunt for prey (Manley and Fay 2013).
Invertebrates, and in particular insects, have evolved a very diverse array of
morphological and neuronal structures to process acoustic cues. Some insects, for
example katydids, a group of grasshoppers, have pressure sensitive eardrums in their
legs that are connected via neurons to their brains (Hoy and Robert 1996). Others have
evolved these structures on the sides of their body, for example the ears that have evolved
in many nocturnal moths to detect the echolocation calls of hunting bats (Hoy and Robert
1996). The acoustic ‘bat-detectors’ of moths are very simplistic, consisting in many cases
of only two neurons, yet they are very effective, as a moth that hears a bat will dive-bomb
out of the air in an unpredictable, spiraling flight path, thereby making it hard for its
predator to intercept. Other insects, such as mosquitos or midges that use sounds made
by their hosts to find them, have evolved very sensitive antennae on their head that consist
of many fine hairs. When a pressure wave passes, these hairs are moved back and forth,
allowing the insects not only to determine the type but also the location of the sound
source (Nadrowski et al. 2011).
Mechanisms of sound production

Sounds in nature can be categorized as either impulsive or continuous. Impulsive sounds
can be produced by using one object to hit another object with considerable force.
Chimpanzees for example use sticks to make drumming sounds on logs in the forest; and
woodpeckers hammer their heads, or more precisely their bills, into trees to advertise their
presence (Bradbury and Vehrencamp 2011). Continuous sounds usually consist of air- or
water-borne vibrations and are often of more tonal quality, depending on the physics of the
morphological sound source and the resonance properties of the morphological structures
surrounding the sound source (Bradbury and Vehrencamp 2011). Continuous sounds are
very short, like the calls produced by some bat species (less than 1millisecond in duration),
or very long, like the whistle produced by some whales, and can vary in frequency and
amplitude over time, which is why we can find such an extraordinary array of different
sounds in nature.
Continuous sounds can either be produced via stridulation, where two solid
morphological structures are rubbed together, via the passage of air or water along
vibrating morphological structures, or via very fast muscle contractions. Most insects
produce sounds via stridulation, the process of rubbing various body parts against one
an other. Crickets for example have comb-like structures on one of their wing veins that
produce chirping sounds when rubbed against the other wing. Cicadas are one of the few
exceptions in insects, as they produce their sometimes deafening sounds via a different
process that is called ‘buckling’. They possess two membranes (tymbals) covered in a row
of ribs at the side of their body that are rapidly contracted and released by a set of muscles.
When the ribs collide or jump into their original position, a snapping sound is produced;
all of this happens at an astonishing rate of several hundreds of times per second.
Most vertebrates, apart from fish off course, use their lungs to vocalize. Upon singing,
talking, or calling, an individual pushes air from its lungs into the trachea where one or
more vibrating membranes act as the sound source (Suthers and Zollinger 2004). The
sounds produced are subsequently filtered by the transmission properties of the remaining
part of the trachea and the oral cavity. Usually there is only one vibrating structure that
acts as the sound source, such as the larynx in mammals and frogs. However, some
songbirds who possess a syrinx can have two vibrating structures, at both ends of the
bronchia that come from the two lungs. This allows them to produce two sounds that
are not harmonically related, which is known as the two-voice phenomenon (Suthers and
Zollinger 2004) (Figure 4.2).
From an evolutionary perspective there are several interesting tradeoffs related to the
sound production mechanisms of vertebrates. Birds, for example, need to open and close
their bills in synchrony with the sound they produce, because opening the bill affects
Nature’s Music 83
Figure 4.2 Sonogram of an Andean solitaire (M. ralloides) that demonstrates the two-
voice phenomenon. The two notes are simultaneously produced but have a different
fundamental, suggesting that there are two sound sources active simultaneously. Most
songbirds have two sound-producing organs (or syrinx) close to where the two bronchea
merge into the trachea. Some species can independently control the muscles in their
syrinx, which leads to this two-voice phenomenon.
Figure 4.3 Sonograms of a recording made with a microphone and a laser-Doppler

vibrometer. The left panel shows the airborne sound made by a calling male tungara frog
(P. postulosus). The right panel shows the vibrations recorded by pointing the beam of a
laser-Doppler vibrometer at a frog’s vibrating vocal sac.
the resonance properties of the trachea. Bird species that produce elements with rapid
frequency modulations, so-called ‘trills’, need to open and close their bills fast, which is
more difficult with a heavy bill than a thin one. Bird bills vary in shapes and sizes, related to
their diet. A heavy and short bill is useful to crack open seeds, but species with heavy bills
cannot sing fast trills (Podos 2001). Birds are thus constrained in the range of sounds they
can produce by their morphological characteristics (in this case the bill). Likewise, some
frogs need to inflate their lungs in order to make a loud and low-frequency sound. Having
a large air-filled lung requires that a frog floats on a water surface in order to support its
body as well as the physical forces associated with pushing air from their lungs through
their larynx. When some frog species that call from water are placed on the ground, their
calls sound less loud and are rated as less attractive by females, simply because they cannot
inflate their lungs to the maximum size (Halfwerk et al. 2017; Smit et al. 2019).
Current approaches to study mechanism

and function of animal sounds
Nowadays there are many ways to study how sounds are produced, how they are
transmitted through the environment, and how they are perceived and used by different
animals. In recent years a new field has emerged that specifically addresses the diversity
of sounds found in nature. This particular field is usually referred to as ‘soundscape
ecology’ and aims to understand the global and local patterns in sounds, as well as their
ecological significance. The field of soundscape ecology is mainly driven by technological
advancement, in particular the use of remote sensing techniques such as the deployment
of a network of automated sound recorders (Pijanowski et al. 2011). Linkage with the
more classic field of animal communication is found in particular in studies addressing
the role of anthropogenic noise on animal behaviour and reproduction (Halfwerk 2012).
Below I will review how current techniques are applied to the different subfields of animal
communication, namely the production, transmission, and perception of sound. I will
briefly review the technologies used for environmental monitoring and explain how these
techniques help us to understand ecological and evolutionary processes.
Measuring production properties

As outlined above, sounds are produced by putting something into motion, be it by
hitting an object with a stick or by making something vibrate. Most current measurement
techniques focus on the production of vibratory sounds, using laser-Doppler vibrometers,
high-speed video cameras, or microphone arrays. Depending on the sampling regime
or frame rate, the production of sounds spanning a frequency range of 1 hertz to 100
kilohertz can be studied, either from the outside or the inside of an animal’s body. For
example, using a high-speed camera that is sensitive to X-rays, the movement of the tongue
as well as changes to the vocal tract of a singing bird can be visualized (Ohms et al. 2010).
This technique requires the use of small lead beads glued to the animal’s tongue and throat
that are easy to trace on X-ray images. When a bird is changing its singing posture, for
Nature’s Music 85
example by changing the position of the tongue inside the bill, the resonance properties
of the vocal apparatus are changed and a different sound is produced. Comparing the
movements of the lead beads from the video with the acoustic features of the song elements
that are simultaneously emitted by the birds thus allows in situ study of the production
mechanism. Even the subtle movements of the larynx or syrinx can now be studied in situ,
for example with a micro CT-scan. Such approaches can be used to study the oscillations
of the different syringeal muscles involved in sound production by different bird species
(Elemans et al. 2015). CT-scan videoing allows researchers to test what aspects of sound
production are shared by species as diverse as ostriches, pigeons, and zebra finches, and to
understand how these complex structures have evolved.
High-speed video imaging has also proved pivotal in revealing some of the more
mysterious sound production mechanisms found in nature. For example, some bird
species produce loud buzzing or ringing sounds during their courtship displays with their
bill closed. Do these birds make these sounds without their syrinx? If so, how can they
produce these high-pitched sounds, which require very rapid movements? The club-winged
manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) is a Neotropical passerine bird found only in the
western parts of Columbia and Ecuador (Bostwick et al. 2009). Males display in so-called
‘leks’ and are visited by females that mate with them; they then leave to build nests and raise
the young on their own. Male manakins spend most of their adult life courting females and
do so by raising their wings high above their heads, while simultaneously making a three-
note whistling sound. Using high-speed video cameras, researchers found out that these
birds move their wings back and forth at a very high speed, exceeding 100 hertz. However,
the sounds are of even higher frequency. Following closer inspection it turns out that the
sounds are made by special feathers with multiple spikes on them, creating multiple sound
waves that, superimposed on one and another, produce the high-pitched ringing sounds
(Bostwick et al. 2009). The high-speed video camera made it possible to uncover a novel
evolutionary invention to court females.
Other measurement techniques that have been applied successfully to sound producing
animals include the use of laser-Doppler vibrometry. This technique makes use of a
monochromatic light beam aimed at vibrating body parts (e.g. the bill, throat, or eardrum
of an animal). If the body part is reflective enough, the returning beam can be compared
to the outgoing beam to assess the Doppler shift, which is proportional to the velocity at
which the body part vibrates. Non-reflective surfaces can be covered with adhesive tape
or very small glass beads covered in silver particles to enhance the sensitivity of the laser.
Many frogs shuttle air from their lungs into a large vocal sac. After calling, this sac deflates
again, pushing the air back into the lungs for the next round of calling. Experiments from
the 1990s, during which frogs were placed in helium enriched enclosures, already ruled out
that these sacs act as resonators (Rand and Dudley 1993). Using laser-Doppler vibrometry,
my colleagues and I have recently found that these vocal sacs do resonate with specific
frequencies (Halfwerk et al. 2017; Figure 4.3). Perhaps these sacs function as radiators or
amplifiers of specific acoustic features which help frogs to create a more diverse type of call.
The use of microphone arrays has also recently improved our understanding of directional
sound production, which is important for research on animals that rely on echolocation.
Bats produce ultrasonic calls with their larynx and emit these sounds either via their nose
or their mouth. Depending on the frequency of the sound and the opening of their mouth,
the sound beam produced is either very directional, being loud in front and faint to the
sides, or more omnidirectional (Jakobsen, Ratcliffe, and Surlykke 2013). Researchers have
studied the shape of the bats’ sonar beam using two arrays of microphones, orthogonally
placed behind a food reward. On the one hand, this approach allows researchers to
triangulate the exact position of an approaching bat; on the other hand, the amplitude
levels recorded by the different microphones can be used to reconstruct the bats’ sound
beam morphology (Jakobsen, Ratcliffe, and Surlykke 2013). As it turns out, when bats are
hunting in an environment with many different objects they narrow their sonar beam to
avoid having to deal with all the echoes that get back to them and interfere with the echoes
that only come back from the prey target (Jakobsen, Ratcliffe, and Surlykke 2013). The
mechanism is comparable to zooming a flash light in and out when switching from a broad
field of view to a narrow beam to look at something of interest in more detail.
Finally, current methods can still be pretty low tech and do not always need state-
of-the-art sensing techniques. An easy way to understand how sound is produced is by
manipulating the organs that are thought to play a part in it. The spikes and ridges of many
a cricket or grasshopper have been filed off by many researchers in an attempt to study
their function. Even the larynx of some frog species has been surgically altered in order
to get a better understanding of their sound-production mechanisms (Gridi-Papp, Rand,
and Ryan 2006). By far the simplest technique is moving an animal to a location with
different physical properties to test how this affects its sound production. Floating frogs,
for example, call at lower amplitude and with less complexity when placed in very shallow
water (Halfwerk et al. 2017).
Measuring transmission properties

I still vividly remember how, years ago, I set out to study the sound-transmission properties
in the cloud forests of Ecuador, bringing nothing more than a tape recorder, a microphone,
and a bag full of balloons. I studied variation in bird song in relation to differences in
habitat, particularly comparing locations higher up the Andean slope to locations at lower
elevations (Halfwerk et al. 2016). One of my hypotheses was that the sounds of different
bird species were adapted to the specific transmission properties of the two habitat types.
At higher elevation, there is much more vegetation close to the ground, which particularly
affects the transmission of higher frequency sounds (Dingle, Halfwerk, and Slabbekoorn
2008). I wanted to compare attenuation rates across frequencies of sounds transmitted
through these two environments and needed a technique to do so. As it turns out, once
inflated to their proper size, popping a balloon produces a consistent broadband sound,
that can be recorded with a microphone at various distances. However, it became a struggle
to move through the dense forest and to start my recorder at one location and inflate and
pop the balloon in a consistent fashion in another location. A year later I returned with
a set of speakers and broadcasted an artificial frequency sweep to achieve the same goal.
Nature’s Music 87
These sorts of transmission experiments have been carried out since the 1980s and have
not changed much since (Richards and Wiley 1980). The main technological advancement
is the use of wireless speakers, as this saves the researcher from either laying out hundreds
of metres of cable between microphone, recorder, and loudspeaker, or having to run
back and forth over difficult terrain as I had to do with the balloons. Nevertheless, these
transmission experiments, either over long distances through continuous habitats or
in small confined spaces such as nest holes or breeding burrows dug into the soil, have
revealed how the environment influences efficient sound propagation (Muñoz and Penna
2016). For example, fast trills are usually more effective in open areas such as meadows and
grass plains, as in forested areas they quickly degrade due to the many echoes. Likewise,
due to the fact that sound of large wavelengths can bend around objects, high-frequency
sound with smaller wavelengths more often bounce off and thereby attenuate faster in
areas with many objects (Wiley and Richards 1978).
Measuring perceptual properties

Understanding how sounds are perceived requires first of all knowledge of a species’
sensitivity. These sensitivities can be specified in the frequency domain, in the amplitude
domain, or in both. Sensitivity measurements provide the lowest and highest possible sound
that can be perceived by an individual, as well as the frequency at which optimal hearing is
achieved. Typically, the most sensitive frequency tends to match the peak frequency of the
most important sounds in an animal’s life, be it the sound of its mates, prey, or predators.
Recording the electrophysiological activity directly from the peripheral auditory nerves
is the most direct way of assessing an individual’s sensitivity of sounds, for example, by
measuring the spike activity of individual hair cells in the mammalian cochlea or individual
neurons in the auditory centres in the brainstem in relation to the playback of different
tones. However, these techniques are very difficult and expensive to use if you happen
to study an animal that does not live in zoos. Another approach is using the auditory
brainstem response (ABR) while playing sounds of different frequencies and intensities.
This technique relies on an electro-encehphalogram (EEG) and records electrical signals
by using electrodes placed on the skull. It is a very useful technique to take outdoors and
is more and more applied to map the acoustic capacities of wild animals (Brittan-Powell
et al. 2010).
Finally, laser-Doppler vibrometry can be applied to study specific resonance properties
of the sound receiving morphological structures. The eardrum does not vibrate equally
well across frequencies in response to an arriving sound pressure wave and thus determines
partly what sounds arrive at the inner ear (Caldwell et al. 2014).
Environmental monitoring
The last two decades, off-the-shelf, stand-alone sound recorders became available. These
recorders allow for the monitoring of sound-producing animals in a standardized and
synchronized way at a cheap price and for a long period of time. Some of these recorders can
be equipped with solar power as well as a satellite connection, and thus allow researchers to
study remote areas that usually take days to reach, such as the High Arctic or Antarctica.
These recorders have been also been used to study the soundscape of a specific area in
order to know how sounds change over time of day and season (Pijanowski et al. 2011).
For example, using an array of twenty different sound recorders, I was able to document
how sound produced by traffic transmits through a woodland area. I found that traffic
noise transmission changed depending on the temperature, wind direction, and geological
morphology of the area (Halfwerk et al. 2011). Furthermore, I could document that traffic
noise overlapped with the song of birds throughout most of the breeding season. Finally, I
could estimate the noise levels in specific frequency bands at breeding nest boxes occupied
by great tits (Parus major); I found that noise levels were negatively related to breeding
success, particularly those noises that overlapped spectrally with the bird’s own song
(Halfwerk et al. 2011).
The movement patterns and population size of animals are nowadays also monitored
with these automated sound recorders. Specially designed and remote-controlled
hydrophones are used to study marine mammals, and recorders with weather-proof
ultrasonic microphones are used to study bats. When combining these setups with GPS
information one can even pinpoint the location of an animal within a specific range if its
sound is recorded simultaneously on two or more recording units.
In areas where animals are difficult to see, for example in the densely vegetated
understory of forests or in murky waters, an array or grid of recorders can also be used to
track movements. A study on banded wrens used a setup with twelve different microphones
to examine how they vocalize in their territory and how they change their song types
depending on where they are. The wrens use certain song types specifically when they are
in the centre of their territory and other song types when they are close to the boundary of
neighbouring territories (Mennill and Vehrencamp 2008).
Conclusion and future perspectives

I have given a short historical overview of the use of different approaches to investigate
the ecology and evolution of animal sounds. The various techniques described above are
by far not a full and complete overview of all that is currently possible. I have provided
some insights into the possibilities that I think have greatly enhanced our understanding
of animal sounds, mostly based on personal experience. Likewise, what I think will be
important directions for future research and applications is more a matter of opinion than
a careful consideration of all possible options.
Currently, many people around the globe possess a powerful sound recorder in the
form of their smartphone. More and more people are providing input via citizen science
projects, or by uploading their sound and video recordings to dedicated websites for
nature observations or recordings, such as xeno-canto.org, observado.org, and fonozoo.
Nature’s Music 89
com. These recordings will turn out to be a valuable asset and perhaps allow for a fully
automated approach to study the diversity of sounds throughout the world. Comparative
analytical tools, perhaps borrowed from the field of genetics, could mine these databases
for interesting patterns, which could then be followed up and may lead to the discovery of
new species or new communicative functions.
Another major advancement may come from the various tools currently used for speech
recognition. These digital tools may help us to identify species as well as individual animals
automatically, and perhaps allow us to link their motivational state to specific acoustic
features present in their songs and calls. Most of the breakthroughs in bioacoustics came
from borrowing already existing techniques from very different fields. The future is not
likely to be different.
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5
Hearing With:
Researching the Histories
of Sonic Encounter
James G. Mansell
I
sit on
this hill
beneath the
shade of this
gnarled, tall,
wise, old oak
looking out
around me at the
amazing beauty that
surrounds me. As far as
the horizon everything brilliant-
ly magnificent. Suddenly, there is a
hush, is it me? Am I imagining it? No, not
even an undertone, utter silence. The birds are
mute, the animals dumb, the wind has ceased in soft sibil-
ation, the clatter and grind of the tractor has been stifled, the
chuckle of the stream is frozen, the world seems to be quiescent, waiting
with bated breath. In this silent paradise I think of what I have to
return to, compared with this it seems like aural purgatory, the noises that
pollute our envir-
onment, the pandem-
onium and hullabaloo
of our modern word.
The rasping and
grating of our
labour saving devices

the instant chatter
of the television,
raucous pop music
played too loud,
the drone of jets
as they pass over
head, the tinny
sound of car
engines rushing everywhere
Even as I think this, heaven is
pierced by the squeal of children
at play, the yelp of a dog, the dis-
tant peal of a church bell and the irritat-
ing rasp of a saw. The world is revived. Gone are
the Angels of Silence and back is the
demon
NOISE.
(Katherine Londesbrough, age fourteen years)
This poem was published in a collection entitled Children on Noise following a literary
competition held in the schools of Darlington, North-East England, in 1978. Prizes of
£100, as well as consolation T-shirts, were available to the children who produced the best
stories and poems about noise in their town. The competition was part of the Darlington
Quiet Town Experiment of 1976–1978 run by the UK government’s Noise Advisory
Council. The experiment sought to ‘determine if noise levels can be reduced by creating an
“awareness” of noise by publicity and education’ (Darlington Borough Council n.d.). The
literary competition was one of many activities undertaken in the town over the two years
of the experiment designed to encourage residents – adults and children alike – to listen
to their town, and to themselves. The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) erected road signs
that read: ‘Darlington is a Quiet Town. Please drive quietly’ (Figure 5.1). Posters, leaflets,
and social activities (such as quiet bingo) were circulated and organized. The people of
Darlington were trained to hear noise and to enact quietness. Though unusual in its format,
the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment is typical of the strategic work that goes on around
and through everyday sound. How we hear is socially shaped. It has a history.
At midday on 21 August 2017, a crowd gathered on the streets of Westminster, central
London, to hear to the final bongs of ‘Big Ben’ – the 13-ton bell atop what is now known
as the Elizabeth Tower at the UK Houses of Parliament – before a four-year cessation to
allow restoration work to take place. Newspapers reported that some in the crowd fought
back tears, including at least one Member of Parliament who had assembled there with
colleagues, heads bowed to reverently mark the occasion. A row had earlier erupted in the
British media about why it was necessary to silence Big Ben for so long. Critics, including
some MPs, pointed out that the bell had tolled through most of the Second World War
and that stopping it for an extended period was an indictment of national ingenuity and a
threat to Britain’s place in the world. The sound of Big Ben was presented by these critics as
Hearing With 95
Figure 5.1 Photograph of an RAC ‘Quiet’ road sign in Darlington. Source: Noise Advisory
Council 1981: 23.
inextricably bound up with Britain, a heartbeat almost. For some it was auditorily symbolic
of national self-determination in the context of negotiations to leave the European Union
in 2019. Even academic commentators were drawn into the frenzy, with one writing that
the silencing of ‘an essential component of the landscape of London, and of the pantheon of
national icons that present “Britishness” to the rest of the world’ was the result of ‘a failure
of management in the heart of Westminster’ (Clapson 2017). The British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC), which ritually broadcasts the live sounds of Big Ben on national radio
in the UK, faced a decision about whether to maintain a live relay of an alternative bell
(Nottingham’s Council House bell was considered) or use a non-live recording of Big Ben.
It eventually opted for the latter.
How did the sound of Big Ben become such a powerful symbol of the British nation?
Was it by sheer virtue of the bell’s geography, placed as it was in 1858 at the heart of
imperial political power? The answer is that Big Ben’s affective power to bind hearers
together is not innate to its stature, geography, or even a straightforward result of its place
in broadcasting schedules but was, rather, actively produced more deliberately than that
by campaigns to direct how it was heard. Prominent among these was the ‘Big Ben Silent
Minute’, sometimes known just as the ‘Big Ben Minute’, a campaign launched in 1940 by
an organization known as the Big Ben Council with close ties to the Conservative Party
and the Church of England, which promoted a daily minute of silence and silent prayer
throughout the British Empire during and in time with the chimes of Big Ben broadcast
on BBC radio in the run up to the news at 9.00 p.m. The full 9.00 p.m. chimes of Big Ben
were broadcasted live, taking around a minute from beginning to end (Dakers 1943). The
minute was originally intended to provide a daily moment of hopefulness about Britain’s
prospects in the Second World War and to reconnect separated loved ones in a minute of
synchronized remembrance. Books of prayer and positive thoughts, written specifically
with the rhythm of Big Ben in mind, were published (such as the ‘Golden Thoughts’
booklet shown in Figure 5.2). The Big Ben Minute remained a feature of BBC radio until
1960, when the 9.00 p.m. news bulletin was moved to 10.00 p.m. and the minute cut amid
angry controversy (Briggs 1995: 325–340).
Like the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, the Big Ben Silent Minute was designed to
direct hearing attention and to produce an affective and meaningful relationship between
sound and hearer, in this instance, among other things, providing an auditory focal point
for the nation and its empire and the sonic conditions needed for it to be sanctified as such.
This is the stuff of sound history. Research in this field seeks to establish not only what
was audible in the past but also how and why that audibility was produced: how and why
sounds – from the chirp of a bird to the roar of a motorbike, from recorded music to the
tone and accent of voice in daily speech – were shaped and given meaning, made valuable
or denigrated, and brought to attention or left in the background. Sound historians do
this not simply for the sake of adding sensory context to our understanding of the past
but because, they argue, what and how we hear shapes subjectivity and community in
important ways. Sounds are socially active, producing us as subjects and drawing us
together as sensing collectives and, to use Tom Western’s phrase, ‘securing the aural border’
(Western 2015: 77–97).
This chapter sets out a sonic-historical methodology drawing on existing work in the
field of historical sound studies that is attentive to the conscious shaping of auditory
perception in the past.1 It proposes two central principles. The first is that historians
could think of what they do as hearing with rather than listening to the past. This is an
approach to historical source material which would seek to historicize sound’s role in
shaping subjects and naturalizing relations of power, remaining alert to a range of
auditory subject positions in the past, and acknowledging the listening ear of the historian
in the act of hearing with. I use the term hearing rather than listening deliberately to
emphasize that, beyond moments of listening and campaigns to direct listening attention
in the past, historical ways of hearing have evolved over time in which sounds have gained
Hearing With 97
Figure 5.2 Front cover of a booklet of positive thoughts to be recited silently in time
with the chimes of Big Ben at 9.00 p.m. Source: Junior 1941.
common-sense meanings and associations for which listening is no longer consciously

required and which have unequal social effects (see also Mansell 2018: 343–352). A way of
hearing is more than an act of listening: it takes shape in text, image, and social discourse
as much as in sound. It impacts beyond the auditory in the ways that subjects think,
feel, and manage their bodies. Ways of hearing produce the possibility of listening. The
second methodological principle is a focus on what I term here the production of sonic
encounter, a socially shaped and culturally specific affective relationship between hearer
and heard. The sonic encounter is the meeting point of ‘soundscapes’ (for my purposes, a
useful shorthand for the sounds that surround us in everyday life) and ‘soundselves’ (as
theorized by Tom Rice [2003], listening subjects whose sense of self is shaped by sound):
it is the affective field of feeling and sense-making which those who wish to produce ways
of hearing seek to shape.2
Hearing with
When I tell fellow historians what I research, they usually say something to the effect
of: that must be interesting, but aren’t you reliant on sound recordings being available,
doesn’t that mean you can only write about the recent past, there probably aren’t many
historical sound recordings around, are there? Because of a deeply ingrained tendency to
privilege reading and writing in historical scholarship, when they hear the word ‘sound’
most historians think, probably media studies, definitely somebody else’s business. The
assumption is that listening to the past is a distinctively poor relation to reading from
its surviving textual source materials. Matthew Rubery describes a similar response
to his research on the history of audio books: listening to rather than reading a book is
considered by many to be distinctly second rate (Rubery 2016). These kinds of prejudices
help to explain why relatively little of the historical work in sound studies is undertaken by
historians working in university history departments. Many, like myself, are based in other
disciplines, including media, cultural, and communications studies. This is an unfortunate
misunderstanding, since the methodological premise of most scholarship in historical
sound studies is textual rather than auditory, and deliberately so.
Mark M. Smith, an early exponent of sound history with his Listening to Nineteenth-
Century America (2001), argues that by rereading historical source material for evidence
of encounters with sound we can understand both the acoustic environments of the past
and how those environments were perceived and made meaningful in cultural-historical
contexts.3 Drawing on a sensorially attuned social history tradition with origins in the
Annales school and culminating in Alain Corbin’s Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the
Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (1998), Smith helped to establish a new subfield
of sound history.4 But the ‘Listening to’ in the title of Smith’s book refers primarily to the
listening done by historical subjects rather than by the historian. Smith, like others who
have attended to past sounds, is rightly sceptical about the historian’s ability to gain direct
and uncomplicated access to how the past sounded precisely because we do not hear in the
same way today, culturally, as those in the past did. Smith’s realist-constructivist approach
is typical of sound historical scholarship. In her history of architectural acoustics in early
twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson defines the ‘soundscape of modernity’
as ‘simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment;
it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’ (Thompson
2004: 1). In textual sources, Smith argues, we find written record of how sounds were
experienced and interpreted, as well as the sound environments themselves. Even where
we have access to recorded sound in the form of radio broadcasts, field recordings, or film
and television soundtracks, Smith and others argue that we need a wider body of source
material to understand the historicity of these sounds. This approach is put to good use,
for example, in Carolyn Birdsall’s (2012) research on Nazi soundscapes, which uses radio
archive materials alongside oral history and written archives to understand historical
hearers as ‘earwitnesses’ to fascism. Smith has written of his hope that, rather than a
self-contained field of sound history, listening through the ears of historical subjects
Hearing With 99
will become more of a ‘habit’ for historical scholarship as a whole, a ‘methodological,

epistemological, and even ontological embeddedness – a way of examining the past that
becomes second nature so that evidence is read, consciously and even subconsciously, for
tidbits of the acoustic, smatterings of the auditory, gestures of silence, noise, listening,
and sound’ (Smith 2014: 13–14).
The listening involved in historical sound studies is a reconstructed listening, then,
an excavation of how past subjects paid attention to sound. As Daniel Morat has noted,
however, ‘listening to’ is far from a settled historical methodology: ‘You can find’, as Morat
observes, ‘different notions of “sound history,” “aural history,” “auditory history,” “history
of hearing,” and “history of listening”’, deployed across the field (Morat 2014: 3). Here, I
wish to propose that in order to avoid the misunderstandings to which the ‘listening to’
label gives rise, as well as some of its limitations, we might more usefully describe what the
sound historian does, or could do, as hearing with. Listening has been closely associated
with the production of knowledge in historical sound studies. Emily Thompson focuses her
attention on the expert culture of listening developed by architectural acousticians. Jonathan
Sterne’s (2003) research on the history of sound recording and reproduction technologies
identifies a range of expert listening practices evolving over the course of the nineteenth
century as the basis of an ‘Ensoniment’ (an auditory equivalent of the Enlightenment)
in which expert auditory ways of knowing, from telegraphy to phonography, formed the
basis for modern knowledge culture. Though not experts in the same sense, Kassandra
Hartford argues that soldiers developed ‘attentive listening practices typically associated
with music and musicians’ on the Western Front during the Great War because, ‘in a war
fought largely in trenches and tunnels, in the dark or in a dugout, visual observation was
limited’ (Hartford 2017: 98). This focus on the historical listener has tended to privilege a
particular kind of audition, that done by a conscious listener, seeking knowledge, with the
ability to make their listening matter in the historical record. In other words, it has limited
the range of auditory subject positions that historians have attended to. ‘Listening to’ has
been a very particular kind of ‘listening with’.
A hearing-with approach would focus not so much on records of this conscious listening
as a route to insight into the historical soundscape, but rather on the production and
sustaining of ways of hearing which operated through atmospheres of everyday sounds and
had different kinds of auditory impacts on hearers. These ways of hearing were produced
in the past by the organization of audibility and the directing of hearing. The organizing
and directing was undertaken consciously, as in the case of the Darlington Quiet Town
Experiment and the Big Ben Silent Minute. However, those involved in such campaigns
were not necessarily aware of the ways in which their attempts to shape everyday hearing
gave audible form to cultures of class and gender (as in the case of quiet) or of an imperial
Britain (in the case of the Big Ben Minute) because those cultural dispositions were not
always recognized as such by those who intervened in sound. The historian’s role, then, is
to return to these historical ways of hearing, to understand how they were assembled, and
to assess what effects they had in the shaping of social life. The organizing and directing
that goes into producing a way of hearing can be found in the historical record, even if it
was not consciously listened to in the past.
Western’s approach to the analysis of ‘audio nationalism’ illustrates the hearing-with

approach I have in mind. He shows, in the context of the BBC’s post-war broadcasting of
folk music and ethnographic field recordings, ‘how sound was at once nationalized and
nationalizing’ on the radio. He argues that ‘certain sounds were selected to represent national
qualities, used to construct national character, and delimit the nation’ (Western 2015: 88).
There was listening work involved here, since the field recordists who gathered materials
for the radio programmes analysed by Western were the ones selecting appropriate music
and sound to embody the nation and its bordered distinctiveness. Yet there was also the
bringing into being of an aural truth of the nation, the production of a way of hearing
music and sound as British that happened in the presentation of these sounds on the radio
and their framing in print contexts such as the Radio Times: the BBC was ‘training people
how to listen’, according to Western (2015:89). A hearing-with approach hears with this
training. Western’s analysis can be extended to the Big Ben Silent Minute whose aim was
similarly to enter into the daily routines of radio listeners and produce an active auditory
engagement with the national community.
A hearing-with approach does not adopt the listening position of the powerful but
rather hears through it what only a historian can hear – the historicity of truths as they
have taken sonic form. But a hearing-with approach also demands that the historian hears
with both those who shaped ways of hearing and with those who were subject to their
influence. Take the example of the sonic category of quiet. Historians have now dedicated
a good deal of attention to noise, understanding why and how past societies made sense
of which sounds to exclude as meaningless or harmful.5 This work has focused on what
Jennifer Lynn Stoever describes as the ‘listening ear’ of the noise abatement campaigner – a
close historical attention to the way in which noise was defined and its eradication justified
(Stoever 2016: 7). The same attention has not been given to quiet, even though most anti-
noise campaigns, such as the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, have been designed to
produce it. In the 1930s, the Anti-Noise League published a magazine called Quiet and
in the 1950s the successor Noise Abatement Society published one called Quiet, Please,
underscoring the kind of sound they wished to produce. In twentieth-century anti-noise
campaigns, noise was listened to critically, but quiet was quietly produced as a category
of good sonic conduct. Far from the neutral category it may seem, quiet contains and
activates social relations of power. In the absence of noise there is not silence but a kind of
sound that contains the normative values of the society that produced it. In the 1930s, quiet
was described by the Anti-Noise League’s leader, Lord Horder, as ‘acoustic-civilization’.6
As the other to noise, ‘acoustic-civilization’ was assumed to be readily understood; it was
comfort, peace, and privacy. It was auditory common sense. Yet upon close inspection of
the surviving historical source materials it is clear that this ‘civilized’ quiet was not the
public good it was made out to be: it was based on a middle-class auditory habitus and was
specifically for those whose work required concentration, mainly professional men. Still, it
was promoted to everyone as universally good behaviour.
The noise abatement advocates of the Anti-Noise League did not listen to the acoustics
of gendered difference, but their way of hearing produced it. The close-up from a 1935
advert for the Underwood Noiseless Typewriter in Figure 5.3, which was advertised in an
Hearing With 101
Anti-Noise League exhibition handbook, shows quiet in the context of the 1930s office:
a male office worker leans forward and listens to his visitor without distraction from his
nearby female typist. Quiet here was an atmosphere that reproduced patriarchal ‘civilization’
in sound. The female typist is identified as a source of noise. The male office worker is an
active listener. His female visitor, to whom he listens, conforms to the ideal of the softly
spoken woman (otherwise the quiet afforded by the typewriter might not be needed). As
Marie Thompson has argued, ‘women have often been represented as “naturally” noisy in
comparison to their male counterparts; within popular consciousness,’ she goes on, ‘they
are imagined to be more talkative, choosing to discuss the trivialities of life and surrounding
themselves with a noisy, meaningless babble’ (Thompson 2013: 300). The field of quiet
was gendered, with women burdened with greater responsibility for producing quiet than
men. Men’s capacity to listen was simultaneously reproduced in such contexts. Cadbury’s
silent theatre box (Figure 5.4), introduced in 1930, was a box of chocolates designed to
offer quiet refreshment at the theatre and provides further evidence of this gendering of
quiet. Cadbury said that it was intended to ‘enable the rapt or bored playgoer to take her
nourishment without distracting the actors by rustling the packing material’. A further note
beside the editorial added that the silent theater box would also allow the playgoer to avoid
‘arousing the indignation of one’s neighbours’ in the theater. A closer inspection of noise
abatement archives therefore reveals the coming into being of a field of quiet produced by
anti-noise campaigning or everyday antipathy to noise which shaped everyday behaviours
Figure 5.3 Section of an advertisement for the Underwood Noiseless Typewriter.

Source: Anti-Noise League 1935: 75.
Figure 5.4 Cadbury’s ‘Silent Theatre Box’ editorial. Source: Advertiser’s Weekly,
12 December 1930: 423.
Hearing With 103
and gave sonic form to time-bound ideas of ‘civilization’. Quietness is a way of hearing.
Of course, it produced not only class and gendered subjectivities, but, as other kinds of
source material would show more clearly, the sonic contours of race, ethnicity, religion,
and sexuality. The colonial archive, for example, might help us to understand the quietness
in Figure 5.3 as a dimension of whiteness.7
The way we hear quiet also changes historically. From ‘acoustic civilization’ in the 1930s
quiet has become financialized ‘natural capital’ in the twenty-first century. A 2011 report
produced for the UK government explained that:
Quiet and ‘quiet areas’ contribute to economic welfare through the generation of human
well-being and prevention of illness and ecosystem decline that inflict costs on society.
However, many of the benefits of quiet are not directly priced in the market and therefore
risk being under-valued with resulting degradation or total loss of ‘quiet’ or ‘relatively quiet’
areas.
(URS Scott Wilson 2011)
Promoting its Quiet Mark consumer goods, such as the quiet Magimix kettle and noise-
cancelling Sennheiser headphones available at the upmarket department store John Lewis,
or even holidays on which hotels guarantee quiet to the discerning holidaymaker in search
of creative recuperation, today’s Noise Abatement Society explains that ‘recognizing
that ultimately all wealth derives from natural systems, we need to find practical ways
of expressing the value of ecosystem services in all decisions which risk reducing natural
capital. This includes soundscape quality’ (see Quiet Mark 2016). What might be described
as a neoliberal way of hearing is at work here, which will one day be the subject of historical
research.
The sonic encounter

Any restatement of sonic-historical methodology must consider its position in relation
to the methodological debate currently taking place in sound studies on the question of
what has been called the ontological challenge. This challenge has been usefully set out
by Brian Kane as a questioning of ‘the relevance of research into auditory culture, audile
techniques, and the technological mediation of sound in favor of universals concerning
the nature of sound, the body, and media’ (Kane 2015: 3). Spearheaded by philosopher of
music Christoph Cox (2011) and cultural theorist of sound Steve Goodman (2009), the
ontological turn in sound studies has sought to shift attention away from meaning and
cultural experience and towards the materiality of sound and its precognitive power to
affect the human body. In Goodman’s case, which is closer than Cox’s to the interests of
most historians, the argument is that during times of war, in particular, what sound means
matters much less than what sound does in terms of its vibrational impact on bodies.
Rather than cultural ways of hearing, Goodman argues that we should be concentrating
our attention on what he calls the ‘politics of frequency’ – by which he means specifically
the bodily impact of low-frequency sounds in war (Goodman 2009: xv) – or as Cox puts it,
ask of our evidence ‘not what it means or represents, but what it does, how it operates, what
changes it effectuates’ (Cox 2011: 157). Connected to a wider turn to materiality, object-
oriented ontology, and affective atmospheres in the humanities and social sciences, Cox’s
and Goodman’s critique of auditory culture approaches, such as the one I have set out in
the previous section, demands a reply.
It has readily found one in several powerful rebuttals. Marie Thompson and Annie Goh,
most notably, have put forward persuasive critiques of the ‘origin myth’ of sonic nature
operating in Cox’s work. Thompson argues that, while Cox claims to have found evidence
of the nature of sonic flux within the best sound art works, ‘his pursuit of the “nature of
sound” risks uncritically naturalizing what is ultimately a specific onto-epistemology of
sound’ (Thompson 2017b: 270). This onto-epistemology draws on a lineage of sound art
extending from John Cage which Thompson identifies as being ‘entangled with, amongst
other things, histories of whiteness and coloniality’. She argues that, ‘ontologies bear the
traces of their historical moment even when those ontologies “withdraw” from mediation’
(266–282). Thompson does not reject sonic ontologies, indeed her book Beyond Unwanted
Sound (2017a) is an argument in favour of understanding noise as an active, affective force
rather than a moral category of bad sound. She suggests, instead, that, ‘situating rather
than simply dismissing sonic ontologies enables us to ask how “the nature of the sonic” is
determined – what grounds the sonic ground – while remaining open to how it might be
heard otherwise’ (Thompson 2017b: 278). Thompson’s is thus an approach that advocates
for the necessity of sound history. It is via attention to what here I have called ways of
hearing that claims to the ‘nature’ of sound can be unmasked as culturally specific and
invested in politics and society. Goh’s argument is even more explicit in its advocacy of an
historical approach to sound. Critiquing what she terms a dominant ‘sonic naturalism’ in
sound studies’ preoccupation with auditory knowledge, she proposes instead a principle of
‘sounding situated knowledges’ in the past as a way of interrogating the conditions of sonic
knowing (Goh 2017: 283–304). In this section, I intend to develop an approach equal to the
challenge of researching what Jim Sykes has described as ‘culturally-constituted ontologies
of sound and listening that structure social relations’ (Sykes 2018: 56).
The ontological challenge of Cox and Goodman raises the question of whether historians
of sound can credibly adopt the concept of affect or affective atmosphere to explain what
sound did and meant in the past. Above, I have hinted, though not yet explicitly claimed,
that ways of hearing are in part affective: they harness sound’s power to affect the body
and produce feeling as a way of actualizing gender and national belonging. If the affect
and the atmospheres that it produces is pre-cultural as Goodman and other affect theorists
maintain, can there be a history of sonic affect? If, as Kane explains, ‘Goodman discourages
accounts of the sonic in terms of conscious hearing or listening in favor of an unconscious,
affective, intensive account of sound as material impact’, where does that leave the historian
of sound? Kane’s answer is that studies in auditory culture have never in fact been ‘simply
studies in “representation” or “signification” without consideration of the body. Rather,’
he goes on, ‘scholars in auditory culture seek to demonstrate the successions and relays
between cognition and affect, or, speaking broadly, between the mind and the body. As
listeners acquire new skills,’ he argues, ‘much of the cognitive effort involved in the initial
Hearing With 105
training is offloaded onto the body. At the same time, bodily capacities constitute both the
basis upon which training occurs and the ground for potential future cultivation’ (Kane
2015: 8). Kane’s theory of auditory training is precisely what is at stake in the production
of ways of hearing.
Others have mounted similar defenses of a method for researching sonic affect that
retains a place for cultural analysis. Marie Thompson argues in Beyond Unwanted Sound
that noise should be thought of as characterized by affectivity rather than negativity, ‘a
perturbing force-relation that, for better or worse, induces a change’. But, she goes on, ‘noise
(and affect) is frequently entangled with signifying registers’ (Thompson 2017a: 42–48).
Anahid Kassabian proposes a theory of ‘distributed subjectivity’ to explain the role that
the affective encounter with sound plays in generating identity. Distributed subjectivity is
‘a nonindividual subjectivity, a field, but a field over which power is distributed unevenly
and unpredictably, over which differences are not only possible but required, and across
which information flows, leading to affective responses’ (Kassabian 2013: xxv). The kind of
information that produces the most powerful affective response, for Kassabian, is sound.
She notes that ‘identity is one of the formations that are left behind after affect does its
work’ (xxvii). She goes on to argue that although ‘identities seem static and positional,
they are anything but, and they are constituted microsecond by microsecond according
to affects that are in motion’. She uses the example of the singing of a national anthem to
illustrate her point.
For many people – though certainly not all – their national anthem invokes pride and
community, a warm feeling of belonging. Each singing is an affective event, creating a wave
of feeling that flows across a group of any size, from one to thousands. Affect like that leaves
behind residue that appears to produce a static identity. But the very fact that it needs to be
done over and over suggests that something rather different is happening.
(Kassabian 2013: xxviii)
Sound, in the example of national anthem singing, is maintaining individual and collective
identity via its ritual performance, according to Kassabian. Sound’s power to affect is being
deployed in the project of nation-building. Kane, Thompson, and Kassabian’s theorization
of the affective and meaningful power of sound lays the ground for my suggestion that
historians might go in search of the production of sonic encounters in the past.
Affect can sometimes appear to be a rather abstract notion. Certainly, a lot of historians
would perceive it this way. Under other names, however, it has been active in historical
understandings of what sound is and does. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
discussions of noise’s tendency to produce nervousness or neurasthenia was the language
of its day to describe the bodily impact of sound and its ability to generate bad feelings.
During the Second World War, government health authorities were alert to the extent to
which bomb sounds could produce fear responses in civilian populations and embarked
on propaganda campaigns to encourage people to hear bombs without fear or not to hear
them at all (by using ear plugs).8 Sound’s atmospheric materiality is what makes it such an
effective medium for the circulation of values and production of behaviours. The Big Ben
Silent Minute is an example of the production of a sonic encounter. The sound of Big Ben
tolling is not in any sense intrinsically British but was produced as such by interventions in
the affective field, what might otherwise be described as everyday atmospheres of sound.
The feeling of national pride or sense of collective endeavour that is associated with Big Ben
is an affective response produced culturally. It is produced by broadcasting, pamphlets, and
ritual, materials which produce the auditory ‘training’ that Kane identifies.
The Darlington Quiet Town Experiment is an example of the kind of work that goes
into producing a sonic encounter, in this instance, with everyday urban sounds. This
two-year experiment was designed to solve the ‘human factor’ in what was now firmly
established as the ‘noise problem’ in public policy planning. While other areas of the
Noise Advisory Council’s work in the 1960s and 1970s focused on scientific investigation
of the technological sources and medical effects of noise, the Darlington experiment was
primarily an educational mission to reshape everyday auditory behaviour in urban space.
It aimed to help the residents of the town realize that ‘much unnecessary noise was made
by people who did not realise that they were causing a nuisance to others’ (Noise Advisory
Council 1981: 4). Children were targeted for involvement not because they were perceived
as the primary creators of noise, but because it was thought that, through education, they
could be transformed into a noise-sensitive generation. The posters, pamphlets, and social
activities undertaken as part of the Darlington experiment were designed to generate a
specific kind of encounter between hearers and specific kinds of sounds, heard as noise.
In the background of the Darlington experiment was an assumption that noise was
a symptom of anti-social behaviour and that fixing the noise problem was a route to
producing a better-behaved and more socially harmonious town. Although some familiar
technological culprits were identified in publicity materials as especially noisy, such as
motorbikes, in general noise was defined as time and context dependent, such as playing
the radio too loudly in the morning or leaving too noisily from the pub late at night. The
experiment was designed to protect domestic, private life in the face of intrusions from the
public realm, but what was being produced was very much a privatized quietness, a quiet
to be enjoyed from the comforts of one’s home. As in the context of the 1930s, gendered
labour underpinned the production of this quietness. In promotional materials circulated
as part of the Darlington experiment, the creators of noise are largely identified as men who
do not appreciate the acoustic needs of women and children for domestic and educational
life. In these publicity materials, it was women who urged their fellow townsfolk to be quiet
(as in the cover of the leaflet announcing the experiment in Figure 5.5 and the logo used
on promotional materials in Figure 5.6). In a leaflet which asked, ‘Do you have a noisy
gnome in your home?’ (Figure 5.7), women were asked to reflect on whether the man of
their house ‘does odd jobs at odd times’, ‘likes music too loud’, ‘never closes doors quietly’,
or ‘leaves his dog uncontrolled’. This leaflet had its desired effect in the story submitted by
one fifteen-year-old girl to the literary competition. The girl in her story complained of
her father’s ‘rendering of Pomp and Circumstance […] blasted around the house at full
volume […] I don’t think he is actually quiet for five minutes each day’, she wrote. ‘When
he wakes up in the morning, he starts his day off by switching on the radio, full blast.’ The
story concludes:
Hearing With 107
So if Darlington wants to make a success of its Quiet Town Campaign, I think they had better
get rid of my father, while they finish the experiment. He often talks about going back to the
places he went to during the war, such as Iceland, Norway and France. I don’t mind which
country you decide to send him to, just somewhere, where he can be as noisy as he likes.
(Darlington Borough Council n.d.: 39)
Figure 5.5 Cover of leaflet announcing the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment. Source:
Noise Advisory Council 1981.
Figure 5.6 Logo of the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment. Source: Noise Advisory
Council 1981.
The Darlington Quiet Town Experiment produced a sonic encounter that naturalized
noise as social disruption. It did so primarily for a female hearer who was constructed
as an agent of quiet in her town. It did so for sounds that threatened the integrity of
the private family home. There was an active listener in the experiment: he is pictured
frequently in reports wielding noise-measuring equipment (see, for example, Figure 5.8)
and represented the knowledge-gathering Noise Advisory Council. By hearing with the
female hearer promoted in the experiment’s publicity, however, the historian might gain a
different perspective on quiet, a perspective framed by gendered ways of hearing. There is
more to hear with in historical instances where sonic encounter has been produced. The
Figure 5.7 Detail from ‘Do you have a noisy gnome in your home?’ leaflet. Source:
Noise Advisory Council 1981.
Hearing With 111
example of gendered ways of hearing that I have set out here is intended only to illustrate
the necessity of hearing beyond the listening-to and of attending to the effects of ways of
hearing in the past.
Sonic encounters also take place out of the immediate context of their production. The
Darlington Quiet Town and Big Ben Silent Minute examples used here have been intended
only to draw attention to the most obvious forms of auditory attention shaping. The sonic
encounter between a Western colonizing ear and, say, the traditional musical tradition of
a colonized people, of the kind that finds form in ethnographic field recordings now held
in institutions such as the British Library, has not been stage-managed in the sense of
the Darlington Quiet Town Experiment, but is nonetheless still the product of a Western,
colonial, way of hearing. In hearing with these ways of hearing, we must reflect carefully on
the role of the historian’s listening ear. There remains further work to be done to theorize the
ways in which historians might realize Goh’s (2017) aim of sounding situated knowledges,
but reflexivity about what makes historical knowledge of the auditory past possible is a
necessary first step.
Figure 5.8 Image entitled ‘Noise reading being taken on a building site’. Source: Noise
Advisory Council 1981: 15.
Notes
1. The chapter focuses on modern sound cultures because the methodologies needed
to research ancient, medieval, and early modern sound are somewhat different to
those needed for the post-1800 period. It should nevertheless be noted that there is a
flourishing field of study on pre-1800 sound history. Foundational texts are Richard
Cullen Rath’s How Early America Sounded (2003) and Bruce Smith’s The Acoustic World
of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (1999). Recent works include Shane
Butler and Sarah Nooter’s edited volume Sound and the Ancient Senses (2019) and Niall
Atkinson’s The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture and Florentine Urban Life (2016).
2. The concept of the soundscape is most closely associated in sound studies with R. Murray
Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994).
3. Smith’s argument on the necessity of textual sources in historical sound studies can be
found in Smith (2015: 55–64).
4. Smith’s edited essay collection Hearing History: A Reader (2004) helped cement the sense
of a field in the making.
5. The key text on the history of noise is Karin Bijsterveld’s Mechanical Sound: Technology,
Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008).
6. Lord Horder papers, Wellcome Library, GP/31/B.4/4; GP/31/B2/23.
7. Anette Hoffman and Phindezua Mnyaka’s (2014) research on the colonial sound archive
points to the importance of further work in this area. See also Hoffman, in this volume.
8. For a discussion on noise and neurasthenia and the management of civilian hearing in
the Second World War, see Mansell 2017.
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6
Sonic Methodologies in
Urban Studies
Christabel Stirling
Introduction
What does it mean to talk about the music and sound culture of a particular city at a time
when the production, circulation, and consumption of music is increasingly trans- or post-
urban? As opera festivals are broadcast from the theatres of one city to the cinema screens
of another, rapid cultural flows between Accra, Johannesburg, and London culminate in
new ‘global’ genres and cross-cultural modes of musical production, and the ‘worldwide
crews’ of electronic/dance music flit remotely between frenzied dance battles in Southside
Chicago gymnasiums and the smooth wooden floors of Manhattan Records in Shibuya,
Tokyo. Meanwhile our notions of where and how to locate the urban grow increasingly
complex. How can we understand, and research, the relationships between music, sound,
and the city in an era of hyper-connectivity and digital mediation? How important are the
affective qualities and sociopolitical potentialities of urban locality, spatial proximity, and
live musicality in such an era? How should one go about conducting qualitative research
of large-scale urban music events where audience numbers are in the tens of thousands?
And what methodological demands are placed on researchers engaging with music and
sound cultures in monstrously convoluted megacities such as São Paolo, Mumbai, or
Manila?
Glancing at the literature on cities, the diverse and even incommensurable approaches
towards analysing the post-industrial city seem to announce the difficulty that
contemporary urban scholars face in dealing with cities that are increasingly fractured,
centrifugal, and enveloped by a vast mediascape of local, regional, and transnational
networks. On the one hand, cultural geographers and non-representational theorists
celebrate the virtual spatiality of the dematerialized ‘information city’ with its promise of
global interconnectivity and a sociality irreducible to spatial propinquity (Amin and Thrift
2002; Amin 2012). Brimful of seductive metaphors such as ‘flow’, ‘hybridity’, ‘excess’, and
‘emergence’, this literature emphasizes the radical potentials of wireless infrastructures and
the non-anthropocentric public spheres that they make possible. On the other hand, urban
anthropologists and architectural theorists critique the notion that virtual space could ever
supersede or displace material space, pointing to the paradoxical enhancement of spatial

propinquity in the digital age, where power and wealth are reconcentrated in specific places
and locales (Sassen 2001; Gandy 2005; Harvey 2006). As these scholars note, it is the global
metropolitan elite who are lifted out of the chaos of the concrete city in air-conditioned
‘citadels of connectivity’ (Gandy 2005: 37). Meanwhile sprawling vistas of congestion,
poverty, and infrastructural collapse rage on around and below – vistas that are themselves
encased in new media, often operating via parallel or ‘pirate’ distribution circuits, but that
nonetheless remain precarious, subject to continual breakdown.
In accounts of the city where music and sound are prominent, it is, however, the recursive
and ‘nested’ relationships between co-present and mediated space that become especially
palpable (Born 2013). Amidst the buzz of Cairo’s popular neighbourhoods, Charles
Hirschkind describes how Islamic cassette sermons ‘spill into the street from loudspeakers
in cafés’, at once reconfiguring the acoustic architecture of the city as the recorded voices
of well-known orators collide with car horns, bustling crowds, and a Michael Jackson
bassline in a passing car (Hirschkind 2006: 7). Reaching the ears of sensitive listeners on
the street, in shops, and on buses, the cassettes draw individuals into moments of private
ethical reflection and shared affective unity. Taxi drivers and shop owners become part
of a pious virtual public nested within the private space of their vehicle or establishment,
‘[exploiting] moments of boredom and labor’ as they hone their virtuous selves through
visceral modes of appraisal (Hirschkind 2006: 28). Meanwhile, in post-industrial Detroit,
Carla Vecchiola traces a different kind of virtual public – one that has evolved from the
city’s grassroots electronic music community and its capillary global movement. As she
notes, transnational networks not only take Detroit and its music ‘out across the globe’, but
also draw streams of ‘international techno tourists’ to the city from Asia, South America,
and Europe, generating a physical coming together of Detroit’s global music fan base in
ways that strengthen local community building and disrupt images of urban decay that
abound in Detroit (Vecchiola 2011: 96). In this context, online communications and mail-
order custom initiate new trans-urban socialities that exceed the locality of the city while
remaining inextricably tied to it: as a ‘social network of friends not yet met and familiar
places not yet physically experienced’ (108).
At a time when the boundaries between material and immaterial, concrete and virtual,
have become so intensely interwoven, what difficulties are posed to scholars engaging
with sound and music in heterogeneous urban settings? How can we get to grips with
the methodological requirements of cities that are so culturally, politically, and physically
different, but that – through ongoing currents of immigration, displacement, digital
circulation and exchange – are also intimately connected? And how might we capture the
potential fluidity and ‘openness’ of the networked city while continuing to challenge the
spatial exclusions and immobilities that erode public life in the physical city? Considering
such questions, this chapter explores possible approaches and methods for dealing with
the complexity of the twenty-first-century city. I begin by providing an overview of recent
research conducted at the intersection of music, sound, and urban studies, highlighting
the methods that those engaging in such work have developed. Next, I reflect upon how
methods and techniques from across the musical sub-disciplines might combine to
Sonic Methodologies in Urban Studies 117
create more critical urban methodologies. Finally, I discuss how I have put some of these
methodological strategies into practice in my own urban musical research. In particular,
I reflect upon the potentials of using a number of audiovisual and participatory methods
alongside more conventional ethnographic techniques and approaches. As I argue, different
cities have different methodological needs, and successful ways of working in one urban
context are not always transferable to another. Nonetheless, it is my hope that this chapter
will offer a set of tools to be taken up, experimented with, and adapted across a range of
empirical urban contexts in order to better grasp the complex realities of our time.
Music in the city and the city in music

Increasingly, urban studies scholars working in geography, sociology, and architecture have
engaged with music and sound as a major part of their research. With cultural geographers
such as Susan Smith (1997), George Revill (2000), and Arun Saldanha (2002) having
probed the spaces and places of music since the mid-1990s, more recent work in this field
has seen a shift to music and sound’s ability to initiate spatialities through practices of
performance, encounter, and the ‘fleshy dynamics of embodiment’ (Anderson, Morton,
and Revill 2005: 643; Revill 2013; Simpson 2017). Grounded in a conception of urban space
not as bounded or preconceived but as dynamic and continually unfolding, such a shift
has had methodological implications too, encouraging a participatory and experimental
engagement with the ‘now’ of musical practice and performance – an approach dubbed
by Nichola Wood and colleagues as ‘doing and being’ geographies of music (Wood, Duffy,
and Smith 2007). Rosemary Overell’s (2012) work on ‘brutal belonging’ in Australia and
Japan’s grindcore scenes is a strong example of this approach being taken up. Drawing
on Wood et al.’s (2007) notion of ‘participant-sensing’, Overell uses a digital recorder
to capture ‘on-the-spot’ experiences of grindcore scene members at different gigs and
venues, as well as supplying participants with their own digital recorders through which to
spontaneously log their thoughts and feelings (Overell 2012: 90–94). While not an entirely
‘non-representational’ method, these audio diaries, she notes, help to ‘close the gap a little’
between the affective dimensions of musical urban life and the ‘clinical ethnographic
interview’, generating a livelier, more embodied account of the spaces and atmospheres
produced by grindcore (90).
Paralleling this, sociologists such as Les Back have, for a long time, been ‘listening’
to urban multiculture, attending ethnographically to the musical and cultural dialogues
arising between South Asian and African Caribbean immigrants in niches of London and
Birmingham, as well as, more recently, examining how the movement of music across
borders – the ‘trafficking of sampled sounds’ (Back 2016: 191) – can generate transnational
and trans-urban connections that challenge ‘racially inflected nationalism[s]’ (Back 1996,
2016). Key to Back’s work is his striving towards what he calls a ‘sensuous’ or ‘live’ sociology:
a sociology that favours a wide range of sensory experiences and multimedia methods,
from film-making and soundscape recording to thick situated description of ‘social life
in process’, thus broadening ethnography’s reliance on interview (Back 2009: 3). Listening
to Deptford market in South East London, for example, Back bears witness to a thriving
multiculture characterized by ‘rituals of sociality and banter’, good-natured haggling,
and the convivial sharing of food recipes – a vibrant sonic social scene that contradicts
xenophobic claims made by his participants in interview and that emphasizes the need for
method triangulation (15). Similarly, in his account of London bus soundscapes, sociologist
Richard Bramwell highlights the ‘ad hoc’ social and technological networks that emerge
around the playing and sharing of music on bus journeys – a sociability that disrupts the
‘anti-sociality’ invoked by the buzzes, beeps, and automated voice-overs of the ‘official’ bus
soundscape, while also subverting the government narrative of London transport as a site
of suspicion and mistrust (Bramwell 2015).
Complementing these social scientific studies, musicology and sound studies have also
shown a burgeoning interest in urban geography over the past two decades, developing
areas of research such as iPod listening and urban experience (Bull 2007); ‘gigographies’
and the cartographies of live performance (Laing 2009; Lashua, Cohen, and Schofield
2010); music’s intertwinement with tourism, travel, and gentrification (Cohen 2007; Holt
and Wergin 2013; Garcia 2016); and the role of music in diasporic urban placemaking,
particularly as a spatializing or ‘homing’ device through which to cultivate shared spaces
of belonging (Dueck and Toynbee 2011; Henriques and Ferrara 2016). Of this literature,
Sara Cohen’s ethnographic work on ‘popular musicscapes’ in Liverpool is particularly
useful methodologically, mobilizing critical forms of cartography alongside archival
materials, photographs, and interviews to draw out the hidden musical histories of the city.
By juxtaposing several different kinds of music city maps – from tourist music heritage
maps to participants’ hand-drawn maps of their music-making activities in the city –
Cohen and her collaborators reveal how particular narratives, musicians, and venues (e.g.
the Beatles, the Cavern Club) have taken on a skewed mythological status in Liverpool,
coming to symbolize ‘entire musical genres and eras’ at the expense of the journeys and
trajectories of other musicians and styles (Lashua, Cohen, and Schofield 2010: 126; Cohen
2011: 240). In particular, these ‘master maps’ of music heritage obscure Liverpool’s black
musical histories and legacies, including the constraints on black musicians’ mobilities in
the post-war period and the ongoing exclusion of black-originating genres such as grime
from urban public spaces. Mapping, in the hands of these scholars, then, becomes a tool
through which to draw out the disparities and contradictions between ‘official’, historical,
sociocultural, and personal characterizations of the musical city, and to illuminate a city’s
musical obstructions and absences as well as flows.
Notably, mapping has also been a key method for sound studies scholars. Primarily
associated with the World Soundscape Project and the emergence of acoustic ecology
in the 1970s, ‘noise maps’ have evolved as a way of charting the volume, density, and
movement of noise in cities, using both quantitative decibel charts and qualitative pictorial
diagrams and graphic notations (cf. Schafer 1970). Meanwhile, ‘sound maps’ constitute
a more playful, artistic engagement with urban sound, less associated with public health
and noise as a pollutant, and more with sound as a defining quality of a city’s character,
and thus as potentially crucial to urban planning and design (Cusack 2017; Lappin,
Ouzounian, and O’Grady 2018). With the explosion of web-based maps in the last decade,
sound and noise mapping have largely become crowdsourced activities, generating new
kinds of ‘participatory’ sonic urbanism and communal sound archiving, as well as raising
concerns about free labour, access to technology, and acoustic surveillance (Waldock 2011;
Ouzounian 2021).
Other kinds of sound mapping, such as soundwalking and field recording, have also
become popular among sound studies scholars, particularly those engaging with the
social and corporeal dimensions of urban sound and/or sound art. Significant, here, is
David Pinder’s (2001: 8) auto-ethnographic account of Janet Cardiff ’s Missing Voice (Case
Study B), which unfolds as an aural psychogeography of London’s East End mediated by
the doubtful, fanciful, subjective listener who walks to excavate ‘hidden histories and
geographies’; Linda O’Keeffe’s (2015) participatory soundwalks with teenagers in Dublin,
which expose the ‘missing voices’ of young people in urban design and the role of the
urban soundscape in exacerbating social exclusion; and Tom Hall and colleagues’ (2008:
1033) ‘touring interviews’ – ‘interviews as, or nested within, soundwalks’ – in which young
people in South Wales ‘walk’ their interviewers through the city, with street noise often
emerging as an ‘innovative disturbance’ that shifts dialogues, sheds light upon urban
reconstruction, and highlights disquieting levels of acclimatization to overwhelmingly
loud industrial sounds. As Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg, and Barry Truax have
noted, such in situ urban sonic practices expand the sensorial dimensions of listening
considerably, generating experiences of sound that are simultaneously tactile, kinaesthetic,
olfactory, and gustatory as well as sociocultural and situated (Cobussen, Meelberg, and
Truax 2016: 6). Consequently, when taken as a qualitative research method, soundwalking
acts as a particularly powerful articulator of the differentiation of urban acoustic experience,
illuminating the conflicting sonic atmospheres, (im)mobilities, and histories that permeate
the city and rendering the experiences of those who are marked by fixity and marginality
as well as choice and fluidity. In this way, soundwalking might be seen to proffer a sensorial
counterpart to Cohen’s cartographic practice, unsettling ‘official’ accounts of the spatially
open, networked city and revealing instead the diverse, often limited ways in which
individuals and social groups navigate urban space in the physical city.
Building on sound’s intertwinement with urban social and cultural identities, a further
important tributary to emerge from musicology and sound studies pertains to histories
of sound in/of the city. Documenting the changes wrought to cities such as Madrid, New
York, and Lyon during the nineteenth century, historians of European and American
music have noted how urban and economic developments of this era not only altered the
acoustics of the street and the trajectories of sound through the city, but also fuelled the
emergence of new social class identities, marked, in turn, by conflicting sound cultures
that jostled for space in the modern metropolis (Picker 2003; Thompson 2004; Boutin
2015; Balaÿ 2016; Llano 2018). Particularly frequent in this literature are references to
the ‘silence-seeking’ bourgeoisie, whose display of contempt for noisy (often immigrant)
street musicians and the ‘shrill cries’ of peddlers signalled both their legitimacy as part
of an elite social-class category, and their desire to control and impose order onto literal
neighbourhoods of the city. Sound and music as instruments of power and order are also
at the forefront of an emerging body of work on colonial urban music history, attentive
to the attempts made to impose European urban values on colonized societies through
sonic-sensory regulation and the propagation of European music (Irving 2010; Baker
and Knighton 2011; Rotter 2019). Employing different methodologies and consulting
a wide range of archival sources – poetry, guidebooks, historic urban plans, paintings,
and personal diaries – these studies act as valuable historical forebears to contemporary
forms of audio mapping and ‘sensuous’ sociology in their ability to shed light upon how a
city’s sounds were perceived by different social and cultural groups at particular historical
moments. Moreover, in charting the point at which urban noise started to emerge as a
public health issue in the West, such accounts are vital to understanding the historical
trajectories of contemporary noise mapping.
A final significant area of research relates to anthropologies of urban sound. In recent
years, ethnomusicologists have engaged compellingly with the relations between affect,
the social, and the spatial in urban environments, emphasizing sound’s ability to implore,
repel, and provoke in ways that instigate shifts between public and private experience,
reconfiguring or reinforcing socio-spatial relations (Stokes 2010; Born 2013; Hankins
and Stevens 2013). Much of this literature has focused on postcolonial and/or post-
conflict cities currently undergoing rapid urbanization in Africa, the Middle East, and
Asia (Hirschkind 2006; De Witte 2008; Eisenberg 2013). Adopting ‘listening’, participant
observation, and film-making among other ethnographic techniques, these accounts
make palpable the deeply encultured nature of city sound. In Beirut, for example, the
acoustically magnifying derelict buildings around which the urban soundscape ricochets
coupled with the relentless drilling and hammering of an enterprise-driven post-war
reconstruction programme amount to a situation in which the grievances of a troubled
history literally resonate (Royaards 2019). Urban sound, in this context, thus takes on a
profound historicity: imbued with the acoustics of disintegrating architectural shells and
yet-to-be-populated towers, traffic noise and muezzin calls carry the sonic trail of ongoing
political instability, spatial rem(a)inder and erasure, and an uncertain identity and future.
Meanwhile, in Accra, public space is similarly cacophonous but differently contested, here
saturated by the sounds of the various religious groups that vie for audible presence in the
cityscape. As Marleen De Witte notes, the combination of technological mediation, in the
form of powerful PA systems, and open-air architecture due to the hot climate, means that
‘private sound easily becomes public and public sound permeates into spaces as private
as one’s bed’, leading to an ‘auditory sacred space that is never contained’ and that fuels
frequent clashes over territory, cultural history, and citizenship (De Witte 2008: 693, 706).
If holding the sounds of these and other cities together exposes their differences, it also
allows similarities to come to the fore, particularly regarding the evolving aurality of so-
called ‘media urbanism’. Defined by Ravi Sundaram (2009: 6) as the convergence of crisis-
level urban growth and ubiquitous media, the soundworlds of media urbanism are those
promulgated by low-cost mobile telephony, fast-moving electronic music devices, and
increasingly ‘hackable’ technological infrastructures in cities that are themselves expanding
at dizzying rates. Under such conditions, the endless sounds of construction work and
the perpetual car horn blowing of informal transport services that use ‘beeps’ to pick up
passengers are overlaid with electronically boosted music, political campaigns, religious
chants, news, prayer, radio sermons, and jingles, most of which extend far beyond their
physical locations (Hirschkind 2006; De Witte 2008; Sundaram 2009). Government and
local authorities are thus confronted with a multiplicity of mediated sound cultures, which,
due to the escalating movement of peoples, are growing in diversity as well as volume, are
often antagonistic to one another, and are increasingly seen as pervasive, ‘unmanageable’,
emerging from the body politic ‘as if without limits’ (Sundaram 2009: 24, emphasis in the
original). Such exhilarating levels of urban-technological intensity and sonic maelstrom
do not, however, obscure sound’s potential to act as an ideological force in the city. On the
contrary, as Delhi’s portable media playing youth are vilified as ‘ear contaminators’ by civic
campaigners seeking to affirm their middle-class identities (24–25), while the Ghanaian
government mobilizes a noise abatement discourse to resolve a cultural religious sound
clash (De Witte 2008: 707), urban sound’s intertwinement with identity formation, social
control, cultural-historical friction, and attempts to silence and segregate the ‘other’ appears
as strong as it did in the nineteenth century. Such degrees of difference and similarity
across both geography and history bring into articulation the potential gains to be made
from studying cities in comparative cross-cultural and temporal perspective, rather than
merely as singular-complex entities (Klotz et al. 2018).
Methods and methodologies

This latter point raises the question of methodology, and how it might be distinguished
from and brought into a critical relation with questions of method. Indeed, taken together,
the above literatures offer a wealth of innovative methods for researching music, sound,
and urban matters. Where ‘participant-sensing’, listening, and soundwalking enable
particular proximity to the micro-social and embodied dynamics of urban musical
experience, ethnographic and archival approaches to mapping (popular) music expose the
higher-level institutional and economic forces that are at work in (re)producing particular
versions of the music city. Meanwhile, historical source analysis affords unique levels of
insight into the lost auditory worlds of cities undergoing modernization, colonization, and
other irrevocable sociocultural and economic changes, while noise and sound mapping,
as analytical and artistic tools, have significantly altered how cities are perceived, planned,
and designed, and will likely continue to do so as environmental discourses gain force.
Perhaps less common in the literature is a critical interrogation of why particular
methodological approaches are deemed more or less suitable for engaging with music/
sound and the urban, what specific benefits and limitations they bring, and what the
different stances could amount to together, particularly when brought into a relation
with theoretical discourses. Auto-ethnography, for example, has numerous advantages
for researching the affective propensities of urban sound and/or sound art, enabling
one to detect changes in adrenaline levels or heightened sensation in the skin and flesh
in conjunction with other aspects of the ‘assemblage’ – sounds, technologies, personal
and other histories, spaces, discourses, and social relations (Born 2010a: 88). Yet, it is
also limited to the experiences of the individual researcher. Supplementing this with
ethnography, which might involve participating in, observing, filming, recording, and
‘listening’ to particular field sites or installations over time, as well as talking to and
interviewing participants, reveals more about how different people going about their lives
experience and respond to city soundscapes and sonic practices, while also facilitating a
sensitivity towards what Danilyn Rutherford refers to as ‘affect and “affect”’: the affects
felt by the researcher engaging with the ethnographic field, and the affects experienced
by the participants being researched (Rutherford 2016: 289). An important benefit of
ethnography, then, is its capacity to expose the existence of multiple, situated perspectives
and vantage points, and the propinquity it affords to the embodied socio-spatial relations
produced by music and sound.
Nonetheless, without an historical perspective, it is difficult to fully comprehend and
diagnose the contemporary. This is true both at the micro-social level, given the way
that social and political histories saturate the everyday urban sonic landscapes in which
we live in ‘intimate, up-close terms’ (Back 2016: 1027); and at the macrosocial level, in
terms of being able to deduce the ‘cumulative outcome’ of such everyday processes as
‘historical trajectories of variation or transformation, stability or stasis’ (Born 2010c: 235).
Triangulating history with (auto-)ethnography thus presents numerous advantages. It
enables, for example, insight into the continuities and breaks between past- and present-
day street music cultures, including how and why certain modes of perception and ideology
‘became available’ at particular historical moments, what discourses and legislative
measures emerged as a consequence, and the extent to which these achieved stability over
time. It reveals how the unequal movement of sounds, genres, and people through the
contemporary city – exemplified in London by the expansion of classical music and other
predominantly white cultural forms into non-traditional urban spaces conterminously
with the relentless shutdown of black-run venues and genres such as grime – have long
historical precedents, from the sonic-spatial domination of classical music over immigrant
street music in Victorian London, to the violent exclusion of black musical expression from
urban space via the ‘colour bar’ in post-war Britain. And it shows how historical forms of
embodied ‘sensitivity’ and white middle-class boundary drawing, including the power to
command silence over urban space, not only penetrate through to the present in European
cities in the form of noise complaints, racist policing, and revoked venue licenses, but
also congeal in new geographical and political spaces, under new media conditions, as
the bedrock for new ethnic and class identities – as Sundaram’s account of New Delhi’s
denigrated ‘ear contaminators’ makes clear. Bringing these diachronic perspectives into
dialogue with theory, it becomes apparent that recent work in cultural geography, which
wants to see the city as radically emergent through a conceptual emphasis on affect,
process, and performativity, poses problems for understanding experiences and events that
are characterized more by continuity than change.
The overarching point, following Georgina Born and Will Straw, is thus that we need
methods capable of articulating both stability and dynamism in urban musical cultures
– ways of working that grasp the ‘effervescence’ and sensory richness of city sounds and
socialities as well as their direction of movement and scale (Straw 2001: 252–4; Born
2005). Combining questions of temporality and history with ‘up-close’ descriptive and
ethnographic work, as Born suggests, allows us to trace ‘the historical trajectories of
musical assemblages’, uncovering the ways in which seemingly unstable, fast-moving
urban musical practices expand into larger processes of historical change or continuity,
transformation or reproduction (Born 2005: 34, 15). Moreover, working comparatively
across geography and topography, as well as history, sheds light upon the often-surprising
similarities and differences that emerge between cities, their soundworlds, and their rates
of change/stability at particular historical conjunctures. As Straw’s (1991) work on ‘scenes’
demonstrates, the empirical challenges that this kind of work generates include thinking
about how ‘indigenously’ produced sounds can propagate to new urban centres and
subsequently evolve at a different rate; how ‘native’ and ‘dispersed’ scenes may enter into
mutually influential relations and precipitate unintended musical developments and trans-
urban connections; and how cities can become host to a vast range of musical practices and
publics that diverge from each other ‘physically’, at the face-to-face level, but coincide and
overlap ‘virtually’, via the shared taste communities that they engender globally.
How, then, one might ask, is it possible to work in all of these different ways at once? How
can one design and conduct rigorous ethnographic fieldwork in complex urban settings
while also attending rigorously to history? What is gained or compensated by choosing
multi-sited over single-sited research, and is the capacity to carry out intensive fieldwork
jeopardized in opting for the former? And if digital technologies have transformed the
sonic fabric of cities, have they not also transformed the methodological possibilities for
researching sound in/of/and the city? In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss how I
have grappled with some of these questions in my own urban musical research. Indeed,
while combining multi-sited ethnography with history and theory enabled unique insights
and perspectives, it still left me with the practical problem of how to conduct qualitative
research in a city that spans 610 square miles and has an estimated population of nine
million (London). As I describe, such a challenge not only entailed that I ‘cast my net’
appropriately but also that I think in more experimental ways about methods that might
do justice to musical urban sprawl.
Comparison, difference, and diachrony

For the past five years, my ethnographic research has focused on live music audiences in
London, drawing insight from classical music, sound art, dub reggae, and electronic/dance
music. Specifically, I have been concerned with the social and affective processes by which
music and sound generate collectivities, and with how one can or might gain proximity
– methodologically and representationally – to the visceral, non-discursive aspects of
musical experience. Working comparatively across genres, some of the questions I have
sought to answer are: how do music and sound act upon the physical body in ways that
potentially shift embodied social boundaries and power relations? What kinds of social
spaces do music and sound make possible, and what role do these spaces play in the
production of urban public life? Can music and sound catalyze social coalitions that are
emergent, and that simultaneously reorder existing social hierarchies and divisions? To
what extent could this facilitate a reimagining of the concept of affect for a musical and
sonic politics?
Comparison has always been central to this project. One significant reason for this was
that, since the project was not ‘about’ a particular community, institution, or otherwise
easily describable entity, but was rather constructed around more open questions about
what might or might not be possible (musically, socially, spatially, politically) at a particular
historical conjuncture (contemporary London), it was important to draw difference into
the ethnographic picture. Comparison, which was built into the research through multiple
field sites and ‘juxtapositions of locations’ (Marcus 1995: 105), seemed an obvious solution,
given its ability to situate the present as pluralistic and multifaceted rather than as unitary.
By traversing, discovering, and moving between an array of musical spaces – some familiar,
some strange, many placed at considerable distances from each other, others adjacent
but oblivious to each other – comparison allowed me to channel the close-up, local
perspective of ethnography along multiple tributaries. It enabled me to build a map of the
urban musical terrain in London that drew a huge amount of diversity into it, generating
a richer, more complex, if necessarily partial, ethnographic, and historical understanding
of the present. This employment of ‘difference’ as a methodological principle proved
central to my theoretical concerns too: it facilitated what Michel Foucault (1981) refers
to as a ‘polyhedron’ of empirical information through which to understand the workings
of musical affect, thus moving away from the theory-driven empiricism of many affect
theorists (see Stirling 2019).
Regarding the study of music and sound cultures in such a big city, it also seemed
important that the genres and field sites I selected had the propensity to occupy a range of
sites and neighbourhoods – not just collectively but in and of themselves too, so as to allow
for different levels of comparison. At the time of fieldwork (2013–2015), the migration
of classical music out of the concert hall and into unusual urban spaces and venues was
gaining particular traction in London, fronted by initiatives such as Nonclassical (est. 2004),
the Night Shift (est. 2006), and the London Contemporary Music Festival (est. 2013) (see
Nonclassical n.d.; Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment 2020; London Contemporary
Music Festival [LCMF] n.d.). Studying this ‘new music’ movement alongside classical
concerts taking place in traditional concert hall settings thus allowed me to analyse the live
performance socialities of classical music across nightclubs, car parks, warehouses, train
stations, and Second World War air raid shelters, as well as concert hall auditoria. Similar
levels of comparison were made possible by my sound art fieldwork, which drew me to
a range of urban spaces: canal towpaths, churches, residential streets, housing estates,
galleries, and arts cafes. Electronic/dance music, encompassing various styles and sounds,
presented an interesting inversion of the classical music scene in terms of its increasing
‘intellectualization’ and the prevalent emphasis on certain subgenres as ‘art’ forms to be
consumed in concert halls and galleries as well as nightclubs. During fieldwork, for instance,
I saw prominent DJs perform at the Southbank’s Festival Hall, the Barbican Centre, and
the Tate galleries, and this was paralleled by a growing number of collaborations between
DJ/producers and symphony orchestras.1 Finally, the dub reggae scene was, at the time of
fieldwork, very wide ranging, incorporating relatively ‘mainstream’ events at established
inner-London nightclubs, smaller-scale dances in non-gentrified neighbourhoods and
community spaces, and large-scale street carnivals such as Notting Hill and Brixton Splash.
As a field site, it thus presented a prime opportunity for comparative work between a range
of indoor and outdoor sound system sessions.
Working between and across these genres and scenes, then, took me to all kinds of
social and musical spaces in all corners of the city – from an outdoor disco festival in
Enfield to an historic Caribbean venue in Southall. It demanded that I travel long distances
– by train, (night) bus, bicycle, and foot – at all times of the day and night. It generated
overlap and similarity as well as difference, as individuals who I had met as part of one
scene popped up unexpectedly in another, while a single multipurpose venue hosted a
reggae night, an experimental classical concert, and an all-night techno event in the
space of a few days. Further, it allowed me to take unexpected trajectories, following the
fragmented and dispersed activities of musical and cultural formations across multiple
online/offline locations. While the research thus didn’t move between cities – though
it might productively in the future – it still encompassed multi-sited ways of working,
requiring that I negotiate different degrees of familiarity and estrangement in relation to
my field sites, moving between ‘public and private spheres of activity’, and demanding that
I constantly recalibrate my positioning in terms of what George Marcus refers to as the
multi-sited researcher’s ‘shifting affinities for […] as well as alienations from, those with
whom he or she interacts with at different sites’ (Marcus 1995: 112–113).
What did comparison between these four broadly defined field sites allow that single-
sited research might not have? Two points are worth drawing attention to here. First,
holding these genres together, as contiguous sites of urban musical activity with distinct
histories and discourses, enabled both differences and surprising commonalities to come
to the fore. For instance, while opposed in many ways, a number of striking similarities
emerged between the dub reggae and classical music scenes, particularly with regard
to the honing and enclaving of the historical and cultural spaces in which these musics
exist in their live forms, and the disciplined forms of embodiment and listening that
occur within and help produce these spaces. Parallels surfaced between dub reggae and
sound art, too, notably in the experimental aesthetic techniques shared by both genres –
montage technique, spatial manipulation, transplanting ‘found’ sounds – and the creative
trajectories and experiences of those who produced and participated in them. At the same
time, thinking about the nature of the social relations brought into play by the different
field sites, sound art’s place-based, participatory, and collaborative potential, which
enables artists to work in diverse urban neighbourhoods with various communities,
afforded very different forms of social and affective engagement than, say, electronic/
dance music, which in turn encompassed a huge amount of difference in itself given its
incorporation of multiple subgenres. Only through comparison was I able to trace these
links between field sites, translating what in one site was comparable to or divergent from,
similar but not necessarily equivalent to, another.
A second important vector of comparison was my ability to map the movement of

individuals across different musical collectivities, and in so doing, to understand both the
interrelations and disconnections between scenes, and the potential reasons why certain
musical performance situations made more sense to certain individuals than others. It
became possible to see, for example, why those I’d met at one field site felt unable or
unwilling to participate in the co-present spaces of another, in spite of liking and listening
to the music of that other field site and feeling part of its ‘virtual’ community. One way this
came to light during fieldwork was when a number of women expressed a strong affinity
for dub reggae, drum and bass, and grime but admitted that they wouldn’t participate
in these musics’ live scenes because the masculine atmospheres and protocols of the
spaces in which the musics were embedded made them uncomfortable. Not only, then,
did comparison allow me to grasp the particularities and differences between the genres
themselves and their collective spaces of performance. It also enabled me to trace the
musical pathways of individuals distributed across those collective spaces, and thereby to
grasp the differing degrees of access and urban mobility that different people harbour in
relation to diverse musical genres. Comparison as a methodology thus helped me, in the
words of Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, to ‘think in the space between individuals
and groups’ (Gatens and Lloyd 2002: 72); to realize the collective dimensions of selfhood,
and to understand that, as individuals, we are ‘inserted into economies of affect and
imagination which bind us to others in relations of joy and sadness, love and hate, co-
operation and antagonism’ (73). I do not believe that these insights would have come to
fruition with single-sited research.
The opportunity to grapple with the qualitative complexity of live crowds was partly
also attributable to my decision to use ethnography as a primary research method. By
virtue of its situated, local perspective, ethnography allowed me to get right up close to
the fleeting, sensory, and ephemeral aspects of urban musical experience. It facilitated
detailed observation of the movements, gestures, and actions of individuals within
musical collectivities; the demographics and social relations (convivial, apathetic, hostile,
etc.) brought into play by such collectivities; and the elusive immaterial quality often
referred to as ‘vibe’ or ‘energy’ that circulates through a musical/sonic body. More than
this, though, ethnography allowed me to enact continual shifts in perspective between
multiplicity and singularity: to attend qualitatively to the threshold mechanisms that
enable people to move between private and public experience in the presence of music
and sound, and in so doing, to see how relations of difference and individuality coexist
with, and are crossed by, relations of unity and similarity. I was thus able to approach a
question that has perplexed social theorists for over a century – that being the question,
as Lisa Blackman frames it, of how the many can act as one, and how one can act as
many (Blackman 2012) – with a methodological stance that neither reduced the musical
public to a unitary totality or entity, nor permitted descent into bifurcating plurality and
heterogeneity. Moreover, when triangulated with comparative and diachronic analysis,
such an approach brought to light how particular socio-musical formations exhibit far
greater degrees of stability and continuity than others, and how relatedly, as Born puts
it, certain genres are transmitted through time and space ‘much more successfully than
others’ (Born 2010c: 244).
To give a simplified example of this: as part of my fieldwork, I sought to bring analyses

of London’s contemporary classical music scenes – both the ‘new music’ and established
concert hall scenes – into dialogue with literature on the social history of concert life
in Europe and America. What this approach revealed was an extraordinary degree of
continuity between past- and present-day audiences. Customs, postures, and practices
that were established among bourgeois concertgoers in the mid-nineteenth century, such
as silently submitting to the ‘work of art’, suppressing outward emotional responses to the
music, and policing the manners of fellow concertgoers, endure practically unchanged
into the twenty-first century. Further, such practices – as well as the primarily white,
middle-class, musically educated publics that enact them – endure in spite of contemporary
classical music curators’ explicit attempts to draw new kinds of audience and alleviate the
formalities associated with classical performance by relocating the music to nightclubs and
other non-traditional concert spaces and reprogramming it alongside popular and non-
Western genres. The picture that emerges is thus one of profound historical longevity and
resistance to change. ‘New music’ initiatives seek to initiate transformation by seemingly
returning to a pre-nineteenth century model of concert life, emphasizing ‘miscellany’ as
a programmatic principle, encouraging informal behaviours, and relocating the music
to quotidian urban spaces such as parks and public squares, as was common in the
eighteenth century; yet audiences not only remain normative to the genre, particularly
in terms of race and class, but also struggle to relinquish the listening habits and affective
registers of nineteenth-century white, male, heterosexual bourgeois idealism. Classical
music’s antiquated social and embodied norms are, then, seemingly ingrained to such
an extent that changes in spatial location and musical programming tend to be fairly
inconsequential.
By contrast, the dub reggae and dubstep assemblages exhibit a much greater degree of
contingency, with alterations to the spaces and sites of performance impacting the musics’
social identity formations in significant ways. When dubstep crossed over to mainstream
in the mid to late 2000s, for example, the genre’s migration to new, less ‘underground’
spaces helped to redraw gatekeeping boundaries, making the scene more accessible to
women as well as to white middle-class groups. Unlike the intractability of classical music,
changes in venue, promotion, and publicity were thus seen to shift the demographics of
dubstep audiences quite dramatically. Similar processes have taken place in dub reggae,
specifically in relation to Jah Shaka, who runs one of the UK’s oldest sound systems. As
my interlocutors reflected, Shaka dances held at cultural centres in the 1970s and 1980s
were predominantly black and male – much like the sound system events that take place
at Caribbean cultural centres today. Yet, during the 1990s, this changed in a fundamental
way. Around 1992, the Black Arts administration service Culture Promotions took over
Shaka’s management and started promoting to a wider audience. Booking Shaka gigs at
venues such as the Rocket on Holloway Road, which was popular with students, as well as
the Dome in Tufnell Park, significantly modified Shaka’s crowds, bringing in a considerable
white middle-class following and many more women in addition to his mixed-class black
and Asian crowd. Gradually becoming a staple of Shaka dances, this social heterogeneity
again demonstrates the power of promotion, venue, and urban location to shift audience
demographics in certain musical assemblages.
The broader observation, however, is that there appears to be a racial and class dimension
to these processes. White middle-class audiences are drawn into black-originating or
multiracial genres such as dub, dubstep, and more recently, grime, at moments when
these genres have crossed over to mainstream or changed their promotional strategies
and venues; while conversely, black and/or working-class audiences have not been able
or do not wish to move into historically white and/or higher-class musical spaces such as
classical music, regardless of the changes made to space, site, and publicity. Such findings
suggest, firstly, that certain musical public spheres are much more resistant to change than
others; and secondly, that social boundaries – particularly those of (higher) class and race
(whiteness) – are being inadvertently recreated by the classical music assemblage itself,
even as claims are made for trying to transform them.
These kinds of comparative insights came to fruition, in part, by repeatedly attending,
observing, and documenting relevant musical events; building trusting relations with,
and interviewing, audience members, musicians, promoters, venue owners, and sound
engineers; spending time in record shops, record production houses, venues, cafes, and
other neighbourhood spaces; and ‘following’ the activity of musical initiatives from offline
to online spaces. I then sought to read across from this ethnographic work to relevant
histories and theories. Nonetheless, I still faced three major challenges in undertaking
my fieldwork. The first was the question of how to research and convey the mercury-like
qualities of musical affect and atmosphere in ways that didn’t simply fall back on discursive
methods. The second challenge was how to conduct qualitative crowd research, sometimes
in situations where audience numbers were in the thousands, or where my hopes of talking
to more than a handful of people during the course of an event were dashed by the rules
and taboos of the genre. And the third challenge was how to approach the study of music
and sound art in a city as vast and as rapidly changing as London. How, in other words,
could I even scratch the surface of this musically saturated, densely populated city, barely
recognizable from one year to the next in its high streets, backstreets, nightclubs, and
skylines? Responding to these challenges, I developed a toolbox of audiovisual, participant-
based, and collaborative methods, which I mobilized alongside conventional ethnographic
techniques. In the next and final section, I unpack this toolbox in more detail.
Live methods
A key source of inspiration when designing my fieldwork was Les Back and Nirmal
Puwar’s Live Methods (2013). Writing from a sociological viewpoint, Back and Puwar
argue that digital technologies have transformed our ways of apprehending and analysing
the social world, creating space for an ‘expanded’ sociology. With the smartphone having
largely eclipsed the notebook as the ethnographer’s storage device, digital methods such
as photography, video, and audio recording – all of which are embedded in a smartphone
– offer new tools for ‘real-time’ or ‘live’ investigation and ‘inter-corporeal understanding’
(Back and Puwar 2013: 7). By making use of such tools, they suggest, we might get closer to
‘the fleeting, distributed, multiple, [and] sensory […] aspects of sociality’ through research
techniques that are mobile and operate from ‘multiple vantage points’ (28).
Several of the methods reviewed earlier can be classified as ‘live’ – from Overell’s use of
digital recording at grindcore gigs to Hall and colleagues' soundwalking interviews. In my
own fieldwork, I also attempted to put a number of ‘live methods’ into practice. Among
the most fruitful was a ‘think-out-loud’ technique that I adapted from Tia DeNora’s (2000)
pioneering work on music in everyday life. Similar to Overell’s use of ‘participant-sensing’,
this method involved inviting audience members at different musical and sonic events
to literally ‘think-out-loud’ into a recording device – my iPhone – about their real-time
social and embodied experiences. Part of the appeal of this method was that it attributed a
certain agency to my participants, allowing them to make spontaneous utterances without
me intervening or taking notes. But these audio snapshots of dancefloors and concert
spaces also proved to be an invaluable way of documenting the minutiae of urban musical
experience. At electronic/dance music nights, for example, participants would use ‘think-
out-loud’ to express disgust at the pungent bodily smells that had suddenly interrupted
their musical pleasure; comment on the way that an event mutates from one hour to the
next, as crowds flood in to see their favourite DJ and then vacate the dancefloor immediately
after; and lament the tendency for intense crowdedness to breed sexual harassment.
Further, these audio memos were revealing in terms of the (dis)connections they exposed
between sonic foreground and background. In one memorable example, a participant can
be heard complaining about a high-profile DJ’s mixing skills not being up to scratch, just
as a distorted but distinctly ‘dodgy mix’ becomes audible overhead. In conjunction with
my own observations of individual-collective relations, as well as informal dialogue with
crowd members, this method thus helped me to build a rich sensory-affective picture of
music, sound, and sociality in their live forms.
Encouraged by the success of ‘think-out-loud’, I also pursued the idea of mobilizing
a ‘team-based auto-ethnography’. Conducted once again through audio-recorded voice
memos, I asked a group or ‘team’ of three or four participants to become ‘co-researchers’
by accompanying me to a particular event, recording their observations and experiences
into their phones, and forwarding them to me at the end of the night. Though this method
proved difficult to coordinate, and I only succeeded in making it work a handful of times,
the data it generated was illuminating, offering glimpses into the potentials that digital
technologies harness for transforming ethnographic crowd research. Indeed, such a
technique was an effective way of ‘re-imagining [participant] observation’, producing what
Back and Puwar call a ‘pluralization of observers’ (Back and Puwar 2013: 7): a group of
individuals who document the same event from multiple vantage points, as different social-
subjective nodes in a complex crowd or public. Not only did such a technique allow me to
involve my participants in the research, acknowledging them as peers and listening to their
thoughts and concerns; it also illuminated possible new ways of researching ‘live’ and ‘live-
streamed’ musical events simultaneously, with a group of researchers potentially dispersed
across co-present and mediated publics, working collaboratively between different cities
and even time zones. Finally, what both the ‘team-based’ and ‘think-out-loud’ methods
drew attention to was how the affective and the sensory were almost always the first points
of reflection for participants in documenting their sonic experiences. This often worked as
a complement to my own text-based field notes, which sometimes centred more on larger-
scale observations, such as audience demographics, entry fees and dress codes, spatial and
material properties, venue capacity, and levels of policing. As such, I was able to amass
data that moved constantly between music and sound’s micro-socialities and macrosocial
conditions and qualities.
A final ‘live method’ that I put to use was field recording. Initially, I would make
recordings of the musical events I attended purely for mnemonic purposes – to help me
remember what was going on or what something sounded like. As such, these recordings
were often low fidelity and semi-random: sporadic snapshots of a dancefloor or snatches
of conversation captured in the smoking area, sometimes no more than a few seconds
long. Yet, listening back at home, I was often amazed at the level of sonic detail that my
iPhone had managed to capture, rendering audible imperceptible, forgotten moments and
affective transitions that would have otherwise passed me by. One could hear, in the form
of shouts and cheers, for example, the jubilant collectivizing energy that erupts across a
dancefloor when a well-loved tune drops; the mediation of sounds and vibrations through
the physical materials of a spatial environment such that those sounds can then tell us
something about the textural surfaces of that cultural space; the distortion on the recording
and the levels of shouting that pulsate into audibility between bass kicks, often indicating
a deliberate cranking up of the volume by venues to encourage people to ‘drink more, talk
less’, as one engineer told me; and the moment when the selector started the record at the
wrong speed by accident, and everyone had a good laugh.
I started to see how these soundscapes were imbued with much wider urban political
issues and cultural histories. Audible expressions of disgust and exasperation at the
overcrowding of a dance club event, for instance, were often a trickle-down effect of
intensifying gentrification and social control, with venues forced to ‘oversell’ their events
in order to cover the costs of extortionate commerce-driven DJ fees, soaring rents, and
compulsory security measures. By listening, I was able to gain an alternative insight into
how these issues manifest audibly and physically on dancefloors: how certain musical
public spaces in London are becoming sites of rigorous control permeated by a crushing,
individualizing crowd density. On the other hand, capturing the rattling windows and
vibrating wooden-panelled toilets of a bass-infused reggae dance was simultaneously
to become sensitive to long cultural histories of migration, homemaking, and survival.
Indeed, the refraction of sound through the ‘homely’ surfaces of wood and carpet that have
sustained African Caribbean cultural centres since the post-war period speaks back to a
time when black British communities were violently excluded from urban public space and
compelled to create their own venues. Initially little more than living room dances with the
furniture pushed back (‘shebeens’), these cultural spaces or ‘public homes’ today remain
invested with sonic histories of resistance and defiance by virtue of their specific material
and spatial properties. Field recording as a method, then, revealed sound’s potential to
impart alternative or additive knowledges about the urban social world and its musical
and sonic environments – to do justice to the impassioned and textured qualities of sonic
sociality and history in ways that writing, speaking, and vision struggle to. Such a method
in turn raises questions about the epistemological work that sound has the capacity to do,
and how sound might be incorporated into the research process as sound, rather than as
transcription or other kinds of discursive translation.2
‘Draw Your Musical London’

As a final methodological tool, relating particularly to the challenges of urban ethnography,
I took inspiration from urban sociologist Emma Jackson (2012), who, in her work on
contemporary spaces of homelessness, invites her participants to produce mental maps
of the city under the instruction, ‘Draw Your London.’ Through their creativity and
willingness, Jackson is able to chart the trajectories of young homeless people in London:
their routes through particular neighbourhoods, their attachment to specific urban
places, and the forms of violence and governance they encounter. Moreover, by virtue
of the composite maps, Jackson is able to identify similarities and differences between
her participants – mutual fears, danger zones, shared spaces of loss, belonging, and
opportunity (Jackson 2012).
Repurposing this method, I experimented with asking my interviewees to ‘Draw Your
Musical London,’ inviting them to create a musical mind map of the city that showed
the spaces and places that were of musical significance to them.3 Part of my reasoning
for deploying such a method was so that I could better understand how people become
implicated in wider socio-spatial, affective, and musical currents, whilst remaining
disconnected from, and unable to ‘make sense’ of, others. And indeed, an important
finding to arise from the ‘musical mapping’ project was how participants perceived
themselves to be spatially and musically ‘distributed’. Brief descriptions scribbled on the
maps often relayed a deep sense of attachment and nostalgia to multiple spaces, people,
and sounds, many of which were placed at a temporal as well as spatial distance from each
other. One participant, for example, included a color-coded ‘Key’ to delineate different
decades of musical life (1970s, 1980s, 1990s, etc.), while another mourned the loss of
bygone life-changing nights experienced in his twenties. In addition to this palimpsestic
quality, what the maps also conveyed was a strong sense of the socio-musical circles
through which people deemed themselves to move. Of particular interest, here, was
how participants’ cartographic portrayals of themselves sometimes reflected a merging
of ‘imagined community’ and physical reality, incorporating venues and musical spaces
that they’d never actually been to before but still felt they belonged to. Equally, there were
times when participants would omit certain musical ‘selves’ from their maps, wanting to
be perceived in a certain way, only for these ‘hidden’ musical identities to surface in an
interview or discussion at a later date. Linked to this, in turn, was the question of people’s
musical-geographic ‘radiuses’ and degrees of urban mobility, often detectable from the
size of their genre maps and the breadth of the spaces that were accessible to them. Indeed,
studying the maps in conjunction with interviews and participant observation became
an important way of analysing the eclecticism and scale of people’s musical affiliations
and participatory horizons – their ‘omnivorousness’ (Peterson and Kern 1996) – which I
often found to be heavily mediated by class, race, gender, sexuality, and age. In this sense,
the maps revealed patterns and disconnections between the private musical tastes and
listening habits of particular individuals, and the degree to which those individuals were,
or were not, able to traverse public musical-spatial boundaries and urban thresholds (see
Figures 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3).
When triangulated with ethnographic, historical, and theoretical approaches, ‘live’ and
experimental methods such as these have the potential to significantly enhance our ways of
knowing and understanding cities and their complex music and sound cultures, not least
by offering ways of overcoming the practical challenges of qualitative crowd research and
generating new techniques for exploring the sonic texture of urban nightscapes and the
spatial distribution of sonic ‘selves’. Moreover, working with critical forms of cartography
and field recording that are participant- as well as researcher-based seems to go some way
towards allowing the researcher to experience the world beyond their own mind. At the
same time, it is clear that such methods also present new challenges, particularly in relation
to questions of representation, ethics, and transferability. How, for example, does one go
about naming, dissecting, and representing experiences that are felt, sensed, or only half-
known, and what evaporates or gets lost in the process? How might a soundwalk or ‘on-the-
spot’ voice memo be incorporated into the research process without recourse to description
or text? How should one credit those participants who become central to the research
through collaborative methods such as mapping and field recording? And what can be
done about the potential non-transferability of digital and ‘live’ methods – something that
I encountered in my own fieldwork upon realizing that ‘think-out-loud’ was extremely
Figure 6.1 Chris’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014.

Figure 6.2 Ali’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014.
productive across the electronic/dance music spectrum but not at all feasible during a
classical concert, but which is also a conceivable problem for those working comparatively
across cities. How might practices of field recording and ‘think-out-loud’ work in a city
such as Beirut, for example, where cameras and sound equipment (particularly in the
hands of Westerners) are viewed with intense suspicion and distrust?
Across sound studies and urban sociology, responses to some of these questions
have started to emerge in the form of multimedia publication platforms, ‘compound’
sound-text-image research outputs, and reflections upon what it means to collaborate
and co-author with our participants (Back, Shimser, and Bryan 2012; Gandy and Nilsen
2014; Ouzounian and Bingham-Hall 2019). To this I would add that there remains
considerable scope for experimenting with ‘live’ methods across diverse urban musical
contexts, and that if different cities have different methodological requirements, some of
the methods outlined above might productively be tested, transplanted, and potentially
modified according to the particular encultured cities/sites that they seek to reveal and
transcribe.
Conclusion
The sheer range of techniques and approaches discussed in this chapter speaks both to the
expansive interdisciplinary nature of the research being conducted between music, sound,
and urban studies, and the challenges faced by those pursuing such research, as cities
Figure 6.3 Martin’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014.
themselves grow increasingly complex and demanding in terms of the methods and tools
required to work effectively within them. Journeying through cultural geography, urban
sociology, historical musicology, sound studies, and anthropology, one finds an array of
innovative and carefully honed techniques for understanding specific dimensions of the
sounding city – from the ‘live’ methods of listening, soundwalking, and digital recording,
which have a particular capacity to render the processual sociality and impressionistic
quality of contemporary urban life, to historical and literary depictions of the nineteenth-
century acoustic city, which impart a vivid sense of the changing affective and ideological
power of urban sound as cities themselves underwent dramatic change. Notwithstanding
the specialist capacities of these methods, scholars such as Back (2009) have emphasized
the need for method triangulation in grasping the contradictory, multifaceted, and often
inconsistent nature of city life. In his own work on racism and multiculture in London’s East
End, Back moves between interviews with his participants, soundscape recordings of their
daily social interactions, and historical analyses of migration, class, and belonging in East
London to reveal significant disparities between words, sounds, and actions: interviewees’
racist melancholia and historical amnesia around ‘whiteness’ and community cohesion are
undermined by the convivial intercultural exchanges and multiracial friendships that they
perform and participate in daily on the streets. As with the contradictions that emerged
in my own fieldwork between participants’ cartographic and interview-based portrayals
of themselves, Back’s findings reiterate the importance of traversing different spheres and
scales of sociality – from the intimate one-on-one interview through the public social arena
to the diachronic ‘long’ view – in order to grasp the chasms as well as connections that arise
between the said and the seen/done, between imagination and reality, biography and history.
Building upon this notion of method triangulation, I pointed – in the second half of
the chapter – towards the potentials of a relational methodology that moves pluralistically
and at times agonistically between history, (comparative) ethnography, and theory.
Such an approach takes inspiration from Born (2005), Straw (2001), and others such
as Lawrence Grossberg (2014), who argue for a closer methodological relationship
between the affective, performative dimensions of musical urban sociality and the wider
institutional forces and ‘weighty histories’ that ‘give each seemingly fluid surface a secret
order’ (Straw 2001: 248); but who also – particularly in Born’s and Grossberg’s case – stress
the importance of holding theoretical discourses to account through rigorous historically
informed empiricism. In this way, speculative concepts and theories can be treated as ‘tools’
whose feasibility has to be ‘constantly constructed and contested’ in relation to specific
concrete situations, while the complexity of the empirical, in turn, may be enlivened and
potentially reconceived by imaginative conceptual thinking (Grossberg 2014: 13; cf. Born
2010b). Indeed, only by pursuing such a methodology – one that places theory in the teeth
of ethnography and history, that refuses, in Deleuzian terms, to choose one ‘or’ the other
– can the limits of conceptual or empirical or historical work alone be deciphered, and the
potentials for more radically collaborative and generative ways of working be brought into
being. Within this, as I have shown, digitally enabled ‘live’ methods can take on a critical
role in triangulating the empirical, rendering audible the historical, and dramatizing or
modifying the conceptual.
Notes
1. For example, techno producer Jeff Mills’s collaboration in 2015 with the BBC Symphony
Orchestra and dubstep innovator Mala’s collaboration in 2018 with the Outlook
Orchestra.
2. This is something that I have explored in a short sound piece published as part of the
Optophono edition ‘Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut’ (Ouzounian and Bingham-Hall
2019) and is something that I continue to explore with my friend and collaborator Freya
Johnson Ross.
3. With hindsight, I realize that this method in many ways resembles the hand-drawn maps
of Lashua and colleagues’ (2010) participants in their study of music in Liverpool.
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7
Sound and Pedagogy: Taking
Podcasting into the Classroom
Neil Verma
There is no obvious point from which to methodically explore the integration of sound
into learning settings. The best-known critical lineages, from Plato’s colloquy on speech
in Phaedrus and R. Murray Schafer’s classes on noise in 1970s British Columbia to John
Cage’s Black Mountain College seminars and Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Institute,
fail to capture the long and elaborate mutual imbrication across cultures of instruction
with sound-making, a category of human activity that could arguably include any
learning that involves vocalization as its minimal condition. ‘Listening is important in
all educational experiences’, Schafer has written, ‘whenever verbal or aural messages are
exchanged’ (Schafer 1992: 7). Rather than trying to relate all that – but as a way to give a
much more practical perspective on ‘sound teaching’ and the myriad issues that attend
it – I focus in this chapter on a recent case of a much more diffuse phenomenon: how
post-secondary instructors have been taking up podcasting as a methodology for student
work, something being developed in an improvised way across several institutions and
disciplines in the United States. Although it draws on traditions – most proximately,
radio documentary and sound art – podcasting is perceived to be a ‘new’ sound practice,
maybe the first sound-pedagogical methodology to emerge in dialogue with sound
studies itself, what Sterne calls the ‘interdisciplinary ferment’ (Sterne 2012: 2) evident
across the humanities and social sciences over the past decades. Musical instruction
and appreciation, rhetoric and public speaking, radio and recording, soundwalking: all
these existed at least as semi-institutionalized training practices before ‘sound studies’
consolidated as a critical mode. Podcasting, by contrast, did not. It is a sonic pedagogy
that emerged at the same time as sound studies, one that is especially self-aware of its
irreducible sonorousness.
We can follow the emergence of this teaching practice precisely. Podcasting first came to
post-secondary classrooms just after the iPod launched in 2001, as educators across settings
began to distribute lectures on iTunes, a movement that used the neologism ‘podagogy’
(Campbell 2005; Rosell-Aguilar 2007; Bell 2008). More recently, in part as a response to
the explosion in narrative podcasting since the popularity of Serial in 2014, an overlapping
approach has begun to emerge as instructors ask students to produce podcasts for classes
rather than just distributing their own lectures digitally. The goal of this chapter is to gain
insight on this newer ‘Podagogy 2.0’ moment from instructors who ask students to learn
‘by’ podcasting rather than ‘through’ the podcasts of others. To this end, I interviewed
nineteen faculty members from around the United States, learning about their motives,
methods, and outcomes. While the interviews suggested a feeling of success, three areas
of ambivalence emerged. The first had to do with finding a balanced approach to teaching
technology. The second had to do with writing skills, and how podcast teaching contributes
to or neglects them. Finally, there was a question about how podcasting troubles boundaries
of what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ the class. Together, these three areas of uncertainty
reflect perennial difficulties and affordances of sound-based pedagogical practices, while
at the same time showing some of the particular issues that instruction through digital
technologies tend to entail.
Podagogy 1.0/Podagogy 2.0

There is a long-standing lack of qualitative, experience-driven advice on podcast creation by
students, although there is a reasonable body of research on podcast creation by instructors
(Campbell 2005; King and Gura 2007; Bell 2008). Educators were among the earliest to
make use of the ‘culture of mobile listening’ that emerged in the early years of the twenty-
first century associated with the rise of the iPod, sending out lectures and assignments as
audio (Bull 2005). In 2004 a well-publicized project at Duke University saw all freshman
given free iPods; two years later philosopher Susan Stuart’s lectures on Immanuel Kant
unexpectedly became among the most downloaded tracks in the education category of
iTunes (Macleod 2006). Scholarly literature that followed these and other developments
focused on a few key areas, such as the use of podcasts in language learning (Rosell-Aguilar
2007), along with a number of pilot studies of techniques in specific fields (Dale and
Pymm 2009; Ng’ambi and Lombe 2012). Some argued that podagogy promoted flexibility
and motivation among students, increasing their level of engagement (Salmon and Nie
2008; Dale and Pymm 2009), while others were sceptical about mere lecture capture as
a meaningful change from existing practices or good use of time (King and Gura 2007;
Kazlauskas and Robinson 2012).
For the purposes of this chapter, I want to step away from that literature a little to focus
on what I will call ‘Podagogy 2.0’, which emphasizes the integration of podcast creation on
the part of students, rather than faculty, into coursework. If the ‘pod’ in podagogy in the
early 2000s referred to putting podcasting in the hands of educators, today it increasingly
refers to putting podcasting in the hands of students. I will focus especially on the classroom
setting, although that is not the only place where podcasts are appearing on campuses.
For five years or so there have been high-profile examples of student-driven and student-
produced podcasts at universities across the United States, such as Stanford’s State of the
Sound and Pedagogy 143
Human podcast and Serendipity at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as a wide variety of
clubs, but in this chapter I will focus on everyday uses of podcasting in classrooms, where
student work primarily faces peers and instructors in a situation where it is intended to
contribute to curricular outcomes.
When it comes to student perceptions and assessments of outcomes of learning through
podcasting, there is rich literature on what can or might be accomplished (Salmon and Nie
2008; Forbes 2015; Galloway 2017). But it has been hard to come by reflection by educators
about why they teach in this way, what they have learned about it, and how they prepare
syllabi and conduct classes. Without this perspective, collective wisdom about the practice,
as well as details about the day-to-day work of assignments and assessments could be lost.
My question for the project was an open-ended one: what issues face instructors who are a
part of the sonic methodology of ‘Podagogy 2.0’? The study has pointed to three answers:
uncertainties in approaching technology, ambivalence about writing, and problems and
opportunities of audience and context.
Project background and methodology

I began asking students to do a podcast in lieu of writing weekly responses in my
class ‘Film Among the Sound Arts’ in 2014. The concept was to look at film sound
in conjunction with sound art of other kinds: radio, pop music, installation media,
tape art, etc. Rather than require students to write essays about the films we watched,
I asked them to create experimental sound pieces, which we called ‘sound responses’
or ‘podcasts’, interchangeably. For a class on The Red Shoes, for instance, one student
imagined a key sequence of the film in stereo, recording the sound of ballet dancers in
rehearsal forming geometric circles. In another assignment, a student created a reading
of Poe’s ‘The Tell-tale Heart’ using an effect she borrowed from The Exorcist. In both
cases, students learned to ‘make things’ with listening and became more intimately
aware of sound in the process. Satisfied with the experience, in 2015 I started a class in
podcast studies, ‘Podcasting and New Audio’, which I have repeated at undergraduate
and graduate levels. As an industry seemed to be growing around podcasting, I wanted
to unsettle student habits of listening. I had long observed that while students could be
adept at unpacking the aesthetics, ethics, and politics behind images, TV programmes,
and films, they tended to listen to audio works lazily, unaware of how editing, mixing,
and storytelling produce rhetorical effects; my podcasting class became a venue to
experiment with ways to improve media literacy in this area. In the class, I explain some
processes that go in to creating podcasts, and I coach students in listening as I have
them create pieces each week in groups – students have prompts that ask them to create
a sonic ‘manifesto’, create the shortest piece of audio that tells a complete ‘story’, and
record something ‘fake’, as a way of identifying the ways in which audio establishes the
meaning of each of these terms.
In 2015, I wrote a reflection on these matters for peers on the Antenna website (Verma
2015) hosted by the University of Wisconsin, and the current project grew out of how I
might learn from my peers in order to expand that article. In consultation with colleagues
I devised an interview-based methodology. In December of 2017, I used two Facebook
groups – Teaching Media, and the Sound Studies Scholarly Interest Group – to solicit
peers who do this kind of work and would be willing to talk about it. I also recruited
interviewees at two professional meetings, the Radio Preservation Task Force meeting (a
national research organization meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, in November
2017), and the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies (GLASS, a regional group that
met at the University of Chicago in November 2017 and at the University of Wisconsin
in April 2018). This yielded a set of nineteen willing respondents who were interviewed
between January and June 2018. Interviews were anonymous, so untenured or contingent
faculty could speak frankly about their experience.
Respondents worked at a reasonably wide variety of institutions, from R1 universities
and large state schools to liberal arts colleges and vocational schools. They taught in
departments from communications and media studies to English, history, theatre,
creative writing, music, and journalism. Some classes for which student-created podcasts
were used included: New Media, Digital Storytelling, Public History, History of Radio,
Environmental History, Pop Music Journalism, Digital Nonfiction, and Audio Storytelling,
as well as several classes on podcasting itself. Courses could be as broad as an introduction
to mass media or a survey of modern theatre, or as specific as a class on the fiction of James
Joyce. The respondents skewed towards early-career faculty, including mostly tenure-track
assistant professors, with only four at the associate level and one full professor, along with
a few grad students and adjunct instructors.
After asking each interviewee what classes they used podcasts for and when they began
to do so, I raised four main subject areas, which we discussed on tape for a period of
between 25 minutes and 1 hour:
● Motivation. I asked what made the interviewee interested in pursuing this kind
of sonic methodology, what learning goals were set, and what sort of institutional
support there had been for the teaching of podcast creation.
● Implementation. I asked about what types of technology were employed and how,
what the classroom listening experience was like, what prompts seemed effective,
whether group work or individual exercises were foregrounded, and what problems
came up.
● Integration. I asked where podcasting fit in the larger aims of the class, the
curriculum, and the discipline. Crucially, I wanted to know what instructors felt
the students actually learn, particularly if the interviewee thought that it could not
otherwise be taught.
● Assessment. To conclude, I asked what sort of feedback the interviewee had received
on her or his work in this area, either from students, peers or colleagues. I also
asked about personal reflections, as well as what remains to be tried and what needs
are yet unmet.
Project findings
Motivation
Nearly all interviewees cited a personal or research interest in podcasting media as a key
reason for pursuing its use in the classroom. Many cited celebrated podcast programmes
such as This American Life, Radiolab, and Serial and competitions, for instance the Third
Coast Audio Festival, as inspirations. Almost all instructors were interested in narrative-
driven podcasts rather than talk, comedy, or music formats. Some noted that students were
already avid podcast listeners, while others said the opposite – that their students had never
even heard of podcasting. Many engaged in this type of teaching as a requirement of their
work, and at least four felt that they were hired because they presented themselves as able to
teach in this area. Two were advisors to campus radio stations, but another just happened
to come across a design for a mobile podcasting cart with a mixer, and stumbled upon
institutional funding to build it. A few were developing certificate or degree programmes
for the making of creative audio. Several instructors, particularly in communication and
media studies, used making a podcast as an experimental unit within an existing core
course, while others looked at it as a chance to give ‘hard skills’ in digital editing to students
who may not have a specific career interest in the actual topic area of the class. Instructors
in the latter category often found themselves in a conundrum, trying to balance actual
readings along with skill-building tutorials, sometimes on two or three editing platforms.
Institutional support for podagogy proved varied. Some instructors felt that they were
treated as if their work was simply a gimmick, but others found strong support, even
earning internal publicity and clout in their institutions eager to seem that their offerings
were cutting edge. It seems clear that the term ‘podcast’ itself was important in this
negotiation, particularly as many in the wider world were still becoming familiar with the
term. All instructors used the term in our discussions, even though many realized that
some of the assignments they devised could easily be classified as ‘field recording’ exercises.
Two instructors, for example, asked students to record the sounds of their daily lives, to
explore ‘what kind of story can you communicate using just sounds’, in a modern version
of Pauline Oliveros’s idea of a ‘listening journal’ (Oliveros 2005). Others could be radio
projects. One instructor took students to a basketball game and asked them to interview
attendees inside and outside the venue. Oral history is another concept – several instructors
included the task to interview a loved one. There are new terms, too. Musicologist Kate
Galloway refers to the creations from a maker practice in her classes on soundwalking and
ecology as ‘digital ecomusicology objects’ and ‘digital audio assignments’ (Galloway 2017:
54, 56). Others have found that calling these and other types of recording ‘podcasts’ made a
difference for recruiting students and was a useful shorthand when convincing department
chairs outside the sound studies idiom to list a course in the area.
Several stated that podcast-creation was a way to ‘work in’ a unit of sound studies
into a larger architecture, enhancing and complimenting work on critical listening. One
interviewee characterized podcasting as ‘a medium for [students] to reproduce the kind
of teaching I do in class where we do careful listening together’. Another insisted that by

podcasting, students could learn how to read audio for implicit and explicit messages.
Goals tended to focus on using podcasts as a way of getting students more engaged and to
provide them with a new creative outlet that let students introduce more personality into
their work, sharpening their sense of audience. ‘You can get lockjaw when writing’, one
instructor pointed out. ‘Podcasts open that and get them thinking critically in real time.’
Like me, many instructors also wanted to make their students better critical listeners and
thought that doing so required making them more creative recorders and editors. One
interviewee emphasized that students ‘realize they’ve come to take for granted how they
process their environment through their ears […] focusing on podcasts has taught them to
really maximize what they can do as listeners’. Nearly all faculty found it to be a relief both
for students and instructors to create something without manifesting it in the written word,
to ‘think conversationally’ as one put it. Podagogy 2.0 also seemed to meet other existing
priorities, from enhancing student pitching skills to teaching community engagement.
Loftier objectives were never separable from production technique. Instructors said that
podcasting could teach creativity, structure, innovation, research, but they also said it
could teach how to mix. One hallmark of teaching in this way is how class conversations
could deal with the most delicate questions of structure, ethics, representation, and art, but
then bounce right away to how to set gain levels to avoid clipping.
Not all instructors asked students to work in groups, but those who did so considered it
to be a very valuable element of the pedagogy. It was felt that by forcing students to divide
tasks and obey a production schedule as a unit, these courses more closely mimicked the
kinds of jobs they would likely have outside of the college setting. Almost uniformly, faculty
discovered that they had a similar surprise as did their students when it came to workload:
students thought producing a podcast would be easier than writing an essay, but ended up
spending much more time than they would have with writing; similarly, instructors had
a rude awakening when thinking that grading podcasts might take less time than weekly
response papers. The need for better time management was a frequent topic of discussion,
but students didn’t seem to mind – one interviewee said that after learning that it takes
more time to produce audio than they expected, 80 to 90 per cent of students in one class
reported that they would still rather do production. No one who was interviewed suggested
they would abandon podcasting, and many had ideas for new iterations, suggesting that
motivation remained high.
Implementation
One of the broadest topics of conversation had to do with the tools instructors employed
in their classes. Some instructors favoured in-studio production, while others favoured
field-based recordings, and many taught students how to sound-treat their own closets and
offices. There was a wide variety of technical approaches to recording itself. For instance,
many instructors took a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to recording and editing, letting
students use whatever was easiest to hand, which in practice meant using smartphones as
recorders and editing with simple, widely available or free programs such as Garageband
and Audacity. Several instructors used Adobe Audition because their institutions already
subscribed to the Adobe suite of software, which made it easy for students to access in a lab.
These solutions seemed to appeal most to instructors who were learning the technology
themselves, and for situations in which there was a low level of recording and editing skills
to begin with and no mandate to improve those skills. In the literature on podcasting, one
advantage of podagogy is the need of students to acquire technical skills and problem-solve
on their own (Forbes 2015). This was a philosophical choice, for some; podcast culture
has a DIY ethic, and having that as a constraint in the creative classroom space is one
way of exploring the meaning of that culture. Several instructors felt that teaching skills
is less important than community involvement and social justice, that there is something
important about inculcating the idea of making media with technologies and skills the
students already have. Another felt proud students could make media out of ‘spit and
duct tape’. A third emphasized that the main thing students at their institution need to be
convinced of is that ‘they can dive in to a new thing that they’ve never done before and
just make something […] that they can be a part of something new’. That said, one or two
instructors pointed out that an emphasis on low-level skills tends to increase a ‘slacker
factor’, giving students the impression that it was all right to throw something together at
the last minute.
And there is another side to the coin. Several instructors took it as their role to help
teach portable skills for professionally oriented students in creative writing and journalism,
but also in theatre, history, and media studies, fields where marketing oneself today
involves a broad set of media tools. Instructors in this camp tended to use professional
or prosumer-grade Tascam or Zoom recorders, particularly the Zoom H5, occasionally
with external dedicated microphones (Rode and Shure were preferred brands), and to
use more ambitious Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs), such as ProTools, Hindenberg,
or Reaper. Some relied on extra staff or teaching assistants to teach advanced tutorials
in DAWs, while others directed their students to YouTube instructional videos or the
training website Lynda.com. This approach had a philosophy too. Instructors who
came from the radio or podcasting industries often spoke of the difference in the
physical experience of interviewing with an external microphone and of responsibly
teaching industry-standard software to students. Particularly in educational settings that
emphasize portfolios – whether that is an art school context, or a two-year college whose
students need a body of work to transfer to a four-year college – skills and outputs are at a
premium. A surprising number of instructors were able to raise funds for hardware from
partners in their departments, scholarly divisions, or at their libraries. Others discovered
that the microphones and recording facilities of legacy radio stations already on campus
could be borrowed – good microphones can last decades with little maintenance and
are interoperable between systems over time. Some also found useful recording facilities
through audiology or clinical facilities. Instructors starting out would do well to begin
by inventorying their own institutions, looking for existing library resources and legacy
radio stations, where excellent equipment is often available, and to scour their campuses
for acoustic environments suitable for recording in.
Whatever the instructor’s philosophy, students do expect to learn skills in these classes
that they can export to other contexts, along with social skills around pitching or workflow,
experience using a mic and working in a DAW remain key skills. It can also be hard to
establish uniform rules for skill building, since many classes have students with variations
in interest in acquiring skills as well as in existing skills, so it is hard to find a way of
accommodating all members of the group. And the more complex the DAW, the more
instruction time could be taken up with tutorials. One instructor let students use more
than one DAW, which meant toggling between two very different programs in tutorials
on common practices such as normalization and cross-fading. Decisions about tools also
necessarily had ramifications on assessment. Those who put a low premium on equipment
tended to assess students based on their concepts as represented in accompanying
statements, rather than the professionalism of their work, while others insisted that a story
should be as close to ‘ready-to-air’ as possible. There could even be a discrepancy in ‘what’
was being assessed in the first place – some would listen to a final work as an mp3 file, while
others would also evaluate the ProTools session that went in to creating it.
As far as assignments go, most of the instructors for whom podcasting was just one
unit among others tended to generate relatively broad prompts, letting students make
whatever they felt would engage with the written material in a survey course. In other
cases, assignments emulated well-known programmes such as Song Exploder or This
American Life, or had very well-defined parameters, such as the creation of a ‘sonic
postcard’. But for the most part instructors tended to conceive of assignments with the
whole course in mind. One student collected the various kinds of ‘silences’ he heard
around campus; another told the shortest possible ‘story’ by recording two seconds of
the snap of a mousetrap. In many cases, the work was expressive as well as intellectual:
a musician wrote a fugue to imitate Joyce, a historian produced dramatic readings of
primary documents, and cinema students were asked to look at paintings or photographs
and compose soundscapes that comment upon them. In other cases, assignments were
more social in nature. For instance, students in a gender and women’s studies class
used a podcast assignment to profile workers at a sexual assault bystander prevention
programme. Some work was site-specific. In one case, students were asked to investigate
the history of an abandoned African American migrant camp from the last century, in
another students did a series of audio projects about a river that runs through campus,
highlighting ecological perspectives. Several instructors opted for a cumulative approach,
inviting students to make projects that follow a brand or style over the course of a semester,
while others asked students to curate pieces of music on a specific theme (say, the music
of Belize, or musical responses to dictatorship), and another tried a three-part structure
that began with a Moth-style recorded storytelling event, followed by journalistic audio
documentary, and finally a work of audio fiction.
I had expected instructors to have more to say about issues of content, specifically as it
concerns the use of copyright material in recordings, but it turned out that a more difficult
matter was privacy. Many found that students used podcast platforms to express highly
personal stories for which propositional writing seldom affords the opportunity. ‘I’ve been
really impressed with the students and the way they will do incredibly personal stories,’
one instructor mentioned, also citing examples of material too sensitive to even discuss
with me. Themes of trauma, loss, and abuse were common in submitted materials, which
made some instructors feel put in the position of a therapist – it could be thrilling, but at
the same time many felt suddenly unqualified. In many cases, listening together as a group
in class could become a little risky, something exacerbated by the solitary way we normally
consume podcasts. As Kate Lacey has pointed out, there is a paradox to the fact that we
seem to listen more ‘socially’ than ever, sharing links to works through social media; at the
same time we listen more individually than ever, alone in the micro-airspace of a personal
device (Lacey 2013a). As one of the instructors who devotes time to listening to student
work in class, these issues had come up for me – for instance, I wasn’t sure about playing
stories about personal struggles with illness in class, or accepting recordings made covertly
by students of others. Elsewhere, instructors have struggled with a wide variety of issues,
including what to do, for instance, about releasing audio online of student interviews with
undocumented immigrants, or others who might be in jeopardy if their voices were heard
in a digital space outside the classroom context (Holmstrom 2017).
Among my interviewees there was interest in establishing clearer ideas about how
podcasts should or should not reach out beyond the confines of a classroom. Some
instructors asked students to submit their podcasts through the online platform
SoundCloud, a common distribution method used by professional podcasters. Of the
instructors who used SoundCloud, several asked students to use password protection, but
others left it open on purpose and were surprised at the number of plays that student
works received. Many instructors encouraged students to develop their podcasts for actual
release, or to submit work to competitions. A few instructors selected pieces to air on
college radio stations, or held live events at the end of their semester, during which students
could exhibit their work, sometimes with a professional from the podcasting world giving
critiques. Those who had no capstone event expressed a desire to be able to do one. Like
the issue of technology, the extent to which podcasts were created for extramural purposes
tended to have a lot of ramifications in terms of the kind of prompts that were chosen, the
extent and type of feedback given and the overall rhythm of the course.
Integration
One question that brought out a great deal of reflection was: what do you feel students
actually learn? Some of the answers became entangled with how instructors felt about their
own disciplines. A historian noted that while few of their students might become actual
historians, many more might use media in their careers, and so teaching students how to
tell stories in the medium was worthwhile. Others noted that their respective disciplines
were increasingly becoming broader, incorporating multimodal ways of expression
and argumentation, in part because of perceptions about the job market. Many skills
podcasters need – pitching, evaluating story structure, selecting tape, working in teams –
would therefore have broader application. One referred to students as ‘media creators’
rather than writers, and another as ‘content creators’ rather than radio broadcasters, terms
which suggest a breakdown in the silos that had once separated media. Other skills cited
were more specific – creative writers who took on podcasting learned about how to write
better dialogue in prose, historians learned about how literary voice plays in to questions
of representation and ethics, print journalists learned interviewing skills, theatre historians
developed modes of performance analysis as well as how to market themselves. There was
a clear impression among instructors that as they enter the workforce, students will have to
work in many media, some of which have yet to emerge, and podcast creation could help
develop the habit of learning new media.
Curiously, we spent a lot of time talking about student writing. Many of my interviewees
admitted that they felt relieved allowing students to do something other than write
in order to receive credit. One commented that the thinking you can do in audio is
different than it is in writing, in that the former encodes the time of thought itself; ‘you
can hear them working things out’ which provides a kind of analytical encounter ‘above
and beyond anything I could get from them from a writing prompt’. It also feels good.
Instructors frankly felt that their students find argumentative writing frustrating, and few
have a passion for it; it is not surprising that creating podcasts instead was a tonic both
to students frustrated by writing and to instructors exasperated by that frustration. Of
course, a form of writing remained part of the process, in part because of the emphasis
on narrative-driven podcasting rather than interview-based podcasting, as students and
instructors realized that writing and rewriting scripts was integral to the creative process,
and it is certainly true that editing recorded audio through software is a kind of ‘writing
by other means’. One instructor spoke of using research-based podcasting to ‘trick them
into writing a research paper and not knowing it’, and another of overcoming the bad
rap that writing suffers, explaining to students ‘you already know how to be creative, you
already know how to be analytical, you just don’t think you know how to be analytical’.
For some, the whole project of teaching through podcasting made a deeper intervention
– ‘trying to break the humanities from the fetish of the book’, as one instructor put it.
Several instructors insisted, moreover, that becoming a better podcaster oddly made their
students better writers, since they learned to write for voice in a way that traditional essay
and excursive formats did not generally allow. One instructor noticed that poets tended to
take to the form well, because they are already used to thinking about economy of words,
as well as how they sound out loud. This is something that is reflected in the scholarly
literature (Porter 2018), which views the development of voice as one of the great boons
of the new medium.
Be that as it may, the majority of interviewees were ambivalent about using podcasting
over writing. By embracing ‘writing by other means’, some asked, are we letting our
students (and ourselves) off the hook? In expanding our curriculum – and to a certain
extent our disciplines – a balance needs to be struck with core disciplinary competencies.
The more things we do in classrooms, the less sharp some of the goals of classes become,
and this was a clear concern for podcast teachers who balance readings with critical
listening, tutorials in ProTools, student presentations, narrative theory, and radio history
all at the same time.
Assessment
Although this qualitative study did not collect student evaluation data, anecdotally it
seems that podcast-based teaching classes and units receive strong reviews. Interviewees
describe these courses as some of the most successful classes they teach in terms of student
satisfaction. Given the landscape of higher education, this suggests these courses and units
have a chance of surviving, even when the medium is not as fresh as it seems today. How
did instructors self-assess? Many felt that they were still new to the area, and issues of
improving the workflow seemed to be top of their minds. Much of the discussion in my
interviews involved stories about how certain assignments were fine-tuned from one year
to another. Often this involved introducing constraints that checked simplistic approaches
(when creating a podcast out of your daily sounds, no toilet or personal grooming sounds,
please) or that brought checks to the process of creation – nearly all of my interviewees
discussed their pursuit of further use of rough drafts for critiques.
The field still has many needs. There are only a couple of effective texts that teach
production strategy, interpretation, or editing in a way that is designed to fit humanistic
higher learning (Abel 2015; Biewen and Dilworth 2017). There are many online resources,
however. Some key resources from which instructors in this study drew included: interviews
on transom.org, the Third Coast International Audio Festival, The Sarah Awards, Louisa
Lim’s Masterclass podcast series at the University of Melbourne, the sound studies site
SoundingOut! as well as the Aca-Media podcast, freesound.org, and the State of the Human
podcast at Stanford. Podcasting has the problem of lacking a canon of common examples,
while at the same time moving very swiftly, which means that scholars often have to rewrite
their syllabi and cannot rely on students coming to class with some key pieces in mind.
Finally, there is no obvious forum in which to share pedagogical strategies. One direct
outcome of this study has been the idea for a shared document folder in which all the
instructors who contributed to the study might pool assignment ideas and syllabi.
Conclusions for sound pedagogy

What does this research project tell us about a kind of sound pedagogy that develops in
light of sound studies? First, sound pedagogy – like sound studies – has a deeply ambivalent
relationship to technology. On the one hand, there is an impulse to embrace it, to speak
the language of technical affordance, and to emphasize creative possibilities, letting these
become the guiding principles in the learning setting. In this sense, the relationship between
sound studies and sound pedagogy is similar to the relation between sound studies and
media archaeology. On the other hand, the emphasis on technology tends to lead to the
de-emphasis of lived social relations and community-based mission. Many instructors feel
they must balance the choice of spending time on devices and the choice of spending time
on stories, although all believe these two things are entwined. Second, sound pedagogy
points towards the acute and fraught relation between writing and sound. While recent
authors have spoken of a ‘sonic turn’ in the humanistic sciences, the institutions of modern
instruction remain deeply tethered to the written word as the key outcome of thought and
discourse. It is telling that many of those who feel podcasting is a better way of teaching
justify this belief on the basis that the method makes students in to better writers, thereby
tacitly conceding the supremacy of the written word over the utterance. Finally, the case
of Podagogy 2.0 (particularly because it is a digital methodology) illustrates the exciting
but also dangerous propensity for sound to travel beyond contexts initially intended.
Everywhere in this study, traditional classroom relationships seemed to alter as a result of
the methodology: students have more personal relationships with one another and with
their instructor as a result of the propensity of confessional storytelling as a mode; works
produced for a class could end up on the web in public, or be presented for communities;
students do their work moving around in the community rather than sitting in libraries or
work carols. In many cases, taking podcasting into the classroom entails taking the class
out of the classroom, embeds it more clearly into communities and audiences, with all the
risks and rewards that such a shift affords.
And what is true of Podagogy today has been true of other settings of sound pedagogies
throughout history, from Socrates leaving the city for his famous discourses in Plato to
Schafer’s seminars exploring the built environment as composition. In so many cases,
when it comes to sound pedagogies, we see the same three attributes – the ambivalent
relation to technology, the persistent and sometimes nagging primacy of textual media,
and the tendency to move out of traditional scenes of instruction, indeed to remake them
– but perhaps it is only in the context of the growth of sound studies that the resonance of
these elements become truly audible.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my interviewees for their time and expertise, as well as the many
students with whom I have worked over the years on these issues. Research for this project
was made possible by the Searle Center for Teaching and Learning at Northwestern
University, where I was a fellow in 2017/2018. I want to thank members of my cohort of
fellows, particularly David Boyk, Jolie Matthews, and Asma Ben Romdhane. I also want to
thank Searle leadership Susie Calkins and Bennett Goldberg for their advice and wisdom,
as well as Sharisse Grannan for her invaluable help designing this project.
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8
Sonic Methodologies in Literature
Justin St. Clair
There are ways you can use a studio. Things you can do that open up impossible spaces in
the mind. You can put the listener in a room that doesn’t exist, that couldn’t exist. You can
put them in an impossible room.
—Hari Kunzru, White Tears (2017: 26)
An impossible room
In the digital age, it is easy to forget that literature, from its very inception, has been
one of our most significant audio technologies. The pen is the ur-stylus, the originary
and prototypical instrument of audio transcription, and the literary record predates its
electroacoustic complements by millennia. Consequently, R. Murray Schafer insists, ‘while
we may utilize the techniques of modern recording and analysis to study contemporary
soundscapes, for the foundation of historical perspective, we will have to turn to earwitness
accounts from literature and mythology’ (Schafer 1993: 8).
In recent decades, numerous scholars have followed Schafer’s suggestion, lending their
ears to literary texts in search of lost sound.1 Nevertheless, this enterprise is, as many of its
own practitioners admit, necessarily fraught. At a minimum, the literary record refracts the
audible past doubly, bending bygone sound through authorial perception and the opacity
of language alike. While literature might provide some tantalizing, complementary data on
the soundscapes of antiquity, it is at best approximative and conjectural. What is more, if we
overemphasize its role as a pre-phonographic transcription technology, we risk diminishing
literature as merely artefactual. The protestations of McLuhanites notwithstanding, print is
neither antiquated nor obsolete. Nor, for that matter, are the sonic methodologies of literary
studies limited to scholarly exercises in audio archaeology. Contemporary literature has an
extensive and profound engagement with sound, and literary art and scholarship continue
to be – as in epistemes past – an intrinsic part of sound culture.
Rather than detailing the methodologies by which scholars have attempted to extrude
historical soundscapes from literary texts, this chapter will instead consider literature as
a sounded site within contemporary media culture, and one, moreover, that can play a
significant role in processing the very notion of ‘soundscape’ itself. In ‘The Stereophonic
Spaces of Soundscape’, Jonathan Sterne examines the roots of what has become a ubiquitous
(and elastic) term within the field of sound studies. He situates the concept historically,
arguing that ‘soundscape is very much a creature of mid-century sound media culture’ and
best understood as ‘part of an electroacoustic moment in sound history’ (Sterne 2015: 67).
Rejecting conventional presuppositions, Sterne argues that ‘the essence of the soundscape
[…] is not physical space or the relation between physical space and its representation’
(emphasis in the original). Instead, he contends, ‘its essence is a stable audioposition, one
from which the entire world is available to be heard’. ‘The soundscape concept is attractive,’
Sterne concludes, ‘because it simultaneously invokes a unified auditory perspective, a
stable audioposition, and then hides the work of shaping perspective’ (79–80). This self-
effacement is inherently ideological: what seems but ‘audio-technical discourse’ obscures
not only the means by which it can ‘figure and amplify modes of subjectivity’, but also
how our ‘ways of hearing the world [are] rooted in the post-war consumerist structure of
listening’ (80).
This pivot from the spatial to the perspectival – from an artefactual or environmental
understanding of soundscape to one that emphasizes the audioposition of the listening
subject – is particularly resonant within literary studies. The reading experience is quite
literally scripted: it is, to appropriate and repurpose one of Sterne’s formulations, a kind of
‘situated omniscience’ in which the very ‘notion of sonic space […] is created through the act
of comprehension’ (Sterne 2015: 73).2 Contemporary literature, in other words, simulates
a stable audioposition, and one from which anything that can be imagined is available
to be heard. Likewise, the soundscapes of literature should also be understood in the
context of contemporary media culture. They are embedded within the same consumerist
structures of listening and part of the same electroacoustic moment in sound history that
gave rise to our critical formulations. As I have argued elsewhere, contemporary writers
‘have an aural fixation, and their obsession with sound echoes larger anxieties regarding
the supposedly diminished position of print fiction in the contemporary media pantheon’
(St. Clair 2013: 2).
Like all media, print has obvious limitations, some so apparent they hardly warrant
mention. If one is after a high-fidelity recording of a live orchestral performance, for
example, print is certainly not the most suitable of options. Nevertheless, literature has
several remarkable qualities that make its contributions to audio culture particularly
unique. First, as suggested above, a literary soundscape is unconstrained by audibility: on
the printed page, anything that can be imagined can be heard. There is an inherent paradox
here, of course, but if we set aside the physiology of listening, momentarily, and substitute
sensory comprehension, the possibilities become apparent. Second, rather than hiding its
perspective-shaping work, contemporary literature is deeply engaged in metadiscursive
practice. Literary fiction, in particular, is far more than mere transmission. It is continuously
appraising its own cultural relevance, assessing itself in relation to ascendant media forms,
and evaluating the role of language within audiovisual mass media. This reflexivity provides
the basis for literature’s media engagement and allows it to offer a minority report on aural
Sonic Methodologies in Literature 157
culture – side-channel feedback, if you will, on the social implications of sound and listening
practice. As Sam Halliday argues in Sonic Modernity, ‘literature […] is especially well suited
for revealing sound’s “configured” quality’, which he defines as ‘sound’s imbrication in the
non- or trans-acoustic’. Literature is inherently a metalinguistic medium and is therefore
‘especially well-suited for revealing such para-sonic factors as sound’s social connotations,
its relationship with other senses, and – perhaps most importantly of all – the qualitative
dimension that means certain sounds are actually of interest to people, things they actively
seek out or shun’ (Halliday 2013: 12).
Hari Kunzru’s novel White Tears, from which the epigraph to this chapter is lifted, is an
excellent example of how literary fiction functions as a sounded site within contemporary
media culture. In short, Kunzru constructs an ‘impossible room’ that is uniquely literary,
one that no amount of studio magic could ever quite conjure. At its core, Kunzru’s novel
is a meditation on audibility – on whose voices get heard, on what gets recorded, and on
how the historical record, ever palimpsestuous, has more gaps and erasures than readable
tape. The novel’s narrator, Seth, is an audio-flâneur who wanders the city, eavesdropping
as he goes. ‘No one ever noticed,’ he reports in the opening paragraph: ‘I had a binaural
setup, two little mics in my ears that looked like headphones, [and] a portable recorder
clipped to my belt’ (Kunzru 2017: 3). When he plays the recordings back in the studio, Seth
invariably discovers ‘phenomena [he] hadn’t registered, pockets of sound [he]’d moved
through without knowing’ (3). For Seth, listening becomes an obsession. ‘I was trying to
hear something in particular,’ he admits, ‘a phenomenon I was sure existed: a hidden sound
that lay underneath the everyday sounds I could hear without trying’ (7). ‘Marconi’, Seth
explains, ‘believed that sound waves never completely die away, that they persist, fainter
and fainter, masked by the day-to-day noise of the world’ (43).
This fantasy of everlasting sound becomes emblematic within the novel. As Seth tells
the story, ‘Marconi thought that if he could only invent a microphone powerful enough,
he would be able to listen to the sound of ancient times’ (Kunzru 2017: 43). It is – perhaps
unsurprisingly, given Marconi’s role in the development of radio – a broadcaster’s fantasy.
If audio recording is a hedge against the ephemerality of sound, Marconi’s imaginary
acoustics obviate the need for recording technology altogether: just tune in to the great
cosmic radio and bygone soundscapes are always already available. Kunzru adopts
Marconi’s microphone as a kind of figure for literature itself, and then sets out to expand its
possibilities. Being able to hear ‘lost’ sound (e.g. listening in on jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden,
of whom no known recordings survive) is one kind of thought experiment, but what about
sounds that were thwarted entirely, sounds that could never have been recorded because
they did not occur? This is what the literary record can offer: the irretrievable b/w the
irreal.
On his rambles around New York City, Seth begins to capture snippets of this impossible
sound, floating ‘like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness’ (Kunzru 2017: 130).
Back in the studio, his friend Carter stitches bits of the field recordings together, and finds,
to his amazement, that an a cappella blues vocal fits perfectly atop a separate guitar track,
one that Seth had not even realized he had recorded. It was ‘as if they were two halves of
a single performance’ (57). With some prodding, Seth manipulates the composite until ‘it
sounded like a worn 78, the kind of recording that only exists in one poor copy, a thread
on which time and memory hang’ (58). Carter invents an artist (Charlie Shaw) and a label
(Key & Gate), and posts ‘Graveyard Blues’ online. And then all hell breaks loose. The
recording they have constructed apparently already exists, but impossibly so. In the world
of the novel, Charlie Shaw was an actual musician, but one who never managed to record
his signature ‘Graveyard Blues’. In 1929, the legendary H. C. Speir had booked him for a
session in Jackson, Mississippi, but Shaw was subsequently arrested for vagrancy. Unable to
pay the $100 fine, he was sentenced – on the very day he was scheduled to record – to one
year on a chain gang, building a levee for the judge’s brother. The label Key & Gate, thus, is a
dark pun: for Charlie Shaw, incarceration serves much the same function as a noise gate in
a mixing console, attenuating his signal and preventing ‘unwanted sound’ from appearing
on record.
Much like the history it depicts, the novel is haunted by a record that simultaneously is
and is not. It is a meditation on authenticity and appropriation, on repetition, race, and the
fetishization of sound. If, metaphorically speaking, literature is Marconi’s microphone, then
it is certainly an augmented version thereof – one that offers impossible sound alongside
the inaccessible. And, indeed, this is precisely how Kunzru develops his sociocultural
critique. As the story unfolds, we learn that the record that Seth and Carter have ostensibly
invented had already been discovered some fifty years earlier by a pair of mid-century blues
obsessives on a collecting expedition in the Deep South. That acquisition ended badly, as
does Seth and Carter’s episode half a century later, both pairs pursued by the vengeful
ghost of Charlie Shaw. ‘My lips move but there is no sound,’ Shaw laments late in the novel,
‘because no one remembers me and no one living will ever hear my music’ (Kunzru 2017:
258). The novel’s key repetitions – Shaw’s unrecorded song and generations of collectors
who fetishize black sound – underscore how institutional racism reverberates throughout
history, how voices on the margins are muted and silenced even as they are exoticized.
Shaw’s original incarceration comes at the hands of the Wallace brothers, leveraging the
laws and institutions of Jim Crow in Mississippi to extend slavery’s promise of free labour.
It is the brothers’ twenty-first-century progeny who provide the reprise on Shaw’s ghostly
return: he is locked away in a facility owned by the Wallace Magnolia Group, a private
prison provider in an America where mass incarceration has become the new Jim Crow
law. If it sounds all too familiar, it is: White Tears gives us history as a broken record and
asks us to attend to the repetitions. ‘If Marconi was right and certain phenomena persist
through time,’ Seth concludes, ‘then secrets are being told continuously at the edge of
perception. All secrets, always being told’ (77).
In the sections that follow, I will sample the sonics of contemporary print fiction, and
describe several ways that literature utilizes sound and figures auditory perception from its
increasingly marginal media position. Much of what follows places emphasis on form over
content, but we cannot ignore the fact that when it comes to literature, the two channels
are never entirely discrete. Formal soundings so often echo their thematic counterparts
that in An Essay on Criticism Alexander Pope famously made it a prescription: ‘The Sound
must seem an Eccho to the Sense’ (Pope 1711: 22, emphasis in the original). Nevertheless,
in an effort to underscore the sonic methodologies we find expressed within print fiction,
its formal features – from techniques of characterization to the referential evocation of

music – must necessarily be placed at the fore.
Sound identities
Many take print fiction to be a character-driven medium. Such expectations are the
unfortunate (if persistent) result of realism’s century-plus reign as the dominant mode of
popular fiction. The predilections of the reading public (and the merits of those preferences)
notwithstanding, character is nonetheless an inescapable element of contemporary fiction,
and one with acoustic significance. In The Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985:
Toward a History of Literary Acoustics (2006), Philipp Schweighauser describes how the
process of characterization hinges on what we might call the sonics of embodiment.
Fictional characters, particularly in works of realism, stand in for real-world subjects, and
as lived experience is inherently sounded, so too must literary lives be articulated within
aural matrices. ‘Like human beings, fictional characters are not merely passive receivers
of acoustic phenomena,’ Schweighauser observes, ‘but actively participate in the making
of the soundscapes they live in.’ The noises these characters contribute to their fictional
environments, he emphasizes, are limited neither to verbal utterances ‘nor to the sounds
of the human voice’, but encompass a wide range of embodied sound. ‘Characters in novels
snore, sigh, snarl, and scream; they grunt, gabble, gossip, and grumble; they clamor, cough,
cry, and curse. At a more basic level, human bodies, fictional or not, continually produce
noises whether they walk, stand still, sleep, get up, or sit down’ (Schweighauser 2006: 70).
For Schweighauser, what is of central importance is not simply the sound of lived
experience, but rather the extrapolations and inferences that invariably occur when we
encounter the sounds of others. ‘If observed,’ in other words, ‘the noises people make will
be subject to the value judgments of observers.’ Or to put it more bluntly, audition is one
of the perceptive senses by which humans stereotype and generalize. Novelists are ‘very
much aware of such mechanisms’, Schweighauser argues, and often craft, as a consequence,
‘acoustic profiles for their characters’ (Schweighauser 2006: 70). As The Noises of American
Literature appeared before profiling (i.e. racial or ethnic) became a political buzzword,
Schweighauser uses the term ‘acoustic profiling’ to describe a creative methodology: that is,
‘a characterization technique that endows fictional bodies with a set of distinctive acoustic
properties designed to position characters with regard to the ensemble of social facts and
practices that constitute the fictional world they inhabit’. ‘These acoustic properties’, he
continues, ‘may range from characters’ accents, dialects, or intonation patterns to the
sounds produced by their laughter, snoring, or the acoustic impact of their footsteps’ (71).
On occasion, a character’s acoustics might be situational, limited to a specific scene or
episode. Often, however, an acoustic profile is consistently rendered throughout a work –
a distinctive, constituent element of a character’s totality. For such cases, Schweighauser
proposes the neologism audiograph – a character’s soundmark, if you will, and a term
which not only can be literalized as ‘sound writing’ but also carries connotations of
individuality and idiosyncrasy by punning on the word autograph. Much like Schafer’s
notion of a soundmark – ‘a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which
make it specially regarded or noticed by people in that community’ (Schafer 1993: 274) –
Schweighauser’s audiograph incorporates reaction and reception into its very essence. In
other words, a soundmark is not so designated on the basis of its own qualities alone, but
rather as a result of how it is regarded and noticed. Similarly, an audiograph is not simply
the aural qualities of a fictional character but rather a sonic methodology that generates
a specific kind of literary audioposition. In short, acoustic profiles ‘serve both to position
characters on the social scale and to direct readers’ judgments of them’ (Schweighauser
2006: 70). Thus, while Schweighauser may have intended the expression ‘acoustic
profiling’ to represent an authorial process, the purpose of the device itself, as he explains
it, is consonant with contemporary understanding of profiling: it generates extrapolative
prejudice. ‘The positioning accomplished via audiographs’, he notes, ‘may involve value
judgments on the part of other characters, narrators, and implied authors as well as implied
and empirical readers’ (71).
While the terms ‘acoustic profiling’ and ‘audiograph’ have not been broadly adopted
within the profession, the methodologies they describe are ubiquitous. Critics, moreover,
have attuned themselves to literature’s long history of aural characterization, whatever the
chosen terminology. In ‘Defining Habits: Dickens and the Psychology of Repetition’, for
example, Athena Vrettos examines how ‘peculiar habits abound in Dickens’s characters’
(Vrettos 2000: 416). Unsurprisingly, a great many of these behavioural quirks have a kind of
sonic signature. In Dombey and Son (1848), for instance, we encounter specific examples of
aural repetition ranging ‘from Mr. Dombey’s habitual jingling of his gold watch chain […]
to Mr. Chick’s “peculiar little monosyllabic cough; a sort of primer, or easy introduction to
the art of coughing”’ (Vrettos 2000: 416).3 ‘Nineteenth-century authors often seem obsessed
with insignificant details,’ Schweighauser observes, but it is a mistake to characterize
audiographs, in particular, as simply verisimilitudinous inclusions ‘with no apparent
narrative function’ (Schweighauser 2006: 73). ‘Rather,’ as Vrettos insists, ‘in a balanced
economy of behavioral exchange, one person’s mannerisms produce corresponding
mannerisms in others’ (Vrettos 2000: 416). ‘Thus,’ she contends, ‘Mr. Chick’s habit of […]
whistling and humming tunes, leads, in turn, to Mrs. Chick’s custom of criticizing Mr.
Chick’s whistling’ (416). Mr Chick’s acoustic profile, in other words, serves to position
him within the novel, inviting not only intradiegetic evaluation (from characters within
the world of the story) but also extradiegetic evaluation (from readers in the ‘real’ world).
Instances of acoustic profiling can be found throughout the literary canon. Even those
casually acquainted with the character Sherlock Holmes, for example, know how often the
great detective is ‘engaged in his favourite occupation of scraping upon his violin’ (Doyle
2001: 45). As with other audiographs, his acoustic profile functions as a positioning device,
opening a space for Watson’s commentary and providing readers with sonic evidence of
Sherlock Holmes’s social position. This famous example also serves as a reminder that
‘embodied sound’ is not limited to the somatic sounds that human bodies emit but also
includes the extracorporeal sounds that bodies occasion. It is not only Victorian literature,
moreover, that insistently represents identity through sound; contemporary fiction – even
while rejecting some of the tenets of realism – has continued this long tradition. David
Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), for example, is awash in sound. Among the most
memorable of the novel’s exercises in acoustic profiling is the sonic signature given to Les
Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a radical organization largely comprised, it would seem,
of legless Québécois separatists. These Wheelchair Assassins, as they are also known, are
‘masters of stealth, striking terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning
excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels’ (Wallace 1997: 1056). In the world of the
novel, ‘to hear the squeak’ becomes a kind of refrain, ‘an understood euphemismic locution
[…] for instant, terrifying, and violent death’ (Wallace 1997: 1057). Wallace’s darkly comic
take on identity not only puns on the concept of separatism (the secession of a province and
the amputation of a limb) but it also satirizes conventions of embodiment and embodied
sound. By situating the acoustic marker of identity outside the body and mapping it,
moreover, onto a symbol of physical impairment, the novel underscores the value-loaded
process by which profiling occurs even as it elicits the same from readers.
In the case of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, Wallace also foregrounds the
linguistic aspects of sounded identity. Even the name of the organization itself is significant:
Québécois is famously idiosyncratic and colloquial, but fauteuil rollent is invented patois,
a nonce bastardization of the French fauteuil roulant (wheelchair). Wallace, here, is
satirizing what Susan Gingell terms ‘print textualized orality: that is, writing that brings
to the paper or digital page a non-prestige lect or a colloquial or otherwise clearly oral
version of a language’ (Gingell 2010: 127). In her essay, ‘Negotiating Sound Identities in
Canadian Literature’, Gingell proposes that the study of minoritarian orality in literature is
best approached via notions of ‘sound identity’.4 Much in the same way that ‘music-making
with others helps to constitute a musical, “We”’, she argues, so too does a written record
of oral practice contribute to ‘the formation of identity and the development of a sense
of place and social context’ (Gingell 2010: 127). Of course, what Gingell is suggesting is
not entirely a new idea. In print fiction, identity has long been developed through both
direct and indirect speech, using the sound of localized linguistic particulars (i.e. accent,
pronunciation, and even syntax) to individualize characters, to position characters socially,
and to orchestrate – internally and externally – the judgement of those characters. What
may be somewhat different in the case of contemporary fiction, however, is a ‘postmodern
understanding that subjectivity is constituted in and through language’ (127). Furthermore,
the realization that human subjectivity is a linguistic construction has opened additional
possibilities for literary characterization, particularly in light of two other postmodern
turns: a conviction that all speech acts are inherently political and a theoretical valorization
of multicultural perspectives.
Media history is littered with examples of aural characterization that amount to oral
caricature, the ostensible purpose of which is to debase or deride the other. (See, for
instance, American minstrelsy and its Hollywood legacy.) While by no means immune
to the racism inherent in popular media forms, contemporary fiction not only engages
issues of race in a productive fashion but, given its self-reflexivity, also reflects upon this
engagement, thereby providing an important forum for cultural deliberation. From a
critical perspective, one of the central questions to be asked of texts that engage in idiolectic
characterization (that is, the sonic individuation of characters by non-standard lexical and
linguistic markers) is simply this: what are the effects of the simulated audioposition?
In other words, when a character’s acoustic profile includes elements of marginalized
oralities, how do those markers function to position the character for judgement, both
within the narrative and for its readers? In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1885), for example, the representation of Jim’s dialect repeatedly positions him for
ridicule within the world of the novel, but the ways in which other characters react to
Jim serve, in turn, as part of a large satirization of bigotry and intolerance. If we compare
Jim’s sounded identity to that of Uncle Remus, we find – in purely representational terms
– little daylight between the two. The effect, however, is far different. Regardless of how
charitably the tales of Joel Chandler Harris may have been received in the 1880s, today’s
readers cannot help but hear ‘one of the most powerful and pervasive racist stereotypes in
American culture’ (Silk and Silk 1990: 15). Simply put, Uncle Remus’s dialect does not serve
to satirize racism but rather reinforces stereotypes regarding black intellect and capability,
while simultaneously promoting white fantasies of the antebellum American South. ‘As
Harris seems to have understood, sound could trigger white southerners’ memories,’
however spurious and counterfactual those memories may have been (Ritterhouse
2003: 611). ‘Harris reinforced a historical theory of slavery that began with the premise,
widespread in his generation, that the human relationships of the peculiar institution
had been close and mutually supporting,’ writes Robert Hemenway, and ‘Remus’s dialect
especially supports this fantasy’ (Hemenway 1982: 21).
When it comes to print textualized orality, context matters. Thus, while accent,
pronunciation, and syntax are often deployed as prejudicial operators, they can also
serve as constructive positioning devices. When incorporated into a character’s acoustic
profile, oral representations in literature can even help to further a sense of community
identity through the ‘signaling of kinship or counter-hegemonic group relations’ (Gingell
2010: 130). In fact, print is a particularly useful medium for recording minoritarian oral
practice because it necessarily foregrounds difference. In the case of a conventional audio
recording, accent, for example, often remains ‘invisible’ to in-group listeners. Not so in the
case of literature. When accents and other elements of oral practice are transcribed, the
orthographic trace of so-called normative usage hangs just off the page, an almost-present
reminder of linguistic variance. This juxtaposition, in short, allows otherwise ‘ear blind’
in-group readers to confront their own linguistic diversity, which can, in turn, serve to
reinforce group identity.
Imagined music
Many of the sonic methodologies we find employed within print fiction involve the
application and evocation of music. As language is better positioned to activate musical
memory than it is to present music directly, however, these inclusions often depend upon
the reader’s imagination. If melodies are to sound in the reader’s mind, in other words,
the text can do little more than plant notational cues. These, in turn, trigger the memory
of past musical experience or exposure, initiating a mental reprise of something already
embedded within the cerebrum. It is little wonder, then, that throughout the literary canon
we repeatedly encounter examples of musical earworms: songs, melodies, refrains, or other
musical snippets that get stuck on repeat, replayed involuntarily in a seemingly endless
mental loop. As with literary music, an earworm is both present and absent – there and
not there simultaneously.
Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ (1845) contains perhaps the earliest
consideration of the ‘stuck song’ phenomenon in print fiction. ‘It is quite a common thing’,
Poe writes, ‘to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of
the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera’ (Poe
1887: 174). Mark Twain’s ‘A Literary Nightmare’ (1876) is another. In this short sketch,
Twain’s eponymous narrator encounters ‘jingling rhymes’ that take ‘instant and entire
possession’ of him. ‘All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain,’ he writes.
‘I fought hard for an hour, but it was useless. My head kept humming.’ It is not until he
teaches a friend the rhyme that the ‘torturing jingle departed out of [his] brain, and a
grateful sense of rest and peace descended’ (Twain 1996: 16–18). Contemporary fiction
continues to employ the trope. In Richard Powers’s ‘Modulation’, for example, one of the
central characters wakes up ‘with a tune in her head’ – or, as the narrator immediately
revises, ‘not a tune, exactly: more like a motif ’. ‘She couldn’t altogether sing it, but she
couldn’t shake it either,’ he explains. ‘She had contracted what the Germans called an
Uhrwurm, what Brazilian Portuguese called chiclete de ouvido: a gum tune stuck in her
relentlessly chewing brain’ (Powers 2008: 94).
In part, the earworm is attractive as a literary motif because it represents the power of
musical recall. Literary practitioners, limited as they are to conjuring music through the
use of words, are envious, even as they try to emulate the effect. From a methodological
perspective, the primary way that novelists make readers imagine music is through
librettization: that is, the technique of embedding song lyrics within the narrative prose.
This is common practice within contemporary fiction and is, without a doubt, the result
of film and television’s ascendance as the primary modes of narrative media over the
course of the twentieth century. Both film and television make extensive use of musical
soundtracks, and print, in an effort to emphasize its currency, has borrowed liberally from
these audiovisual forms.
While by no means the first work of literary fiction to make use of song lyrics, John Dos
Passos’s U.S.A. (1938) trilogy set the tone for novelistic soundtracking in the twentieth
century. Scattered throughout the three novels – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and
The Big Money (1936) – are sixty-eight ‘Newsreels’: modernist collages comprised of news
clippings, headlines, and popular song lyrics. From the first song that appears (‘There’s
Many a Man Been Murdered in Luzon’) to the last (‘Yankee Doodle Blues’), U.S.A. uses
music to index culture. ‘Popular songs were manifestations of the “spirit of the time” that
John Dos Passos captured,’ a barometer on politics and popular sentiment in the opening
decades of the so-called American Century (Trombold 1995: 289). But it does more than
this. Given both the experimental nature of the sections in which they appear as well
as the sociocultural overtones of the songs themselves, the lyrical snippets also serve as
musical metacommentary, evaluating both the propagandistic function and the subversive
potential of sound media. While much of U.S.A.’s music may be unfamiliar to an audience
today, contemporaneous readers would have instantly recognized most of the songs and, as
a consequence, involuntarily ‘heard’ the accompanying melodies. Whether these earworms
would continue to gnaw at readers after the book was set aside is an open question, but
there can be little argument that the melodies extend the fiction’s reach, resonating not
only within the immediate context of the ‘Newsreels’ but also harmonizing with nearby
episodes (see Seed 1984 and Trombold 1995).
In contemporary fiction, there is no novelist more closely associated with imagined
music than Thomas Pynchon. Unlike Dos Passos, however, Pynchon mostly includes
lyrics of his own invention. All eight of the novels he has published over the past half
century, in fact, have featured his often irreverent songs – from sea shanties to snatches of
comic opera and just about everything in between. Pynchon has a fondness for all types of
enthymematic constructions: that is to say, literary devices that leave their ‘conclusion[s]
unexpressed – to be drawn by the reader or the listener’ (Hollander 1997). As Charles
Hollander notes, ‘the enthymeme is the rhetorical technique of choice for a comic who
wants his audience to infer the withheld punchline’, as in the old ribald one-liner: ‘What’s
the difference between a rooster and a lawyer? The rooster clucks defiance.’ Improvisational
musicians engage their audiences in much the same manner: ‘a great soloist […] flirts with
a melody, plays around it, transposes it into various keys or rhythms, offers a fragment or a
phrase something like the written melody but not quite’, and while ‘never quoting the tune
directly […] still gets the audience to sing the lyric in their minds’ (Hollander 1997). With
his love for jazz and a deep commitment to the comedic arts, Pynchon not only replicates
both of these techniques, but his lyrics often reverse the process, making the melody the
implicit, unexpressed term of the enthymeme.
Among Pynchon’s obsessive fandom, determining the tunes to which his songs have
been set has become something of a parlour game, for the ‘persistent rumor holds that all
the songs in Pynchon have actual melodies’ (Moody 2011). On occasion, Pynchon reveals
his musical sources directly, introducing his parodic lyrics with sing-along instructions –
for example, ‘sung to a march called Colonel Bogie’ (Pynchon 1999: 348) or ‘to the tune
of the William Tell Overture’ (Pynchon 2006a: 232). Usually, however, he plays it a bit
coy, coaxing the reader towards a particular melody without offering the source title
directly. Some of these unnamed tunes, to be sure, are easier to identify than others. In
V. (1961), for example, the radio plays ‘a song about Davy Crockett’. ‘This was ’56’, the
narrator tells us: ‘the song invited parody’ (Pynchon 1999: 65). Even readers who have but
a cursory acquaintance with twentieth-century pop music hear Disney’s ‘The Ballad of
Davy Crockett’ behind the nine verses that follow. Other times, however, Pynchon’s hints
are a bit more obscure. ‘The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys’
(Pynchon 2006b: 310) or ‘a sort of medium-tempo Cuban Rhythm’ (Pynchon 2006c: 90)
don’t give the reader much with which to work. In such cases, Pynchon often embeds
auxiliary clues within the lyrics themselves. For example, a reader who thinks she hears
the standard ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ playing behind ‘Snap to, Slothrop’ in Gravity’s Rainbow
(1973) has her suspicions confirmed when she arrives at the line ‘No one here can love
or comprehend me,’ which, unlike the rest of Pynchon’s bawdy parody, barely revises the
original lyric (Pynchon 2006b: 63).
In the contemporary era, the quotation of popular song lyrics is far more difficult an
enterprise than it was in John Dos Passos’s day for one reason in particular: increasingly
aggressive copyright protectionism, which has curtailed literary sampling much in the
same way it has altered the practice in pop music. Literary writers – and their publishers –
often avoid extensive quotation simply to keep costs under control. As a result, we find
paraphrase and other referential techniques deployed more often than lengthy, direct forms
of musical quotation. Pynchon provides ample examples of these methodologies as well.
One trick of which he is particularly fond is lifting short phrases from popular songs and
inserting them into his prose, either as part of the narrative exposition or placed within the
dialogue. By limiting the reference to a few scant words, such inclusions typically qualify as
fair use and – perhaps more importantly – function as another type of musical enthymeme.
Often times, Pynchon will attribute the borrowed phrase with a colloquial ‘always sez’, as
in ‘sad but true, as Dion always sez’ (Pynchon 2009:11) or ‘hey if that’s the way it must
be, okay, as Roy Orbison always sez’ (69). This type of referential soundtracking induces
activity on the part of the reader, who must mentally recite a few lines before arriving at the
withheld title of the song in question – ‘Runaround Sue’ (1961) and ‘Pretty Woman’ (1964),
in these particular examples. On other occasions, it is the song title itself that Pynchon
includes, as in: ‘the car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors’ “People Are Strange
(When You’re a Stranger)”’ (Pynchon 1990: 133).
Ultimately, techniques such as these serve as a referential matrix within contemporary
fiction. With a few well-placed cues, writers trigger musical memories and make melodies
resound in the minds of the reading audience. Much like the sounds that comprise a
character’s audiograph, imagined music is not just superfluous detail used to augment the
fiction’s illusion of reality. Rather, it is yet another example of literary audiopositioning: the
use of sonic devices to provide an auditory perspective, to situate readers and characters
in relation to the sounded phenomena of lived experience. In some cases, imagined music
serves to supplement a character’s acoustic profile; in others, it provides a sonic topography
for the fictional environs, positioning its listening subjects along spatiotemporal axes. The
early 1960s surf music we find in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009), for example, serves
both functions simultaneously: on the one hand, the songs explicitly figure as part of
the protagonist’s audiograph (‘souvenirs out of a childhood Doc had never much felt he
wanted to escape from’), while on the other, they provide a specific sense of time and place,
indexing the death of the 1960s with a nostalgic ear to the near past (Pynchon 2009: 125).
Closing notes
The sonic methodologies discussed in this chapter represent only a small sample of
literature’s rich engagement with aurality and sound culture. For readers interested
in further explorations, I would propose two starting points. First, as I suggest in the
opening section, racial sonics has emerged as an important topic within literary criticism.
Recent book-length studies that provide excellent points of entry include Carter Mathes’s
Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after Civil Rights (2015) and
Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening
(2016). Second, over the past half century, literature has responded to the ascendance of
other media forms with ‘a cluster of anxieties about being displaced from some possibly
imagined position of centrality in contemporary cultural life’ (Fitzpatrick 2006: 201). The
result of these anxieties? ‘A frenzy of remediation’, in which print ‘attempts to eat all the
other media’ (Hayles 2002: 781). In fact, remediation – that is, the way in which one media
form replicates and repurposes the tropes, techniques, and devices of another – might be
one of the governing logics of literary fiction today. Studies that examine these tendencies
with an ear towards media sonics include Mikko Keskinen’s collection Audio Book: Essays
on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction (2008) and my own Sound and Aural Media
in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening (2013). As both make clear, one evident result
of contemporary fiction’s media fixation is a superabundance of audible retransmissions,
from the loom-echoing, mechanistic triads that reverberate throughout William Gaddis’s
novella Agapē Agape (2002) (‘it’s Babbage Babbage Babbage but he got his idea from
Jacquard’s loom so that’s all you ever hear, Jacquard’s loom Jacquard’s loom Jacquard’s
loom’) to the snippets of television audio that punctuate the domestic conversations in
Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). Literature is one of our most important fora for cultural
deliberation, and the sonic output of our media-saturated world percolates throughout
contemporary fiction, providing, in equal measure, both devices that enrich the form and
content ripe for critique.
Notes
1. See, for example, Smith 1999; Picker 2003; Cazelles 2006; Boutin 2015; and Pye 2017.
2. Here, Sterne is actually discussing Schafer (1967). My misapplication is intentional.
3. The embedded quotation is from Dickens (1983: 489).
4. Her reference here is to Hudak (1999: 447–474).
References
Boutin, Aimée (2015). City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris. Champaign, IL:
Cazelles, Brigitte (2006). Soundscape in Early French Literature. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies.
DeLillo, Don (2016). White Noise. New York: Penguin.
Dickens, Charles (1983). Dombey and Son. New York, Penguin.
Dos Passos, John (1996). U.S.A. New York: Library of America.

Doyle, Arthur Conan (2001). A Study in Scarlet. New York: Penguin Classics.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen (2006). The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of
Television. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Gaddis, William (2002). Agapē Agape. New York: Viking.
Gingell, Susan (2010). ‘Negotiating Sound Identities in Canadian Literature’. Canadian
Literature 204 (Spring): 127–130.
Halliday, Sam (2013). Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture, and the Arts.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine (2002). ‘Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’. American
Literature 74: 779–806.
Hemenway, Robert (1982). ‘Introduction: Author, Teller, and Hero’. In Joel Chandler Harris,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, 7–32. New York: Penguin Classics.
Hollander, Charles (1997). ‘Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of The Crying of Lot
49’. Pynchon Notes 40–41 (Spring–Fall): 61–106.
Hudak, Glenn M. (1999). ‘The “Sound” Identity: Music-Making and Schooling’. In Cameron
McCarthy, Glenn Hudak, Shawn Miklaucic, and Paula Saukko (eds), Sound Identities:
Popular Music and the Cultural Politics of Education, 447–474. New York: Lang.
Keskinen, Mikko (2008). Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction. New
York: Lexington Books.
Kunzru, Hari (2017). White Tears. New York: Knopf.
Mathes, Carter (2015). Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature after
Civil Rights. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Moody, Rick (2011). ‘Serge and the Paranoids: On Literature and Popular Song’. Post45, 1 July.
Available online: http://post45.research.yale.edu/2011/07/serge-and-the-paranoids-on-
literature-and-popular-song/ (accessed 29 June 2020).
Picker, John M. (2003). Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1887). ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. In The Murders in Rue Morgue and Other
Tales, 170–175. New York: Worthington Co.
Pope, Alexander (1711). An Essay on Criticism. London: W. Lewis.
Powers, Richard (2008). ‘Modulation’. Conjunctions 50: 87–103.
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Palgrave.
Pynchon, Thomas (1990). Vineland. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Pynchon, Thomas (1999). V. New York: Harper Perennial.
Pynchon, Thomas (2006a). Against the Day. New York: Penguin.
Pynchon, Thomas (2006b). Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin.
Pynchon, Thomas (2006c). Mason & Dixon. New York: Penguin.
Pynchon, Thomas (2009). Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin.
Ritterhouse, Jennifer (2003). ‘Reading, Intimacy, and the Role of Uncle Remus in White
Southern Social Memory’. Journal of Southern History 69 (3) (August): 585–622.
Schafer, R. Murray (1967). Ear Cleaning: Notes for an Experimental Music Course. Toronto:
Clark and Cruichshank.
Schweighauser, Philipp (2006). The Noises of American Literature, 1890–1985: Toward a

History of Literary Acoustics. Tallahassee, FL: University Press of Florida.
Seed, David (1984). ‘Media and Newsreels in Dos Passos’ U.S.A’. Journal of Narrative
Technique 14 (3) (Fall): 182–192.
Silk, Catherine and John Silk (1990). Racism and Anti-Racism in American Popular Culture:
Portrayals of African-Americans in Fiction and Film. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Smith, Bruce R. (1999). The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the
O-Factor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
St. Clair, Justin (2013). Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening. New
York: Routledge.
Sterne, Jonathan (2015). ‘The Stereophonic Spaces of Soundscape’. In Paul Théberge, Kyle
Devine, and Tom Everrett (eds), Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel
Sound, 65–83. London: Bloomsbury.
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn (2016). The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening.
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9
Sonic Materialism and/as Method
Tyler Shoemaker
It’s hard to see but think of a sea

Condensed into a speck.
And there are waves—
Frequencies of light,
Others that may be heard.
The one is one sea, the other a second.
—Louis Zukofsky
The homophonic slippage that ties together Zukofsky’s sea and see, ocean tide and
apprehended light, gives voice to the problem of sonic materialism. During anything other
than its vocalized activation, sound, here, is not there but only implied, a felt phantom
resonating as a residual effect from the two mute things Zukofsky strikes together.
Occupying at varying intervals the same phonic space, sea and see rely on a voiced middle
C to articulate the parallactic flip that disentangles, briefly, one thing from the other, which
then ‘may be heard’. ‘The one is one sea, the other a second’, the one sea is seen a split
second later by a second seeing – or heard, rather, since C charges that timed interval. And
yet, though this note manages that interchange it remains the unwritten spectre of this
poem, unseen. Here sound appears unnamable because it is so closely bound up with other
things, not only as one of their felt effects but as a resonate frame in which their qualities
are transmitted and perceived. Indeed, the generative ambiguity driving Zukofsky’s middle
C derives from an inability to discern whether the note in question is the sound of an object
(the sea), some secondary quality attending but not constitutive of that object’s essential
traits, or a sound not sourced, not an effect, but the object itself (middle C), isolated and
available for direct contemplation.1 In the first track, we hear objects. In the second, sound
is the object we hear. In both, however, a phenomenological analysis poses but cannot
alone resolve the ambiguities of distinct components at present commingled in phonic
overdetermination.
Present, but perhaps not a thing per se, perceived, but indiscernibly sourced from objects
with more well-defined outlines, sound in Zukofsky’s poem persists as an after-effect that
nevertheless affects and enlivens material interplay. In it, the possibility of teasing out
which sound object makes sound remains an open question. That sonic thing in itself (if
in fact it is a thing) cannot be cleanly shorn from the things accompanying it (if at all),
making it difficult to measure the extent to which sound participates in the materials of
Zukofsky’s world. It does, that is clear, but how much – or by what means – is anything but.
This is a problem, not for sonic materialism, as if this mode of inquiry is the right tool
for the job of disentangling Zukofsky’s poem, but of it. Prepositions matter here, for when
sound is possessed by matter (or the other way around), or participates in matter, and
when materialism attempts to explore this ‘palpable effect on, and affection by the materials
through and against which it [sound] is transmitted’ (Cox 2011: 148), the tangled terms to
which his poem points come alive. As it attempts to delimit the coordinates of those terms
materialism exerts a strangely grammatical force on sound’s interactions with the world,
positioning sound athwart the spaces and things that accompany it. The sound of matter
puts sound with matter, not by it, not on it, nor strictly from it. But how that with works –
and on what side of that with sound sits – remains unclear. If sound is to be the object of a
materialist inquiry, and if that inquiry is to understand sound as something that interacts
with matter – and in fact is matter itself – that inquiry needs to contend with this problem.
Vibratory energy
In part this problem stems from materialism’s search for common denominators. Shelly
Trower has argued that physicalists throughout the nineteenth century – among them,
Thomas Young, William Herschel, and Hermann von Helmholtz – situated sound as a
special case of vibration, wherein its own range of waveforms would merely occupy a
small portion of a broader energetic spectrum, one featuring light, heat, and, in the more
farfetched theories of Gustav Fechner, supernatural spirits. Different from these other
phenomena not in quality but in quantity, the mechanics of sonic waves were to be found
in that of vibratory activity more generally; in this framework, energy took on many forms,
with sound being only one such instantiation of this force among others. But sound retained
one significant feature that set it apart from those other forms: its effects as that of vibration
were palpably present to conscious awareness, whereas, say, the vibratory character of heat
or light was not. Trower argues that nineteenth-century physicalists leveraged sound’s felt
vibrations to conceptualize the existence and mechanics of those other insensate energies
(infrared light in Herschel’s case; waveform spirits for Fechner), ones whose qualities,
effects, and limits could not be easily ascertained by either phenomenological verification
or an experimental setup. Sound ‘became a model for energy in general, which physicists
described as vibratory, imperceptible, and infinite’ (Trower 2012: 39). To attune oneself to
that sensible phenomenon was to acquaint oneself, albeit at some remove, with a wider
set of energetic activities always surging through and around the natural environment,
mechanical artefacts such as heat engines, one’s own body, and, according to some, one’s
mind. When and where conscious awareness could not register the particular effects of that
broader spectrum, it fell back on sound as metaphor and model to provide a framework
that suffused the matter of the world with energy of varying degrees. Sound, present, made
space for a latent potentiality of matter, vibration, rarely felt if yet always there.
Sonic Materialism and/as Method 171
My brief account of Trower’s argument should make it clear not only that sound has
been historically entangled with materialist inquiry, but that an abstract and general
concept of vibration (which sound best exemplifies) has served as an underlying model
for thinking through the effects and the power of matter. This is no more apparent than
in the recent new materialism. In one of this method’s most popular formulations, Jane
Bennett argues for an understanding of matter’s vitality. Things, she writes, have power,
and this imbues them with an agential force, a ‘thing-power’ that remains partially exterior
to human agency and knowledge, sometimes slowing, diverting, or altogether blocking
our intentions. Things have efficacy in excess of their designs, their uses. They have inertia,
a vitalism Bennett equates with affect, a capacity of matter to do and to be and to tug
and to pull on anthropomorphic agency; at times things obdurately persist along paths
running crosswise to those of human actors and intents. For Bennett, a vitalist take on
the material world sets out to asses those frictional junctures, attempting, ‘impossibly, to
name the moment of independence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that
must be there, since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their
power’ (Bennett 2010: 3). And more, at times this force leads things to associate. Things
stick and they stick together (Ahmed 2006: 39–40). They self-organize and this gives them
agency – or rather, enhances what agency they already have. The vitalist bent of Bennett’s
new materialism theorizes an inertial force inherent in things that not only hinders
effective, anthropomorphic action but also brings those things together, whereupon their
collective presence produces a phase shift that moves them from individual thing-power
to the impetus of the assemblage as a whole. The larger and more diverse the assemblage,
the more it gains influence, and this both impels and compromises the agencies of its
constituent elements.
When it comes time to demonstrate this concept of thing-power, Bennett tellingly
deploys language that resonates with the epistemologies Trower describes. Note the
following analogies the new materialist uses to explain how the capacities of human actors
run up against competing energies in an assemblage: ‘an intention is like a pebble thrown
into a pond, or an electrical current sent through a wire or a neural network: it vibrates’ –
that word again – ‘and merges with other currents, to affect and be affected’ (Bennett 2010:
32). Bennett resorts here to the very same semantic, maybe even subatomic field Zukofsky
himself thematizes. Her vitalism is his vibration, and both of these are first and foremost
energetic. As ‘much force as entity, as much energy as matter’ (20), the ‘elusive recalcitrance’
of things Bennett seeks to ‘impossibly’ name in her investigations finds its articulation in
channelled waveforms. Inasmuch as her analysis rests on this general affective capacity it
remains in the tradition of a universal energy first sensed in sound, analogically tied to the
insensate waves physicalists thought sound could exemplify.
But because it remains to the side of intent and outside of knowability, a thing’s ‘elusive
recalcitrance’ appears to prevent Bennett from formulating the precise nature of the
participants in her ontology. Her baroque lists – a rhetorical tic in new materialism –
simply give no stable sense of what a thing is. Even as she uses vibratory energy as her
general model, she takes the existence of its discrete manifestations for granted and does
not devote time to ontologically disentangle one material mode from another, sometimes
to a deleterious result, as in the abrupt category errors that stem from equating coal and
sweat with economic theory (Bennett 2010: 25). If vibratory energy is somehow to be the
model for these three elements, or to serve as a common denominator to be found among
them all, Bennett skirts that explanation in her eagerness to theorize collective, cross-actor
affects embedded in assemblages within and beyond human frames. While one might
overlook such category errors in the service of that broader and important point about this
kind of connectedness, without a more fully elaborated ontological framework focused
directly on the thing (in what way, for example, is economic theory a thing?), it remains
difficult to see where and how these connections might work at all. Bennett’s vibrancy
vibrates to such a fever pitch that its own anchoring points in the matters of the world are
lost along the way.
These difficulties serve as something of a cautionary tale for sonic analysis, particularly
one like the chapter at hand, which attempts, as thoroughly as possible, to audit sound
alongside the world of things. There is no doubt that Bennett’s analysis has considerable
purchase on my own sonic-materialist dispositions, or of those Christoph Cox and Salomé
Voegelin have both elaborated. Indeed, running her waveform analogies through a sonic-
materialist channel demonstrates that sound, too, has agential force, its own ability to
act upon the elements of its attendant assemblage. Examples of this are close at hand:
beyond canonical instances in Western philosophy, such as Martin Heidegger’s suggestive
comment in the epilogue to ‘Das Ding’ that we are to ‘hear an appeal of Being’ (Heidegger
2013: 181–182), or Louis Althusser’s infamous scene of interpellation achieved through
auditory means (Althusser [1970] 2014: 190–191), there are the rings, squeals, hisses, and
clicks of tinnitus, which result from the ear’s exposure to prolonged and loud noise; there
is what Martin Daughtry (2014: 29) calls the ‘weight’ of sound, thumping into the cranial
and pericardial spaces of clubgoers or, well outside that scene, those of victims suffering
from improvised explosive devices in war zones – these, like those earlier philosophic
frameworks, evince the world-making (and at times world-destroying) power of sonic
activity. And as all of these examples’ shared psychological bent indicates, this kind of
activity is susceptible to being multisited and multi-mattered, even intersubjective.
But emphasizing these crossovers may too quickly lose sight of the matter at hand;
objects affected by sounds are not sounds themselves. And though these objects are
susceptible to such affection, surely each resonates in ways particular to its own situation.
Rendering this kind of specificity is something Bennett’s own analyses do not quite achieve.
There is a risk here of reifying sound into a common denominator, one that infiltrates all
things but that nevertheless remains unidentifiable as it does so. Mutual resonance may be
a powerful category for thinking through sound’s involvement with matter, but it may also
fail to arrive at a thoroughgoing account of sound as such.
A closer investigation into vibratory activity would seem well equipped to asses these
matters, and contemporary theorists of sound have keyed into this approach, well after
Helmholtz and others laid it out some two centuries ago. ‘Sound is vibration that is
perceived and becomes known through its materiality’ (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 1).
Similarly, Nina Sun Eidsheim has suggested that sonic phenomena be thought of as a series
of ‘intermaterial vibrational practices’, with only a small section of that field – or a slice of
the spectrum, to recall the epistemologies Trower tracks – designating cochlear activity
(Eidsheim 2017: 3). Because sound depends on its materials, and because those materials
act upon sound as much as it acts upon them, Eidsheim’s own method posits that, ‘for all
practical purposes, the material that vibrates’ alongside sound serves as a candidate for
sonic analysis (161). Sonics are thus necessarily ‘multisensory’ phenomena. Like things,
sound is sticky – matters of sound more so. And they range wide. But herein lies the sticking
point, one very much in line with the one troubling the vibrancy Bennett attempts to name:
is sound an object at all? If sound is inter-material and multisensory, does calling sound
‘sound’ make sense? What kind of vibration do David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny mean?
Which materiality does it become known through? Follow out a physicalist monism to its
furthest extent and where along that spectrum is the meaningful difference between one
vibrating thing and another? Zukofsky wants to know.2 It informs the difference between
his seeing and seafaring. And these questions are not merely a poet’s playthings, for as
Trower demonstrates, in empirical investigations sonic things also tend to blur. If, in the
wake of quantum mechanics (a subject in which Zukofsky himself was well versed), all
matter is reducible to periodic disturbances otherwise called vibration, in what sense does
sound, apparently the most obvious of all waveform phenomena, stand out? If waves are
heard but also seen and are also water, wherein lies a sound wave’s particular materiality,
and what epistemological payoff would an analysis of that materiality grant?
This is the problem of sonic materialism. Insisting on the materiality of sound, letting
that materiality be felt, does not automatically formulate a clear, conceptual framework for
and of the sound object. Nor does it guarantee that there will be any object there to frame
at all, among materials, passing through or around them. In fact, by virtue of this paradigm
shift it becomes even more difficult to audit the sonic thing in itself.
Sonic in-distinction
The title of a recent essay by John Mowitt multitracks the phenomenal effect of an English
onomatopoeia with noumenal and German overtones to frame the problem of sonic
materialism this way: ‘The Ding in Itself.’ John Cage’s Water Walk (1959) serves as its subject.
Performed in January of 1960 for audience members attending the CBS gameshow I’ve Got
a Secret, the composition features three minutes of Cage moving about an assemblage of
ordinary things, ranging from two mechanical fish, a few ice cubes in a blender, a bathtub,
a pressure cooker heated to its steaming point, five radios, a grand piano, and more. At
timed intervals (Cage carries with him a stopwatch and looks at it fastidiously) he ‘plays’
these things, slamming them, squeezing them, blowing on them, switching them on and
off – whatever the thing, Cage uses it in a manner that makes sound. But not only sound.
Exempting the piano, on which he at times plays a few dense, close-fingered chords, the
sonic signature of the things in Water Walk lie among what appear to be non-musical,
non-aesthetic categories, and yet Cage explicitly frames them in his opening remarks as
components of music, integral in fact to it; it is music he is after and it is music he therefore
creates, if only nominally in the opinions of those among his chuckling audience. That
Cage asserts this musicality walks up to a central question in sound art, Mowitt explains.
His claim is that Cage’s composition presents to listeners an occasion with which to sound
out the limits of the frame of intelligibility that demarcates music from that of sonic
phenomena more generally. Posed, suspended, and then posed again, the question, ‘are the
sounds these things make music?’ proliferates throughout all of Water Walk.
For Mowitt, if a sound is to count as music, to sound like music, another question
will need its own answer: ‘what is a thing?’ (Mowitt, forthcoming: 2). The disciplinary
distinctions Water Walk introduces, if only to thwart, stand within the vicinity of a
broader ontological problem opened in the rift between perceptual content and aesthetic
prejudice. Immanuel Kant, and Heidegger reading Kant, loom large here. By asking after
the musicality of its sounds, Cage’s composition by proxy demarcates the things of music
from the mere sound objects that remain peripheral to it, for as Mowitt explains, the extent
to which those sounds are or are not music is also the extent to which this distinction relies
upon a listener’s framing of those sounds in a manner that distinguishes their sources as
either the inert stuff of the world or as things charged with aesthetic potential. But as Kant
argued, these distinctions are intuited, pre-made, prejudged, and thus situated so that their
precise borders tend to elude the terms of their very investigation. A thing appears to be a
thing before being recognized as a thing, for in the Kantian paradigm ‘perception is never
unmediated by knowing’ (Mowitt, forthcoming: 8). Matter is situated in judgement before
it matters. Sound, then, is a thing before it is heard.
Though these questions are situated in aesthetic terms, they nevertheless provide
a highly useful frame around which to draw a materialist approach to sound. Replace
Water Walk with the absorptive, defamiliarizing strolls and tours of Christina Kubisch’s
Electrical Walks and Mowitt’s track, and that of Bennett’s, Eidsheim’s, and my own will
easily converge. In this later series, which serves as a kind of audial revamp to the city
symphony films of Dziga Vertov and Walter Ruttman, urban environments, electrified, are
transformed into musical events, sonified. Starting with a first stroll through the city centre
of Cologne in 2004, Kubisch has since threaded participants through such places as Riga,
Chicago, and London, giving each walker a set of specially designed wireless headphones
to wear during their explorations. These pick up electromagnetic waves. ATMs, fluorescent
lights, underground cables: in a return to the vibratory activities of Helmholtz, Herschel,
and others, the fields these objects produce as they run are transformed into a perceptual
field of auditory experience. Each element therein has its own sonic signature; that signal
meshes with others; together, they build into a silent soundtrack lying latent in urban
environments, environments whose rhythms, timbres, and volumes vary across continents
and municipalities (Cox 2006).3 To hear such differences, one needs only tune into the
right frequency – wireless tech wires in listeners to electrical currents running through
miles of wires coiled in urban infrastructure.
Kubisch explains in her artist’s statement that the background – or underground –
radiation of city dwelling has its own surprises: ‘Nothing looks the way it sounds. And
nothing sounds the way it looks’ (Kubisch n.d.). Hers is an art practice of the habituated
thing made sonically unfamiliar. But while matter and its manufactured sounding may fail to
mimetically correspond, their perceptual disparities share in the work of framing yet another
(perhaps happily) subverted assumption: a city’s ‘sounds are much more varied and musical
than you might expect’ (Kubisch n.d.). Grey, winding, and bleak miles of infrastructural
guts are above all aesthetic: this discovery puts Electrical Walks quite clearly in line with the
ordinary objects Cage puts to use. And more, it puts Kubisch’s series in a position where it
is available to the very same line of questioning Mowitt explores: musicality is as much at
issue here as it is at the CBS studios in 1960. Kubisch, however, adds a techno-materialist
layer to the identification of a sonic occurrence within its disciplinary justification as music
(or not), since strictly speaking the things of her Walks are non-cochlear. They must be
made to make audible sound – or more precisely, they make audible sound through a
form of translation. Though Cage ‘plays’ things, he assumes that, in whatever way he plays
them, this will be enough to produce sound, whatever the kind. Sound as such thus goes
unquestioned in Water Walk.4 Electrical Walks also positions urban infrastructure under
a similar aesthetic judgement, but Kubisch’s method of electromagnetic listening can only
pose, not answer, the question of whether the things that populate the auditory terrain this
judgement delimits are themselves sound. That is, though she assumes fluorescent lights
can be framed by sonic activity, this assumption cannot definitively state if what one hears
as a result of that framing is ‘actually’ sound – perhaps it is just electricity. In the Electrical
Walks, matters of sound, not just aesthetic judgement, quickly enter what Mowitt calls a
‘zone of in-distinction’ (Mowitt, forthcoming: 2). There, sound blends with electricity, with
things. Sound happens, this is clear. It can be perceived. Yet a thing that was not sound
now is. Or a sound is not sound but simply an electrified thing otherwise silently vibrating.
Whether we parse this zone of in-distinction into stable and set participants with
explanations grounded in physicalist vibrations, perceptual content, or ontological first
principles, Mowitt ultimately claims that sound’s thingness puts disciplinary frames into
question. The continuities of sonic phenomena audited in a materialist method figure
sound as something available to such a method, but because of this, those continuities
thwart the definitional constraints upon which materialism relies. Trower, for example, is
careful to note that however well it may frame sound among things, vibration ‘is not itself
a material object at all’, even as it is ‘bound up with materiality; vibration moves material,
and moves through material’ (Trower 2012: 6). It situates sonic matters, resonates with
them, and yet stays separate from them; and so, like other matters of sound, vibration
is paradigmatic. These matters ‘teeter’ – Mowitt’s phrase – between a thing (translated
but perhaps not ‘actual’ sound in Electrical Walks) and a thing in itself (whatever sound
‘actually’ is). For Mowitt, a sonic thing ‘is not something one perceives, whether cochlearly
or non-cochlearly, or measures’; rather, it is that which ‘surrounds us in the ambience of
questioning. It may, in effect, not even be itself ’ (Mowitt, forthcoming: 8).
In effect: a quiet pun, splitting these matters into sonic practice and the results thereof
(phenomenal, empirical, or, to return to Daughtry, violent). The quiddity that sound
is, whatever it is, relies on its disciplinary articulations. And crucially, those in science
and technology studies would point out that such articulations are always embedded in
material-discursive conditions. They work by way of what Karen Barad calls ‘agential cuts’,
wherein technological apparatuses resolve ‘the ontological inseparability’ of materiality
so that it may become available for observation and description (Barad 2007: 348).
I will have more to say about these operations later, but for the moment I want to call
attention to the way Barad’s cuts charge the passive voice in Novak and Sakakeeny’s general
definition. ‘Sound’, remember, ‘is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through
its materiality.’ Perceived, known through materiality: in their formulation vibration
establishes a paradigm wherein what sound is hinges on these two open variables; recourse
to the passive voice of a general definition is necessary when only particulars activate or
create the phenomenon in question. The effects of the agents that may come to occupy
those placeholders – effects both semiotic and material – will cut matters of sound out of
phenomenal processes and determine their particular character. Such a paradigm opens
avenues for non-cochlear analyses of deafness and deafening, for experiencing sound
without hearing it, as demonstrated by the work of Mara Mills (2011, 2015c), that of
Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich (2012), and Christine Sun Kim’s art practice.5 And
it can explain, too, the sonic quality of non-sonic things in Electrical Walks, inasmuch as
Kubisch’s wireless headphones put electromagnetic waves towards auditory ends.
There is something crucial, then, about how, in spite of its own definitional failures,
a sonic materialism of mutual vibration is well primed to examine the precise junctures
at which sound resonates, even silently, with and throughout a place. And there is
something crucial too in the fact that technological apparatuses can make these junctures
known or felt, as if they transpose, however briefly, the intuitions of aesthetic judgement
Mowitt discusses into a field in which they may be available for more direct (because felt)
contemplation. Whatever vibration is at a given moment, it is only so because material-
discursive conditions have made it so. Ontological matters of sonic things notwithstanding,
wireless headphones articulating things as sound is something to which materialist analysis
can attune itself.
Listening agents
At times this attunement may be as simple as using sound to forensically investigate times
and places. This enables a historical materialist approach to sonic matters. As part of a
multisited installation he calls the Hummingbird Clock (2016–), ‘private ear’ – not eye –
Lawrence Abu Hamdan has installed three binoculars outside and opposite to the law courts
of Liverpool. Meant to act like a ‘public time piece’ (Hamdan 2016), the Clock’s lenses are
trained to point in a close, scrutinizing focus towards the clock set in the Liverpool Town
Hall, sitting just under the brim of its dome, which arches up to a statue of Minerva, seated
and looking down. Below each camera is a placard. On them Hamdan explains how the
very same power grids supplying energy to the devices Kubisch audits produce a hum on
their own, without the help of electromagnetic translation. Though it often sits just below
the threshold of normative audibility, this ‘mains hum’ is a constant, found everywhere on
digital audio and video recordings – much to the annoyance of sound engineers seeking to
gain clean signals in their studios. As viewers in Liverpool look on, this hum’s frequencies
surge all around them, silently saturating their urban environment. Small electronic
screens on Hamdan’s placards track those rates. While the hum is always there, nominally
operating at 50 hertz per second, there are small changes in the electrical current of the
power grid, and these changes produce corresponding changes in the noise of the mains
hum. These minute modulations imprint their own, unique sonic signatures on recording
devices across the UK, and as Hamdan explains, they are used by the UK government as
a means of state surveillance. Because the material conditions of digital recordings come
pre-packaged with sonic ‘fingerprints’ (Hamdan 2016), forensic investigators can extract
that information, scan it, and map the time and place of its making – ubiquitous humming
pinpoints its material-discursive conditions.
As a countermeasure to these investigations, Hamdan directs viewers to the second
location of his piece, a website: hummingbirdclock.info. There, he has amplified the UK’s
mains hum well into the decibel range of normative audibility and set the fluctuations of its
frequency in his own clock face, complete with a hand each for hours, minutes, and seconds,
the last of which visualizes those fluctuations ‘like a seismograph’, climbing and dipping
whenever the mains’ nominal 50 hertz cycle wavers as much as a hertz off from its intended
mark, up or down. Like the agents of state surveillance, Hamdan does not just livestream
these rates but clocks and archives them; starting from 7 July 2016 onward, anything in the
UK government’s records should also be in his. And whereas state surveillance remains
wrapped in secrecy and silent black boxes, Hamdan’s website makes the gathering of this
data plain plus it offers to check the hum of any digital recording against the artist’s files.
He provides a submission page for those needing to corroborate a claim. ‘Perhaps you
are caught on a recording that is being used as evidence against you, but know that it has
been edited to make it sound as if you said things you didn’t, or that certain material has
been edited out’ (Hamdan 2016). Fill out a form, send it in, and, with additional help from
members of the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths College, Hamdan
will produce a full report cataloguing the conditions of a recording’s sonic making.
Hamdan’s Clock is one such example of how the arrival of a thing quite literally ‘takes
time, and the time that it takes shapes “what” it is that arrives’. Sara Ahmed writes that
‘what arrives not only depends on time, but is shaped by the conditions of its arrival,
by how it came to get here’ (Ahmed 2006: 40). That digital recordings carry with them
such conditions; that they arrive with clock time reified in and by their data, sequenced,
made material, even sensible; that they are shaped by this time; that they interact with
other times; that Hamdan detects these times, corroborates them, and disseminates them
as a counterstrategy to state surveillance – all this comes together as a practice of sonic
materialism. His is a method of transposing into sensuousness sonic things so they may
arrive at, and then give some sense of, what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1998: 45)
once referred to as the ‘historical product’ of a ‘definite’ social system (see also Ahmed
2006: 41–44).6 He enables audiences to listen for what Douglas Kahn calls the ‘long
sound’, a sound that acquires its particular character from an extended encounter with
the materials and spaces across which it has propagated (Kahn 2013: 162). Those, along
with that signal’s source, make matters of sound matter. Social development, industry,
commercial intercourse: the Hummingbird Clock audits the very junctures of historical
forces Marx and Engels sought to accent, inspecting them, attending to them, hearing
them. Here, something like a sonic-materialist method begins to take shape.
What remains crucial in this method is how and what the ‘private ear’ listens for. Kahn
describes an audial attunement to world forces and energies as a ‘transperception’, which
functions like an ‘apperception, a consciousness or intrinsic awareness of an energy that
includes what has been traversed’ (Kahn 2013: 162). In a return to the Kantian tradition in
which Mowitt places his own argument, Kahn’s prefixed morpheme formulates a posture
that puts sound into place before and as it arrives as cochlear activity. This awareness
primes listeners to attune themselves to the presence of past auditory phenomena at play
during a present moment of audition. It is a vitalism in line with that of Bennet’s new
materialist analyses; it highlights channels of transmission, accenting the hum of the world
that elsewhere vexes audio engineers; it audits sound as the material assemblage that it is,
for a sound, Kahn writes, ‘is always sounds’ (170).
Hamdan’s amplifications take a similar approach. And because they do so with an
aesthetic that traverses the thresholds of normative audibility, they indicate the lasting
usefulness of a phenomenological approach that comports itself to sound’s affective weight
– and wait times, as in the not-yet but soon-to-be-heard sonic event lying latent in the
electrical wiring of cities. Though I wrote above that no such approach would be able
to parse the terms of Zukofsky’s poem into stable categories and set them in place for
further contemplation, sensate sound – though not always cochlear sound – still matters.
It most often opens the question that a materialist inquiry takes up. Like Kubisch, Hamdan
provides listeners with a technological aesthesis that apprehends and articulates the
material-discursive conditions of sonic matter, reifying those conditions into felt registers.
His Clock makes sound representable in and to phenomenal awareness and, with it, makes
tangible the things of that sound. What matters, for sonic materialism, is how we ultimately
attend to the constructed nature of those felt effects.
Another way to put this is to say that I am not claiming that any and all sensory effects
should be anthropomorphic or made to fit only those registers. Even as Hamdan and
Kubisch make worlds that conform to human sense-certainty they also indicate a range
of sensations and sensibilities that remain exterior to experience. Without the inclusion
or acknowledgement of this exteriority they would simply fall into what Mark Hansen
has called the phenomenological error of recent media studies, which ‘involves the
transposition of our modes of experience into the heart of other modes of experience –
specifically, technical modes of experience – that are not constituted on the model of what
matters to us’ (Hansen 2015: 121–122, emphasis in the original). Both artists avoid this
error by providing forms of sonic immersion that are tinged with unfamiliarity, slightly
off, twanging with the technical conditions of their aesthetic productions in such a way
that those conditions remain well within the range of hearing. Kubisch and Hamdan
acknowledge the frames of sonic mediation. In doing so they follow on the ‘phantasmagoric
practice’ of Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence, manufacturing forms of
sonification that treat any-thing as a ‘dynamic locale of the agency of perception’ (Voegelin
2010: 103), where, in that locale, listening agents – not things, not objects, not assemblages
– quite literally make sound for and by themselves.7 This practice puts these agents’ elusive
recalcitrance (as Bennett would have it) into direct interaction with the act of audition.
Otherwise put, I am, in effect, arguing that sonic materialism should not galvanize but
rather mediate the gap between a sonic thing’s arrival and a listening agent, and it should
do so by asserting that the agents involved therein are open variables. Whether an agent be
human or nonhuman, whether its mode of listening aligns with cochlear activity or takes
on other sensibilities (technical, material, whatever else), there is a place for the listener in
and of sonic materialism. In that place, matter matters most where it engenders the act of
whatever it is we decide to call listening. Hence the trans- of Kahn’s transperception.
This mode of perception gains its prefix not only because it listens across the materials
that stick with sound – in Voegelin’s account a sonic thing is a ‘honeyed thing’ (Voegelin
2010: 20) – for their times, their energies, their modulatory powers, but also because this
act is almost always bound up with multiple auditing agents. Transperception transforms
sound into sounds and the auditor into auditors; for this kind of listening the sonic thing
arrives shaped by multiple sites of sensation. It is here where Eidsheim’s work on the
‘multisensory’ phenomena of sound is most relevant – multisensory, it should now be clear,
both in terms of involving more than one sense and in that of involving multiple sensors,
some of which may be specifically equipped to process sound, some not. Having been
worked over by these things, Kahn’s long sounds gain and change character. And a key
part of this process is that the media technologies involved in those changes do not merely
modify a signal and pass it on, as if all perceptual effects of waveform phenomena were
due to a single, selfsame signal vibrating every-thing in the world. This is the rhetorical
trick of the nineteenth-century physicalists in Trower’s account: they relied on sound,
typically cochlear, to uncover some prior vibratory connectivity enlivening all elements in
the universe. And this too is the potential threat, so Hansen would say, that the works of
Zukofsky, Kubisch, and Hamdan pose to a concept of sonic materiality if this concept fails
to highlight how these pieces work through a multitude of signals instantiated and actively
shaped by the control logics of an experimental setup or aesthetic practice. A focus on the
multisensory materials of sound sets us up to audit things along that second track because
this focus cannot take for granted the existence of sound as such, even as it perceives
(potential) sounds everywhere. And yet, by staying with this uncertainty, this focus may
yet carve out space for sonic specificity, even when matters of sound seem to stretch wide
and stick to so many things.
Boundary music
It is perhaps for this reason that transduction has stuck so well in sound studies. This
process will put these present matters of sound to an end. Appearing in work ranging from
media and cultural studies (Henriques 2001, 2011; Sterne 2003; Helmreich and Friedner
2012) to science and technology studies (Barad 2007; Helmreich 2007, 2009, 2015) and
certain strains of affect theory and post-phenomenology (Deleuze and Guattari 1987;
Goodman 2010; Eidsheim 2017), transduction centres matters of sound at the crossover
points between sensate bodies, technological substrates, and cultural techniques – each one
an open variable for auditing agents. It is an act of conversion and transcoding, an agential
cut whereby some technology pools, condenses, and then modulates world energies from
one form into another. Crucially, however, it does not transubstantiate those energies.
Transducers produce energies anew, and differently, each device manufacturing them
after the manner of its own ‘representational recipe’ (Helmreich 2009: 212–249, 2015).
Though these representations often give off a sense of presence and total immersion for
those on their receiving end (hence vibratory physicalism), they are nevertheless available
for material-discursive inquiry, much like the one at hand. Along these lines, Kahn’s own
thinking about transduction leads him to comment, quite suggestively, and in a way that
deserves much more elaboration than I can do here, that transduction often adjudicates
distinctions between technological objects and those of the natural world (Kahn 2013: 55).
While the process can appear to do this quite easily and instantly, even naturally, it does so
by engendering distinctions that are inevitably caught up within cultural logics. Whatever
sound is, transduction reminds us that sound is only, as Marie Thompson (2017: 274)
writes, ‘heard as’, and so a materialist take on transduced sound can never quite leave the
semiotic arena.8
Emphasizing how transduction situates audition emphasizes how media technologies
actively remake world energies – or better put, make new energies that nevertheless remain
in some proximal, analogous, or otherwise roughly translatable position to that of the
one a given technology first received. These energies are separate entities enframed by a
thoroughgoing logic of technological mediation that an analysis attuned to transduction is
best equipped to draw out. Transductive inquiry, writes Stefan Helmreich, ‘should remind
auditors of the physical, infrastructural conditions that support the texture and temper of
sounds we take to be meaningful’ (Helmreich 2015: 225). In the context of these conditions
sonic matter comes to matter, doing so with a reliance on discursive practices that, as Barad
explains, are themselves ‘specific material (re)configurings of the world through which the
determination of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted’ (Barad
2007: 148). Transduction is continuous and highly situated among these conditions. So it
is perhaps not so much that a sonic thing arrives by way of this process, at least in the sense
of ‘having travelled from’; a sonic thing stays with the devices entailed in its making, and
when those devices interact (intra-act, in Barad’s vocabulary), new sonic things appear
along with them.9 What an auditor eventually senses as transmitted sound is first of all the
event of material-discursive manufacture.
Because it in part constitutes the very borders of world energies, realizing them after
the manner of Barad’s agential cut, transduction strangely bounds signals and subjects
them to further modulation. The process puts the phenomenon of sound into place, even
as it appears to make or let that sound leak into a far wider field (see Eidsheim 2017: 17,
157–178). More, transduction’s boundary making often happens with one and the same
action, and this action has much to do with the difficulties sonic materialism must traverse
– if, in fact, it is not one of the primary causes of those very difficulties. Indeed, bounding
sound as a thing is both the end result of transduction and the first thing this process seems
to dissolve because this process is the boundary itself – the boundary making – sonic
materialism largely works within, sometimes seeks, but cannot itself verify.10 Electrical
Walks and the Hummingbird Clock make this situation obviously apparent, inasmuch as
both use transduction to maintain a gap between things and our experiences of them, all
while also making room for further nonhuman auditors. Similarly, in Zukofsky’s poem sea
and see are condensed into a single graphic capacitor, where they await their transductive
articulation by phonic intervention, an intervention that, by activating these resonances,
cannot disentangle them. But this blurring works only by virtue of the materials involved.
Though a methodological elaboration of matters of sound cannot quite solidify those
borders, it can work with the things temporarily bounded therein.
This, finally, is what sonic materialism must audit: bounded things, things and their
boundaries, things as boundary making. Amid their silences, their soundings, their
vibrations, their elusive recalcitrance, and their enigmatic histories, sonic materialism treats
things as impossible brackets cast around the situation of sound. Though this situation may
not be wholly reducible to those things, these two phenomena co-occur in such a way
that one makes the other available to inquiry. Simply put, sonic materialism puts things
and sound in mutual resonance. To repeat the grammatical positioning above: listening
for the sound of matter puts sound with matter, not to equate them, not to establish some
sort of causal relation between them, but simply to hear them in and as the thoroughgoing
entanglement with which we always find them.
In this way sonic materialism audits, and perhaps even makes a kind of boundary music.
To listen for this music, follow the directives Mieko Shiomi ([1963] 2002) has drawn up
into the Fluxus event score below. It encourages a form of performance that cuts close to
the matters of sound tangled together at least since the power of Zukofsky’s middle C and
vibrating everywhere. It makes sound sound, even amid silence. Do what she has to say
generally, and when it comes time to put these matters to work for sonic-materialist ends,
know that Shiomi’s first verb applies equally well to production and reception. Each are
acts of making. As you keep that in mind, act on this as you see fit:
<boundary music>
Make your sound faintest possible to a boundary condition whether the sound is given
birth to as a sound or not. At the performance, instruments, human bodies, electronic
apparatuses and all other things may be used.
Notes
1. John Locke first makes a distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the former
being those qualities that are ‘utterly inseparable from the body’, such as solidity, number,
extension, and figure; the latter, epiphenomenal, are qualities ‘which in truth are nothing
in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us’ (Locke 1998:
135). For a rebuttal of Locke’s theory as it pertains to sound, see O’Callaghan 2007: 15–17.
2. For a discussion of Zukofsky’s engagement with quantum mechanics, see Quartermain
1992: 44–58, 70–89.
3. Wolfgang Ernst would say these Walks confirm digital media’s implicit sonicity. All such
media have a time-ordering logic Ernst equates with sonic phenomena: ‘Sound in its
generalized sense as a temporal enunciation refers to continuous (“analog”) and discrete
(“digital”) vibrational and frequential dynamics of all kinds […]. Sonicity is where time
and technology meet’ (Ernst 2016: 21).
4. Framed in this way, Water Walk poses an encounter between sound and music while
leaving unexplored its underlying ‘sound-space’. Other outlets of Cage’s practice (his
work with indeterminacy) and pedagogy (his Experimental Composition course at the
New School) do more fully engage with that space, working from out of what Deleuze,
adapting Kant, calls the ‘problematic Idea’, where the idea of sound is ‘not an essence
defined in abstraction from everyday practices, but is rather seen as a process of learning,
creation and experimentation’ (Campbell 2017: 369).
5. Many of Kim’s pieces engage sonic materiality through notation, displaying sound
information without cochlear activity to draw out how inter-material assemblages create
and shape sonic events. See, for example, her series ‘The Sound Of … ’ (2017), which
features score notations for events such as ‘The Sound of Passing Time’ and ‘The Sound of
Obsessing’.
6. Tina Campt’s cross-medial method of listening to the ‘felt sound’ of images powerfully
draws out the temporal dimensions of sonic arrival even further. She superposes haptic
and affective frequencies, infrasound and figurative sound to tune into the multiple
temporalities of black futurity intimated in passport photos, ethnographic photos of
Africans in the Eastern Cape, and criminal identification photos – times past, present,
future, and virtual.
7. In an echo of the vibratory physicalists of Trower’s account, Hansen argues that
something similar to what Voegelin describes happens with all twenty-first-century
media. Geo-sensors, structures of dataveillance, high-frequency trading, and the like all
work in the ‘operational present of sensibility’, a register of micro-temporal experiences
to which consciousness ‘has no natural access’. Like world energies in the nineteenth
century, the kind of sense data these media produce simply ‘cannot be directly lived by
consciousness’ (Hansen 2015: 52–53). Perhaps it will fall to sonic aesthetics to once more
make this condition more ‘real’ to us.
8. If there is merit in the recent turn towards sonic ontology, argues Thompson, it lies in the
way ‘sonic ontologies enable us to ask how “the nature of the sonic” is determined – what
grounds the sonic ground – while remaining open to how it might be heard otherwise’
(Thompson 2017: 278). An analysis that does not engage these determinants threatens
to reify what she calls a masculine and Eurocentric ‘white aurality’, which claims
privileged access to sound beyond culture and representation ‘while invizibilizing its own
constitutive presence in hearing the ontological conditions of sound-itself ’ (274). See also
Brian Kane’s discussion of exemplification and embodiment in the ‘onto-aesthetics’ of
Christoph Cox, Steve Goodman, and others.
9. Casey O’Callaghan has gone so far as to suggest that sound itself may not travel ‘through’
a medium but rather stays put in a location (O'Callaghan 2007: 46). However, he does
not leverage this suggestion to understand what sound has to teach us about discourse’s
entanglement with matter. But Annie Goh does. Her proposed method of ‘sounding
situated knowledges’ reassesses the nature-culture division in sonic realism by claiming,
‘sound studies’ central positioning of the body and embodiedness positions sounding as
predisposed to the political-philosophical project of situated knowledges’ elaborated in

Donna Haraway’s feminist epistemology (Goh 2017: 289).
10. In this sense, one of transduction’s cardinal functions in a techno-materialist analysis of
sound may be that of the parergon (see Derrida 1987: 54–64; and Moten 2003: 247–251).
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10
Sonic Methodology in Philosophy
Elvira Di Bona
Introduction
Investigating the nature of sound and how we experience it is important not only for the
comprehension of the functioning of audition but also because, on the one hand, it helps
us understand the role of sensory perception in general within the architecture of the mind
and, on the other hand, it tests commonsensical claims on the functioning of perception
which are usually based on vision. That is, the investigation of hearing and sounds can be
seen as a ‘sonic’ methodology which serves to understand perception with regard to its
peculiar object and its relationship with space and time.
Firstly, focusing on the object of auditory perception and characterizing it as a stream
of happenings or events (sounds) have challenged the claim, based on the analysis of
visual perception, according to which the object of perception has to be a material object,
such as, say, tables or chairs. That is, the mere analysis of what is the object of auditory
perception might help to rethink what we perceive when we are in touch with the world,
by raising concerns, at least, with respect to the usual theoretical framework of the theories
of perception that see vision as a reference point for all sense modalities. However, the
same analysis might also lead to the conclusion that auditory objects overlap with material
objects (sound sources), allowing us to confirm what is already stated in vision. Therefore,
the study of the auditory object has a very important function: on the one hand, it might
reinforce the commonsensical idea that we perceive material objects – this will be shown
by embracing a specific conception of the auditory object which claims that we hear sound
sources – on the other hand, it may call into question this commonsensical idea and thus
strengthen the disanalogy between vision and audition – by suggesting that the auditory
object is constituted only by sound and its properties. Moreover, the focus on hearing
and sound, together with the investigation of what we usually characterize as auditory
experience, acts as a useful methodology in order to deepen our understanding of spatial
and temporal experiences. That is, if the spatial properties we recover through audition are
about the location of sound sources, we can claim that, analogously to vision, audition is
informative about the location of material objects. In addition, analysing the experience of
sound contributes to cast light on some of the most representative examples of temporal
experiences, namely, temporal phases, persistency, and temporal contour. The discussion
of these temporal experiences will be pursued by comparing the experience of sound and
the experience of colour with relation to time.
To sum up, I argue that the study of sound and auditory experience can be seen
as a very successful methodology in philosophy in order to develop and enhance
the understanding of perception as a whole and to enrich our comprehension of the
experience of space and time.
Sonic methodology and the object of

perception
When answering the general question of what we perceive when we are in touch with the
world, we mainly provide an answer which is based on the analysis of the sense modality
of vision. That is, before answering this question, we usually ‘take a look’ at what is around
us and describe what we immediately ‘see’. When we ask what we perceive to be around
us, we answer by mentioning things that we are visually acquainted to (tables, chairs, trees,
animals, and their qualities). We tend to identify such things with material objects and
their attributes.
In the history of the philosophy of perception, the majority of philosophers, with
few exceptions, have adopted this way of proceeding when elaborating their theories
of perception. The philosopher Casey O’Callaghan suggests that this tendency, which
has established a paradigm often referred to as ‘visuocentrism’, has strongly shaped
our understanding of perception for a long time (O’Callaghan 2007: 4). Taking
into account sense modalities that are different from vision is a relatively recent
development in the philosophy of perception. This development indicates a distancing
from the idea of relaying upon vision in the discussion of the object of perception and
its relationship to space and time. Therefore, when answering the question of what
we perceive when we are in touch with the world, due to the increasing study of sense
modalities which are different from vision, it is not obvious that, from the perspective
of these sense modalities, we would provide the same answer we would give when
focusing on vision.
If we take audition into account and ask what we perceive when we are in touch with
the world, we usually answer that we hear sounds, melodies, or rhythms which are things
that we do not usually characterize as material objects. As the philosopher Matthew
Nudds points out: ‘The idea that our experience of sounds is of things which are distinct
from the world of material objects can seem compelling. All you have to do to confirm
it is close your eyes and reflect on the character of your auditory experience’ (Nudds
2001: 210). Therefore, focusing on audition challenges the granitic tendency of claiming
that we perceive material objects and their attributes; it constitutes a valid method to
put this commonsensical idea into question. At the same time, though, this method of
Sonic Methodology in Philosophy 189
investigating hearing and sound could also reinforce the commonsensical idea that we
perceive material objects just by showing that, as in vision, we perceive material sources
in audition as well.
Sound theories employ their own notion of an auditory object which basically depends on
how the theory answers the following interrelated questions: What do we hear? Are sounds
the unique objects of auditory perception, or is there something else that we hear when we
have an auditory experience? Does it make sense to say that along with sounds we hear also
sound sources? When answering these questions, we come up with two possibilities: either
we hear only sounds and their audible qualities, which are pitch, loudness, and timbre, or
we hear the causes of these sounds, namely, sound sources (Di Bona and Santarcangelo
2018: 43). If we merely reflect upon our auditory experience when listening to, say, a high-
pitched sound, we tend to describe it as either a bold sound with its audible qualities, or we
might go deeper and say we hear something richer, something like the cry of a baby or the
siren of an ambulance which comes from far away. These two possibilities generate a strong
disagreement in the field of auditory perception and determine two different philosophical
positions: on the one hand, there is the position according to which the only things we hear
are sounds, which are taken to be items that ‘exhaust’ the content of auditory experience;
on the other hand, there is the position for which we hear the objects that produce sounds,
which means that we are in touch with the sound sources. Both views are legitimate
and grounded on different but equally acceptable intuitions: the intuition for which our
auditory system tracks sound sources in order to avoid obstacles and dangers, allowing
us to navigate the environment (this intuition justifies the view for which we auditorily
perceive sound sources), and the intuition suggesting that sounds are items which can
be ‘separated’ from their causes and are somehow ‘disembodied’ entities. This intuition
warrants the claim that we perceive only sounds (43). Developing the first intuition would
challenge the commonsensical idea that we perceive material objects; developing the
second intuition would reinforce it.
Two opposite views on auditory perception

Let me analyse in greater detail these two different views and start from the discussion of
philosopher D. L. C. Maclachlan’s position according to which we merely hear sounds. This
is what he asks us to do:
Suppose that there is a car passing the window. I am asked how I know that there is a car
passing the window and I answer: ‘Because I can hear it.’ Again, suppose that there is a
burglar moving about downstairs. I am asked how I know that there is a burglar downstairs
and I answer: ‘Because I can hear him.’ Usually we would be perfectly happy to accept these
answers as quite satisfactory, unless, for example, we had reason to believe that the burglar
downstairs was only the cat. But do we really hear the car passing the window and the burglar
downstairs? In general, do we ever hear anything except sounds and noises of various kinds?
[…] All I really hear are certain suspicious noises, and I say I hear a burglar only because I
assume that a burglar is responsible for the suspicious noises in question.
(Maclachlan 1989: 8)
Maclachlan claims that we hear nothing but sound. He distinguishes between knowledge
by perception and knowledge by inference, recalling the Russellian distinction between
knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. According to Maclachlan,
through the sense of hearing we perceive only sounds and noises and then, only indirectly,
we perceive the things responsible for these sounds and noises. The things we indirectly
perceive are merely inferred from what is actually given to the experience. His view echoes
George Berkeley’s, who introduced the difference between the proper object of audition,
which is sound, and what we perceive only indirectly, which are sound sources, in the
following passage:
For instance, when I hear a coach drive along the streets, all that I immediately perceive
is the sound; but from my past experience that such a sound is connected with a coach,
I am said to ‘hear the coach’. Still, it is obvious that in truth and strictness nothing can be
heard but sound; and the coach in that example is not properly perceived by sense but only
suggested from experience.
(Berkeley 1975: 54)
Berkeley suggests that nothing can be heard but sound. Then, sound sources, which in his
example are exemplified by a coach, are not ‘properly perceived by sense but only suggested
from experience’ (Berkeley 1975: 54). In the Berkeleyan view, sounds are the unique objects
of auditory experience and, since we have already had the experience of perceiving a coach,
we are able to associate the sound we currently hear with the passage of a coach. With
regard to the idea that sounds are the immediate objects of auditory perception, Berkeley
adds:
Philonous. This point then is agreed between us, that sensible things are those only which
are immediately perceived by sense. You will farther inform me, whether we immediately
perceive by sight anything beside light, and colours, and figures: or by hearing, anything but
sounds: by the palate, anything beside tastes: by the smell, beside odours: or by the touch,
more than tangible qualities.
Hylas. We do not.
(Berkeley 1975: 8, emphasis in the original)
In this passage of the ‘Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous’, Berkeley claims that
just as light, colours, and figures in vision, tastes in taste, odours in smell, and tangible
qualities in touch, sounds are the immediate object of hearing and are sensible things.
I have briefly presented the view for which what we perceive in auditory perception is
only sounds. Let me now introduce the position for which we literally hear sound sources.
In order to defend this view I could start by individuating the characteristics of sound
sources that we can have an access to auditorily. By ‘sound sources’ I mean all the objects
which are capable of emitting a sound if correctly stimulated. It seems to be intuitive that
there are some attributes of sound sources which we cannot perceive by audition. The
redness of a ripe tomato or the heat of a piece of bread just taken out of the oven are
among them. There are, however, attributes of objects which, even if prima facie do not
seem to be ‘audible’, turn out to be auditorily perceivable. For example, studies in ecological
psychology show that some material objects’ properties, such as hardness, texture, or the
length of an object, which are commonly perceived by vision or touch, might be perceived
also by hearing (Lederman 1979; Freed 1990; Carello, Anderson, and Peck 1998). Hardness,
texture, and object length are not only characteristics of ordinary material objects but can
be taken also as specific features of sound sources which are audible. All objects capable
of making sounds have hardness, texture, and a certain length. The wood of a violin or the
surface of a table have a specific hardness; the metal which constitutes a gong might have
a hardness as does a pan made of cast iron; and both a flute and rods dropped to the floor
have a certain length. Therefore, by auditory perception, we are able to capture some of the
sound sources’ properties. Among them we have also the gender properties expressed by
human voices. I have supported this claim by investigating auditory adaptational effects on
gender properties and contrasting auditory experiences before and after the adaptational
effects take place (Di Bona 2017b). In light of this investigation, I concluded that auditory
experience is not limited to sounds’ audible properties, such as pitch, loudness, and timbre
(which are also usually labelled as the ‘low-level properties’ of auditory perception). The
existence of adaptation effects on a property is taken to be good evidence that that property
is part of the content of perception (Fish 2013; Block 2014). The logic behind this idea is
that in vision, for example, all the perceivable properties uncontroversially agreed upon –
such as luminance, contrast, or motion – are susceptible to adaptation (Antal et al. 2004;
Chen et al. 2005). Therefore, if other properties are susceptible to adaptation it suggests
that they might at least be part of the content of perception as well (Di Bona 2017b: 2632).
Claiming that we perceive sound sources when having an auditory experience does not
mean to affirm that we can always recognize exactly the object which produced the sound
we listened to, since recognizing the source of the sound is not always possible. To argue in
favour of the auditory perception of sound sources is enough to account for the perceptual
experience of the audible properties of sound sources. This is why we focus on specific
attributes such as hardness, texture, the length of an object, or the gender properties of
human voices. The fact that, by audition, we can be acquainted with different objects’
features shows that perception appears to be much more informative about the auditory
surrounding than it is usually believed.
The richness of auditory perception is further confirmed by a number of studies which
show that we are able to recognize the activity in which material sources are involved
while producing sounds. An experiment demonstrates that listeners who were asked to
identify different recorded sounds of jars and bottles of different size falling to the ground
either bouncing or breaking, were almost always accurate (Warren and Verbrugge 1984).
In another experiment, when listeners were asked to identify thirty common natural
sounds (common natural sounds are those generated by clapping, tearing paper, or
footsteps), they were able to recognize their sources very reliably. Nudds mentions that, in
a similar experiment, seventeen sounds were played and listeners were asked to identify
what they were listening to (Nudds 2010: 111). They nearly always described the sounds
in terms of their sources, and their descriptions were quite accurate. Several perceivers
could ‘distinguish the sounds made by someone running upstairs from those of someone
running downstairs, others were correct about the size of objects dropped into water’
(111). Another study analysed whether a perceived walk was performed by a female or by
a male (Li, Logan, and Pastore 1991). Xiaofend Li, Robert J. Logan, and Richard E. Pastore
asked eight males and eight females to walk across a hardwood surface. Listeners simply
had to listen to a recording of four steps and say whether the walker was a male or female.
The probability of identifying a male walker correctly was 69 per cent and the probability
of identifying a female correctly was 74 per cent. Another experiment was conducted by
the psychologist Bruno Repp and was on clapping. Repp’s basic question was whether
when we hear clapping, we can also get information about the configuration of hands.1
In Repp’s experiment, perceivers listened to eight different ways of clapping. The clapping
was ranked from a flat, parallel mode in which two hands perfectly overlapped, to a mode
in which the clapping was made by the contact between fingers and palm. The task was
to identify palm-to-palm clapping, finger-to-palm clapping, and one intermediate type of
clapping. Even if they were not able to distinguish among the ways of clapping produced
by a group of different subjects, (1987: 1104) perceivers were quite able to identify
ordinary claps.
Agreeing with the claim that we hear sound sources will confirm the analogy with vision,
according to which, as the objects of visual perception are material objects, also the objects
of auditory perception are sound sources, namely, material objects producing sounds,
some of their properties, and the activities in which they are involved. On the contrary,
agreeing with the claim for which we hear only sounds will support the disanalogy with
vision, according to which, as the object of visual perception are material objects, the object
of auditory perception are sounds with their loudness, timbre, and pitch. As previously
shown, there is empirical evidence demonstrating that when having an auditory experience,
we mostly go beyond the mere perception of sounds and their properties, and tend to
be acquainted with the actual material sound sources. Therefore, the sonic methodology
applied to the problem of the object of perception has ultimately demonstrated that the
analogy with vision might work so that we can start providing a unitary answer to what is
a perceptual object. Nevertheless, sounds are the intermediaries between the perceiver and
sound sources; they allow us to get in touch with sound sources, so that we can say that we
hear sound sources by hearing sounds. Therefore, when claiming that the auditory object is
constituted by sound sources, we still need to tell a story of what is the relationship between
sound and sound sources and how sounds allow us to be acquainted with sound sources.
Answering this question is the demanding task of future research.
Sonic methodology and space

If what we hear are sound sources or, at least, some of their attributes, we can investigate
to what extent we get spatial information about the location of sound sources. As I said,
the focus on hearing and sound is a useful methodology not only to understand perceptual
experience in general but also to understand the functioning of spatial experience. The sonic
methodology applied within issues on the experience of space goes from the particular
way of recovering spatial information in audition, to an account of spatial experience in
general. That is, if the spatial properties we recover through audition are about the location
of sound sources, I can claim that analogously to vision, audition is also informative on the
location where material objects are. This is the starting point to provide a unitary account
on spatial experience that is based on the study of the common spatial features of material
objects we recover through audition and vision.
Moreover, if I can explain how we auditorily perceive spatial properties of sound sources,
I will contribute to enrich the list of sound sources properties we can get through audition
in addition to the properties I already mentioned as to be part of the content of auditory
experience, namely, hardness, texture, object length, and the gender properties of human
voices.
In everyday listening, sounds are often perceived as located in the surrounding
environment at some distance from the perceiver and coming from a specific direction.
We hear the sound of the knocking on the near door; we hear someone crying down the
street; we hear the baritone singer rehearsing in the apartment adjacent to ours. By audition
we not only get information on the kind of objects in the environment which produce
these sounds but also we are acquainted with sounds which seem to have a location in the
surrounding space. We turn to look towards a sudden thud or a loud explosion because
sounds seem to have an indeterminate location outside our head. Simple reflections on
the phenomenology of auditory experience seem to tell us that we hear sounds as being
somewhere.
Empirical evidence supports the thesis that, despite the fact that the spatial characteristics
we detect by audition are neither as accurate nor as precise as the spatial characteristics we
get through vision, audition gives us directional information:
Research has shown that the region of most precise spatial hearing lies in, or close to, the
forward direction and that, within this region, a lateral displacement of the sound source
most easily leads to a change in the position of the auditory event […]. The spatial resolution
limit of the auditory system [about 1 degree of arc] is, then, about two orders of magnitude
less than that of the visual system, which is capable of distinguishing changes of angle of less
than one minute of arc.
(Blauert 1997: 38–39)
The scientist Jens Blauert claims that even though the spatial resolution of the auditory
system is less accurate than the spatial resolution of the visual system, in audition we
do not perceive only spatial characteristics related to direction, but we experience also
what he calls ‘distance hearing’, according to which ‘for familiar signals such as human
speech at its normal loudness, the distance of the auditory event corresponds quite well
to that of the sound source’ (Blauert 1997: 45–46). Sound engineers use researches about
the localization of sound to shape the experience of music in different environments
(concert halls, theatres), while contemporary composers, too, are often familiar with such
researches which they exploit in order to create special effects in their compositions (Di
Bona 2017a). (I am referring to composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono,
Pierre Boulez, and Alvin Lucier.) If we combine empirical research on spatial hearing
with reflections on the phenomenology of auditory experience related to spatiality, we
can conclude that the spatiality of audition is essentially about the location of sound
sources and the sound that comes from them.
In the philosophical literature, a taxonomy of sound theories has been already proposed,
based on the location we assign to sounds and sound sources when reflecting upon hearing.
The philosophers Roberto Casati and Jérôme Dokic distinguish four different groups: The
distal theories group, which argues that sound is located where sound sources are; the
medial theories group, according to which sound is in the transmitted medium, which
separates the listener from the source; the proximal theories group, which claims that
sound is either in the ears of the listener or in the space in the vicinity of the perceiver; and
the a-spatial theory group, corresponding to Strawson’s position,2 which claims that sound
is an a-spatial item which we hear as occupying no location whatsoever (Di Bona 2019).
Each of these groups of theories assigns a specific location to sound and, consequently,
accounts for a different relation between sound and its source, and argues for a different
spatiality of sound sources.
Let us see in detail how each group of theories elaborates on the relationship between
sound and sound source. Medial and proximal theories consider sounds as caused by their
sources and as somehow distinct from them. If sounds are sound waves coming from
an object and propagating in the environment, or if they are proximal stimuli, they are
distinct from the source. These theories claim that, by audition, we get spatial information
that is about sounds and do not explicitly say whether this information is also about sound
sources. Which is why they face some worries. Both positions assign a location to sound
which happens to be different from the location where the sound sources are; therefore,
they need to justify why, very often, when asked about where sound is, we mention the
place where a sound is coming from, which corresponds to the place where that sound
has been produced, namely, its source. Moreover, even if the proximal and the medial
views might claim that we can still get spatial info on sound sources which happen to be
different from spatial info on sound, they need to justify how, when having an auditory
experience, we can distinguish between the spatial info on sound and the spatial info on
sound sources.
The distal position (Casati and Dokic 1994; Pasnau 1999; O’Callaghan 2007; Kulvicki
2008, 2014), according to which we hear sounds as items located at the object that produces
them, is less controversial than the proximal and the medial positions with regard to the
spatiality of audition. This is because, given that it claims that sounds are heard to be where
sound sources are, it can easily account that when we get spatial information on sounds,
this is information tout court also on sound sources, due to the co-location of sound and
sound sources. They justify co-location by virtue of metaphysical considerations on the
nature of sound, namely, by saying that sound is either an event-like individual located at
the source and identical to the event source (Casati, Dokic, Di Bona 2005; Casati, Di Bona,
and Dokic 2013), or that sound is a relational event that is a medium disturbance at the
interface between the vibrating object and the surrounding air (O’Callaghan 2007). Within
the distal view, co-location can be warranted also by classifying sound as a categorical
property of the source (Pasnau 1999) or as a dispositional property of the sounding object
(Kulvicki 2008, 2014).3
All these different metaphysical options on sound reveal a tight relationship between
sound and sound sources. Since sound can be identical to the event source, it can be the
medium disturbance originated at the interface between the vibrating object and the
surrounding air, a categorical or a relational property of the source. The tight relationship
between sound and sound sources revealed by the metaphysical status that the distal
view attributes to sound acts as a picklock in order to justify why, when we get spatial
information on sound, we get spatial information tout court on sound sources. It seems
clear that among the different groups of views, only the distal view of sound conforms
with the phenomenology of spatial experience and the empirical data suggesting that the
spatiality of audition is essentially about the location of sound sources and the sounds
coming from them.
I did not discuss the a-spatial view of sound for which sound is an a-spatial item which
we hear as occupying no location whatsoever since it seems to be strongly counterintuitive
and in disagreement with the basic phenomenological considerations and the empirical
data on the spatial experience I have already mentioned.
As in vision we can easily say that the material objects we perceive have a location in
space and a specific spatial dimension, we can also affirm that audition is informative on
the spatiality of the material objects which produce sounds, by telling us at least at what
distance and in which direction they are located with respect to us. Therefore, the analogy
between vision and audition works not only to the extent that in both cases material objects
are the objects of perception, but also since their spatial location can be considered as
visually and auditorily perceivable. The analogy works, though, only within the framework
of the distal view of sound.
Sonic methodology and time

If sonic methodology has helped to test the comparison between vision and audition
concerning the object of perception and the experience of space, we need to test whether
it works also when talking about temporal features. It will be clear that sonic methodology
will be useful also in this respect. This time, I will be more specific and compare sounds
and colours.
There seems to be different temporal experiences that interest sounds. We can hear the
different temporal elements or phases that shape the temporal evolution of sound, we can
hear sound as something which persists in time, and we can also individuate the temporal
contour of a sound with the aim of distinguishing it from a simultaneous one (Di Bona
and Santarcangelo 2018: ch. 4). Sounds begin, last, and come to an end. This is evident
all the time that we hear a dog barking, a siren wailing, or listen to a melody in a concert
hall. In acoustics, the envelope describes the evolution of sound in time. This is typically
segmented in four phases (attack, peak, sustain, and decay). It refers to a single sound, such
as a brief note on a piano, but it can also be used to describe an entire stream of sounds,
such as the slamming of a door or footsteps on a street. The ability of detecting the different
temporal phases of an unfolding sound or stream of sounds is considered to be at the basis

of the difference with the way in which we experience colours.
On this regard, Casati, Dokic and Di Bona write: ‘Sounds take up time. They start
and cease. They are intrinsically temporal entities. Their temporal profile is essential to
individuating them, in a way which has no analogue in the case of colors and shapes’ (Casati,
Dokic and Di Bona 2005: 20). I should specify that the disanalogy Casati, Dokic and Di Bona
mention applies when we take still colours as an example but when we see colours in motion,
like patches intermittently coloured in red, we could experience them as items which start,
last, and come to an end. At the same time, let us imagine the situation in which we are in a
car, waiting at a traffic light. Let us imagine that the green light starts and then its intensity
changes before smoothly becoming yellow. We can describe the evolution of the green light
by virtue of the envelope whereby we can detect four phases in the evolution of green, as
it happens with sound. Therefore, we can conclude that the experience of this first form of
auditory temporality does not justify the disanalogy with colour perception (Di Bona and
Santarcangelo 2018: 122–123).
Another form of temporality which seems to characterize the experience of sound is
that sound resists qualitative changes. O’Callaghan claims that:
Sounds survive changes to their properties and qualities. A sound that begins high-pitched
and loud may continue to exist though it changes to being low-pitched and soft. An object
does not lose its sound and gain a new one when it goes from being high-pitched to low-
pitched, as with an emergency siren’s wail. […] Determinate perceptible or sensible qualities,
however, do not survive change in this way. The red colour of the fence does not survive the
whitewashing. The dank smell of the dog does not survive the perfuming.
(O’Callaghan 2008: 4)
O’Callaghan suggests that while sounds resist all kinds of qualitative changes, colours
do not survive qualitative changes. It seems quite convincing, indeed, to claim that
we do experience the persistency of colour and the persistency of sound in a quite
disanalogous way.
A last form of temporal experience in audition is the temporal contour, which is at
the core of our ability to individuate sounds (Di Bona and Santarcangelo 2018: 126–
128). This form of temporal experience is often analysed by scientists when working on
the identification of auditory objecthood (Bregman 1990; Kubovy and Van Valkenburg
2001; Griffiths and Warren 2004; Denham and Winkler 2015). Being able to detect the
temporal edges of sound is crucial in order to differentiate auditory streams from a
chaotic background. According to Albert S. Bregman (1990), the auditory scene analysis is
grounded on two basic groupings: the primitive grouping and the schema-driven grouping.
The primitive grouping takes place sequentially and simultaneously. Both mechanisms of
the primitive grouping lie on our ability to have a temporal auditory experience. Sequential
integration originates streams segregation allowing us to distinguish the different sensory
elements which come from the auditory environment, such as loudness, pitch, and timbre,
and to attribute them to the sound or the stream to which they actually belong. We
attribute those features, whilst they change over time, to the appropriate streams and we
segregate one stream from another. As for the simultaneous grouping, among different
factors, a factor that tends to group components that come from the same source is the
synchrony of onsets and offsets of components. This factor that is helpful because parts of
a single sound usually start at the same time. The grouping of simultaneous components
influence auditory perception, including the number of sounds that are perceived, their
pitch, timbre, loudness, and location.
Is there a form of temporal contour which is at the core of our ability to individuate
colours which justifies the analogy between vision and audition concerning temporal
experience? Small colour differences can be discriminated when the coloured areas are large
and adjacent to each other. These conditions occur, for example, when looking at continuous
coloured data as in maps of weather or temperature. Larger colour differences are needed
if the conditions change from this ideal. The adjacent stripes are distinctly discriminable.
As the region of the coloured areas to differentiate is reduced, larger colour differences
are difficult to detect. The ideal condition for colour distinction to take place is when a
clear limit separates the colours, as in the case of a badge against the background colour of
a dress. Instead, when a gradual limit separates two colours, even the smallest detectable
difference in colour appears to be quite visible. The experience of temporal contour
seems to be crucial for segregating streams of sounds. On the contrary, when we have
to discriminate colours, which is an analogous activity to segregating streams in vision,
spatial cues seem to be much more relevant than temporal cues.
Therefore, if there is a significant disanalogy between the experience of sound and the
experience of colour with regard to time, temporal contour and temporal persistency mark
this disanalogy. On the contrary, when focusing on the experience of temporal phases,
the way in which we experience colours and the way in which we experience sounds are
analogous.
Sonic methodology helps to show that we can justify the commonsensical idea
of perceiving material objects only if we embrace the distal view of sound. This idea is
further reinforced by empirical and phenomenological considerations on the spatiality
of auditory experience. Furthermore, the commonsensical idea for which we experience
time disanalogously when looking at colours and when hearing sounds is justified by the
way in which we experience temporal contour and temporal persistency. Conversely, the
experience of temporal phases seems to tell us that we experience time analogously in
vision and audition.
I conclude that sonic methodology turns out to be a useful procedure in order to test
some commonsensical ideas about the object of perception and the experience of space
and time, especially when comparing visual experience to auditory experience.
Notes
1. Actually, the experiment was meant to show that we can also recognize the gender of the
person clapping but the results were not considered convincing.
2. The philosopher Peter Strawson was the initiator of the discussion on the spatiality of
audition within analytic philosophy with the second chapter of his book Individuals
(1959) titled ‘Sounds’.
3. Kulvicki changed his view and embraced a position according to which, given the
complexity of the auditory world, instead of focusing on mere sounds, philosophers
should focus on the different aspects of what we hear, namely, events, individuals, and
spaces.
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11
Sonic Methodologies in Science
and Technology Studies
Joeri Bruyninckx and Alexandra Supper
Introduction
In this chapter, we provide a survey of work which engages with sound in relation to
knowledge production and technological practice, and which resonates with broader
concerns in the academic field of science and technology studies (STS). STS is itself an
interdisciplinary amalgam of perspectives, drawing upon concepts, theoretical approaches,
and methodologies from a wide range of disciplines and inter-disciplines. Since the 1970s and
1980s, various interdisciplinary programmes and networks have emerged at the intersection
of academia and activism. At the core of these networks lies a shared interest in studying
the social contexts of scientific and technological practice from historical, philosophical,
or sociological angles, but often also an activist effort to sensitize scientists, engineers,
or policymakers to the societal stakes of scientific and technological development. Over
time, the field has incorporated methodological and theoretical approaches from long-
established mother-disciplines such as sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, or
political science, but intermittently also sought association with more recently established
domains, such as social geography, gender studies, media studies, or indeed, sound studies.
That diversity typifies STS. But although the field lacks a unified, cohesive methodological
programme, its various strands share a social constructivist perspective, which attends to
categories, ideas, objects, and structures as the product of social choice, negotiation, and
convention.
In this chapter, we trace how, since the early 2000s, attention to sound has emerged as
a subject within STS. We trace this interest back to two separate, if interrelated, concerns
within STS. On the one hand, we consider it as a product of attention to science and
technology as a set of material practices, including the bodily skills that practitioners bring
to bear on them. On the other hand, we see interest in sound technologies as an expression
of a wider interest in tracing the complex interactions of social, scientific, economic, and
aesthetic contexts in technological development and use. After providing this two-part
genealogy of sonic preoccupations within STS, we turn our attention to a specific case – the
relationship between science and music – that exemplifies the diversity of epistemic and
methodological approaches through which STS scholars study sound. In the second half
of this chapter, we finally outline a set of methodological principles that run through the
diverse body of literature at the intersection of STS and sound studies.
Origins of sound studies in STS

Beyond the laboratory: Science and technology
as a set of material practices
The origin story of the field of STS has been told in different ways. Some of these stories
take academic traditions as a starting point – for instance, by tracing an intellectual lineage
from traditional philosophies of science via Thomas Kuhn to the strong programme and
actor-network theory (Sismondo 2010). Others place stronger emphasis on developments
outside the academy – for instance by highlighting the formative influence of the protest
movements of the 1970s and their interrogations of the social impact of science and
technology (Guggenheim and Nowotny 2003). There are nonetheless some aspects that
unite these seemingly disparate accounts; some recurring themes include the importance of
cultural and social context for understanding the development of science and technology, or
the rejection of essentialist positions in favour of constructivist approaches. Conspicuously,
the sound of science and technology is not usually considered in these intellectual histories.
While overviews of scholarship on sound routinely highlight the role of science and
technology as ‘keys to unlock these new worlds of sound’ (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012: 5),
the reverse has rarely been true. Yet although many of the classics of STS scholarship have
been mute and devoid of references to the sonic environments of science and technology,
we argue here that the study of sound is closely intertwined with some of the core interests
and concerns of STS. To understand these intertwinements, it makes sense to start looking
in (and proceed to continually hark back to) a place that holds special significance in the
manifold origin stories of STS: the laboratory.
Indeed, the laboratory has been widely regarded as a key site in the development of STS.
As Park Doing argues, its symbolic power as ‘the hardest of hard places’ (Doing 2008: 277)
has made the laboratory an especially welcoming place for STS researchers to forcefully
demonstrate the social construction of what may have been regarded as ‘pure knowledge’.
Michael Guggenheim and Helga Nowotny poignantly recount the heroic story of STS
researchers who ‘fearlessly enter the laboratories whose threshold no social scientist had
ever dared to cross before’ and reveal science as ‘a conglomerate of (cultural) practices,
just like other fields of activities or other kinds of work’ (Guggenheim and Nowotny 2003:
235). One of the most influential epistemological and methodological principles at the
foundation of STS research has been the so-called ‘principle of symmetry’, formulated as
part of the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge. This principle
Sonic Methodologies in Science and Technology Studies 203
holds that both the success and the failure of knowledge claims need to be accounted
for and explained in the same manner; in other words, ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ can never be
explanations for why certain beliefs or claims displace others, but are themselves in need of
explanation (Sismondo 2010). Such constructivist approaches to understanding scientific
development became vital to the field of STS, and the laboratory has become a key site to
study how and why some claims become accepted as scientific and objective, while others
are pushed aside as unscientific and biased.
Sound, however, did not typically factor in these explanations. It was not until 2005 that
Cyrus Mody explicitly drew attention to the ‘sounds and noises, wanted and unwanted’
that permeate laboratory walls (Mody 2005: 176). Classic laboratory studies did prepare
the ground, however, by highlighting the importance of local, embodied, tacit skills
and material practices that are needed to make scientific experiments work. While STS
researchers have long acknowledged these elements in relation to the production and
consumption of images, models, and visual ‘inscriptions’ (Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Knorr
Cetina 1999), a more recent strand of scholarship has extended this concern to other
sensory dimensions of scientific work – the aural in particular. Such work has revealed, for
instance, how sound helps to structure the routines and practices of scientists’ experimental
work (Schmidgen 2003; Mody 2005; Kursell 2008; Bruyninckx 2017) and to articulate
expectations and conceptions of their objects of study (Roosth 2009; Roosth 2010; Supper
2015; Helmreich 2016; Stephens and Lewis 2017). Following a long-standing concern with
the tacit dimensions of scientific and medical practice (Polanyi 1966; Collins 2010), the
embodied nature of auditory knowledge has come into view in relation to various other
domains of technoscientific practice, such as medicine (Van Drie 2013; Harris 2016),
audio engineering (Horning 2014), and music (Waksman 2004; Atkinson, Watermeyer
and Delamont 2013). So, too, in underscoring the importance of scientific instruments’
material qualities and affordances (Hankins and Silverman 1995), authors have shown
many such instruments to derive from domains of music or acoustics (Jackson 2006; Pesic
2014). Similarly, attention to the material qualities of devices that produce or measure
sound has also been extended to non-scientific domains, such as police work (Kim 2016)
or the music industry (Devine 2015).
Such attention to the micro-practices of laboratory work has often been combined
with tracing processes of translation between these local contexts and the wider world.
This concern has frequently tied into questions about the construction of scientific
credibility and the circulation of scientific knowledge outside of the laboratory. Indeed,
the geographical and local specificities of ‘places of knowledge’ (Livingstone 1995) and the
fluctuating relationship between the laboratory and other places of scientific work, such as
the field site or conference, has been an important concern in STS research (Gieryn 2006;
de Bont 2009). Similar concerns resonate in studies of the sonic dimensions of scientific
practice (Höhler 2002; Bruyninckx 2012; Supper 2015), which trace how knowledge about
sound has taken shape in specific cultural and geographic spaces (Lachmund 1999; Nelson
2015). The circulation of auditory knowledge beyond the laboratory, too, has become an
important concern at the intersection of STS and sound studies (Hui, Kursell, and Jackson
2013). How and why, for instance, have sound-related knowledge claims and listening
habits gained, or failed to gain, credibility and authority (Perlman 2004; Volmar 2013;
Supper and Bijsterveld 2015)? And how are the dynamics of these processes involved
in the emergence and stabilization of professional and amateur communities (Porcello
2004; Krebs 2012; Bruyninckx 2015)? As a phenomenon associated with art (music) as
much as with science (acoustics), one that is sensual, immediate, and ephemeral yet also
traced, inscribed, and conceptualized in a myriad of ways, sound has been well suited to
explore the ramifications of key STS principles, by showing that how sound is heard and
understood is deeply dependent on its social, cultural, and material context.
New technologies within cultural contexts

In the 1980s, meanwhile, sociologists and historians of technology too began adopting the
constructivist agenda of science studies and its principles of symmetry. In doing so, they
extended their viewfinder from processes of invention, development, and innovation –
primarily within contexts of manufacturing and large-scale technical systems such as
power grids – to consider categories of everyday, domestic and consumer technologies
and the complex interplays between producers, regulators, and users through which they
take and shift shape (Staudenmaier 1985). Such work has come to regard technologies as
reflective of producers’ social context and cultural assumptions, while at the same time
showing technologies to be consumed, modified, domesticated, redesigned, and resisted
by users in often unforeseen ways (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003). For scholars in STS, then,
understanding how technologies came to dwindle or proliferate has required attending
not just to design and development, but also to how they are being appropriated in local
contexts and become entangled with social identities and cultural practices. Following on
the heels of these developments, sound has come to serve as a valuable index for such
complex interactions between a technology and its social, scientific, economic, or aesthetic
context. Indeed, in establishing the mutual shaping of sonic and material, scientific, and
technological cultures, STS-inspired scholars have shown sound to be not merely an
accidental by-product but often also a consequential driver of technological change.
These dynamics have come into view most conspicuously in relation to musical culture.
Inspired by classic STS concepts, a long-standing strand of work has demonstrated that
musical technologies are amenable to the same sorts of analytical categories as, say,
bicycles or kitchens (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003), and has found musical culture rich with
technologically mediated ways of producing, manipulating, recording, and controlling
sounds. ‘Following the instruments’ (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2004), this work has revealed
that their histories are often shaped by similar kinds of ‘interpretative flexibility’, forks,
diversions, dead-ends, and local reinterpretations as they are transported across
different geographical, social, and professional boundaries. In doing so, this work has
consistently foregrounded instrument builders, artists, musicians, and broadcasters as
(often unsuspected) agents of scientific and technological change in different capacities
(Jackson 2006; Pantalony 2009) and geographies (Zimmermann 2015); for instance, by
bending and reconfiguring media technologies into musical instruments (Flood 2016)
or by reinterpreting musical devices (such as the metronome, tuning fork, or siren) as

scientific instruments and conceptual tools (Hui, Kursell, and Jackson 2013). In turn,
inventors, engineers, and manufacturers have influenced broader musical and cultural
changes. Advances in electro-acoustics and electronics, for instance, have yielded new
instruments, techniques, and concepts that transformed both popular and experimental
twentieth-century music (Braun 1994; Dunbar-Hester 2010); in fact, these technologies
have also often purposefully been shepherded by their developers to influence new and
emerging musical cultures (Pinch and Trocco 2002; Nelson 2015). Moreover, in shifting
the boundary between machines and musical instruments, these technologies have been
shown to persistently interrogate the boundaries of musical culture, by not just affecting
its acoustic, compositional, and conceptual qualities but also questioning what counts as
authorship, performance, virtuosity, and eventually, art (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003).
Technologies have not only influenced musical culture and its aesthetic sensibilities but
have also transformed broader sonic and aural cultures. Such cultures have rarely been
determined solely by single momentous technological breakthroughs. Rather, particular
listening cultures have been shown to sediment through a complex assemblage of long-
standing and shifting values, practices, discourses, and techniques (Sterne 2003). One
strand in STS-inspired sound studies has demonstrated, for instance, how – rather than
an objective measure for sound quality – ‘high fidelity’ has been a shifting entity, achieved
by insidious marketing (Thompson 1995), enforced through changing performance styles
and audile techniques (Sterne 2003; Katz 2010), fostered through peculiar practices of
consumer appreciation and validation (Perlman 2004; Downes 2010), and resisted through
the cultivation of various counter-aesthetics (Supper 2018). Studies such as these illustrate
the importance of attending to the micro-dynamics of user practices when considering
technological change; for instance, by tracing how new sound technologies become, or
fail to become, embedded in existing cultural discourses and practices (Taylor 2001;
Bijsterveld 2004; Bijsterveld and Van Dijck 2009; Morris 2015). As such, they underscore
the importance of considering sound’s symbolic, cultural, and phenomenal value in
accounting for the peculiar trajectories of a technology’s use and non-use, its acceptance
and resistance.
A related strand of STS-inspired scholarship has examined how sound technologies
have been implied in the constitution – sonically as well as socially – of new subjectivities
(Theberge, Devine, and Everett 2015). These are created, for instance, through sensory
engineering and product design, among others in the car industry (Bijsterveld et al. 2013),
or through engineering of psycho-acoustic models in new media technologies such as the
telephone (Mills, forthcoming) or the mp3 (Sterne 2012). Such media technologies not only
offer new possibilities for communicating through sound in specific settings and contexts;
they are also part and parcel of broader engineering cultures and form the infrastructure
of a trans-local sonic culture. Accordingly, the twentieth-century development of acoustic
and electro-acoustic technologies has often been deeply political; whether because such
technologies allowed controversial ‘noises’ to be measured, objectified, and compared, and
thus be made the subject of political interventions or industrial struggles in campaigns for
noise abatement (Bijsterveld 2008), or because they emerged as a product or an instrument
of a military-industrial complex that arose against the background of two world wars and
one cold war (Volmar 2013; Ritts and Shiga 2016; Camprubí 2017).
Zooming out to an even larger scale, some scholars have explored these developments
as part of a series of broad-based shifts that consolidated a new, distinctly modern sonic
culture (or ‘soundscape’). These shifts have been understood as originating from early
twentieth-century advances in electro-acoustic engineering, which have changed how
sound was conceptualized, stored, reproduced, modulated, and transformed, resulting in
a complex interplay between techno-scientific advances and wider developments across
the domains of politics, industry, medicine, and entertainment (Thompson 2002; Wurtzler
2007; Mansell 2017; Wittje 2016).
STS and sound exemplified: Science

and music
In this chapter so far, we have traced a genealogy of curiosity about sound within the field
of STS scholarship, following two main paths from their respective points of origin. Yet
as we have also hinted in the previous sections, these paths have intersected and often
even merged in more recent scholarship. The multifaceted relationship between science
and music is one topic that illustrates recent productivity at this intersection and can at
the same time exemplify the methodological approaches taken by STS (and fields in close
intellectual proximity to it), whose guiding principles we seek to disentangle in the next
section.
One of the most fundamental questions about the relationship between science and music
concerns the boundaries between these two domains. Indeed, the categories of ‘science’
and ‘music’ are themselves not stable, immutable entities; rather, as a product of historically
and culturally variable practices, their relation has been continually renegotiated over the
past centuries. In Greek natural philosophy and Renaissance mathematics and astronomy,
musical performance and scientific experiment were often hard to distinguish (Johnson
1996; Pesic 2014). If music at first served to investigate natural order in the universe or
disprove claims to natural magic (Hankins and Silverman 1995; Gouk 1999), by the late
eighteenth century, musical culture and its instruments helped to consolidate acoustics as
a science of sound. That privileged position of music shifted between the mid-nineteenth
and early twentieth century, as scientists and engineers began to broaden their scope of
investigation to include less harmonic acoustical sources, such as noise (Hui, Kursell, and
Jackson 2013).
Scholars of science, technology, and sound have linked these epistemological shifts to
changes in the social, cultural, material, and discursive make-up of both domains. For
instance, just as the separation of music and acoustics has been interpreted as a product of
social processes of disciplinary specialization and technical innovation – most notably the
electrification of sound (Thompson 2002; Wittje 2016) – so a more recent prioritization
of interdisciplinarity on policy agendas and the ubiquity of digital instruments has been
shown to create new possibilities for convergence (Mody 2013). The effects of these
developments are visible in institutionalized experimental music research centres (Born
1995; Nelson 2015), but also in more ad hoc and project-based formations, such as in
approaches for sonifying scientific data, in which the boundaries between science and art
are continually renegotiated (Supper 2014).
Music and science have not only changed themselves but also mutually redefined
each other. In examining the boundaries between science and music, STS scholars
have traced substantial traffic across its porous borders. Some of that traffic has been
of a primarily rhetorical nature, as musical metaphors have long helped scientists to
conceptualize and communicate about their research subjects (Roosth 2009; Supper
2014; Helmreich 2016). The metaphors used to describe sounds themselves have also
undergone transformation; for instance, the understanding of electronic sounds as
individuals with specific properties co-emerged not only with scientific epistemologies
but also with cultural differences and social hierarchies (Rodgers 2011). Indeed,
developments in sound technology and engineering have changed how sound/music
has been conceptualized, the instruments it has been produced with, and the listening
habits it has generated (Peters and Cressman 2016). Such contingencies complicate
existing music historical narratives, as seemingly stable aesthetic objects such as musical
pitch have turned out to be the product of standardization by musicians, scientists, and
instrument makers, as well as international diplomacy by industrial actors and trade
unions (Jackson 2006; Gribenski 2018).
Conversely, sonic practices and skills have been shown to be fundamental to the work
of professions across science, engineering, and medicine (Supper and Bijsterveld 2015)
and ‘to structure emergent disciplinary knowledge’ and social configurations (Davies
and Lockhart 2017: 2). New musical aesthetics such as those of nineteenth-century
bourgeois culture, for instance, have been revealed to shape scientific conceptions of sound
and hearing in peculiar ways (Hui 2013). Just so, bourgeois pedagogical networks and
simultaneous professional occupations such as inventors, performers, lecturers, artisans,
and scholars have yielded influential collaborations across the domains of science, music,
engineering, and craft work (Jackson 2006; Pantalony 2009).
Such work has designated material conditions, including such unlikely spaces as the
workshop, the parlour, the performance stage, and later the sound studio, as sites of both
scientific and artistic innovation. It has also involved taking seriously the role of technology
and their materiality (Tresch and Dolan 2013): as musical and acoustic instruments
travelled between the realms of science, music, arts, entertainment, and natural magic, their
meaning as well as that of the contexts in which they were used have transformed. Musical
notations have shaped and been reconsidered in such fields as ethnomusicology or even
ornithology, before they were reinvented again by the musical avant-garde (Bruyninckx
2018). Likewise, instruments such as the tuning fork, the siren, or electronically generated
sounds have revolutionized the investigation of hearing and influenced musical theory –
indeed, musical instruments have often helped researchers to come to terms with ‘epistemic
things’, those sources of distinct but as yet unknown knowledge (Rehding 2014). Yet their
sounds have also often entered and changed the very definitions of music and sound.
Methodological principles
The above sections have demonstrated the diverse ways in which scholars drawing on STS
perspectives have investigated the sonic environment. Yet regardless of this diversity, such
work shares several fundamental methodological and theoretical premises – if not as a
strict list of fixed requirements, then at least as a web of family resemblances, of which any
given piece of STS scholarship on sound will display at least some elements. What, then,
does it mean to study sound from a perspective of science and technology studies?
STS approaches avoid essentialist explanations of

events, phenomena, and artefacts
As the discussion above suggests, for scholars in STS, there is no such thing as a single
definition of sound, nor does sound exist in any ‘real’, ‘natural’, or ‘metaphysical’ state
of being. Rather, in line with a social constructivist attitude, STS approaches attend to
the processes, theories, methods, practices, relationships, material features, institutional
arrangements, and ideologies that modulate how sound is made, heard, known, and
understood.
STS approaches may apply a variety of research

methods
One implication of this focus is that STS scholars interested in sound rarely attend solely to
its sonic qualities; rather, they tend to study sound as it is embedded in specific discourses,
narratives, practices, and contexts. In doing so, they may avail themselves of any number of
methods that are also used in other domains within the social sciences and humanities. This
includes, for instance, ethnographic methods of interviewing and observing individuals
and groups who are involved in making, listening to, making sense of, or otherwise being
affected by sound; tracing networks of sound-related knowledge and communities through
network analyses and citation analyses; or studying historical documents, media discourses,
and other (predominantly written) sources for traces of how sound is given meaning and
implicated in particular processes, practices, narratives, and institutional arrangements.
They often take the form of case study approaches, weaving together theory, method, and
empirical data to study knowledge practices in concrete, local settings.
STS approaches attend to situated practices

Rather than pinpointing universal and essentialist foundations of knowledge (about or
through the sonic world), they study how ways of understanding and knowing the world
are made, performed, and enacted in practice, through a mixture of theories, methods,
perceptions, experiments, tools, and institutional arrangements. The classic ‘principle
of symmetry’ of the sociology of scientific knowledge, which holds that true and false
beliefs should be explained in the same way, opens up the path for understanding why
particular knowledge claims gain credibility and traction rather than taking their truth-
value as self-evident. Similarly, against the suggested possibility of a ‘god trick of seeing
everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1988), the notion of ‘situated knowledge’ suggests that
knowledge, methods, and indeed, even perception are always situated in specific contexts,
implicating the position of both the producer and the objects of knowledge. These notions,
albeit implicitly, resonate today in work – within and beyond STS – that traces the rise of
acoustics, not as a result of inescapable and universal truth about the functioning of sound,
but as a particularly Western, scientific epistemology of the acoustic that emerged in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century, under specific social and material conditions, which
may interact with other acoustemologies or technoustemologies (Greene and Porcello
2005; Feld 2012; Ochoa Gautier 2014).
STS approaches attend to contingencies

The emphasis on situated practices already hints at the importance of local and historical
contingencies. Indeed, the claim that ‘it could have been otherwise’ is a slogan that captures
the spirit of STS like no other, referring not only to (scientific) knowledge claims but
also the development of technology. The principle of ‘interpretive flexibility’ extends the
notion of symmetry to the success (or failure) of specific technologies, drawing attention
to the historical and social contingencies that shaped technological development and to
the possibility of alternative interpretations and designs. The fruitfulness of this approach
for the study of sound is demonstrated, for instance, in research on the emergence of
technologies such as radio broadcasting (Wurtzler 2007) or analogue synthesizers (Pinch
and Trocco 2002), or of knowledge practices such as auscultation (Lachmund 1999); but it
also, more implicitly, resonates in work that traces the possibility of sound recording not so
much in terms of its societal effects as its cultural origins (Sterne 2003).
STS approaches attend to unspoken assumptions

Showcasing the interpretive flexibility of technologies is not an end goal for STS analysts;
rather, it is one of several strategies to make visible the unspoken and taken-for-granted
assumptions that are built into technologies and knowledge claims. These assumptions
relate not only to the technologies and knowledge claims themselves, but also to the
broader cultures that they are inserted into; and while uncovering them is the responsibility
of the STS analyst, this responsibility is facilitated by moments of disruption that are
sparked by the introduction of new technologies or techniques. A new technique for
making audible sound recordings of the 1860s, which were originally developed to be seen
rather than heard, for instance, may challenge our ‘assumptions regarding the givenness
of a particular domain called “sound,” a process calling “hearing,” or a listening subject’
(Sterne and Akiyama 2012: 556). The notion of a ‘breaching experiment’, adopted from
ethnomethodology, draws attention to how new technologies may ‘make visible norms and
values concerning the art of music and music making that are usually taken for granted’
(Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003: 543) – whether the technologies in question are player pianos
(Pinch and Bijsterveld 2003) or auto-tune (Marshall 2017).
STS approaches attend to and juxtapose context-

specific paradigms
Not only does the focus on situated practices imply an interest in the local settings in which
knowledge and technologies are made; it also necessitates strategies for making visible what
is at stake in those settings. Following in the footsteps of a long tradition of ‘controversy
studies’ within STS (Sismondo 2010), the juxtaposition of two or more different paradigms
which coexist and compete for epistemic authority is a helpful tactic for articulating what
is specific to, but also shared among, different approaches. For instance, to understand the
specific ways in which audiophiles make meaning around sound, it is useful to consider
how they resist the scientifically grounded knowledge claims of audio engineers; but in
turn, the juxtaposition of these two competing approaches also makes explicit the grounds
on which audio engineers themselves claim epistemic authority (Perlman 2004). In some
cases, it is precisely on such epistemically contested and controversial terrain that locally
stable configurations of knowledge can be found; as the case of research on automatic
speech recognition, with its controversy between ‘engineering’ and ‘auditory’ paradigms,
demonstrates, controversies and competing paradigms can also be fruitful sites to
investigate the creation of stability and order (Voskuhl 2004).
STS approaches attend to processes of translation

and circulation
While much STS research is concerned with tracing how knowledge is made and
performed in local settings, another recurring concern is with recognizing how such ways
of understanding and acting upon the world travel: how they become accepted, routine,
standardized, distributed, circulated, and appropriated, and how in doing so, they also
shape the worlds through which they travel. Hence, STS approaches pay attention to
processes of translation and transfer, for instance by studying how processes of the global
circulation of music have been implicated by digital transformations (Taylor 2001) or by
tracing how artefacts and knowledge, such as recordings of birdsongs (Bruyninckx 2018),
travel between different cultural domains and communities of practice.
STS approaches attend to a variety of phenomena

and entities
They approach the phenomena they study by understanding them in a variety of different
contexts – social, cultural, organizational, political, material – and in a variety of different
phases of development, circulation, and appropriation. They study the centres and hubs
of innovation, but also consider peripheries, for, as Timothy Taylor argues, ‘the margins
often have much to say about the centers that those in the centers might not be aware
of ’ (Taylor 2001: 9). Furthermore, the entities that are studied are themselves manifold.
They range from discursive formations such as the trope of noise (Wittje 2016) to material
arrangements such as audio labs (Klett 2014), from norms and standards such as musical
pitch (Gribenski 2018) to bodily dispositions such as self-percussion (Harris 2016), from
human producers/users and their intermediaries, such as instrument salespeople (Pinch
2003) to nonhuman actants, such as the musical instruments themselves (Bates 2012).
STS approaches are reflexive

Not only do STS approaches study how knowledge about and through sound is produced,
circulated, applied, and interpreted, but they also reflect on the foundations of their own
knowledge and interpretations. The notion of reflexivity has a long-standing place within
STS, for instance as one of the core principles of the sociology of scientific knowledge
prescribing that any sociological theories of scientific development should also be
applicable to sociology itself. More recently, for instance in the work of Stefan Helmreich,
the notion of reflexivity and its underlying visual rhetoric of individual self-reflection has
itself been subject to reflection; inspired by auditory conceptions, Helmreich proposes
the notion of ‘transduction’ as an alternative form of inquiry, ‘animated by an auditorily
inspired attention to the modulating relations that produce insides and outsides, subjects
and objects, sensation and sense data’ (Helmreich 2007: 622).
The reflexive and transductive nature of STS approaches presents challenges when it
comes to producing an overview of the sonic methodologies of this interdisciplinary and
diverse field of study; after all, the insides and outsides, the subjects and objects, of the field
of STS are themselves fuzzy, unstable, and difficult to pinpoint conclusively. While our
chapter has made an attempt to provide some reference points for what it might mean to
take an STS approach to sonic materials, its contours and emphasis have also been shaped
by our own position in the field.
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12
The Sonic Environment in
Urban Planning, Environmental
Assessment and Management
A. Lex Brown
Introduction
This chapter provides a broad overview of methodologies used in the study and control
of the sonic environment of cities. This is not a straightforward task, as there are multiple
disciplines that play some role in this and whose many and varied approaches tend to be
applied to only a limited facet of the sonic environment – primarily where there are high
levels of unwanted sound or noise. Until recently there has been little attention to those
parts of the sonic environment of cities that are not ‘high noise’. Furthermore, the sonic
methodologies that have the widest application are bound up within other processes such
as city planning or the assessment of transport infrastructure developments. This chapter
is as much an examination of how consideration of the sonic environment is incorporated
into the methodologies of these other processes, as it is an exposition of urban sonic
methodologies per se.
The sonic environment of cities is introduced briefly below by enumerating the
common and dominant sound sources present in most urban areas. It is the outdoor
environment which is of interest here or, more precisely, the outdoor sonic environment
as heard indoors. The chapter then identifies the primary disciplines that play some role in
study or management of the sonic environment generated by these sources. It introduces
approaches to monitoring and mapping this environment and to measurement of human
responses to sound exposure. These are prerequisite to the formulation of limit criteria that
can be applied in acoustic management based on empirically derived exposure-response
relationships.
The chapter then overviews various practices of management of the sonic environment
that include engineering noise control and specific noise-focused methodologies within
regulated environmental assessment. The role of urban planning in the management of
the sonic environment of cities is also touched upon. Finally, the chapter moves beyond
the current focus on the ‘high-noise’ part of the urban sonic environment and postulates
various loci where the methodology of soundscape planning could be appropriate.
The sonic environment of cities

The sonic (or acoustic) environment of urban outdoor spaces, consists of all the sound
generated by sources heard by a person in those spaces, as modified by the propagation of
the sounds from the sources to the receiver.
In most cities, road traffic is the most extensive, and dominant, source heard over
most outdoor spaces (European Environment Agency 2014b) because in motorized cities
the roadway network permeates the urban form, providing not only through routes for
traffic between different areas but also extensive access into the different land uses of the
city. As populations and motorization grow, the intensity of traffic increases as does its
spread into more areas and into more of the diurnal cycle. Taken together, the moving
point sources on the roadways can effectively be considered as line sources, and sound
propagates hemicylindrically from them to urban receivers, affected by shielding effects of
intervening structures and by ground surface effects and atmospheric absorption during
propagation. Other transport noise sources of aircraft and railway traffic can also be
pervasive, depending on the propinquity of airports and railway lines to where people live.
Propagation of sound from these sources is largely spherical and, in the case of aircraft, not
affected in their transmission path by the urban form.
Stationary mechanical sound sources of industry and construction also contribute to the
outdoor acoustic environment, but the spatial extent of their intrusion into noise sensitive
areas, such as residential precincts of a city, is limited. Construction sounds, by their nature,
tend to be of fixed and limited duration, though construction activities in dense inner cities
may be becoming perennial and occurring in closer proximity to increasing numbers of
people now resident within central business districts. Small-scale mechanical sources such
as household air-conditioning plants or swimming pool filters form part of this mix but are
highly localized because they have much lower emission levels than the transport sources.
Human sounds and the sounds of nature are also components of urban environments.
These include the sounds of voices, footsteps, amplified music, and domesticated animals,
associated with both residential and commercial areas of cities. The sounds of nature are
generated by wind, by water, and by wildlife. In urban areas, the wildlife is insects, frogs,
and birdlife, and dependent, more or less, on the extent of urban vegetation and other
habitat available in the streets, footpaths, and yards of urban properties, and in the parks
and open spaces of cities. Sounds from the latter occur across a city but are far more likely
to be associated with locations that are not proximal to the more dominant transport noise
sources where they are masked, or at least partly so, by transport sounds (Pablo Kogan
et al. [2018] use a Green Soundscape Index across urban areas to describe the ratio of
natural sound to traffic noise perception). These sounds of people and of nature have only
The Sonic Environment 219
recently become of interest in the management of the urban acoustic environment of cities
because of new attention to the city soundscape.
The outdoor urban acoustic environment is transmitted into dwellings, schools, offices,
and other buildings, and to date it is the adverse effects of noise from external sources on
people (Jean-François Augoyard’s [1998] ‘sounds of discomfort’) as heard indoors that has
tended to be the motivation for most urban noise studies and efforts at management and
control of the urban acoustic environment.
For completeness, it should be noted that people in cities also hear sounds whose
sources are not located outdoors, where sounds are generated, propagated, and heard
inside buildings. This is the province of architectural, room or building acoustics – the
science and engineering of how sound behaves within enclosed spaces and usually with a
focus on achieving good sound environments for people within buildings. Architectural
acoustics has its own specialized methodology for study and design which is outside the
scope of this chapter – apart from the penetration of outside sound into buildings that is
considered below.
Multiple disciplines and approaches

Various disciplines have defined, but overlapping, involvement in the sonic environment of
cities, which further confounds exposition of a straightforward urban sonic methodology.
As could be expected, acousticians play a significant role, but primarily in measurement of
sound and in both modelling and mapping of sound levels. Psychologists and public health
specialists measure human response to acoustic environments and generally link this to
exposures, establishing relationships between exposure to sound and human reaction –
so-called exposure-response, or dose-response, relationships. Epidemiologists and other
health professionals extend this approach to noise effects such as sleep disturbance and
cardiovascular effects. The same methodologies also apply where the human outcome of
interest is quality of life and well-being.
Engineers largely carry responsibility for noise control of mechanical sources in cities
and for control interventions along the propagation path; environmental and public health
managers also set limits and control mechanisms for some of these sources, and for some
non-mechanical sources found in cities such as domesticated animals and entertainment
noise. Urban planners influence the sonic environment of cities, but rarely as a primary
focus, more often as a by-product of planning methodologies for other purposes. Transport
specialists predict the future traffic flows on planned transport infrastructure which in
turn are used in the prediction of future transport noise levels and exposures. Architects
and other building professionals are also involved through design requirements on the
acoustic insulation provided by the envelopes of buildings.
The chapter briefly elaborates on the approaches followed by some of these disciplines,
with an emphasis on noise from transport sources. The emphasis is appropriate given the
predominance of transport noise in the sonic environment of cities.
Exposure assessment: Noise monitoring

and mapping
Measurement has always been an underpinning of all investigations and management
of the acoustic environment of cities. The first urban noise survey, a 138-site study of
noise levels across New York City, was undertaken by its Noise Abatement Commission
(Brown et al. 1930) nine decades ago. Since then, many cities have embarked on physical
measurement programmes of their levels of environmental noise. These have variously
been termed ambient noise surveys, background surveys, or community noise surveys.
They are generally based on point noise-level measurements, made over at least 24 hours
to capture diurnal variation, and spatially distributed in some predetermined way over
a city – often at points on a grid overlain on the city, or perhaps by using a stratified
sampling across the land use categories of a city. While these surveys have been major
data collection exercises, providing early knowledge and experience of sources and sound
levels in urban areas, they have generally failed to provide information on populations of
urban noise levels that allow comparison of levels between cities and between different
urban populations, or the dependence of noise levels on urban form (Morillas et al. 2018).
This is primarily because the spatial variability of sound across a city is finely grained as
a result of multiple sources and the complex shielding effects provided by buildings and
other structures of the built form. The grid sizes used in many surveys have been orders of
magnitude larger than that which would be required to capture the real spatial variation in
the urban sonic environment.
For this reason, estimates of the sound levels of a city based on measurement
methodologies have largely been replaced by empirical modelling techniques. These
combine emission models from transport and other sources with detailed forecasts of
future traffic flows on transport networks and utilize complex sound-propagation models
(Licitra 2012). Emission modelling requires an understanding of the variation in emission
strengths of vehicle sources under different loads; the effects of barriers to propagation
paths, including refraction of sound around them; and the absorption and reflection by
all surfaces in the urban area, including the ground and the facades of buildings. These
models are continuously being improved to provide useful estimates, usually as maps, of
the exposure of dwellings or other sensitive land uses to urban noise.1 Most models are
2D, showing the distribution of sound levels spatially across cities, but 3D models, which
provide the distribution of noise levels on vertical facades of tall buildings, have also been
developed. These are essential in high-rise cities such as Hong Kong (Stoter et al. 2008; Law
et al. 2011).
The combination of such modelled noise maps with residential densities in geographical
information systems allows estimates to be made of the exposures of populations to noise
(European Commission 2007). Detailed knowledge of the exposures of populations at
different levels of environmental noise forms the cornerstone of a formalized methodology
for strategic management of the sonic environment of cities. This provides estimates
of the number of dwellings, schools, hospitals, and other noise-sensitive uses that are
exposed to unsatisfactory levels of noise (Fiedler and Zannin 2015), and the estimated
numbers of people with exposures above limit levels. This is essential information for
the development of policies and action plans to manage the ‘high-noise’ part of the sonic
environment of cities.
There is also increasing utilization, though still experimental, of mobile devices and
citizen-science-based initiatives – enabled by inexpensive microphones and sound level
devices in mobile telephones – for obtaining much finer grain knowledge of the exact
exposures of people to sound as they move about their daily activities (Guillaume et al.
2016; Murphy and King 2016; Shim et al. 2016).
Measurement of human-response and

exposure-response relationships
Noise has a range of effects on people. This includes interference with speech
communication; sleep disturbance; adverse effects on human performance, for example
in learning situations; and physiological impacts such as cardiovascular problems (World
Health Organization [WHO] 2018). There are also effects on wildlife, domesticated
animals, and property values. There are evolving trends in methods for the assessment of
noise effects in a community (as described in the section on strategic-level assessments
below) but to date, the primary measure of effects of noise on people in urban areas has
been their level of annoyance or dissatisfaction with the acoustic environment – mostly
the annoyance caused to people when they are indoors, at home. Thus, most current
management of the urban acoustic environment has been based on annoyance as the
primary effect outcome of noise, most often expressed as the percentage of affected
people in some area who are highly annoyed. The latter tends to be the effect variable
used in correlational studies with noise exposure levels in the derivation of exposure-
response relationships for environmental noise. The fact that different exposure-response
relationships are found for different noise sources adds to the complexity. Limit values
for noise exposures beyond which noise control measures may be warranted (such as
roadside traffic noise barriers, or dwelling insulation schemes under aircraft flight
paths) are currently derived from exposure-response relationships based on subjective
annoyance responses.
Methods are well established for measuring self-assessments of annoyance with the
acoustic environment as part of community surveys. These are generally conducted
in people’s homes using face-to-face interviews, or by mail, by telephone, or online. A
questionnaire protocol, and specific questions to ascertain annoyance reactions, has been
recognized as an international technical specification (ISO/TS 15666), ensuring consistency
and comparability across languages and cultures. Surveys of annoyance with different
noise sources in exposed populations have been conducted to derive exposure-response
relationships in many different cities. Rainer Guski, Dirk Schreckenber, and Rudolf
Schuemer (2017) have recently provided a new systematic review and meta-analysis on
effects of environmental noise on annoyance for aircraft, road and rail transport, as well
as wind turbines. The conclusion of their review was that more recent exposure-response
studies indicate some increase in annoyance responses at comparable exposure levels to
those found in earlier meta-analyses. This suggests that people have become less tolerant
towards sound exposure from these sources over time, or it may be some effect of the
changing nature of some of these sources themselves. The authors suggest that limit
recommendations need to be adjusted accordingly.
Meta-analyses of exposure-response studies for human outcomes other than
annoyance have also been produced. Elise Van Kempen and colleagues (2018) undertook
a systematic review of the effects of environmental noise exposure on people’s cardio-
metabolic systems, showing, amongst other findings, that there was a significant
association between exposure to road traffic noise and the incidence of ischemic heart
effects. Mathias Basner and Sarah McGuire (2018) reported a systematic review of sleep-
disturbance effects. They found a significant increase in the percentage of people who
were highly sleep disturbed with increasing exposure to each of aircraft noise, road traffic
noise, and rail noise. The method of collection of both cardiovascular and sleep outcomes,
as for annoyance, was self-reported accounts. In addition to these subjectively assessed
responses to noise, sleep research has also utilized objectively measured outcomes. For
example, Basner and McGuire (2018) reported polysomnographic studies on the acute
effects of transportation noise on sleep. They found that the probability of cortical
awakenings increased with the maximum level of transport noise events, for each of air,
road, and rail traffic. For policymaking and mitigation decisions, objective measures
of human response would appear superior to self-reported measures, but the objective
measures of cortical awakening are of an acute response only, with as yet, no clear link to
long-term health effects of noise exposure.
Noise control and urban planning

The general approach to noise control is three-pronged: reduction of the sound level at
the source, reduction of the sound along the transmission path (as in noise barriers), or
shielding of sensitive receptors through increasing the attenuation of the envelopes of
buildings such as dwellings and schools. This broad methodology applies in different ways
for different noise sources, and with responsibilities spread over many authorities and
disciplines.
Source control of transport vehicles is a primary technique of transport noise
management, but this occurs largely at the fleet level and is achieved through vehicle-
type certification originating at international (e.g. aircraft) and national (e.g. road vehicle)
levels. By contrast, source levels from motor vehicles may also be reduced, for example,
by locally installing special asphalt surfaces which significantly reduce noise from tyre–
roadway interaction. Other local examples include regulation of heavy vehicle access on
certain streets or traffic-planning activities such as defining minimum noise routes for take
off and landing aircraft flight paths.
Engineers largely carry responsibility for noise control of mechanical sources and for
control interventions along the propagation path, but building professionals and architects
have the responsibility for the reduction achieved by transmission sound loss by building
envelopes. The latter depends particularly on the windows of buildings, both in terms
of achieved transmission loss (for example, single glazing vs double glazing) and the
behaviour of residents in terms of their management of ventilation to their dwellings by
the extent of window opening, particularly during sleep.
Urban and city planners affect the sonic environment of cities primarily through land-
use planning practices, which have had some success in achieving environmental objectives
(de Roo 2017), and by development controls over building form and construction.
However, management of the acoustic environment of a city is rarely the direct focus of
planners’ activities – mostly it tends to be a by-product of planning methodologies utilized
primarily for other purposes. These include:
● Separation of incompatible land uses such as polluting industry and residential
uses. Such separation is one of the primary tools of spatial planning, achieving a
wide range of objectives. As a result, noise from industry tends not to impact noise-
sensitive land uses. However, planners are encouraging more mixed land uses for
purposes such as minimizing transport demand. Recreational and domestic noise
within such developments may also be a problem for residential neighbours.
● Planners control urban densities through the permitted height of buildings, amount
of floor space, and building bulk. It is the number of people living in areas of
different noise levels that determines the exposure of a city’s population to noise,
and choices about the location of higher density residential use determine this. The
bulk of the building form also has significant effects on the propagation of sound
through a city.
● Spatial planning of the location of transport infrastructure in the proximity of
dwellings, and the location of new urban development relative to existing transport
noise sources have a strong influence on exposures (also see the section on
Environmental Impact Assessment [EIA] below).
● Planning development permits may be required for buildings that have noise
sensitive uses such as schools, dwellings, or hospitals but that are to be located
within areas with adverse acoustic environments such as near roadways or under
airport flight paths. This may result in development conditions that include
requirements on the building envelope to reduce noise.
Jean Miguel Morillas and colleagues (2018) provide a succinct review of the small
number of studies available that have examined the influence of various urban design and
planning variable decisions on, particularly road traffic noise, exposures.
Environmental assessment methodologies

and the urban acoustic environment
Noise and project-based environmental assessment
Incremental yet broadly continuous growth in transport infrastructure tends to be the
dominant policy response to population and traffic growth in most countries. Transport-
planning tools are used to predict future traffic demand, whether that be surface or
air transport modes. Additional transport infrastructure may be provided to meet
deficiencies in capacity. As part of this planning process, new infrastructure projects are
proposed. Examples include new rail lines, modified flight paths or roadway realignments.
Invariably, associated with these types of proposals, is a regulatory requirement for the
project to be subject to formal environmental assessment procedures. Environmental
Impact Assessment (EIA) is now firmly established as an important part of the planning
and development of road, rail, and air transport projects. The same applies to many new
non-transport-related projects such as wind farms, industrial or processing facilities,
and large developments such as shopping centres or tourism resorts. They too may be
subject to project-based EIA, depending on the regulatory screening process, which
varies across different jurisdictions.
The methodology of project-based EIA is well recognized and there is wide experience in
such assessments. If the screening has triggered a requirement for assessment, the process
includes the steps of scoping which impacts and issues should be considered; a prediction
of the likely magnitude of the impacts; an evaluation and assessment of the significance of
the predicted impacts; the consideration of alternatives; and the identification of mitigation
strategies for impacts that have been identified as significant.
The relevance for this chapter is that noise is nearly always an issue included in the
scoping of a project’s potential impacts (Burgess and Finegold 2008) either because
the development itself generates noise – as do most road, rail, airport, or industrial
developments – or because it may contain noise-sensitive uses that will become exposed
to existing noise sources from outside the development site. A major land development
proposed under airport flight paths is an example of the latter. There is an extensive
literature on the inclusion of noise considerations in project-based EIA (e.g. Canter
1996; Therivel and Wood 2017). This includes extensive development and application of
modelling techniques. Modelling involves the prediction of noise emission levels for all
source types, and the subsequent estimation of levels at receptors after attenuation by the
distance, by the atmosphere, and by the barriers and reflections along the propagation
path from the noise sources (Wood 1999; Garg and Maji 2014). Regulations, guidelines,
and criterion levels are available to evaluate the significance of future exposure levels
predicted within the EIA process. Mitigation strategies to reduce predicted high levels
of exposure by noise-control techniques are widely practiced within EIA. They also often
include planning approaches such as increasing the separation distance between the
sources and the receivers.
Noise and strategic environmental assessment

EIA methodology has been applied primarily at an individual project level. Over the last
two decades, however, this has been extended to the environmental assessment of upstream
strategic planning and policy instruments such as urban and regional land-use plans, or
transport, water management, or energy policies. This is termed Strategic Environmental
Assessment (SEA). It is possible, within SEA, to assess broad acoustic impacts of policies
and plans early within planning processes, rather than relying on EIA of individual projects
to assess noise impacts later in the development process. The advantage is that various
alternatives and options that may be foreclosed once the policy or plan is adopted are
still on the table. For example, it would be appropriate to assess noise effects arising from
urban consolidation policies, the introduction of road pricing, major land-use changes, or
modal subsidies. Policies such as these have the potential to change transport flows, the
disposition of noise sources relative to sensitive land uses, and the density of receptors
exposed to particular sources – all of which affect the sonic environment of a city and
people’s exposure to it. However, despite the ubiquitous application of environmental
assessment and mitigation tools at the project level, to date there has been little equivalent
consideration of noise at these broader strategic plan and policy levels. A.E.M. De Hollander
and colleagues (1999) confirm that attention to specific environmental health outcomes
when alternative policies and plans are being considered tends to be limited.
While they have had little application to date, examples of two quite different strategic-
level approaches are described below.
Environmental modelling incorporated in travel

demand models
It is possible to incorporate the techniques of project noise modelling directly into the
transport network planning process. This effectively provides an SEA, quantifying the noise
effects of different transport scenarios simultaneously with the preparation of transport
plans. Transport specialists predict the future traffic flow on the transport infrastructure
which can then be used to estimate future transport noise exposures. If these exceed
limits, mitigation strategies may be introduced by the transport specialists, or they may
revise transport strategies. In transport infrastructure design, future levels of exposure to
noise may effectively become a limiting factor to traffic load, and thus a warrant for noise
reduction strategies. An example is the determination of flight paths at an airport based on
minimum noise routings that reduce aircraft noise exposure across the community.
A range of systems for modelling environmental impacts of transport have been
developed, many of which have a transport model integrated with the environmental
modelling for considering the environmental effects of road transport at the network
level. In one example of this methodology, Lex Brown and Joseph Affum (2002) describe
a modelling system in a geographic information system intended for use by transport
planners as an add-on module to existing transport planning models. The module uses, as
its prime input, the output data from travel demand models used in transport planning,
overlaid with land-use information in the immediate vicinity of the modelled road traffic
network. The system is designed to provide rapid information to the transport planner on
the noise effects of any transport proposal being considered, including comparisons of the
levels of exposures to road traffic noise under different planning scenarios, and thereby the
ability to aid the selection of a preferred transport scenario based on environmental, not
just transport-related, outcomes. In this way, the consideration of noise can be brought up
front in the planning process.
Burden of disease: Health Impact Assessment

Methods have now been developed for inclusion of transportation noise metrics in
quantitative Heath Impact Assessments at aggregated strategic levels in planning. In recent
years, evidence has accumulated regarding the health effects of environmental noise –
beyond measurement of the annoyance it causes. In order to inform future policy, and
to develop management strategies and action plans for its control, national and local
governments can now consider this new evidence on health impacts of environmental
noise, and utilize it in the application of SEA to plans, policies, and programmes that
have an effect on the exposure of the population to noise. It is possible to quantitatively
estimate the burden of disease due to environmental noise by a risk assessment approach –
combining the identification of hazards, the assessment of population exposure, and the
utilization of appropriate exposure-response relationships. The environmental burden
of disease (EBD) is expressed in the disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) metric, which
sums the potential years of life lost due to premature death and the equivalent years of
‘healthy’ life lost by virtue of being in states of poor health or disability. The World Health
Organization (WHO) has previously estimated the global burden of disease and the EBD
of disease due to environmental factors such as outdoor and indoor air pollution, poor
water supply, and sanitation (Murray and Lopez 1996; Prüss-Üstün et al. 2003). It has now
extended this EBD methodology to environmental noise.
The WHO provides guidance for estimations of the burden of disease for various health
endpoints caused by environmental noise (Fritschi et al. 2011). The DALYs lost through
environmental noise exposure are calculated for cardiovascular diseases in adults, cognitive
impairment in children, sleep disturbance, annoyance, and tinnitus. The EBD process, as
applied by the WHO, is one way of synthesizing this evidence in a standardized manner
that provides a useful starting point in providing policymakers with quantitative estimates
of the health risk of noise in urban areas.
Given the nature of the evidence on which the estimation of the health effects of
environmental noise are based (large-scale data sources, multi-study and multi-country
estimates of exposure-response) examination of the health effects of noise in this way
is unlikely to be suitable for project-based EIA. However, the availability of quantitative
assessments of the burden of disease from environmental noise means that noise can now
be appropriately considered as one of the consequences within the planning of strategic
level activities. These could include consideration of options within regional/national
transport plans and policies, and the development of policy settings such as a preferred
form of urban development or transport management options such as congestion pricing.
The magnitudes of the EBD for road transport will likely rank, in many health impact
assessments, alongside estimates of the EBD of factors such as road vehicle accidents
and atmospheric pollution. Further, there is some evidence that, while the EBD for other
factors may be dropping over time, that for environmental noise may be increasing. These
approaches could be used to incorporate the sonic environment in decision making with
respect to option choice in a range of policy and plan-making activities.
Soundscape planning
Beyond the adverse effect of noise in urban areas, there is a growing interest in the urban
sonic environment as a resource and its utilization to achieve human well-being objectives
(see Cobussen 2016). The resource is primarily that part of the sonic environment of cities
that is not ‘high noise’ and which have thus been rarely considered by most of the planning
and management methodologies for the sonic environment already described in this
chapter.
Methods for analysis (e.g. Engel et al. 2018) and management of the soundscape of the
urban acoustic environment do not yet have widespread acceptance in practice, and there
is limited experience as to where soundscape approaches could be applicable (Xiao, Lavia,
and Kang 2018). Planners and designers need guidance on how to identify spaces and places
for potential soundscape management to achieve positive human outcomes (Cerwén,
Wingren, and Qviström 2017). Further, they need to be able to identify specific objectives
for the soundscape design of any particular place and translate these into acoustical design
criteria that support the beneficial uses of that place (Cerwén, Kreutzfeldt, and Wingren
2017). What is required is analogous to what the designers of indoor spaces already have
available in terms of acoustic objectives and criteria – say for facilitating learning in
classrooms or for enjoying speech or music in auditoria. Set out below is a conceptual
framework within which to identify potential loci for soundscape planning and design
in the outdoor spaces of cities – a much needed contribution to soundscape planning
methodology for the urban sonic environment.
It is possible to identify generic loci for soundscape planning and design. Some of these
are specific urban spaces/places; others apply more broadly across urban residential areas.
Developments of new mapping models to aid soundscape planning (Magaritas and Kang
2017) are required to assist in this identification. Four examples of opportunities for the
application of soundscape planning are discussed below.
Some specific loci for soundscape planning

Managing quiet areas
In Europe, quiet areas have been recognized as a target for management of the urban
sonic environment, and a Good Practice Guide on Quiet Areas has been published by the
European Environment Agency (2014a). There has been some mapping of quiet areas in
urban and non-urban environments, though generally this has been through the portrayal
of the inverse of maps of predicted high levels of transportation noise rather than on
any specific identification of characteristics of high acoustic quality. This is because, for
the most part, identification of quiet areas has been based on low levels of integrated
sound, with no distinction between sound sources. This is inadequate. Whilst a low level
of sound may be a characteristic of some areas that are of high acoustic quality, quiet is
not the antithesis of noisy, and areas that have low levels of sound may not necessarily
be ones in which the acoustic environment is assessed by people as being of high quality.
For example, there are many places in urban areas where sounds are at low levels but
the source of these sounds is traffic on distant roadways. Most people would be unlikely
to prefer the sonic environments of these places. Similarly, there are many urban places
where sound levels may be high but that would generally be perceived to be tranquil or
of high acoustic quality. Locations near to fountains or where there is extensive birdlife,
are examples. There is increasing evidence that it is the congruence of the type of sound
heard in a particular environment and people’s expectations of that place that determines
its acoustic quality (Bild et al. 2018). In other words, identification of areas with a low
sound level in urban areas is potentially useful as it could highlight areas that may have
high acoustic quality – but this is not a sufficient condition. What is also needed is a
parallel investigation as to whether the sounds in these areas meet peoples’ expectations/
preferences (Vogiatzis and Remy 2014; Rey Gozalo et al. 2018). Manon Raimbault and
Danièle Dubois (2005) largely reject physical acoustical parameters as measures of
preferred soundscapes.
Managing/Making areas of high acoustic quality

Managing and protecting the acoustic environment of particular ‘quiet areas’ is useful if
they are of high acoustic quality. But there are many outdoor areas that are of high acoustic
quality that are far from quiet: a forested urban park with wind in the trees; a fountain
with loud splashing water; loud singing of birds or insects in urban parks and residential
gardens; buskers in a mall or subway tunnel; church bells in a town square; the sounds of
children playing, or of sports fans cheering; the hum of a marketplace (with people sounds
as the dominant source and free from mechanical or recorded sounds). Within appropriate
contexts, people are likely to enjoy, even cherish these sounds. These areas of high
acoustic quality contribute to the richness of urban life and can be included in conscious
management and planning of the urban sonic environment. Clearly, design criteria for
them cannot be based on sound level. Lex Brown and Andreas Muhar (2004) provide an
approach, for any particular human activity and specific context, based on establishing
appropriate human objectives. Examples for particular places are: moving water should be
the dominant sound heard; hear mostly the non-mechanical, non-amplified sounds made
by people; or good for hearing unamplified speech or music.
Management or acoustic design can ensure the wanted sounds in such areas are not
masked by the unwanted sounds. The inverse approach of increasing the wanted sound can
also be utilized through, for example, design of reverberant space in a mall specifically for
the purposes of creating a lively space for busking. Simulation and virtual reality methods
are being applied, experimentally, for evaluation and design of urban sound environments
(e.g. Jiang et al. 2017) and Sonia Alves et al. (2015) provide several examples of the design
and management of urban public spaces using soundscape planning.
Protecting iconic or place-defining sounds

These types of sounds are highly specific to particular localities: bells, clocks, chimes, waves
on beaches of seaside cities, the sound of particular local transport (San Francisco’s cable
cars, for example), perhaps even sounds from agricultural or industrial processes which
define the economic base of a town. These can be essential components of the identities
of specific urban areas, and could also have much wider values through management of
cultural heritage and the attraction of tourism (Maffei, Brambilla, and Di Gabriele 2015).
Iconic sound events, such as coordinated multiple church bell happenings, could have
dramatic acoustic and sociocultural impact.
Design for sound installations

‘Sound installations’ is used here as a generic term for public works of art that include
some acoustic dimension (e.g. Lacey 2016). Examples include those which react to their
environment – either driven by natural forces of wind or water, or responding to human
interaction such as drums, chimes, or voice trumpets. Others may incorporate recorded
sound, of music, voice, or natural sounds, or fed-back amplification of sound from the
immediate, or some remote, environment. The soundscaping issue here is twofold – firstly
the appropriateness of the introduced sound to the particular locality (is it a wanted sound
by most of those who will hear it) and secondly if the sound generated by the work of
art will be audible over the area intended, or whether this may be masked by unwanted
sounds. Experiences of various acoustic art installations in different cities show that many
are either not adequately supported by local stakeholders or are rendered ineffective
through their being masked by traffic noise or other mechanical sounds at the site of the
installation.
Broader application within residential areas

Ensuring diversity in the acoustic environment
Another concept associated with the acoustic environment as a resource is that of diversity.
Diversity in genes, species, and ecosystems underpins the management of systems of
biological resources. Maintenance of natural diversity (and cultural diversity) is also a
principle adopted in the spatial planning of regions, natural areas, the countryside, and
urban centres. The same diversity principle can find application in management of the
acoustic environment. For example, matters such as the characteristic of local sounds
and tranquillity are important elements of the spatial quality of rural and urban areas.
In an early soundscape study in Boston, Michael Southworth (1969) hypothesized that

changes in the soundscape are needed to increase (1) the identity of the soundscape,
and (2) the number of opportunities for delight in sounds and to provide responsive
settings which contain novel sounds. The study noted the grey blurring of the acoustic
environment that was occurring in cities, in terms of transport noise sources becoming the
dominant background everywhere, masking natural sounds and local community sounds.
Soundscapes studies have the potential to articulate the extent, or absence, of diversity in
the urban acoustic environment.
Encouraging attention to sub-criteria exposures and to

restoration of human well-being
Studies of the burden of disease for environmental noise show that there is a contribution
from noise even at exposures below what might be set as criteria, or cut-off points, for
noise-abatement action. This is because, while the risk of any particular outcome response
is lower at lower exposure levels, the numbers of people within an urban area exposed
to these levels is high. The consequence is that any action to reduce exposures across the
dwellings of a community will intrinsically have health benefits. The relevance of this for
soundscape planning is that it is unlikely that traditional noise-control approaches will
ever set noise limits for particular sources lower than criterion limits. However, lowering
of levels of sound over parts of a residential area may be the outcome of some broader
soundscaping plan and it is important to recognize that this can result in tangible health
benefits as the burden of disease from sub-criterion exposures is significant.
Somewhat more speculative is the potential benefit to people of creating availability, even
knowledge, of a better-quality acoustic environment somewhere in their neighbourhood.
Francesco Aletta, Tin Oberman, and Jian Kang (2018) have documented the limited
evidence available of the positive health-related effects of supportive soundscapes and
Van Kamp et al. (2015) note that the restorative benefits of good soundscapes elsewhere
may also accrue to a person who otherwise is subject to adverse effects of noise at home.
A soundscape planning scheme that introduces quiet sides to dwellings, or increases the
prevalence of high-quality acoustic environments elsewhere in a neighbourhood, may
provide health benefits through this mediating mechanism.
Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of the study and management of the outdoor sonic
environment of cities, predominantly its high-noise components. Acousticians and others
apply a range of methods to measure or model the noise levels in cities, and exposure of
the population, and the nature and extent of the discomfort and disease it causes them.
Exposure-response relationships, and the specification of limit criteria are derived from
these. Management actions are largely based on limiting human annoyance from noise
– even though there is a well-documented range of health effects of transport noise in
addition to annoyance outcomes.
Most methods for control and management of the sonic environment are bound within
engineering, design, and the planning paradigms of infrastructure and urban development.
These include source reduction, changes in the propagation path, changes to transmission
loss of the envelopes of buildings, spatial separation of sources and receivers, and changes
in transport and other infrastructure. These involve engineering, planning, transport,
architectural, and other design disciplines.
One of the primary ways that noise is assessed and managed is within project-based EIA
of new and changed infrastructure. EIA utilizes well-tested methodologies in prediction,
assessment, and mitigation of noise impacts. However, despite the ubiquity of assessment
and control tools at the project level, there has to date been little consideration of noise at
the broader strategic planning levels. This is now changing, with methodology developed
for inclusion of noise in quantitative Heath Impact Assessments at aggregated strategic
levels of planning.
Concepts of soundscape planning and management also have a role within the
methodological toolbox of management of the acoustic environment of urban areas.
Soundscape approaches focus on human perception of the acoustic environment and have
been applied to places such as urban parks and gardens, city malls, and historical and
cultural locations. It is complementary to, not a substitute for, the dominant management
paradigm of environmental noise control found in environmental assessment and urban
planning approaches. The loci of application of noise control methodologies is where
predefined noise limits are exceeded – conventionally adjacent to high noise-level sources
or at sensitive receptors where adverse impacts and effects arise. By contrast, the range of
application of soundscape management methodologies is much less well developed, apart
from a basic awareness of protection of existing ‘quiet areas’. This chapter redressed this
imbalance by providing methodology for identifying a spectrum of opportunities, and
potential design criteria, for urban soundscape interventions.
Soundscape approaches will be applicable for managing quiet areas – but not exclusively
so. Soundscape design and management may include creative acoustic design to achieve
places of high acoustic quality; ensuring the potential for humans to experience diversity in
the acoustic environment throughout urban areas; encouraging attention to sub-criterion
exposures; providing restorative access for human health; protecting iconic or place-
defining sounds; and providing spaces for public acoustic installations.
Note
1. Stylianos Kephalopoulos and colleagues (2014) describes current modelling of road
traffic, railway traffic, aircraft, and industrial sources.
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13
Sonic Methodologies in Medicine
Jos J. Eggermont
Introduction and overview

Sound plays a prominent role in medical practice and research, in diagnostics as well as
in therapy. Historically, one distinguishes three types of sound based on their frequency
content. Audible sound occupies the frequency range from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz.
Ultrasound consists of frequencies greater than 20 kilohertz, approximately the upper limit
of hearing in young normal hearing humans. Similarly, ‘infrasound’ consists of frequencies
less than 20 hertz, the lower limit of human hearing. Audible sound produced or reflected
from inside the body was used early on for methodical investigations and diagnosis using
stethoscopes, which were invented in 1816 by René Laennec in Paris, but made practical in
1852 by Georg Philip Camman (Wade and Deutsch 2008).
Audible sound in the form of standardized pure tones is used in the determination of
frequency-dependent hearing loss, commonly illustrated by the audiogram. The audiogram
graphs the audible sound levels in decibels as a function of octave-separated frequencies,
typically from 125 hertz to 8,000 hertz, and refers to the normal hearing-level standard.
In the nineteenth century, the use of tones in audiology was based on the Galton whistle,
tunable to various high frequencies and specifically useful to test the deteriorating high
frequencies in age-related hearing loss (Zwaardemaker 1891). The whistle, invented by Sir
Frances Galton (1822–1911), can be adjusted to produce high-frequency sounds between
5 kilohertz and 42 kilohertz, and was used by its inventor to test the limits of hearing in
the dogs he saw on his walks in London’s Hyde Park. Other instruments in audiology use
around the end of the nineteenth century included the monochord (Mollison 1917), a
single string tunable instrument, and tuning forks. The tuning fork, invented in 1711 by
British musician John Shore, was introduced in audiology to test low- and mid-frequency
hearing at the end of the nineteenth century (Feldman 1997). In the 1920s the first electronic
audiometer came into use (Bunch 1929). Audiograms form the basis for locating the
sources and degree of hearing loss, and this information is used to prescribe hearing aids or
surgery. Audible sounds are also used in combination with neuroimaging techniques such
as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and electroencephalographic (EEG)
techniques to localize brain areas involved in, for example age-related hearing impairment,
mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease (Eggermont 2019).
Because of the increasing evidence for a link between hearing loss and early cognitive
decline, timely hearing aid fitting is advised. A hearing aid amplifies external sound and
allows easier speech understanding, facilitates communication, and may prevent social
isolation. Another category of therapeutic use of audible sound is music that is widely
advocated in managing among others, behavioural-emotional disorders, types of dementia,
and Parkinson’s disease where it is known to improve the ability to initiate and control gait.
There is also some evidence that music therapy improves social functioning and quality of
life for people with psychiatric disorders.
Another important branch of medical diagnostics uses ultrasound to visualize internal
body structures in the abdomen such as the pancreas, liver, gall bladder, kidneys, and
spleen, including prenatal testing, in order to find the source of a disease or to exclude
pathology. The creation of an image from ultrasound, a sonogram, is done in three steps:
(1) a series of focused sound pulses are produced by a piezoelectric transducer, (2) the
pulses echo off tissue, and (3) the electric pulses from the echoes vibrate the transducer
and are used to build up a digital image based on the delay and strength of the sound echo.
An example is echocardiography used to diagnose the dilatation of parts of the heart and
function of heart ventricles and valves. By using Doppler ultrasound analysis one can also
assess the blood flow.
Therapeutic use of ultrasound is also varied and includes breaking up kidney stones and
gallstones by using high-energy pulses; cleaning teeth; treating cataract by using focused
ultrasound sources; and non-invasive ablating tumours and other tissues. Here high-
intensity focused ultrasound is used and often guided by MRI.
Audible sound as a diagnostic tool

Types of hearing loss
Imagine that your hearing sensitivity for pure tones is exquisite – not affected by frequent
exposure to loud music or other noises – but that you have problems in understanding
speech even in a quiet environment. This occurs if you have a temporal processing
disorder. Although hearing loss is in the ear, hearing problems such as those caused by
deficits in temporal processing originate in the brain. We often take hearing for granted;
not realizing what good hearing allows us to do. Without hearing, communication with
our fellow humans largely disappears. Substitutes for total loss of hearing are sign language,
which replaces hearing with vision, and cochlear implants, which restore hearing to a large
extent. For hard of hearing persons, amplification with hearing aids restores the sense of
sound but does not generally result in normal perception, except when the hearing loss is
of the conductive type.
Hearing loss comes in two broad types, conductive and sensorineural. Conductive
hearing loss results from deficits in the sound-conducting apparatus of the outer and middle
ear. Problems such as fluid in the middle ear and immobility of the middle ear bones are
Sonic Methodologies in Medicine 237
the main causes of a conductive hearing loss (Figure 13.1). Sensory hearing losses result
from damage of structures in the cochlea, namely, to the hair cells – the microphones and
amplifiers—and the stria vascularis – the battery charger in the ear (Figure 13.2). Neural
loss occurs when damage to the auditory nerve is involved. The latter often follows hair cell
loss – called secondary degeneration and then constitutes sensorineural loss – but can also
occur in isolation, as primary degeneration.
Use of sound in audiology for site of lesion testing

Air- or bone-conduction audiograms
Conductive hearing losses are diagnosed by measuring the audiometric difference in the
threshold for air- and bone-conducted sound called the air-bone gap. Bone conducted
sound, produced by a vibrator on the scalp, bypasses the external and middle ear in
stimulation of the cochlea, but is much less effective than air conduction in normal hearing
people. By comparing the air and bone conduction audiograms, both relative to those in
a normal ear, middle ear problems can be detected. If only the air-conduction threshold is
elevated a conductive hearing loss is concluded; if both are similarly elevated the loss is of
the sensorineural type. Mixed types occur as well.
Speech discrimination testing

Speech audiometry is a fundamental tool in hearing loss assessment. Together with pure-
tone audiometry, it can aid in determining the degree and type of hearing loss. Speech
audiometry provides information on word recognition and about discomfort or tolerance
to speech stimuli. Speech audiometry outcomes help also in setting the gain and maximum
output of hearing aids for patients with moderate to severe hearing losses. An adaptation
of speech audiometry is the Hearing-in-Noise Test, in which the stimuli are presented by
a loudspeaker in a frontal position and the patient is required to repeat sentences both in
a quiet environment and with competing noise being presented by loudspeakers, coming
from different directions.
Otoacoustic emission testing

The ear does not only receive sound, normal ears also emit sounds, which are called
spontaneous otoacoustic emissions. Otoacoustic emissions were discovered by David
Kemp (1979), and can be recorded with a sensitive microphone in the ear canal and provide
a noninvasive measure of the working of the cochlea. There are also two main types of
sound-evoked otoacoustic emissions in clinical use. The first, transient-evoked otoacoustic
emissions are evoked using a click stimulus. The otoacoustic emissions to a click comprise
frequencies up to around 4 kilohertz; frequency selective masking allows identification of
individual bands (Figure 13.3). The second, distortion product otoacoustic emissions are
evoked using a pair of primary tones with frequencies f1 and f2 with a frequency ratio of
f2/f1<1.4. The most commonly measured distortion product otoacoustic emission is at the
frequency 2f1–f2. Recording of sound-evoked otoacoustic emissions has become the main
method for newborn and infant hearing screening (see below).
Auditory brainstem response testing

The auditory brainstem response is a short-latency auditory evoked potential, with
amplitudes below 0.5 microvolt obtained by signal averaging from ongoing electrical
activity in the brain and recorded via electrodes placed on the scalp. The resulting recording
is a series of scalp-vertex positive waves labelled I through V (Figure 13.4). These waves
occur in the first 10 milliseconds after onset of an auditory stimulus, typically a click or
short tone pips. Wave I is generated in the cochlear part, wave II in the intra-brain part of
the auditory nerve, and wave III in the lower brainstem. Waves IV and V are generated in
the upper brainstem (Figure 13.4; Ponton, Moore, and Eggermont 1996).
Amplitude and latency of waves I, III, and V are the basic measures for quantifying
the auditory brainstem response. Amplitude is dependent on the number of neurons
firing action potentials and above all on their synchrony in firing. Latency depends
on hearing loss and again on neural synchrony; interpeak latency (the time between
peaks) depends on conduction velocity of action potentials along the brainstem, and
interaural latency (the difference in wave V latency between ears) is sometimes used
in auditory nerve tumour diagnosis (Eggermont, Don, and Brackmann 1980). The
auditory brainstem response is used for newborn hearing screening, auditory threshold
estimation (Figure 13.5), determining hearing loss type, and detection of auditory nerve
and brainstem lesions.
Newborn hearing screening

In 1995, a US ‘Joint Committee on Infant Hearing’ (JCIH) had ‘endorsed the goal of
universal detection of infants with hearing loss and encourages continuing research and
development to improve techniques for detection of and intervention for hearing loss as
early as possible’ (JCIH 1995). Following this statement, a feasibility study sponsored by
the National Institutes of Health in the United States was set up to determine the accuracy
of three measures of peripheral auditory system status (otoacoustic emissions, auditory
brainstem response thresholds, and behavioural visual reinforcement audiometry) applied
in the perinatal period (Norton et al. 2000). In this study, both babies who had been in a
neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) and healthy babies with one or more risk factors for
hearing loss were targeted for follow-up testing using visual reinforcement audiometry at
eight to twelve months of age. Automated auditory brainstem response audiometry was
implemented using a click stimulus of 30 decibels above its threshold in normal ears, which
appeared to be reliable for the rapid assessment of hearing in newborns. More than 99 per
cent of infants could complete the auditory brainstem response protocol. More than 90 per
cent of neonatal ICU babies and well babies at nursery infant age ‘passed’ given the strict
criteria for response, whereas 86 per cent of those with high-risk factors met the criterion
for auditory brainstem response detection. This method is now used in a large majority of
developed countries around the world. Details can be found in Eggermont, Hearing Loss:
Causes, Prevention and Treatment (2017).
Auditory evoked potentials

Hallowell Davis (1896–1992) is often called the ‘father of the evoked response audiometry’,
as he was the first to use long-latency auditory evoked potentials to estimate hearing
thresholds and obtain so-called objective audiograms. However, we should consider his
first wife Pauline as the ‘mother of auditory evoked potentials’, because she spotted the
repetitive changes in the ongoing electroencephalogram when loud sounds were presented
(Davis 1939). These electroencephalogram changes were not easy to quantify, and it was
only with the introduction of signal averagers (Dawson 1954) that the recording of auditory
evoked potentials and its use in audiometry became a practical venture. The recording of
auditory evoked potentials at that time was restricted to long-latency potentials because
they have about ten times larger amplitudes (~ 5 microvolt) than those of shorter latency
(see below for a classification; Figure 13.6). After his retirement from the Directorship of
the Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis in 1965, Davis further developed the long-latency
auditory evoked potential audiometry (Davis 1976). His first collaborator in that endeavour
was Atze Spoor, then chief audiologist at the Leiden University ENT clinic, who introduced
me in 1968 to long-latency auditory evoked potential audiometry at the start of my career
in audiology. It became obvious that in children, who were instructed to sit still and stay
awake (this was before the days of silent video or Game Boys), this procedure was not very
reliable and was soon abandoned in favour of short-latency evoked potentials such as the
auditory brainstem response, which can even be recorded in sleep or under anesthesia.
An early classification of auditory evoked potentials is based on peak-response latency,
and distinguishes short-latency, middle-latency, and long-latency auditory evoked
potentials (Figure 13.6). The auditory brainstem response peaks are indicated by Roman
numerals (cf. Figure 13.4). The middle latency (10–50 milliseconds) response components
are typically indicated by Na, Pa, Nb, and Pb, and the long latency (above 50 milliseconds)
components by P1, N1, P2, and N2. The magnetic fields associated with middle- and long-
latency auditory evoked potentials follow the same pattern.
Auditory evoked potentials were initially recorded with only a few electrodes, typically
placed at the scalp vertex, forehead, and both mastoids—the hard bone behind the ears.
Currently, the use of multiple recording sites (32–256) is standard practice. The use of such
high-density electrode recordings allows under specific assumptions the calculation of the
strength and location of the clusters of neurons contributing to the signal picked up at the
scalp (Ponton et al. 1993). These estimated source localizations have been validated by
simultaneous recording of multi-electrode auditory evoked potentials and fMRI in young
adults (Scarff et al. 2004). The peaks (or valleys) in the auditory evoked potentials have
of course served as objects of interest and for most of these components we have a good
idea what neural structures they represent, although in most cases (e.g. P1 and N1) there
is likely more than one structure that contributes to a given auditory evoked potential
component. It is also clear that a given structure (e.g. primary auditory cortex on Heschl’s
gyrus) can contribute more than one auditory evoked potential component. In some cases
there are also reasonable guesses at what information the individual auditory evoked
potential components might represent, other than just the presence or absence of a sound
(for details, see Ponton et al. 2000; Eggermont 2007).
Age-related declines of neural synchrony in the human auditory system, which
determines the amplitude of the electroencephalogram waves, have been inferred through
the use of long-latency auditory evoked potentials. These potentials represent sound-locked
electroencephalogram activity. One frequently used auditory evoked potential response is
the P1-N1-P2 complex (Figure 13.6), and age-related differences affecting its latency and
amplitude have been reported. Although the presence of a long-latency auditory evoked
potential response indicates that a stimulus was physiologically discriminated, its presence
neither quantifies the quality of stimulus encoding nor indicates if subcortical age-related
changes, such as reduced neural synchrony, contribute to cortical responses in older
adults. Inconsistencies between behavioural and long-latency auditory evoked potential
data have been found, in particular age-related differences in the neurophysiological
pattern without corresponding effects in the behavioural task accuracy. Typically, ageing
has a higher influence on late cognitive processes than on the perceptual (N1) and pre-
attentive (mismatch negativity) ones. The presence of the mismatch negativity – basically
the difference between the P1-N1-P2 complex recorded for stimuli consisting of a high
probability (standard) and an interspersed low probability (deviant) – reflects pre-attentive
coding of this stimulus difference. The mismatch negativity is also used to evaluate the
integrity of the working-memory system. In particular, a reduced mismatch negativity
response is a robust feature among the elderly (Eggermont 2019).
Music therapy
Music therapy is used in medicine with the goal to assist in the physical recovery and health
maintenance of patients. I briefly introduce here its use in coronary heart disease, serious
mental disorders, tinnitus, and Parkinson’s disease, for which evidence-based evaluations
are available. However, there is a wide spectrum of other potentially beneficial uses for
which stringent evaluations have not yet been done.
Coronary heart disease

Music is often used to reduce anxiety and distress and improve physiological functioning
in patients with myocardial infarctions. A Cochrane systematic review covering twenty-six
clinical trials with a total of 1,369 participants found that:
Listening to music also appears to be effective in reducing anxiety in people with myocardial
infarction, especially when they are given a choice of which music to listen to. Listening to
music may also reduce pain and respiratory rate. However the size of the effects on pain and
respiratory rate is small. Therefore, its clinical importance is unclear. Finally, listening to
music appears to improve patients’ quality of sleep following a cardiac procedure or surgery.
We found no evidence of effect for depression or heart rate variability, and inconsistent
results for mood.
(Bradt, Dileo, and Potvin 2013)
Serious mental disorders

For people with serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, music therapy may help
people improve their emotional and relational competencies. A Cochrane systematic review
covering eighteen studies with 1,215 participants suffering from schizophrenia found a
positive effect of music therapy compared to standard care (Geretsegger et al. 2017). Their
overall conclusion was that ‘music therapy seems to help people with schizophrenia but
further research is needed to confirm the positive effects found in this review’ (Geretsegger
et al. 2017).
Tinnitus
Tinnitus or ringing in the ears frequently accompanies hearing loss. About 15 per cent of
the population suffers from it. Albeit the cause is often hearing loss, tinnitus is a result of
maladaptive changes in brain connectivity. Namely, the brain fills in the missing frequencies
resulting from the hearing loss, akin to phantom pain in the case of missing limbs
(Eggermont 2012). Sound in various forms is used, from simple noise to mask the tinnitus
to music therapy aimed at changing the maladaptive changes in the brain that underlie
tinnitus. There is no conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of masking, largely due to
lack of quality research (Hobson, Chisholm, and El Refaie 2012). Combining hearing aid
amplification alone or with a sound generator also is currently insufficiently investigated
to draw firm conclusions (Tutaj, Hoare, and Sereda 2018). A potentially effective method
appears to be the use of notched music for tonal tinnitus, where, after the frequency of
the tinnitus is established, music selected by the patient is filtered such that energy at and
around the tinnitus frequency is absent. A clinical trial of this technique, however, found
no effect on tinnitus distress, albeit that the loudness of the tinnitus was significantly
reduced (Stein et al. 2016). Christoph Krick and colleagues (2017) developed a therapeutic
intervention, namely the Heidelberg Neuro-Music Therapy, which showed an effective
reduction of tinnitus-related distress following a one-week short-term treatment. Using
fMRI, they found that the default mode network in the brain showed increased activity
that correlated with the improvement in tinnitus distress.
Parkinson’s disease
People with Parkinson’s disease (PD) often show gait abnormalities, such as shuffling steps,
start hesitation, and freezing. Rhythmic auditory stimulation, such as marching music and
dance therapy, appears to be an effective method in improving the gait in PD patients
(Ashori et al. 2015). In a systematic review, Shuai Zhang and colleagues found ‘evidence
of a positive effect of music-based movement therapy in PD supporting its use for the
treatment of motor dysfunction. There was neutral effect evidence to support the use of
music-based movement therapy for the treatment of cognitive function and quality of life’
(Zhang et al. 2017: 1635).
Ultrasound
Ultrasound frequencies commonly used in biological and imaging applications range from
about 500 kilohertz to more than 50 megahertz (Halliwell 2010). After X-radiography,
ultrasound technologies are currently the most common of all medical imaging. Emerging
clinical applications are found among others in breast disease, cardiology, gastroenterology,
gynecology, minimally invasive surgery, musculoskeletal studies, urology, and
cardiovascular disease (Wells and Liang 2011).
Diagnostic use of ultrasound

An ultrasonic imaging system typically is able to resolve structures of around 1 millimetre
in size at depths of up to around 15 centimetres in the body. Ultrasound travels at a speed
of about 1,500 metres per second in soft tissues; this means that the frequency needs to
be in the low megahertz range because the wavelength, which is one of the factors that
determine the spatial resolution, for example is 0.5 millimetre at 3 megahertz. Pulse-echo
ultrasonic imaging is based on the principle that a beam of pulsed ultrasound causes echoes
that are delayed in time according to their depths. If the ultrasound is reflected by targets
with a component of motion along the axis of the ultrasonic beam (e.g. by pulsatile blood
flow), the echoes that are received are shifted in frequency by the Doppler effect (Wells and
Liang 2011). Here, we only review three common applications in some detail.
The echocardiogram
An echocardiogram is a sonogram of the heart, and is routinely used in the diagnosis,
management, and follow-up of patients with any suspected or known heart diseases. It is
one of the most widely used diagnostic tests in cardiology. It can provide information on
the size and shape of the heart, pumping capacity, and the location and extent of any tissue
damage. Not only can an echocardiogram create ultrasound images of heart structures
but it can also produce an accurate assessment of the blood flowing through the heart by
Doppler echocardiography. This allows assessment of both normal and abnormal blood
flow through the heart (for details, see Moran et al. 2013).
Prenatal diagnostics
A prenatal ultrasound test uses ultrasound that is transmitted through the abdomen via a
transducer. The echoes are recorded and transformed into video or photographic images
of the foetus. The ultrasound can also be used during pregnancy to show images of the
amniotic sac, placenta, and ovaries. Major anatomical abnormalities or birth defects are
visible through ultrasound. Most prenatal ultrasound procedures are performed with the
transducer on the surface of the skin, using a gel as a conductive medium to aid in the
image quality (for recent advances, see Gardiner 2018).
Abdominal sonography
In abdominal sonography, the solid organs of the abdomen such as the pancreas,
aorta, inferior vena cava, liver, gall bladder, bile ducts, kidneys, and spleen are imaged
(Wikipedia 2020). Sound waves are blocked by gas in the bowel and attenuated in
different degree by fat, therefore there are limited diagnostic capabilities in this area.
The appendix can sometimes be seen when inflamed (as in, for example, appendicitis).
It is also used on the abdominal aorta to detect or exclude abdominal aortic aneurysm
(Rafailidis et al. 2018).
Ultrasound as a therapeutic tool

In therapy, continuous wave ultrasound is used in applications such as physiotherapy and
surgery. Relatively high-power ultrasound can break up stony deposits or tissue, accelerate
the effect of drugs in a targeted area, and assist in the measurement of the elastic properties
of tissue. In physiotherapy, claims have been made that ultrasound may alleviate muscle
pain and improve tissue healing. However, in a systematic review, Valma J. Robertson and
Kerry G. Baker (2001) found ‘little evidence that active ultrasound is more effective than
placebo treatment for treating patients with pain or a range of musculoskeletal injuries, or
for promoting soft tissue healing. The few studies judged to have adequate methodology
examined a diverse range of medical conditions and the dose of ultrasound varied, often
for no discernable reason.’ Here, I introduce four typical therapeutic applications of
ultrasound.
Kidney stones
Focused high-energy ultrasound pulses can be used to break kidney stones and gallstones
into fragments small enough to be passed from the body without undue difficulty. The
procedure for kidney stones appears to be safe and effective (May, Bailey, and Harper 2016;
for a historical review, see Tzou et al. 2017).
Tumour ablation
Ultrasound can ablate tumours or other tissue non-invasively. This is accomplished using
a technique known as focused ultrasound surgery. This procedure uses generally lower
frequencies than medical diagnostic ultrasound but significantly higher time-averaged
intensities (Zhou 2011).
Topical drug delivery

Delivering chemotherapy to brain cancer cells and various drugs to other tissues is called
acoustic targeted drug delivery. These procedures generally use frequencies between 1 and
10 megahertz and intensities up to 20 Watt/centimetres squared. The acoustic energy is
focused on the tissue of interest to make it more permeable for therapeutic drugs (Lewis
and Olbricht 2008).
Neuromodulation in the brain

Electric and magnetic signals strongly influence cells near the brain’s surface but can only
penetrate 1 or 2 centimetres. Ultrasound can target brain structures with high precision
and penetrates deep regions in the brain selectively. However, precisely how the technique
works remains unclear (Landhuis 2017). Recently, two studies have unequivocally
established that low-level ultrasound applied to the brain activates the auditory midbrain
and cortex in a similar way as audible sound, but at much lower levels than needed for the
desired neuromodulation of non-auditory structures (Sato, Shapiro, and Tsao 2018; Guo
et al. 2018). Hongsun Guo and colleagues (2018) found that stimulation with ultrasound
of different auditory cortex locations elicited extensive activity throughout the auditory
midbrain (central nucleus of the inferior colliculus, ICC) with no indication of localized
effects. The effect disappears when the cochlea was destroyed, indicating that the inner ear
itself is activated by the ultrasound. Auditory activation of the brain may activate other
brain areas by cross-modal interaction. Tomokazu Sato, Mikhail G. Shapiro, and Doris Y.
Tsao (2018) noted that the mechanisms that underlie activation of the auditory system are
unclear but may,
include mode conversion between primary compressive ultrasound waves and shear waves
within bone and the brain’s soft tissue, leading to mechanical activation of ear structures.
The ultrasound pressure waves themselves may contain power at frequencies in the audible
range, including broadband power due to the onset and offset of each pulse, as well as at
harmonics of the pulse repetition frequency, which get propagated to the cochlea.
(Sato, Shapiro, and Tsao 2018).
Conclusion
Sound in medicine is used as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool. Audible sound is used
to test the auditory system sensitivity, perceptual qualities, and cognitive patency. In this
way it allows topographic diagnostics including neurological abnormalities impinging
on the auditory pathway. Combining sound stimulation with imaging techniques allows
differentiation between peripheral and central mechanisms underlying age-related hearing
impairment. Therapeutic use of audible sound, in particular music, is widespread but the
evidence-based assessments still are sceptical for some of its claimed benefits.
Ultrasound is used as an imaging technique, the second most used after X-rays, based
on delayed reflection by internal structures, with very good spatial resolution, and it allows
the solid organs of the abdomen such as the pancreas, liver, gall bladder, kidneys and
spleen to be imaged. Combined with Doppler techniques, echocardiography is used to
diagnose the dilatation of parts of the heart and function of heart ventricles and valves. By
using Doppler ultrasound analysis one can also assess the blood flow. Therapeutic use of
ultrasound is abundant with notable successes in ablation of tumours and crushing kidney
stones. Caution must be used in the interpretation of its neuromodulation capabilities.
More recently, Davide Folloni et al. (2019) have shown the effects of transcranial focused
ultrasound (tFUS) in the macaque anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and amygdala. They
measured neuromodulatory effects by examining relationships between activity in these
areas and the rest of the brain using fMRI. In control conditions without tFUS, activity in
a given area was related to activity in interconnected regions, but such relationships were
reduced after sonication, specifically for the targeted areas. Dissociable and focal effects
on neural activity could not be explained by auditory confounds, because the auditory
stimulation associated with the tFUS application ceased after the sonication, but the
neural activity measurements were initiated tens of minutes later. Further, the tFUS of
each area, ACC and amygdala, had specific effects that were distinct from one another. To
date, tFUS is the most promising neuromodulatory technique to reach areas deep below
the dorsolateral surface of the brain in a minimally invasive and focal manner, thereby
Figure 13.1 The sound conduction pathway in the human ear. Left: Schematic of the
outer, middle, and inner ear. Right: A section through the temporal bone showing the
sound conduction pathway in the ear. Vibrations of the eardrum or tympanum (t) are
relayed via three middle ear bones, the malleus (m), incus (i) and stapes (s), and initiate
pressure waves in the cochlear fluids, the pressure being relieved at the round window
(rw). The pressure waves set in motion the basilar membrane, on which the organ of
Corti and the hair cells are located (cf. Figure 13.2). The cochlea is shown as straight to
illustrate its internal structure, but it is normally coiled as in the inset. Different sound
frequencies excite different regions of the cochlea, the specific locations being given in
kilohertz: from 0.1 to 20 kilohertz in humans. Note that the frequency map is logarithmic,
so that each decade occupies an equivalent distance on the basilar membrane. The
components are drawn roughly to scale for the human ear, in which the cochlea is 35
millimetres in length. Source: Fettiplace and Hackney 2006.
Figure 13.2 Cross section of the cochlea showing the location of the organ of Corti
containing the outer and inner hair cells from which the spiral ganglion cells leave. The
cochlea is divided into compartments filled with fluids of distinct ionic composition.
Perilymph is similar to extracellular fluid with a high Na+ concentration, i.e. close to
seawater, a reminder of our evolutionary past. Endolymph, which is found in the central
compartment above the tops of the hair cells, contains a high K+ concentration. Source:
Davis et al. 1953.
Figure 13.3 Frequency-specific click-evoked otoacoustic emission waveforms obtained

from the human ear. Decomposition of wide-band otoacoustic emissions is obtained by
frequency-selective masking. From top to bottom, the spectral bands are 0.7–1.0, 1.0–1.4,
1.4–2.0, 2.0–2.8, 2.8–4.0, and 4.0–5.6 kilohertz. Source: Molenaar, Shaw, and Eggermont
2000.
providing it with the potential for causally mapping brain functions within and across
species. A study in mice demonstrated that sharp edges in a tFUS rectangular envelope
stimulus activated the peripheral afferent auditory pathway, and that smoothing these
edges eliminated the auditory responses without affecting the motor responses in normal
hearing mice (Mohammadjavadi et al. 2019).
Studies such as Sato, Shapiro, and Tsao (2018) and Guo et al. (2018) are important for
assessing the fundamentals of the tFUS field; the size of the animals may have some effect,
but acoustic edges need to be considered as a major confound.
Figure 13.4 Auditory brainstem response sources in the brainstem. Wave III cochlear
nucleus; wave IV dominantly from the purely contralateral axonal pathway at the
bend near, or ending in, the lateral lemniscus. Wave V from the pathway synapsing in
the medial superior olive (MSO) and continuing to the lateral lemniscus, dominantly
contralateral to the cochlear nucleus (CN) (full line) but also a minor contribution from the
ipsilateral lemniscus (dashed line). Source: Ponton, Moore, and Eggermont 1996.
Figure 13.5 Three examples of a comparison between behavioural audiograms
(large-dashed line) and audiograms based on auditory brainstem response – threshold
responses (small-dashed line). The x-axes represent tone frequency (log scale), the
y-axes represent sound level in decibels (dB) relative to normal hearing. Source: Based
on Don, Eggermont, and Brackmann 1979.
Figure 13.6 Auditory brainstem responses (ABR) and obligatory auditory evoked
potentials (AEP) on a logarithmic timescale. The ABR components (‘waves’) are labelled
I, III, and V. The middle-latency components are indicated with Na, Pa, Nb, Pb (P1). The
long-latency components are indicated with P1, N1, P2, and N2. Note that Pb typically
overlaps with P1. Source: Eggermont 2014.
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14
Soundscape as Methodology
in Psychoacoustics and Noise
Management
André Fiebig and
Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp
Introduction
The soundscape concept, which was first introduced by R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s,
conceived of environmental noise as a musical composition (Schafer 1969). Schafer’s
work prefigured soundscape studies as the middle ground between science, society, and
the arts: from acoustics and psychoacoustics we learn how sound is interpreted by the
human brain; from society we learn how sound affects and changes behaviour; and from
music we learn how to create ideal soundscapes. These three perspectives together laid
the foundation of a new interdisciplinary field: acoustic design (Schafer 1977). This diverse
footing led to a heterogeneous development of methods for investigating soundscapes.
In the 1990s, the soundscape concept was increasingly used in the context of community
noise and environmental noise assessment. It received more attention from noise
consultants and researchers due to the notion that the perception of sound is a ‘multi-stage
process’ and cannot be understood without studying the context and meaning of sound
(Schulte-Fortkamp and Nitsch 1999). During this time, the first sessions were organized
at acoustical conferences and congresses, presenting soundscape concepts and early
studies to an audience of acousticians, noise consultants, and noise-control engineers, and
the benefit of the soundscape concept for noise-control engineering was discussed. The
first special session at an acoustic conference that focused on soundscape, titled ‘Sound
Amenity and Soundscape’, took place in Yokohama at the International Congress on Noise
Control Engineering (1994). Today, special sessions dedicated to soundscape take place
regularly in renowned acoustic conferences, with presented papers ranging from theory
to applications across diverse fields. Special issues about soundscape research have been
routinely published in various journals, steadily increasing the number of publications in

the scientific literature of the field (Kang et al. 2016). Today, over three hundred papers
on soundscape, mostly non-open access, are published annually and are expanding by the
year (To et al. 2018).
The concept of soundscape was adopted to provide a holistic approach to the acoustic
environment beyond considerations of noise and its effect on the quality of life. The concept
assesses all sounds perceived in any particular environment without simplification. To do
this, soundscape studies use a variety of data collection and measurement methods related
to human perception, the acoustic environment, and the interrelationships between person,
activity, and place, in space and in time – defined as ‘context’. The context influences the
soundscape through auditory sensation, its initial interpretation, and one’s subsequent
responses to the acoustic environment.
When perception is ‘measured’ by gathering data about individual responses to the
acoustic environment, different data collection methods are applied simultaneously. This
increases the validity and reduces the uncertainty of the measurements. Importantly,
studying soundscapes relies primarily upon human perception and only turns to physical
measurements as supplemental information. Different techniques of perception and
physical measurement will be discussed in this chapter.
Soundscape study draws together these different assessment tools to understand the
perception of the complex sonic environment. Due to the context-related procedure in the
study of the environment, soundscape studies reach a high ecological validity (Schulte-
Fortkamp and Genuit 2011).
The increasing use of the soundscape approach in practical applications and systematic
studies led to the development of scientific methodologies that improved the credibility
of the soundscape approach. These were further accompanied by standardization efforts
across the discipline, which resulted in the series of the international soundscape standard
ISO 12913–1 being adopted in 2014 and its 2nd and 3rd parts in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Development of soundscape standards

Starting in 2009, an ISO working group was formed to develop and establish standards
in the field of soundscape investigations. This ran parallel with the COST TUD Action
TD0804 project ‘Soundscape of European Cities and Landscapes’, which brought diverse
soundscape researchers from all over the world together. According to the working group,
it became clear that progress in soundscape research was being impeded by a lack of a clear,
shared understanding of what was meant by the term soundscape, and the group decided
that a clear definition was a requirement for further progress (Schomer et al. 2010). In 2014,
the first international soundscape standard, the ISO 12913–1, was published, providing
definitions of soundscape and related terms, as well as a conceptual framework (ISO
12913–1 2014). The standard offers a definition of soundscape reflecting the common use
and concept determined by the working group consisting of several experts from different
Psychoacoustics and Noise Management 255
Figure 14.1 The perceptual construct of a soundscape according to ISO 12913–1 (2014).
disciplines. The standard describes soundscape as ‘an acoustic environment as perceived or

experienced and/or understood by a person or people in context’ (ISO12913–1 2014). The
conceptual framework describes the process of perceiving an acoustic environment and
indicates its basic elements: context, sound sources, acoustic environment, auditory sensation,
interpretation of auditory sensation, responses, and outcomes, as shown in Figure 14.1.
These elements and their specific interrelations contribute to the soundscape – the
perceptual construct of an acoustic environment. The standard provides the basic elements
for supporting a common basis for investigations and studies. The strong impact of this
first standard on soundscape investigations and research can be estimated by considering
the frequent citations of this standard in soundscape publications. For example, at the
Internoise conference 2017, held in Hong Kong, over a third of the papers of the special
session ‘Soundscape in Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape’ quoted ISO 12913–1
and used its definitions.
The second part of the ISO series, ISO/TS 12913–2:2018, is a technical specification –
which indicates that it addresses work still under technical development. This second part
deals with data collection, reporting requirements, and proposing methods and tools for
soundscape investigations. The proposed explorative methods are mainly based on the
work done in the COST Action TD0804. The third part of the ISO series ISO/TS 12913–
3:2019 dealing with the analysis of soundscape data is a further technical specification.
Soundscape methods
Due to the holistic theoretical basis of the soundscape concept, numerous methods from
various disciplines have been proposed and applied in research: ‘The field of soundscape
investigations and projects has evolved differently across disciplines leading to multiple
definitions of soundscape and its aims’ (ISO 12913–1 2014). Thus, a broad diversity of
methods and tools are applied in soundscape investigations according to the respective
objective.
Figure 14.2 Types of soundscape studies and their main actors. Source: Lercher and
Schulte-Fortkamp 2013.
According to Peter Lercher and Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp (2013) generally three

different types of soundscape studies can be distinguished: type I focuses on the individual,
type II deals with larger groups of individuals, and type III deals with higher level concerns
by studying soundscape on a large scale (see Figure 14.2).1
Aletta and colleagues (2016) delineate soundscape studies as varying in terms of applied
methods, such as soundwalks, laboratory experiments, narrative interviews, behavioural
observations, and the tools and instruments used such as questionnaires, semantic
scales, interview protocols, physiological measurements, and observation protocols.
In fact, diverse qualitative and quantitative methods as well as various combinations of
those methods find their way into soundscape investigations. Some methods focus on
the collection of perceptual data whereas others intend to measure mostly physical data.
The range of applied methods is shown in Figure 14.3, illustrating the variety of different
approaches available for investigating soundscapes.
The different investigative approaches apply varying measurement instruments or
instrument combinations – generally, most methods apply several instruments for
investigating human perception of sound. Yet measurements of perception alone do not
constitute a real soundscape study because acoustic measurements do not include the most
important requirement derived from the definition of the term soundscape, namely the
focus on the perceptual construct of an acoustic environment (Brown et al. 2016). The
integration of psychoacoustic principles provides a quantitative link between physical
stimuli and their evoked auditory sensations (Fastl and Zwicker 2007). However, more
parameters beyond classical psychoacoustic metrics are needed to derive information
about perception related categories such as, for example, pleasantness and acceptability of
sounds (Genuit and Fiebig 2016).
Currently, the most common methods for data collection applied in soundscape
investigations are the soundwalk and the interview. Unfortunately, researchers often claim
to investigate soundscapes when they are relying on physical measurements alone. The
frequent occurrence of this misunderstanding underscores the need for the standard. Such
research that only uses physical data (see Figure 14.1), with its elementary understanding
Figure 14.3 Methods and instruments frequently applied in soundscape studies.
of human perception of an acoustic environment as the leading criteria, is not sufficient to

study soundscapes appropriately. The ISO standardization is designed to be a practical and
useful tool in soundscape ecology (Picker 2018).
Recently, big data approaches in soundscape investigations have been proposed. For
example, Aiello et al. (2016) applied a new methodology that relies on tagging information
of geo-referenced pictures to the cities of London and Barcelona. They determined
sound-related words from the most popular crowdsourced online sound repository,
related those to social media data, and observed that the words matched most of the
picture tags and offered the widest geographical coverage. Simply said, social media data
was mapped onto the streets. Eoin A. King and colleagues (2017) intend to harness the
potential of big data to better assess public sentiments towards soundscapes by analysing
NYC311 complaints and geo-localized data mined from Twitter. A third, more direct
approach is to offer online platforms where users can directly provide soundscape related
data. For example, Antonella Radicchi (2018) developed a free mobile application with
a focus on quiet areas to crowdsource, evaluate, and map soundscapes by collecting
audio recordings, pictures, and user feedback on the location where the sounds are
recorded. This data collection method allows researchers to explore correlations between
a soundscape and emotional responses, semantic descriptors, perceived quietness, social
communication, or personal data.
Another methodological direction is the use of biomonitoring techniques investigating
and assessing human responses to (acoustic) environments by means of physiological
data. According to Dick Botteldooren et al. (2016) these techniques are more objective
than questionnaires, even when it comes to aesthetics or pleasure. Pyoung Jik Lee
and colleagues (2018) observed in a laboratory setting that a rural area with water
sounds showed the greatest psychological restoration leading to the most physiological
restoration. A method that avoids redirecting the natural attention of humans specifically
towards acoustic environments is non-participatory observation. For example, changes
in human behaviour can be studied by observing specific sonic interventions, such
as installing a fountain or broadcasting music or natural sounds in certain areas. It is
generally known that humans behave more naturally if they are not informed about
being observed (Fischer et al. 1984). Of course, in this context ethical issues must always
be addressed. Although observational methods offer advantages regarding ecological
validity, they are resource-demanding and established, robust protocols are needed to
make non-participatory soundscape studies comparable for particular cases (Lavia et
al. 2018).
It is expected that the detailed description of questionnaires in ISO/TS 12913–2 will
lead to more harmonized data collection across soundscape studies, which in turn will
improve the comparability of studies and allow the application of meta-analysis. However,
since no bias-free method exists, researchers or investigators must be aware of both the
advantages and limitations of the different approaches (Aletta et al. 2016) and must
choose the method or combination of methods according to the research objective. The
use of different methods is recommended to achieve convergent validity and overcome
the shortcomings of one single method. For example, Daniel Steele at al. (2016) carried
out a mixed methods study based on observation, questionnaires, and recordings, where
multiple types of soundscape assessments were collected and analysed. The general idea
is that one can be more confident with a result if different methods confirm prior analysis
by identical results (Schulte-Fortkamp and Fiebig 2016). In particular, the combination
of qualitative and quantitative methods can be productive. Empirical social research
pursues different approaches to combine qualitative and quantitative data analyses. A
triangulation approach is frequently suggested; in contrast to other approaches such as
preparatory, elaboration, or generalization models (Mayring 2001), the triangulation
concept treats qualitative and quantitative data equally (Fiebig et al. 2006). Accordingly,
Norman K. Denzin (1978) explains that the combined use of micro- and macro-level
studies, qualitative and quantitative approaches, and theoretical ideas should complement
and verify each other in order to achieve robust results. Triangulation for soundscape
measurement appears to be a powerful technique that facilitates the validation of data
through cross-verification of three components: people, context, and acoustic environment
(Schulte-Fortkamp and Fiebig 2016). However, according to Lawrence E. Marks and
Daniel Algom (1998) differences between scales might be related to the nature of sensory
reality and not on the vagaries of responses, underlining the difficulty in interpreting
apparently contradictory results obtained by different methods. Considering the diversity
of methods used in different studies, the soundscape standard needs to become known
worldwide and practically applied.
Soundwalks
The most popular method in soundscape investigations is the soundwalk, where participants
visit certain locations, listen to the ambient noise, and report their feelings and emotions
via interviews or questionnaires. The soundwalk is an instrument to explore urban areas by
‘lending ears and minds of the local experts’ (Voigt and Schulte-Fortkamp 2012), providing
meaningful information for appropriately interpreting any numbers and values derived
from recordings. To collect such data, many researchers started over the past decade to
utilize the soundwalk in diverse ways as tools for investigating soundscapes (Jeon et al.
2013), but methodological differences between various soundwalk designs are significant.
Sampling methods of participants vary from random samples (e.g. random visitors)
to systematic samples (e.g. residents). The selection of specific soundwalk sites is carried
out in many ways: either it is defined a priori based on explorative pre-studies, specific
criteria, or the respective object of investigation; or the participants freely chose relevant
sites themselves, which makes the data analysis more difficult.
Soundwalks have been performed individually as well as in groups; the latter
accelerate the data collection process and are more popular. The sampling methods of the
participants (random vs systematic samples [Berglund and Nilsson 2006]), the instruction
of the participants (attention directed towards sounds [Adams et al. 2008] vs emphasis
on multi-modality [Fiebig 2015a]), the use of open or closed questions and rating scales
(varying in numerous aspects, like bipolar [Axelsson et al. 2009] vs unipolar [Jeon et al.
2018], or discrete [Lindborg 2012] vs analogue [Fiebig et al. 2010]) differ significantly.
Most important, the attributes to be judged by the soundwalk participants vary as well.
Based on a principal component analysis, Östen Axelsson and colleagues (2010, 2015)
identified two main orthogonal components, pleasantness and eventfulness, which can be
evaluated by means of a set of eight affective attributes. Other identified main factors were
comfort, quietness, and weakness (Jeon et al. 2010). Some researchers focus on the level of
restorativeness by collecting in-situ soundscape assessments (Payne 2013). Problems arise
when the results of studies using pregiven attributes may lead to the same results. This
contradicts the preferred emphasis of foregrounding people’s expertise in order to meet the
needs of the study, for example, an urban planning investigation.
Table 14.1 summarizes the different methodical aspects used in soundscape
investigations. As a measurement method, soundwalks appear to be suitable for exploring
urban areas through the minds of local experts and thus opening a field of data for
triangulation (Schulte-Fortkamp 2013).
Interviews
Interviews are most important for investigating personal and social soundscapes. In most
cases, so-called open interviews are conducted. The nature of the soundscapes can be
determined effectively by examining the detailed results of open interviews, particularly
when these interviews focus on the expertise of people who are familiar with the
Table 14.1 Methodical Aspects of a Soundwalk Method

• Aspects • Condition
• Acoustic measurements • Monaural-binaural
• Duration
• Measurement position (stationary, mobile)
• Way of collecting responses • Interview type (open, structured, semi-structured)
• Ratings on scales
• Sampling of participants and sample size • Visitors vs locals
• Ad hoc sample, random sample, systematic sampleNumber of participants
• Duration of soundwalk • Snapshot vs ‘long-term’ measurement interval
• Instruction • Tasks (level of attention directed towards sounds, emphasis on multimodality, etc.)
• Collection of visual information • Pictures, videos
terrain under study. According to Betina Hollstein, the strong influence of sociocultural
backgrounds on perception requires a heterogeneous field of research for measuring
soundscape perception:
This includes different forms of observation, interviewing techniques with a low level of
standardization (such as open-ended, unstructured interviews, partially or semi-structured
interviews, guided or narrative interviews), and the collection of documents or archival
records (e.g., from libraries or public repositories). Despite their differences, such approaches
all share common ground, as advocates of the ‘interpretive paradigm’ agree on certain
ideas about the nature of social reality. Social reality is always a ‘meaningful’ reality, and by
representing meaning, it refers to a context of action in which actors organize actions.
(Hollstein 2011)
Therefore, even though fully structured interviews can be easily conducted, they should
only be an addition to open interviews in much the same way as physical data. The second
part of the soundscape series, ISO/TS 12913–2, provides a guideline for conducting open
interviews.
An established text analysis technique is needed to analyse the data gathering in open
interviews. A technique such as Grounded Theory2 allows the analysis of data through
a systematic process and resists possible criticism from strict advocates of quantitative
research (Fiebig and Schulte-Fortkamp 2004). In one recent applied example, Fangfang Liu
and Jian Kang (2016) used a multistep analysis technique based on Grounded Theory to
study factors that affect individuals’ preferences and understanding of urban soundscape
based on fifty-three in-depth interviews. Using Grounded Theory for analysing interview
data also enables the development of integrative diagrams where moderating factors are
identified and integrated into a location-related evaluation model (Schulte-Fortkamp and
Fiebig 2006).
Interview data allows an exploration of the interviewees’ reality and the individual
construction of the environment implicitly related to social contexts. Advocates of open
interview methods claim that, in contrast to questionnaires, they can be performed
without the need for detailed research hypotheses. Moreover, such data shines a light on
the knowledge of involved experts and therefore provides needed information for the
project, for example for succeeding in the planning phases.
The benefit of soundwalks: An example of

a soundwalk study
The soundwalk method is a popular participatory method of obtaining human sensations
and responses to a sonic environment (ISO/TS 12913–2 2018). In order to underline the
explanatory power and reliability of in-situ assessments collected by the soundwalk method,
soundwalks performed in Aachen (Germany) and their respective results are discussed in
the following section. Predefined assessment sites were visited and evaluated by means of
different tools and questionnaires. At the same time, psychoacoustic measurements were
taken to link the in-situ assessments to the properties of the acoustic environments. The
advantage of these soundwalk measurements was that, by means of the same measurement
procedure, the sites investigated through soundwalking were visited several times over
several years, allowing for the consideration of basic quality criteria of empirical research
such as reliability. The repeated soundwalks were performed within the framework of
the COST Action TD 0804 over the course of several years. The results were analysed
using quantitative as well as qualitative analysis methods. The major question was whether
specific sites can elicit comparable feelings and emotions over years while the visitors spent
only a few minutes there.
Methods
Participants
In total fifty-seven participants (thirty-seven male, twenty female) took part in the
repeated measurements. The soundwalk participants were young researchers taking
part in soundscape seminars and could be considered to be non-familiar with the
investigated sites.
Stimuli
Eight sites in Aachen were visited and evaluated by soundwalk group sizes ranging from
four to nine participants. In total, eight soundwalks were conducted, taking place in 2010,
2011, 2012, and 2015, two per year. The sites were deliberately selected with respect to
diversity and representativeness (Fiebig 2015a) and included an urban park and central
square, among others. Four groups walked from site 1 to site 8, and four groups walked
from site 8 to 1.
Procedure
The participants walked together with the moderator. After arriving at a study location,
the moderator indicated the direction to face and the start of the active listening period
to be considered for assessment. The participants were requested to listen in silence for
the indicated period and to use all of their senses to experience the respective sites. After
3 minutes of silent listening to each site the participants provided assessments on an
evaluation paper sheet. The participants rated their experience on a provided five-point
analogue rating scale with respect to ‘loudness’ (How loud is it here?) and ‘unpleasantness’
(How unpleasant is it here?), ranging from ‘not at all’ to ‘extremely’. Moreover, the
participants could note any thoughts and feelings running through their mind after the
listening period.
The soundwalk moderator performed psychoacoustic measurements with a binaural
measurement system in order to record the environmental noise.
Results
The data gained was then subjected to analysis. Figures 14.4 and 14.5 display the in-situ
assessments of loudness and unpleasantness in terms of average values and the 95 per cent
confidence intervals for each year. The relatively large confidence intervals are due to the
relatively small samples. Only rarely statistically significant differences occur between the
years (Fiebig and Herweg 2017). At site 6, a significantly different assessment occurred in
2012 due to a construction site and its noise located nearby.
When comparing the assessments of a particular site judged by different groups over the
years, the majority of ratings by the groups were in fact quite similar; it seems as if the sound
tended to evoke similar perceptions and assessments through time. When comparing the
assessments of the different sites, statistically significant differences between the sites were
observed for both loudness and unpleasantness.
Statistically significant differences were observed when examining the influence of the
visiting order to the different study locations. In particular, the first and last site of the
soundwalk route were judged differently in the scaling task. This observation illuminates
the role that a frame of reference or previous experience plays for participants, particularly
at the beginning of the study because there is no predecessor to relate one’s judgement to.
Regarding the criterion unpleasantness, site 1 was judged as less unpleasant (p<0.05) at
the first visit compared to the ratings provided at the end of the soundwalk, whereas site
8 was assessed as more unpleasant (p<0.05) by the end of the soundwalk compared to the
ratings of the groups starting at site 8. The same tendencies were observed for the loudness
judgements. It must be mentioned that the different groups did not listen to exactly the
same sounds, which means that the observed differences between the groups starting at
different sites cannot be fully attributed to the factor of order alone.
Figure 14.6 illustrates the relationship between loudness values determined by
means of ISO 532–1 (2017) (binaural channels averaged) and the LAeq3 with the judged
Figure 14.4 Assessments of loudness of eight sites repeatedly visited by different
soundwalk groups over several years. Arithmetic mean values and 95 per cent
confidence intervals are shown.
Figure 14.5 Assessments of unpleasantness of eight sites repeatedly visited by

different soundwalk groups over several years. Arithmetic mean values and 95 per cent
confidence intervals are shown.
Figure 14.6 Unpleasantness group judgements over measured loudness values

according to ISO 532–1 (left) and over LAeq-values in dB(A) (right).
unpleasantness (respective means of the soundwalk groups). The correlation coefficient

clearly decreases compared to the prediction of loudness judgements when hedonic
judgements (unpleasantness) are considered, which cannot be predicted by the magnitude
of sound (loudness) alone. Psychoacoustic loudness performs better in predicting the in-
situ unpleasantness data than the LAeq. If all single judgements of the unpleasantness data
are considered, the explained variance by the loudness according to ISO 532–1 drops
further down to 42 per cent, resembling the amount of explained variance in classical
annoyance surveys (Guski 1999).
Discussion and conclusion

The results of the repeated soundwalks underline the general level of reliability of
soundscape investigations performed in-situ under non-laboratory conditions. Since
soundscape measurements take place in-situ in uncontrolled conditions and a soundscape
experiment (e.g. a soundwalk) cannot be replicated in a strict sense to study objectivity
or reliability aspects, the repeatability of results cannot be taken for granted. Altogether,
the results of the presented repeated soundwalks suggest a reasonable reliability. It was
observed that the soundscape assessments of the considered sites converge over the years
and that different groups of participants provided mostly similar assessments (Fiebig and
Herweg 2017). Detailed investigations on the basis of the acoustic measurements and the
assessments showed a high level of reliability (Fiebig 2016). However, it should be noted
that certain sites caused more variance in the assessment data over the different soundwalk
measurements and were more unstable acoustically. Thus, the level of reliability and
validity of soundwalk measurements cannot be universally defined but depend on the
nature of the investigated site. As the order of the visited sites played a role, a variation of
the order is recommended (Brambilla et al. 2017).
Future prospects
Nowadays, soundscape research has a rich research tradition and can provide tools to
enhance the acoustic quality of an area. There is common consent that the perception and
assessment of acoustic environments is not based on the loudness level alone, but also on
the meaning of the sound and whether sounds act as carriers of information (Schulte-
Fortkamp and Fiebig 2016). Still, solutions must be found for data collection methods
and for identifying which kind of analysis is the best for soundscape data. Frequently
researchers have sought correlations between perceptual and physical data to achieve
a paradigm shift and achieve better results regarding people’s needs for a good acoustic
environment. But what kind of procedures will be needed when it comes to developing
predictive models relevant for soundscape planning and design (Kang et al. 2016)? It
is well known that ‘any human action, decision making, choice, and prediction about
the future is motivated by meaning’ (Fiebig 2015b). This leaves us with two big steps to
take in the near future: first, guaranteeing the use of platforms that will be known and
available for participation, and second, improving the necessity for big data analyses.
It will be important to use the soundscape approach based on the ISO standard to
ensure that new findings related to any acoustic environment lead to a contextualized,
common understanding of the assessment and are based on the participatory expertise
of stakeholders.
Notes
1. Considering the majority of soundscape publications, type I studies are performed most.
So far studies on higher type levels rarely have been done, preventing generalizations at a
group level (Lercher and Schulte-Fortkamp 2013).
2. Grounded Theory is a socio-scientific analysis method with specific systematic
procedures often applied to textual analysis (Strauss 1990). It is necessary to enhance the
level of abstraction to improve its generalizability without any interpretation. The text
must be categorized and conceptualized despite needing to look for simple paraphrases
because of their lack of analytical depth. Core categories must be discovered, which then
detect and explain ties and dependencies of different categories. Tentative integrative
diagrams must be prepared to explore missing interfaces and inadequate knowledge
about the links between the identified categories and concepts. The analysis process
of coding and developing diagrams is continued until the model is saturated, i.e. new
categories or concepts could not be detected in spite of coding new material (Fiebig and
Schulte-Fortkamp 2004).
3. LAeq is an A-weighted equivalent continuous sound pressure level, which means that the
sound pressure level is averaged over time. The LAeq metric is usually applied in all kinds
of noise regulations.
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15
Sonic Methodologies of Sound
Salomé Voegelin
THE TAPERECORDERS are on the floor in front of the TV, their counters turning from one
to two. It is four hours later. ‘We found the tapes,’ Marcia told Joan when they went to see
her after supper. ‘We are going to play them as soon as we get back. We are going to have a
concert.’ Marcia claims that Joan clicked her tongue at that. Nobody else heard, but they are
all feeling encouraged.
—Barbara Gowdy (1997: 245)
The scope of this chapter as it is indicated by the title might seem self-evident. The
expectation being that sound practices and studies by necessity and logic realize themselves
through sonic methodologies; that their method of investigation, doing, and interpretation
refer themselves to sonic vocabularies and theoretical tools that draw on sonic initiatives
and experiences. However, this impression soon gives way to a different insight which
shows that sonic practices, from music to audiology, more often than not do not trust their
own ‘immaterial’ base, but seek a visual framework and language to develop their tools of
investigation and interpretation in order to confer reliability, repeatability, and consensus.
From an emphasis on the visual score, maps, and spectograms to the philosophical
integration of the heard into visual epistemologies, sound cannot take for granted that its
material, experience, and expression will be studied and discussed on its own terms. Instead it
has to accept that due to historical cultural and disciplinary boundaries and expectations
it is the knowledge and thinking of a visual logic that will more often than not frame what
it does.1 This chapter engages in this apparent contradiction and investigates the scope of a
sonic understanding of sound: making suggestions about what such a methodology might
be and how it might contribute to a current scheme of what we know and how we know it.
Therefore, this text deliberates the tendency to conceptualize and catalogue the sonic in
visual terms, and the propensity to ventriloquize sonic practices and sound with a visual
voice. Subsequently and in response it will look to sound art and its discourse to propose
a different approach and different thinking. In particular Annea Lockwood’s composition
Amazonia Dreaming (1987) will serve as the immaterial ground and practice-based
framework for the development of these suggestions.
The motivation for this writing lies not in a critique of the visual and visual methodologies,
however, but in the curiosity as to why theory and research eschew sound; an interest to
promote its scope; and an intrigue with where the sonic, taken as a legitimate, reliable, and
shareable methodology might take us in our understanding of sound and the world heard.
What new knowledge we might find, and how we might be able to question the capacity
and partiality of our knowledge base by developing tools from the ephemeral itself.
Grasping the ephemeral

‘We are all in it,’ Doris whispers amazed. She has picked out Gordon saying orange and
peanuts, Sonja saying nostrils, father and jeepers. Gordon has heard nostrils and jeepers.
Peanuts, to him was penis but he instantly decided it must be Venus. He is concentrating
on the second tape, which is playing a short passage of murmured words whose rhythm is
syncopated to the ‘Mister Sandman’ rhythm.
(Gowdy 1997: 246)
The recent turn towards sound in art, theory, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology,
etc., as well as in technology and science fields, has developed on at least two parallel
tracks. These tracks are split by methodological and ideological distinctions, between
those who seek to understand sound on its own terms, to reach the knowledge of its
invisible flow, and those who accommodate sound within conventional (visual) knowledge
frames. Those, in other words, that pursue an epistemological assimilation of the invisible
into the seen, and those that try to grasp sound despite and against the visual bias and
vocabularies. Examples of this distinction are most clearly articulated between theorists
who follow a non-cochlear/conceptual path for sound studies or who seek to establish
an auditory cultural studies within which sonic artefacts, occurrences, and their contexts
and technologies are subject to a cultural rather than a material study (for example, Seth
Kim-Cohen, Jonathan Sterne, Michael Bull) and those whose theories and ideas pertain to
listening and hearing the material itself, in relation to its virtual flow or its affective power
(for example, Christoph Cox, Marie Thompson, Steven Goodman). However, in a possibly
involuntary and maybe unavoidable confliction these different paths cross and embrace
each other on the pinhead of theory, which ultimately brings their aim level, because as
Michael Eng reminds us: this ‘desire for sound is still a theoretical desire – a desire of and
for Theory’ (Eng 2017: 317). And as Adriana Cavarero points out, theory is logocentric.
Therefore, theory’s access to sound is always a takeover of its sounding, an assimilation of
ungraspable noise into devocalized lexical thought. It is a visual and mute pursuit: ‘Freed
from the acoustic materiality of speech, this pure semantic – which is the privileged object
of theoria – occupies the place of origin and rules over the phonetic’ (Cavarero 2005: 57).
Theory then, even of the sonic, promotes a visual and mute thinking of the world. In its
hold things are ‘this’ or ‘that’, visible and boundaried, framed by referents and distance,
rather than sounding speechlessly their invisible and indivisible in-between. Nobody and
nothing finds a voice in theory but theory, as it reverberates with its own visuocentric
origin and scope. Therefore it is not in the battle between the non-cochlear-conceptual
and the material-affective-ontological, nor in the establishment of one certain scholarly
Sonic Methodologies of Sound 271
territory for the study of sound that the sonic will find its methodology. Rather, it is in their
mobile in-between and on the fluid invisible terrain of what their approaches reveal about
theory, theoretical thinking, its scope, hierarchy, and authorship that a sonic methodology
of sound might find its attitude and where it might practice its own rhythm.
A focus on sound is a focus on the unseen and mobile in-between of things. It stages
the world and thought, history and geography as an indivisible volume. This volume is not
a measure of decibels but the viscosity of an expanding and connecting sphere: a quasi-
aquatic cosmos. In this viscous sphere space and place are not designed by boundaries
and differences, walls and doors, but as an indivisible expanse in which we live together as
interbeings: as beings with and of each other and other things, whose meaning and sense
derive from this lived co-laboration2 and whose investigative methodology has to co-habit
this cosmos.3
In sound the world is not made of ‘this’ or ‘that’, but is a dimensionality in which things
inter-are and where the practice of contingent connecting rather than the shape of separate
objects, things, and subjects grants access to knowledge. In this invisible dimension theory
is not this or that either, but inter-is as a practice of connecting and expanding what are
seemingly oppositional stances from their mobile in-between and in its indivisible sphere
in whose viscosity their thoughts co-laborate.
Therefore it is not about the difference between those that seek to write a history or
geography of the world in which sound provides new insights and serves as an additional
signifier to a visual event or location, and those that seek the (affective-) material of the
world to theorize its virtual condition. Instead, it is through the practice of the indivisible
volume of sound as a sonic possible world that we reach beyond locations on a map or dates
in a chronology, and that we get further than an epistemology of the invisible or an ontology
for a materialist articulation of the unseen. In this way we step into the dark simultaneity of
interactions and interagencies of all there is; into the world’s invisible dimensionality, where
history and geography as well as philosophy are the doing and digging of practical thought
that yields unlived times and unknown lands4: the seemingly impossible possibilities of
that which we did not think we could think, include, consider, do, or talk about because it
cannot be theorized as ‘this’ or ‘that’, but moves unseen in-between.
An issue in this task of considering a sonic methodology of sound is then not only
sound itself but the practical engagement its indivisible invisibility encourages us into: to
practice a perceptual attitude and sensibility that works on the viscous interbeing of the
ungraspable prior to its organization, without evoking mysticism and without grasping
it, but by participating in its co-production. Sound as perceptual attitude and sensibility
demands a creative movement towards the world. And its invisible vagueness asks that we
strain towards what might be left unheard even, where Penis might mean Venus, and where
the patriarchal referent gets swallowed between nostrils and jeepers.
What is needed is a practical methodology that defies the quietism of theory, and that
as a practice of the unseen and mobile in-between – singing, dancing, gardening, and
digging – might achieve a generative sense of things. However, a sonic methodology
is not a theory as access to, but is access as possibility of. Therefore, the knowledge
generated in this practice does not grant access to a sonic world as a certain place, it
does not grasp its territory but opens the possibility for vague, mobile, and contingent
understandings that challenge the privilege and certainty of existing concepts and
categories of the real.
According to Rosi Braidotti this uncertain activity happens at the margins: ‘the center is
void; all the action is on the margins’ (Braidotti 2011b: 42). The margins are where listening
becomes a generative field, and where gardening rather than theory produces the reality of
a lived world.5 From these outskirts the actual looks like a construct of power and authority
rather than a lived actuality. And even though I have still to gain a voice, and my singing
and dancing at the margins remains as yet without impact, at least the overwhelming
muteness at the centre has lost its persuasion, and has revealed itself as a naturalized rather
than a natural position.
We can try such a sonic sight by squinting our eyes and refocusing the now vague
outline of things from the viscosity of their mobile in-between. In this way we gain a sonic
sensibility and concept that starts from our interbeing with things and that does not seek
distance or absence to get a clear view, but practices a generative doing and closeness to
understand what might be there.
In terms of critical thought, ‘squinting’ provides knowledge that is not based on the
distance of a (mathematical) new materialist sense: that does not rely on the absolute
truth of the unthought and of calculability, or on a virtual flow, and that does not seek to
categorize and structure from the hyper-invisible centre of a visuocentric logic.6 Instead,
it acts from fluid margins with the responsibility to hear difference without distance in
what so far remained inaudible because unrepresentable, without simply representing
it but by questioning the status and logic of representation and practising another tune:
tuning in to the reach and tools of logocentric knowledge, representation and theory, and
opening it, through the creative diffraction of its knowledge base, to reveal what remains
without impact and consequence.7 In this respect it is acknowledged, with Jonathan
Sterne, that there is no pure hearing and listening that could achieve and take account of
a sonic methodology of sound: ‘Both listening and technology are prior to hearing and
investigating the scene of audibility always reveals power relations that subtend its most
basic sonic possibilities’ (Sterne 2015: 72).
Rather than taking this cultural and technological always and already of aural (and
incidentally also visual) perception as a stumbling block to a sonic methodology of sound,
it is exactly because sound is the invisible site of power played out in-between people and
things that it compels a critical approach from its own voice. And it is because the auditory
is conventionally reached and communicated through technology, scores, spectrograms,
and maps, made into a state of quantifiable objectivity, that a sonic methodology is needed
to hear and address the mediation and make ‘visible’ and ‘sensible’ the power relations that
span its possibilities. In this way what remains impossible because ephemeral, indivisible,
and incalculable, outside the dominant flow, can enter scientific discourse and practice and
show us an expanded possibility of the actual.8
The access to this impossible lies not in the spectrogram or the score, it does not lie in
theory, neither structuralist or materialist, but in the activities on the margins and in sound
art, as a practice that owes nothing to knowledge and delivers so much in relation to how
we could understand the world.
The knowledge of sound art

What is the voice saying? He is about to get up and fiddle with the dials when the voice says
distinctly and at such a high volume that it sounds shouted – ‘YOU CAN KEEP A SECRET,
CAN’T YOU?’
(Gowdy 1997: 246)
Jean-Luc Nancy’s often quoted question about the secret that is at stake when we truly listen,
when we focus on the sonority rather than the message of a sound, excites possibilities
for a practice that can have words without erasing what it talks about; that can keep a
secret while telling it (Nancy 2007: 5). This has to be a language that points at its own
limits and deformities, that practices a ‘cut in the un-sensed [in-sensée]’, where we do
not hear the source as a quasi-visual and complete appearance or sign but hear the scars
and intersections that make a fragile form: ‘A friction, the pinch or grate of something
produced in the throat, a borborygmus, a crackle, a stridency, where a weighty, murmuring
matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance’ (27).What we hear in such a
listening is our deviance from norms and expectations, our solitude and our desire for
intimacy and sharing, our relationship to other humans and nonhumans, and our failure
to be accurate and objective. Listening at the cut in the unsensed is anti-foundational, in
limbo, unreliable, and thus apparently it has to be deformed if it is to enter into scientific
discourse: represented as scores, spectrographs, according to a referent and grasped by
theory, which provide an objective ear and signal our ‘dis-ability’ in the face of their clear
and communicable intelligence. However, as a practical knowledge the indivisible breath
of murmuring matter describes another openness to meaning, where our dis-ability is our
scope for plural stories, for the inclusion of the fantastical, dreams, and impossibilities into
the register of the real. It offers the possibility of a practical sense that reveals itself in the
in-between, in the viscosity of an indivisible world, where the spectrogram inhabits the
same volume as my formless ears and the two can negotiate and generate a terrain between
actuality, possibility and the apparently impossible.
Sound art undertakes this negotiation. It tells a secret while keeping it. It pursues a
practical knowledge that enrols scores, drawings, photographs, texts, as well as maps,
instrumentation, temporality, etc. as elements of its methodology without insisting on
their scientific solidity or unambiguous communication. In the context of the audible work
these maps and scores do not turn into visual objects but keep an invisible shape. Mobile
and elastic, they bend into possibilities of what they could be. And we too can remain
formless in its listening, certain of our uncertainty, participating in the interbeing of ears,
body, culture, technology language, and sense.
Experimenting with a borrowed snare drum, I became aware of sonorities available from
almost every part of the instrument – a much wider range than I’d associated with it
previously. They suggested delicacy, close focus, a sensual world reminiscent of certain vocal
sounds, thus, a duet for hands and voice. Using a plastic jar lid, chopsticks, marbles and
various mallets, the player sounds every part of the instrument in a variety of ways without
using any of the traditional gestures; the snares are only engaged at the end.
(Lockwood 2017)
Annea Lockwood’s composition Amazonia Dreaming from 1987 is one such engagement
with the knowledge of secrets. The voice on her recording does not say anything but is in
duet with other things: ‘plastic jar lid, chopsticks, marbles and various mallets’. They inter-
are and co-laborate on the production of an event that is not on a score or a timeline but
between things and subjects as things, performing the instrument without tradition but
in its sonority. The work’s sonic methodology is one of exploration and experimentation.
It does not focus on the voice or the instruments in their separate purpose and virtuosity,
but on what they propose to be. And in the viscous space of sound they perform their
relationship as a contingent knowledge of what it is they suggest.
Listening, I can participate in this experimentation. I can explore the invisible space
between myself and the record player, its turning motion, the slight crackle, where
‘murmuring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance’ (Nancy 2007:
27). Where nothing is by itself but everything is known through its interbeing: the being
of myself in this room of sound as a volume of things together, human and nonhuman,
whose sense of things is contingent: the rhythm of their interaction is a co-laboration that
creates the reality of the moment as an interactuality. This listening is not an uncritical
indulgence in a solipsistic trance. Instead it is a critical and social listening, aware of the
power relations revealed by audibility and conscious of my interbeing in its volume and
thus of my accountability to what I hear and what I ignore. However, this critical attitude
does not mute the heard, it does not replace hearing with a referent neither musical nor
linguistic. I do not think about it in theoretical terms but remain together with it, part of
its rhythm and viscosity, and glean a sense of things from this interactuality.
The piece sounds rhythms from touching, from the friction of the in-between and the
grating movement of things against each other. Body and instrument are produced not as
this or that but in their interbeing as a being with and of each other. Furthermore, they
do not perform the centre of their discipline and actuality, understood as conventional
instrumentation or according to linguistic meaning, but as marginal activities of the voice
and the instrument as sound, playing their formless form. Their movements do not make
music but experiment with the vagueness of being sound without a referent. They expand
what might be heard through their ‘dis-ability’ in view of expectations of virtuosity and
the recognizable, providing a practical sense and demanding a practical engagement and
attitude to the possibilities opened in their unkept sonority.
I get to this understanding of the work by performing its movement: hearing the
potential of friction, touching, and the grating of a circular turn in the voluminous sphere
of my listening, and in the tiger’s eyes pictured on the album cover. In sound, its eyes as well
as the image of the Amazon rainforest on the other side cease to be representations and
become part of the heard attaining a sonic sensibility and a blurred focus. They are parts
but not components of the whole. The composition is not a Gesamtkunstwerk, the album
not a concept album. The voice, the chopsticks, the snare drum, my body, the record player,
the tiger’s eyes and the Amazonian trees are autonomous elements of the sound artwork
that agitate the invisible viscosity of the in-between and open the work’s critical audibility
to practical experimentation: to digging, dancing, singing, and gardening.
These autonomous elements move on the margins without unifying into one whole.
Instead they stick out, open and break through what a whole might be. And so listening
I do not sit in a homogenous room defined by walls, ceilings, doors, and windows,
but in the volume of the work and the architecture of my location as a heterogeneous
space and possible world of complex and even contradictory interaction and interbeing.
Here reality is not centred but marginal; the contingent interactuality of what there
is: an experimentation of the real that has no reference and whose theorization would
render it mute, but whose practice resounds with the possibilities of an unseen and
unmapped world.
It is in narrating this experimentation rather than theorizing it that I reach the
knowledge of the work as its continuation. I have to become a storyteller to retain the
ambiguity and the elasticity the work produces, and to participate in rather than grasp
what the work does. This storytelling is not literature, it does not produce the fiction of
parallel worlds. Literary worlds are created from elements of the primary world they relate
to, but they always remain autonomous from the actual world and its ontology, its causes
and consequences: ‘fictional worlds are based on a logic of parallelism that guarantees
their autonomy in relation to the actual world’ (Ronen 1994: 8) and that guarantees the
autonomy of the actual world in relation to fictional worlds. They remain a proposition
rather than an action, and while they can fictionally thematize and discuss real events, their
interests and ideologies, they are unable to intervene in their construction.
By contrast, the telling of a sonic story is the telling of sonic possible worlds that do
not remain autonomous from the actual world, merely a parallel fiction, but that show
the limits of its concepts and categories, and that augment its thinking and knowledge
by generating and gesturing towards an invisible real. Sonic fictions are not limited to an
actual ontology or to the ontology of literary worlds, but produce the non-ontology of an
unseen world as a sonic science fiction that yields the insight of unseen lands as unknown
lands that once heard can become part of our present.
To narrate these sonic science fictions and make their knowledge count, we might
use Luce Irigaray’s gesture-words and ‘appeal to language as a path towards sharing the
mystery of the other rather than mute its voice’ (Irigaray 2001: 20). Through her notion
of words as caress, language regains the physical, its resonance on the body, and therefore
also its sound: ‘This touching upon needs attentiveness to the sensible qualities of speech, to
voice tone, to the modulation and rhythm of discourse, to the semantic and phonic choice
of words’ (Irigaray 1996: 125, emphasis in the original). Such gesture-words produce,
through their reverberation on the body and on things, the imagination and experience of
the invisible volume of sound. And from within this volume they do not act as descriptive
references but produce the reality of the indivisible interactuality of interbeing bodies,
things, sounds, and voices.
To amplify these gestures we might sing scholarly texts and revocalize what is theorized
already, re-sounding mute categorizations and realities to their own rhythm. We might
revocalize history, geography, and philosophy by adding our own voice tone into
the volume of concepts and ideas that are its theorizations. Singing ‘a short passage of
murmured words whose rhythm is syncopated to the “Mister Sandman” rhythm’ (Gowdy
1997: 246) we could create an interactuality that would not sound as inferior to the clarity
of the spectrogram, theory, or the score, but signal the plural scope of our dis-ability to
render perfectly. Since, our dis-ability to produce a communicative intelligence enables
the possibility for the creative ‘actualization of multiple ecologies of belonging’ (Braidotti
2011b: 41) and of multiple ecologies of perception and production.
A sonic methodology of sound is thus not a theory but a plural practice of touching
and singing: the practice of writing as a making of gestures that sound the contact between
theory, work, and experience in an indivisible sphere; and the practice of sounding the
rhythm and tone rather than the outline of the work, as a creative actualization of the
composition. In this way sound, the composition, is not heard as a sum of components,
grasped by theory, but as autonomous elements continued in words and in song that show
fissures, contradictions, and disagreement, where things keep on sticking out, denying
a certain shape but produce a work nevertheless. Thus we could promote as a sonic
methodology of sound the creative movement of the voice and of words, understood as
a diffractive mechanism that hears differences without making them and includes secrets
without divulging them.
Instead of hoping we will come to a sonic understanding of the world by coercing
listening and hearing into (visual/logocentric) theory we could turn to the work of Irigaray,
Barad, and Braidotti, in its emphasis on gesture-words, diffraction, and creativity, to
find tools to approach the invisible and for it to gain its own voice. And we could enrol
literature and song in Cavarero’s call for the revocalization of theory to secure a different
voice for the heard from the actual fictions of sonic possible worlds. I am thinking here
particularly of Barbara Gowdy’s writing, whose book Mister Sandman draws from the
invisible, the fantastical, and the imaginary the possibility of a different knowledge, and
which accompanies and narrates this essay through citation. And I am also thinking of
Steven Feld whose anthropological narrations produce a knowing as acoustemology: as
‘the experience and agency of listening (hi)stories, understood as relational and contingent,
situated and reflexive’ (Feld quoted in Novak and Sakakeeny 2015: 15).9
Accessing all the stories

However fruitful and exciting both singing and writing fiction could be in bringing an
artistic and auditory imagination to knowledge and to promote a sound studies based on
sonic methodologies of sound I don’t know if they will entirely succeed. I am not sure that
they will be accepted into discourse to solve the contradiction this chapter started with: the
expectation that sonic phenomena and practices are investigated via sonic methodologies,
when in fact more often than not they are approached and interpreted within visual
thinking, languages, and referents.
The problem is that they are both and each easily dismissed as pertaining to the mythical,
the feminine; to a pre-enlightenment fantasy of the non-representational that defies
scientific logic and a calculable world, extravagant in its refusal of consensus and repetition;
or that they are plain goofy.10 Sound, a sonic sensibility, is the sorceress in the room of
masculine, mute thinking, and the elephant in the footnote of academic discourse. As long
as we can grasp the sonic with theory, graphs, notations, and frequencies that are the bricks
of a conventional knowledge base which stay mute themselves while categorizing what
sounds; and as long as we achieve academic expectations of clarity and communicability,

we can and will ignore sound’s unwieldy power to think things differently. But in doing
so we also ignore its plural songs and what Doreen Massey terms the ‘simultaneity of
stories-so-far’ (Massey 2005: 9–10) that resonate within its knowledge. In other words, by
dismissing the unrepeatable vagueness of sound from the register of scholarly discussion,
we not only ignore its knowledge but also its authorships and contexts. And by failing to
engage in its indivisibility and insisting on the theorization of ‘this’ or ‘that’, we do not reach
its possibility, which is not its theorization but the access to different ways things can be
thought: since the point is not to read sonic fictions, in the process of which they might
become theory, but to write them and to sing them.
Once a sonic methodology of sound acquires, from the ambiguity of sound art, from
caresses, gesture-words, and the contingency of singing scholarly texts, a methodology that
can persuade in its invisible formlessness, we are offered the secret of a different sense. This
is a sense that does not need to compete with the visual lexicon and register, but can make
it move to reveal the cut at the unsensed from where a plurality of senses might emerge.
At this cut the voices of those that so far have not been heard might become audible.
Disciplines and historical givens might open into the indivisible sphere of a sonic
sensibility and borders might be diffracted to hear with Barad not difference but ‘inventive
provocations’ that illuminate ‘the indefinite nature of boundaries’: the lack of clear lines
and outlines that allows disciplines and territories to be read through one another, and
whose indivisibility invites a reimagination of their crossovers and interbeing (Barad 2003:
80). And to sense with Braidotti the need for a ‘transdisciplinary approach that cuts across
established methods and conventions of many disciplines’ (Braidotti 2011a: 7) and that,
as I would like to suggest, produces the continuity, co-laboration, and tuning of a cosmic
world, where the audible and the unheard can find an ear and a methodology of their own
expression. Because, if we sing together and at the same time and there is only our own
echo we know that we have to catch our breath and make space for another sound to come
back to us.
In unison the two tapes click off their reels. ‘That’s the end of side one,’ Gordon says, slapping
his knees and coming to his feet. He is feeling fine now. More than fine – fired up. As far as he
is concerned, Joan’s rhythmic variations are as sophisticated as anything he ever heard on a
David Rayne recording. ‘This is extraordinary,’ he says as he turns the tapes over. ‘Disquieting
in places, there’s no question about that. But once you accept that her intention is to provoke
there are levels within levels.’
(Gowdy 1997: 251)
Notes
1. The notion of the visual in this context does not stand for what can be seen but how
we look: how our cultural engagement in the world as a place to be seen and to be
written about is constructed through a historical and geographical viscuocentrism
and a conceptual logic that holds investments and consequences on what we take as
real, truthful, and reliable, and that restricts how else we might think of the world and
ourselves. The aim is not to simply critique the dominance of the visual and its impact
on scholarly enquiries of sound, however, but ultimately via a sonic methodology to
augment and pluralize its reality and values.
2. I deliberately replace the expected word collaboration with the word co-laboration to
emphasize the experimental, laboratory, nature of this collective production as well as
its transdisciplinary approach. This is not a collaborative effort towards a greater aim or
outcome, but a co-laborative exploration of things together.
3. ‘To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with
every other thing. This sheet of paper is because everything else is’ (Nhat Hanh 2012:
57). While not adhering to the Buddhist context of Thich Nhat Hanh’s philosophy,
his notion of interbeing, developed in relation to sound and listening, is a useful term
to acknowledge the sociality of a sonic consciousness and thinking and to pursue its
consequences and impact into the potential of a sonic methodology of sound.
4. I am borrowing the expression of unknown lands from Nigel Thrift who in his essay
‘Performance and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands’ promotes the
performance of geography to challenge its abstract knowledge, to aid the articulation of a
geography of the unknown, and to create a different territoriality and a different sense of
boundaries and participation.
5. Braidotti encourages ‘a sort of intellectual landscape gardening’ (Braidotti 2011b: 46)
of an embodied mind as a way to draw a shifting landscape. Pursuing her thoughts into
sound, the soundscape and sonic atmosphere, we need an actual gardening, digging, and
shifting of earth to revocalize and rephysicalize theory.
6. With the notion of a hyper-invisible centre, and hyper-invisibility in general, I am
referring to the norms and conventions at the centre of our sociocultural lives, which,
while ideologically and culturally constructed, are so omnipresent and accepted as
to have become entirely invisible. They present a naturalized reality that pretends a
convenient actuality that is hyper-invisible: its construction and the investments and
norms embedded therein are unseen and invisible while its form and the responses and
attitudes it demands present the only visibility possible.
7. I borrow the term diffraction from Karen Barad, who via Donna Haraway and quantum
physics, proposes the practice of reading the world diffractively rather than reflectively:
as a reading of difference and detail rather than a looking for sameness and outlines. In
this sense, diffraction is a performative reading of the world from its interactions and
interferences. It is a practice rather than a theory that allows us to see the world as a
heterogeneous entanglement of plural patterns (Barad 2003: 803).
8. At this point Sterne asks: ‘What would sound studies become if we started without the
automatic assumptions that we have direct, full access to our own hearing, or through
our hearing, direct access to the sonic world?’ (Sterne 2015: 74). He suggests that such
a project is a little difficult to imagine. In response, I would like to suggest that it is not
particularly difficult to imagine at all, but that it might not realize itself through theory
and a theoretical thinking alone. Since theory, as mute thinking and a logocentric pursuit,
while fulfilling the demands of academic clarity as the expectations of a (seemingly)
transparent exchange and the aim of actual knowledge, works along horizontal lines,
on points of reference, and thus confirms the possibility of universal access rather than
generating the access to possibility. In that sense it can point at the cultural construction
of listening: the impact of technology, gender, race, class, and historical contexts, etc. on
how we listen and what we hear, showing their influence on the perception of a current
and ‘immediate ear’. But it cannot include what misaligns with its line of articulation,
what has no words and falls outside its visual lexicon and history. Thus it cannot produce
‘another ear’. Instead it runs the danger of reaffirming the reality of the historical
prejudice, of what the audible subject and object of a sonic culture are in a theoretical
actuality, unable to hear and make count what is outside its comprehension in a practical
possibility. Sound’s immediacy does not produce imminent intelligibility but presents
misalignments, errors, and awkward perspectives in the between-of-things. Its ephemeral
instability and flow remind us of its interbeing: its being with and of other things. This
directness is material and sensorial rather than intellectual, and provides a material
sense, which is always just now, but not therefore natural, exempt from enculturation.
Since, while it is about the now, it is not about the instantaneous. Instead, the now of
sound is thick with cultural memory and prejudice. In practice these prejudices are not
deciphered and restaged in theoretical language, but are made to sound. We do not seek
to grasp this now in words that outlast its immediacy, but engage in the gap between
what sounds and what is heard, the misalignments that make language and interpretation
difficult, but that reveal a practical knowledge that reminds us to hear sounding as well
as listening. Consequently a cultural study that aims to explore the construction of what
appears immediate, directly accessible, might want to co-laborate with practical sonic
methodologies of sound, to include the outside of (theoretical) language. Not in order to
pretend a direct access but to engage in the inaccessible of culture through the contiguity
of its temporal and invisible materiality.
9. In anthropology and ethnography more than in philosophy, visual theory, and science
discourses, stories have a legitimate place amongst the methodological tools available,
particularly when they are backed up and accompanied with more quantifiable data
sets, or embedded in theoretical writing, to which they are a parallel and expanding
stream.There are also other fields that develop sonic fictions as a way to discuss sound
in its own audibility. Most notably Kodwo Eshun’s seminal More Brilliant than the Sun:
Adventures in Sonic Fiction, whose Afrofuturist science fiction critiques and expands how
music is written about and thus how it could be listened to.
10. ‘Goofy’ is the term used by Manuel De Landa when describing Irigaray’s work in a
conversation with Christoph Cox. In answer to a question about Gilles Deleuze and
his circle of friends, that is, like-minded philosophers, De Landa suggests that ‘Deleuze
was close to Foucault and Lyotard, but not to Derrida, and certainly not to Irigaray and
her goofy notion of a “masculinist epistemology”’ (De Landa quoted in Cox, Jaskey,
and Malik 2015: 87). This statement is not only embarrassing but also paradoxically
demonstrative of a masculinist viewpoint, deliciously unaware of the dominance of
its logic and the suppression of the other, of what is unfamiliar and unknown, while
searching for the unthought.
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Quartet Books.
Feld, Steven (2015). ‘Acoustemology’. In David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds), Keywords in
Gershon, Walter (2013). ‘Resounding Science: A Sonic Ethnography of an Urban Fifth
Grade Class Room’. Journal of Sonic Studies 4 (1) (May). Available online: https://www.
researchcatalogue.net/view/290395/290396 (accessed 13 July 2020).
Gowdy, Barbara (1997). Mister Sandman. London: Flamingo.
Irigaray, Luce (1996). I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History. London: Routledge.
Irigaray, Luce (2001). To Be Two. New York: Routledge.
Lockwood, Annea (2017).Tiger Balm/Amazonia Dreaming/Immersion. Black Truffle Records,
BT028, liner notes.
Massey, Doreen (2005). For Space. London: Sage.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007). Listening. New York: Fordham University Press.
Nhat Hanh, Thich (2012). The Pocket Thich Nhat Hanh. Boston, MA: Shambhala Pocket
Classics.
Ronen, Ruth (1994). Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Sterne, Jonathan (2015). ‘Hearing’. In David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny (eds), Keywords in
Thrift, Nigel (2007). ‘Performance and Performativity: A Geography of Unknown Lands’.
In James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein (eds), A Companion to
Cultural Geography, 121–136. London: Blackwell.
Part II
Sound Arts, Musics, Spaces
282
16
Introduction to Part II:
Art – Research – Method
Marcel Cobussen
In the beginning of the 1990s some intriguing and provocative music theatre performances
took place in The Hague and Amsterdam. The equally famous and notorious Dutch
composer, theatre maker, and theoretician Dick Raaijmakers (1930–2013) presented a new
series of works, called Intona (after Luigi Russolo’s sound or noise machines Intonarumuri
from the 1920s), in which the microphone played the leading role. In Intona the microphone
no longer performed a reproductive function but was treated as a music instrument or,
perhaps more accurately, as a patient: the audience witnessed its groaning, wailing, and
even its dissolution while attempting to resist the way the musicians treated it. Indeed,
Intona was created to investigate whether the microphone has a voice of its own, whether
it can talk, sing, play, or communicate, outside of our consent. In order to achieve this,
Raaijmakers searched for and experimented with several ‘rapprochement techniques’: the
microphones could be sawn, milled, drilled, wrenched, or swung around; they could be
burnt by gas burners, drenched, and cooked or boiled in water; they could be irradiated by
compressed air, so that their membranes cannot receive sound waves anymore; they could
be treated with chemicals so that they exploded or dissolved, etc. (Mulder and Brouwer
2007: 316–319).
Dick Raaijmakers was an artist, and he was a researcher. As an artist-researcher he
had a rather specific research method. Perhaps this method was (slightly) less systematic
than his colleague-researchers in medical labs investigating stem cells or trying to refine
cancer treatments. Raaijmakers’s research was certainly less teleological, less focused on
obtaining a predefined objective or clear-cut end result. Perhaps he was less disappointed
when things went wrong, simply because he could not predict what would be a good or,
conversely, an undesirable outcome; perhaps he was also more interested in the process
than in the final product, an emergent process unfolding outside of the confines of a
controlled experimental context.1 In the words of Tim Ingold, Raaijmakers’s method was
not ‘a set of regulated steps to be taken towards the realization of some predetermined end.
It is a means, rather, of carrying one and of being carried […], speculatively open to the
possibilities of the future’ (Ingold 2015: vii). Speculatively open to all the possible sonic
reactions of a tortured mic – I assume that Raaijmakers could have recognized his own
approach in this description; his systematicity emerged from flexibility and adaptation,
rather than from mechanistic predispositions.
However, like his fellow researchers in the academic world or at more commercial
research institutes, he was experimenting on the basis of existing knowledge, in this case
knowledge as to how microphones register vibrations in the air by way of their ultra-thin
diaphragms, their magnet, and their coil as well as the embodied cognition and situated
knowledge he had gathered as an artist. Intona was, therefore, not simply the result
of an artistic brainwave or the outcome of some genius’s aesthetic intuition; Intona was
(in)formed by Raaijmakers’s many years of working for the Philips NatLab, the research
institute of this multinational. However, his research was not undertaken only for the
benefit of art; it mostly took place in and through art. New art works were the outcomes
of his research, but artistic experimentation, improvisation, and responsiveness to the
materials he was working with were also the methods he used to develop new performances,
installations, and compositions.
The majority of the contributors to this second section of the Handbook are, like
Raaijmakers, artists and/or artist-researchers. Most of them do not have the opportunities
and means Raaijmakers had at his disposal in the laboratories or studios in which he
worked. Nevertheless, they also often deploy their artistic practice as a method, either to
add something to already existing knowledge, raise awareness, and make new experiences
possible or to intervene in, transform, and affect already existing situations, events, and
sensitivities.
Usually opening sentences such as these are followed by a brief overview of the content
of each chapter. I will refrain from following this convention here, nor will I attempt to
cluster or group the chapters other than having them all included in Part II of this book. The
main reason for deviating from the tradition is that summaries invariably do injustice to
the richness of a text. Besides, each reader can and should decide for her- or himself which
trajectories and threads to follow, in which order to read the contributions, and which
parts of the texts are the most interesting. Instead, this Introduction will concentrate on
and offer a critical reflection on the triangle art-research-method, while certainly deriving
inspiration from the chapters that follow.
(Sound) art and research

In her contribution to this volume, sound artist-researcher Yolande Harris starts by asking
if attentive listening can be a method to change us as human beings and our relationship
to the environment. What can we learn about our environment through sounds, and how
can they help to transform the way we affect and are affected by our milieu? Through her
performances, multimedia installations, workshops, soundwalks, field recordings, lectures,
and writings Harris attempts not only to increase our awareness of the environment we
inhabit but also to influence our attitude towards it. Although she is well aware that
Introduction to Part II 285
(ecological) science has more or less the same goals, she regards the input of sound artists
as essential in establishing such a renewed relatedness. Art works appeal to more than
just comprehension and rational argumentation: empathy, imagination, and embodied
knowledge, activated by and through sounds, are human faculties that can support, inform,
and change a primarily scientific relatedness.
Harris’s words resonate and return in somewhat modified forms in several other
contributions: Jana Winderen, for example, explains in her interview with Stefan Helmreich
how her art works may augment a certain active connectedness to the environment. For
Jonathan Gilmurray it is imperative that we also learn to engage with our environment
through other means than just science and/or politics. Especially sound and sound art
are important in this respect, as they can – in contrast to the more static and stable image
that visual information provides – make us aware of the dynamic processes that are
constantly operative in our environment. Marie Højlund and colleagues term it perceptual
attunement, referring to a particular sensitivity to movement and change that does not
result in representational knowledge, while Jordan Lacey speaks of artistic ruptures to
create new experiences, to transform, and to establish new encounters with and within
public urban spaces, a strategy that becomes very concrete in the contribution of Edwin
van der Heide as well.
All these scholars and artists attribute to art the ability to act as a medium or method
through which new/other knowledge, new/other experiences, new/other awareness, new/
other sensibilities, or new/other affects become accessible. However, the questions that
become pertinent are what kind of methods can be deployed by research in and through
the arts, whether this type of research fundamentally differs from other research traditions,
and whether there is an unbridgeable gap between the arts and the sciences in terms of
methods and methodologies. And, within this field of artistic research, is there a specific
role to be played for sound and sound art? These questions lead us into the next paragraphs.
Philosophical objections against methods

and methodologies
Almost any definition of ‘method’ foregrounds terms such as ‘systematic procedures’,
‘modes of inquiry employed by a proper plan’, ‘tools through which we can collect
empirical material’, ‘a body of principles and techniques’, and/or ‘a regular and orderliness
of thought, action, etc.’ (see, for example, Gray and Malins 1993; Merriam-Webster.com
Dictionary n.d.; Vannini 2015: 10). Methodology, then, is the system of methods and
principles used in a particular discipline or the science of method; it is the larger body of
knowledge – consisting of practical applications, abstract reflections, and epistemological
foundations – on which choices of methods are based.
However, especially in and through contemporary Continental philosophy, the history of
science, and artistic research, the idea – rightly or wrongly – that one can latch on to a clear
and strict method has been under attack. In Practice as Research in the Arts, Robin Nelson,
Professor of Theatre and Intermedial Performance in the UK, writes with regard to artistic
research that it is ‘no longer tenable to take the methodologies of the sciences as the gold
standard of knowledge’ (Nelson 2013: 48), suggesting the erosion of the self-evidence of
their applicability. Echoing the post-structuralist criticisms on the fundaments of Western
thinking, he continues by stating that, for several decades, the methodological paradigms
of positivism, rationalism, and empiricism – research methods such as observation, data-
gathering, testability, and falsifiability, deployed by objective and neutral researchers and
leading to general truths and knowledge of an independent reality – have already been
supplemented or even replaced by methodical principles based on the interrelatedness
of subject researcher and object as well as by the notions of an interminable potential for
new discoveries, the ineluctable situatedness of both research and knowledge, and reality
as a linguistic construct (49–53). What is important for Nelson is that these changes or
adaptations should be regarded as ‘a recognition that knowing is processual and a matter of
multiple perspectives’, with the consequence that current methods and methodical rigour
need to be rethought (53–55).2
A fundamental criticism of the rather rigid models, methods, and research strategies of
the sciences has also been offered by the Swiss historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.
In Toward a History of Epistemic Things he questions the hegemony of theory in our post-
Kuhnian era and replaces it by emphasizing the dynamics of research and its related methods
of experimentation. Rheinberger explicitly connects this new scientific and methodical
paradigm to the concepts of invention and change that are also operative in the art world:
the function of experimentation is no longer to provide empirical proofs for theoretical
propositions but, rather, to stress the importance of a conceptual indeterminacy during the
journey into the unknown in order to produce knowledge that is not yet at the scientist’s
disposal. Rheinberger here seems to propose a methodical move that shifts from focusing
on known unknowns (what we know we don’t know) to unknown unknowns (what we don’t
know we don’t know): ‘I perceive thinking as remaining a constitutive part of experimental
reasoning, conceived as an embodied disclosing activity that transcends its technical
conditions and creates an open reading frame for the emergence of unprecedented events’
(Rheinberger 1997: 31).3
It is telling that the Canadian philosopher Erin Manning begins her essay ‘Against
Method’ with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead: ‘Some of the major disasters of
mankind have been produced by the narrowness of men with a good methodology’
(Manning 2015: 52). Manning’s text is a frontal attack on the idea of method as a way
of organizing knowledge in pre-established categories and frames, thereby becoming a
‘safeguard against the ineffable’ (Manning 2015: 58). In other words, Manning warns
(academic) scholars that methods all too often contribute to the creation of new
orthodoxies in relation to – or actually in contrast to – our experiences and thinking
processes. What is at stake is a micropolitical disciplining of a model modelling the
researcher.
Although Manning does not mention him, her arguments against rigid methods and
determined methodologies echo the objections formulated by Austrian philosopher
of science Paul Feyerabend in his book bearing the same title as Manning’s essay:
Against Method. Feyerabend developed arguments against the endeavours of
other philosophers of science – such as Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and the logical
positivists – to establish a fixed, general, and universal scientific method: it is
unrealistic (ignoring human developments), pernicious (enforcing rules is inhuman),
and detrimental to science (neglecting the complex physical and historical conditions
which influence scientific change). He argues that scientific progress or growth of
knowledge is often only possible when researchers are able and willing to break
laws; ‘proliferation of theories is beneficial for science, while uniformity impairs its
critical power’ (Feyerabend 1993: 5). Therefore, Feyerabend claims, the only ‘method’
which will not inhibit scientific progress is an epistemological anarchism in which
‘everything’ is permissible, for example contradicting well-confirmed theories and
working counter-inductively (20).
Methodological criticism in music studies

Also within the discourses around music, objections have been raised against certain
methodical and methodological habits. Already in 1991, music theorist and pianist
Lawrence Ferrara in his Philosophy and the Analysis of Music argued against the tendency
of researchers in music to often establish their method first and then start examining a
musical work. The trap is that they become predominantly concerned with executing the
chosen method instead of giving precedence to the music:
Methods have developed or evolved in ways that do not fully respond to the multiplicity of
levels of musical significance. Methods define the tasks and scope of inquiry into musical
significance. As the method replaces the immediacy of the analyst, music comes to mean
only what methods allow it to mean.
(Ferrara 1991: xvi)
According to Ferrara – less inspired by post-structuralism but rather by the hermeneutics

of Hans-Georg Gadamer – each method that objectifies musical data, for example through
precise language and predesignated tasks, subjugates the music and ‘controls music by
asking questions that grow from a preconstructed schematic of what music can mean’
(Ferrara 1991: 38). The strengths and weaknesses of any pre-established method determine
to a great extent the analytical judgements and outcomes. In other words, it is not
the researcher who can be accused of subjectivism; the subjective role is transferred from
the analyst to the method, as it is the method which ‘interrogates’ and thereby restrains the
music.4
Although Ferrara’s alternative, a methodological pluralism or eclecticism, is
still in the service of systematically investigating and mapping the various levels of
musical significance – thereby closely connected to a functionality that, for example,
Rheinberger tries to overcome – his criticism of the prescriptive power of methods
traditionally used in music analysis offers possibilities to reformulate and renew the
epistemological tools with which music can be approached by music scholars. The key
terms with which Ferrara presents his eclectic method are openness, engagement, and
objectivity, the latter understood in an hermeneutical sense as letting the object speak
of and for itself:
A responsive subject who openly engages a freer object is on the way to the classical notion
of objectivity. Within this view, the object is given the freedom to show itself. In order to
allow a piece of music to be a free object, the analyst must release his methodological will to
dominate it. Real objectivity, to the degree that it is attainable, occurs when analytical tasks
support the freedom of the music object to show itself in its multi-dimensional polyphony
of sound, form, and reference.
(Ferrara 1991: 46)
Philosopher Gary Peters criticizes methodology through musical improvisation in his

book The Philosophy of Improvisation (2009). While an absence of methodology in the
academic world would equate with an absence of credibility, he claims that improvisation
cannot bloom within this type of rigour (Peters 2009: 148). Peters creates a fundamental
opposition between methodology and method, strongly deviating from the hierarchical
difference presented above. In Peters’s view methodology is first of all teleological, aiming
for the straightest line possible, leading to a clearly formulated and predetermined
goal. Aberration is allowed but only temporarily, briefly, and strictly limited: ‘Such a
curvature of thought is always measured against the teleological straightness that the
methodology provides’ (162). Improvisation has an uneasy and problematic relation
to such a methodological straitjacket because it has no clear end point to which it
should converge and because it is almost always built on the principle of trial and error.
Of course, Peters is quick to clarify, this does not mean that improvisation is lacking
rigour; only, this rigour – which shows itself for example in all kinds of experientially
rooted conventions and (implicit) rules – is of a different order: ‘methodical rather than
methodological’, that is, developed ‘from work to work and from moment to moment’
(148–149). Therefore, Peters states, improvisation has no (need of) methodology, but
it does have a method, as a method doesn’t necessarily need to rely on the dogmas of
progress and teleology. Improvisation ‘depends upon error and the failure to reach a
goal’ (162).
Whereas Ferrara questions the role of methods and methodologies in research on
music, Peters criticizes the use of methodologies within the musical practice itself.
Methodologies obstruct a necessary amount of creativity and freedom in the production
of art. Art benefits from the right to fail, the right to stray from a straight and narrow path,
the right to err. Interesting for the rest of this text is how Peters ends his short reflection
on the ontological difference between methodology and method: ‘Blanchot describes such
erring as “research,” an endless “turning” and returning that resists the desire to terminate
the “fascination” of error in the rush for a terminal truth’ (Peters 2009: 163). Connecting
research to music making and rethinking the role of methods beyond the systematic
application of pre-established rules paves a way to say a bit more about the relation between
arts, theory, and methods.
The experiment as method

The previous paragraphs have made clear that a rigorous application of (dogmatic)
methods has been under attack in (Western) philosophy, science, and the arts. Is it possible
to rethink the role, position, and implementation of a specific research method in order
to formulate an alternative? And how can the arts and research done by sound artists
contribute to such a reorientation? In order to start answering these questions it is good
to see that what connects Peters’s erring, the artistic practice of Dick Raaijmakers, the
theoretical insights of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, and several contributions in this Handbook
is the practice of experimentation as the key method to gain access to something new, be
it art or scientific knowledge. What was perhaps a very natural and self-evident way of
searching and researching for Raaijmakers receives a more theoretical foundation in the
work of Rheinberger. Experimental activities, Rheinberger states, generate not only awaited
and predictable results but, crucially, also unexpected, unknown ones as well. Therefore,
these activities are not methodological procedures made to confirm or reject certain
hypotheses or to verify, refute, or modify theories; this would lead merely to knowledge
that is already preformulated, and the experiment would play only a subsidiary role in
rationalistic accounts of theoretical developments or changes. Instead, experiments should
function as actual generators of knowledge that were previously obscure and unexplored
(Rheinberger 1997: 138; Assis 2018: 108). Rheinberger warns the reader not to interpret
this as either a paradigm shift, the replacement of one theory by another, or an irregularity
within an established conceptual frame. Experimental processes open up unforeseen
directions; they are generators of surprises. After Royston Roberts he calls the results of
such processes pseudo-serendipity: they come as a surprise but are made to happen through
the inner workings of systems (Rheinberger 1997: 133–134) and the quest of researchers.5
Quoting Michel Serres, Rheinberger describes such experimental researchers as people
who, paradoxically, are ‘not yet quite sure what they are looking for, and yet blindly do
know what they are after’ (Serres in Rheinberger 1997: 14).
Researchers, according to Rheinberger’s use of the term, tinker, linger, and are on an
almost constant journey into the unknown; they are bricoleurs, unable even to formulate
a clear research question at the beginning of their investigations. Experimentation as a
method could then be described as creating conditions where the unexpected can happen.
This description implies that a method – how research should be done – should at least
partly be deprived of its functionality and teleology and be rethought as simply a way of
doing. And it could be precisely art that is able to stretch the framings of a method as a doing
beyond its axiomatization6 – a doing that oscillates between what is defined and what is (as
yet) undefinable, between limits and the unlimited, between the already known and the still
unknown. In this context ‘oscillating between’ should be understood in the way Deleuze
and Guattari have thought it: ‘Between things doesn’t designate a localizable relation going
from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal
movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that
undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25).
Experimental processes as methods of research perpetually lead to events that cannot be

anticipated (in contrast to, for example, relations of cause and effect) but only appear in the
making. As such, they are not only contingent but also irrevocably local and situated.7
Artistic research and method

Although rather prescriptive and still speculative, Rheinberger has shown that the traditional
scientific methods, grounded on privileging neutrality and objectivity, are not the only
valid knowledge-producing methods. Other modes of knowing – knowledge coming from
experience, situated knowledge, embodied knowledge, or processual knowing – require
other methods. Research done in and through art does not simply produce descriptive
knowledge or logical schemas. It may ask questions that could not be anticipated within
a more traditional epistemological horizon. And methodically, it is performative, a
practice where theory and practice coincide – ‘imbricated within each other’ – based on
an investigative strategy of doing-thinking. Artistic researchers do knowledge, meaning
that ‘thinking is not constrained to the abstract and propositional’ (Nelson 2013: 62, 66).8
In the artistic-experimental network of affective and interconnected forces, a network
of objects, events, concepts, materials, practices, minds and bodies, spaces and places,9
a transformation takes place from science-as-a-system to science-as-a-process: reflection
becomes reflaction. As Manning states, in artistic research ‘making is a thinking in its own
right’ (Manning 2015: 53).
Taking these insights into the concrete realm of a contemporary musical performance
practice, Lucia D’Errico states in this part of the Handbook that recitals of musician-
researchers may become a locus of experimentation in which ‘the known’ is reconfigured:
by considering musical works as dynamic reservoirs of forces, functions, traits, and
materialities, artistic researcher-performers critically reflect on current modes of thinking
and making music, not through theoretical approaches and detached observations but by
actually performing music themselves. The reflection takes place in and through music
making; it takes place before (e.g. while rehearsing or while analysing and reorganizing
repertoire), after (e.g. while evaluating a concert), but – most importantly – also during
a performance. Performing becomes an experimental strategy and embodied research
method through concepts such as a musical work can be (re)considered.10
Paul Nataraj’s contribution to this book testifies to a comparable methodical approach,
albeit in a completely other musical domain. Interested in the relation between music –
more specifically: vinyl records, considered as a site of convergence between many human
and nonhuman agents – and memory, Nataraj not only interviewed several persons about
their connection with a specific record, but carved a transcription of the respondent’s story
back onto the surface of the record. In and through his artistic practice he thus works on the
record’s materiality and resistance, deconstructing its prescribed model of sonic replication
by adding the voice of his respondents as well as other sounds on top of the original music.
Nataraj neither does away completely with old elements nor is he introducing something
altogether new; rather, he reorients and rearranges given elements by exploring new
relationships and thereby opening ‘sonic possible worlds’ (Voegelin 2014).
It permeates this whole Handbook: the privilege of neutrality and objectivity, both
on an epistemological and methodological level, is questioned, and modest contours of
other warrantable research methods are well within reach. Insights as well as methods are
situated – the method is not predetermined by the researcher, nor pre-existent and ready
to be used, but tailored to the situation; it is a singular pathway11 hacked within the field of
research12 – but should nevertheless be cognitively apprehensible. As Nelson writes:
If there is no secure, neutral basis for establishing objective knowledge in any discipline,
and if there is no firm ground from which to make a ‘truth language’ claim of superiority for
science, history or philosophy among competing micronarratives, it is incumbent upon all
disciplines, including the sciences, to offer a reflexive account of their methodology and the
rigour of its internal methods.
(Nelson 2013: 55)13
Towards a sonic methodology without method

When artistic experimentation is indeed recognized as a valid research method in sound
studies, this also implies that the total research process can be embedded in sound art,
implying that this type of research can only be done by the artists themselves. Hence,
experimentation as an important element in research that takes place in and through
sound and sound art consists of a feedback loop between action and thinking, practice
and theory, and, perhaps especially, mind and body or the intelligible and the sensible.
More pervasive, more explicit, and more conscious than in most other scientific fields,
the body belongs to the methodological toolkit of artistic researchers: their bodies play,
rehearse, perform, walk, make, construct, repair, disassemble, etc. in order to contribute
something new or extra to already existing discourses, knowledge, experiences, and
intuition. A sonic ‘methodology without method’ rooted in sound art is experimental as
well as performative, that is, embodied, embedded, and enacted. While interacting with
the environment, the body is gathering information – information regarded here as having
been (in)formed by corporeal knowledge, perception, affect, intuition, and sensibility –
dispersing cognition partly away from the brain.14 Next to and in addition to theoretical
doing, artistic research takes place via an actual-corporeal participating. Bearing in mind
Serres’s description of experimental researchers who are ‘not yet quite sure what they are
looking for, and yet blindly do know what they are after’, a methodology without method in
sound art research could be called an unexpected but nevertheless expectant exploration
of a network of nodes, agents, and their relations through making art. Methodology can
then be understood in an extended manner, namely as making numerous and surprising
connections, an exploratory means for the discovery of potentiality and contingency.15
Methodology as a doing, a gathering, a connecting, or as a way to encounter unknown
unknowns is then less concerned with matters of fact than with matters of concern.16
These matters of concern are singular and diverse, from dis-covering Vietnamese rural
soundscapes by placing musical instruments in rice fields and on the top of mountains,
thereby making the wind a co-player (see Östersjö and Thanh Thủy, in this volume), to
gaining access to a recording studio by capturing the sounds of both the control room and
the live room (see Thompson, in this volume) – both examples of a sonic ethnography;
from Edwin van der Heide’s trials and experiments with pneumatic valves in order to
compositionally shape audible air pressure waves via the controlled release of compressed
air, to Jana Winderen’s explorations regarding optimal use of the most suitable hydrophones,
depending on weather parameters, such as temperature and wind speed, and what one
is seeking to record – both examples of research methods depending on technological
knowledge; and from investigating possibilities to create sound art installations for public
spaces that both interact with as well as improve the already existing sonic atmosphere (see
Lacey and Højlund et al., in this volume), to turning sound art into a political instrument
that makes us more aware of climate change and ecological pollution (see Gilmurray, in
this volume) – both examples of how sound can be deployed as a method to raise awareness
and increase well-being. To quote Gary Peters once more, research in and through sound
art is ‘methodical rather than methodological’ as it is ‘developed from work to work and
from moment to moment’ (Peters 2009: 162).
Notes
1. Historian and curator Sarah Cook and arts worker Beryl Graham explain in Rethinking
Curating: Art After New Media (2010) that the term laboratory resonates with scientific
models that emphasize process over product. Raaijmakers’s practice certainly happened
in spaces which deserve the name ‘lab’.
2. Of course one could question whether the times of positivism are really over. More
important, however, is Nelson’s idea that the research methods belonging to positivistic
or so-called objective theories can no longer be taken for granted, no longer be accepted
as an incontestable standard.
3. Rheinberger’s ideas echo those of Jean-François Lyotard, who writes in The Postmodern
Condition: ‘A Postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text
he writes or the work he creates is not in principle governed by pre-established rules
and cannot be judged according to a determinant judgment, by the application of given
categories to this text or work. Such rules and categories are what the work or text is
investigating. The artist and the writer therefore work without rules, and in order to
establish the rules for what will have been made’ (Lyotard 1984: 81).
4. In Ludic Dreaming the Occulture (a collective consisting of David Cecchetto, Marc
Couroux, Ted Hiebert, and Eldritch Priest) briefly touch upon the affordance and
constraints of methods. They claim that methods by definition exclude and prioritize data
and are thus ‘constitutively incapable of representing within its framework that which is
excluded or deemphasized in this method’ (The Occulture 2017: 89).
5. For Rheinberger the term system does not refer to an enclosed, perfectly defined set of
rules and axioms but to a loose network of technical and organic units, existing both in
time and space. A system consists of both experimental conditions, determined within
given standards and operative within sufficiently stabilized procedures, as well as so-
called ‘epistemic objects’, the latter being vague, as they embody what is not yet known.
6. In The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto, Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin, and Ann Douglas
write that ‘artistic research can be defined as knowledge of the process of creativity, not
its outcomes. It offers an account of the search trajectories in artistic practices, not a real
explanation and certainly not a “prediction” of where they will lead’ (Coessens, Crispin,
and Douglas 2009: 26). In fact, they present artistic research as a method here, yet
strongly diverging from established scientific methodological models.
7. Writing about musical improvisation as a research methodology in this volume, Rebecca
Caines claims that such a methodology is often eccentric, experimental, personal, and
non-generalizable, which implies that the research conditions are most of the time
unable to be repeated. Rheinberger would in this respect probably speak of ‘nonidentical
reproduction’ as an inevitable consequence of a situated making of science. A situated
method – this time, on this occasion, under these circumstances – is never settled in
advance, but must be worked out, per-formed.
8. For pianist and artistic researcher Paulo de Assis, researchers thus appear as doers, not as
enlightened academics delivering proof of given theory (Assis 2018: 112).
9. It should be clear that the researcher-as-doer is not external to this network but one
force within it. In her contribution to this part of the Handbook, Elena Biserna makes
this very concrete: sound artist-researchers always participate in the soundscape they
listen to. Simultaneously with the analyses, evaluations, reflections, and – if applicable –
interventions of these persons, they co-create the soundscape under study rather than
purely functioning as non-involved observers and detached analysts.
10. In The Reflective Practitioner, the philosopher Donald Schön coins the terms ‘knowing-
in-action’ and ‘reflection-in-action’, both referring to the idea that this type of thinking
does not precede acting but coincides with it. It is a thinking about doing while doing it,
of which the rules are difficult to describe; this thinking hinges on surprises and (thus)
does not rely on categories or methods of established theories and techniques. According
to philosopher Sher Doruff it is exactly this element of surprise (what we don’t know we
don’t know) in research-creation that is the node of the indeterminate contingencies of
artistic research practice (Doruff 2010: 7).
11. Elsewhere in this volume, Naomi Waltham-Smith writes that Derrida regards method as
a meta-hodos, that is, following of a way or path. Therefore, method can only take shape
in the process of its practice, hence in a singular event. At the same time, however, it is
repeatable yet always already open to unanticipated modifications.
12. In her contribution to this part of the volume, Darla Crispin stresses the interactions
of musical materials with the specific ‘tone’ of a researcher-performer, which creates a
unique synthesis.
13. Nelson’s words resemble those of Feyerabend when he states that ‘one of my motives for
writing Against Method was to free people from the tyranny of philosophical obfuscators
and abstract concepts such as “truth”, “reality”, or “objectivity”, which narrow people’s
vision and ways of being in the world’ (Feyerabend 1993: 179).
14. In this second part, Højlund et al. call this the attuning approach, that is, the active
engagement of the enactive user through practice-based experiments moving beyond the
already familiar or expected.
15. The suffix ‘-logy’ as in methodology could then be read in the Heideggerian sense as
coming from the Greek λέγειν, letting-lie-before-us or gathering, assembling, and
connecting (Heidegger 1968: 208).
16. In this sense, a sonic methodology against method might satisfy Douglas Barrett’s
concerns, expressed in this part of the Handbook, about the ‘formalist tendencies’ in
sound studies. Although a sonic methodology of course hinges on sound – it can best
be described as a method-without-methodology directed by sound – the overall idea
presented and defended in this Introduction with its focus on research being done
in and through art rather centres around a critical stance towards conventional ways
of thinking about and applying research methods instead of emphasizing a medium
specificity.
References
Assis, Paulo de (2018). ‘Experimental Systems and Artistic Research’. In Logic of
Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance through Artistic Research, 103–118.
Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Coessens, Kathleen, Darla Crispin, and Anne Douglas (2009). The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto.
Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Doruff, Sher (2010). ‘Artistic Res/Arch: The Propositional Experience of Mattering’. Acoustic.
Space Journal 9. Available online: https://sherdo.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/artistic-
res_arch.pdf (accessed 2 July 2020).
Ferrara, Lawrence (1991). Philosophy and the Analysis of Music: Bridges to Musical Sound,
Form, and Reference. Bryn Mawr, PA: Excelsior Music Publishing.
Feyerabend, Paul (1993). Against Method. London: Verso.
Gray, Carole and Julian Malins (1993). ‘Research Procedures/Methodology for Artists &
Designers’. Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237475054_
Research_Procedures_Methodology_for_Artists_Designers (accessed 2 July 2020).
Heidegger, Martin (1968). What Is Called Thinking?. Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper
& Row.
Ingold, Tim (2015). ‘Foreword’. In Phillip Vannini (ed.), Non-Representational Methodologies:
Re-Envisioning Research, vii–x. New York: Routledge.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Manning, Erin (2015). ‘Against Method’. In Phillip Vannini (ed.), Non-Representational
Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, 52–71. New York: Routledge.
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary (n.d.). s.v. ‘Method.’ Available online: https://www.
merriam-Webster.com/dictionary/method (accessed 16 July 2020).
Mulder, Arjen and Joke Brouwer (eds) (2007). Dick Raaijmakers: Monografie. Rotterdam:
V2/NAI uitgevers.
Nelson, Robin (ed.) (2013). Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies,
Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Occulture (David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Ted Hiebert, and Eldritch Priest) (2017).
Ludic Dreaming: How to Listen Away From Contemporary Technoculture. New York:
Bloomsbury.
Peters, Gary (2009). The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins
into the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Schön, Donald (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New
York: Basic Books.
Vannini, Phillip (2015). ‘Non-Representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction’. In
Phillip Vannini (ed.), Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, 1–18.
New York: Routledge.
Voegelin, Salomé (2014). Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. New York:
Bloomsbury.
296
17
Ambulatory Sound-Making:
Rewriting, Reappropriating,
‘Presencing’ Auditory Spaces
Elena Biserna
If movement is itself a potentially transformative activity,

then moving to sound is doubly so.
—Michael Bull (2007: 47)
Walking as embodied situated spatial

knowledge
Walking has featured in sound studies discourses first of all as a mobile, situated, and
embodied methodology to explore and perceive auditory spaces. In other words, it has
been interpreted primarily as a ‘form of engagement integral to our perception of an
environment’ (Pink et al. 2010: 3). This interpretation, beyond aligning itself with some
recent trends in urban anthropology, is linked to a whole tradition of thought that
understands walking as a means to perceive, read, and comprehend the environment.
The origins of this tradition are far from recent and are rooted in the late nineteenth
century. The flâneur – recently back in vogue in a plurality of researches (Tester 1994;
D’Souza and McDonough 2006; Elkin 2016, among others) – represents the archetypal
figure of this possibility of exploration and observation of urban space from below
by crossing it. As Mary Gluck states, the true prerogative of this literary figure,
both a symbol and a symptom of the emergence of the modern city, is ‘[his] radical
sensibility and innovative visual practices, which made him distinct from all other
social types of his age. The flâneur’s unique achievement was to pioneer a new way of
seeing, experiencing, and representing urban modernity that privileged the everyday
perspective of the man of the street over the bird’s eye view of the rationalist or the
moralist’ (Gluck 2010: 272).
It is precisely this ability to observe the new metropolitan landscape from an internal
perspective, by walking through it, that characterizes the flânerie.1 The flâneur’s mobile
gaze bonds the links between the heterogeneous elements that make up the urban fabric,
tracing its fragmentary nature to continuity. This activity has a revealing potential: the
possibility to perceive and experience the world outside of any banalizing frame, capturing
the aesthetic dimension of everyday life.
If much of the literature on flânerie remains focused on visual perception, other
contributions insist on the embodied and intersensory nature of walking (Sansot 2000;
Thibaud 2008; Thomas 2010; among others). David Le Breton, for example, claims the
centrality of the relationship between body and world unfolding through walking in
opposition to the erosion of the sensory sphere in contemporary life. The city, for the
French anthropologist, is an inexhaustible source of both physical and mental stimuli:
The relationship existing between the walker and the city, with its streets and neighborhoods,
whether one already knows them or discovers them on the way, is above all an emotional and
bodily one. A sound and visual background accompanies his ambulation, his skin registers
temperature variations and reacts to the contact of objects and space. He crosses layers of
inviting or repelling odors. This sensory plot infuses the walk along the streets a pleasant
or unpleasant shade depending on the circumstances. The experience of walking in the city
solicits the body in its entirety.
(Le Breton 2000: 14)
In these contributions, immersion and sensorial contact reinforce the flâneur’s internal,
‘bottom up’ perspective and walking becomes a methodology for ‘knowing the world
through the body and the body through the world’ (Solnit 2001: 29): a methodology
producing a situated, affective, and embodied spatial knowledge.
Soundwalking as auditory spatial

knowledge
This situated, internal, embodied, and affective methodology to experience space is
fundamental to soundwalking. Anticipated in the mid-1960s by artists and musicians such
as Max Neuhaus and Philip Corner, soundwalking has been defined and canonized within
the World Soundscape Project (Westerkamp 1974; Schafer 1994) to spread, in the following
decades, into a multiplicity of different research and aesthetic practices (see Drever, in
this volume). What all these practices share is the will to develop often participatory
experiences of exploration of space through a perceptual reorientation on hearing (Drever
2009; McCartney 2014). As stated by Hildegard Westerkamp, soundwalking can be done
alone, in groups, with a map, recording, interacting with the environment, or simply
listening: ‘No matter what form a soundwalk takes, its focus is to rediscover and reactivate
our sense of hearing’ (Westerkamp 1974). In other words, soundwalking proposes to cross
the environment to ‘listen’ rather than to ‘hear’, defining listening as a way to know and
relate to the world.2
Ambulatory Sound-Making 299
For Westerkamp, beyond orienting and establishing a dialogue between the walker and
the environment, soundwalking has also an aesthetic potential and ‘reveals the poetics of
space’ (Westerkamp 2010). However, in the World Soundscape Project, soundwalks are first
of all used as a methodology to make a first acoustic cartography of studied sites (Paquette
and McCartney 2012) and – in Schafer’s pedagogical and ethical perspective – they are
thought first of all as ‘useful educational experiences for everyone’ (Schafer 1977: 1), as
exercises to refine our listening sensibility and to prepare the field for the development of
sound design (82). In continuity with this pedagogical and research vocation, soundwalking
is used today as a qualitative in situ research methodology in the fields of ethnography,
sociology, geography, etc. (Pink 2009; Gallagher and Prior 2017; among others).3
Walking as rewriting and reappropriating

space
Yet, walking is not only a practice that allows us to immerse ourselves in space, to know
it from the inside, through contact and proximity. Walking – the first anthropic sign of
demarcation, appropriation, and mapping of territories (Careri 2006) – is also a spatializing
practice: a practice producing space (Lefebvre 1991).
This view is particularly important in French literature, where considerable emphasis is
put on walking as a way to reappropriate and rewrite the urban. In The Practice of Everyday
Life, Michel de Certeau starts the chapter devoted to walking in the city by comparing the
view of Manhattan from the World Trade Center with the experience of the passer-by. He
also underscores the role of the body by emphasizing its exclusion in the view ‘from above’:
To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s
body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous
law; nor is it possessed whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and
by the nervousness of New York traffic […]. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur.
(De Certeau 1984: 92)
However, for De Certeau, pedestrians’ practices are not only a way to read and perceive, but
also (and first of all) a form of writing of urban space. In his words, the city becomes ‘an urban
“text” [passers-by] write without being able to read it’ (De Certeau 1984: 93). By establishing
a clear dichotomy between planners and users and assigning to the latter the possibility of
reshaping the spatial order imposed from above, De Certeau interprets walking as one of
those resistance tactics through which users can reconfigure the dominant cultural economy.
Accordingly, he explicitly refers to the linguistic system by comparing walking to a speech act:
The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the
statements uttered. At the most elementary level, it has a triple ‘enunciative’ function: it is a
process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […], it is a
spatial acting-out of space […]; and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that
is, among pragmatic ‘contracts’ in the form of movements.
(De Certeau 1984: 97–98)
As a linguistic system, the functionalism of urban planning provides a system of use and
control of spaces, setting up a number of possibilities, rules, and interdictions. Pedestrians
actualize and put this system into use, but they can also redefine, reinvent, or deny its rules,
thereby creatively rewriting urban space through their personal and social practices.
This linguistic metaphor returns in the writings of several authors and notably in Jean-
François Augoyard’s Step by Step. In this examination of the everyday walking patterns
in a newly built borough in Grenoble, Augoyard proposes a rhetoric of walking and
describes this practice as a form of interaction between the pedestrian’s individuality and
the organization of the built environment, as an act of articulation of the urban spatial
structure, as a way to read and rewrite space:
Walking resembles a reading-writing. Sometimes rather more following an existing path,
sometimes rather more hewing a new one, one moves within a space that never tolerates the
exclusion of one or another […] the succession of steps effectively rewrites the space that
opens before the walker, even when done in the slightest of action modes.
(Augoyard 2007: 25)
From this perspective, urban spaces are not stable and inert formations, but are activated
and actualized by the practices of those who cross them, by the ‘legs’ generative grammar’
(Bailly 1992) put in place through walking. Therefore, walking becomes a methodology to
read, but also to reappropriate and rewrite space.
Soundwalking as interacting with and

rewriting auditory spaces
Brandon LaBelle translates this process in the auditory realm:
The urban soundscape is itself a material contoured, disrupted, or appropriated through the
meeting of individual bodies and larger administrative systems. From crosswalk signals,
warning alarms, and electronic voices, the urban streets structure and audibly shape on a
mass scale the trajectories of people on the move. In contrast, individuals supplement or
reshape these structures through practices that, like de Certeau’s walker, form a modulating
break or interference.
(LaBelle 2010: 92)
This interference, for the walking listener, can take the form of an interaction between
her own sounds, those already travelling through the spaces she traverses and the acoustic
features of the environment, transforming the city in a space-time multiplicity created and
recreated in the contingency of her mobile experience.
By directing our attention to listening, soundwalking always also implies a relational way
of experiencing or, better, of engaging with space. Listening provides information not only on
the nature of the objects and subjects that inhabit the world but, first of all, on their mutual
relationships, their constant becoming, their simultaneity. In other words, from the listening
point of view, urban space is never static or inert, but is a field of dynamic, temporary, and
processual relationships: ‘a spatio-temporal geography, a dynamic geography of events rather

than images, or activity rather than scene’ (Rodaway 1994: 90). This geography is never
independent of the one who crosses it. As Paul Rodaway writes in Sensuous Geographies: ‘The
soundscape moves with the sentients as they move through the environment and it continually
changes with our behavioral interactions’ (87). The mobile ear of the soundwalker experiences
the city as a continuous series of events in perpetual movement, a dynamic multiplicity that
is constantly generated in relationship with her changing positions and behaviours. In other
words, she never has an external position but always participates in the soundscape she listens
to, contributing to the ongoing constellation of sound events that is always already there
in urban space and interacting with her environment through the reciprocal relationship
that always exists between a sound event and the acoustic properties of the space where it
propagates. Her own sounds spread through space and are reshaped according to its material
and acoustic qualities creating different effects, such as resonance, reverberation, reflection,
absorption. From an auditory point of view, then, we always both perceive and interact with
auditory spaces as we traverse them. We always read and rewrite them.
Playing the city: Acoustic interactions

In current acoustic ecology’s soundwalks, the most widespread and canonized ‘format’ is
the listening walk: a silent exploration of a sonic environment guided by a leader who
selects the itinerary and suggests the listening approach (McCartney 2010). However, as
Barry Truax’s The Handbook for Acoustic Ecology suggests, soundwalking can be reinforced
through sound-making:
In order to expand the listening experience, sound-making may also become an important
part of a soundwalk. Its purpose is to explore sounds that are related to the environment,
and, on the other hand, to become aware of one’s own sounds (voice, footsteps, etc.) in the
environmental context.
(Truax 1999)
If we look at the World Soundscape Project’s early definitions and related map-scores,
sound-making appears to have an even wider scope. In The Tuning of the World, for
example, after defining the ‘sound-walk’ and the ‘listening walk’, Schafer introduces several
examples based on the idea of playing the environment and interacting with the context.
He describes a walk where participants were asked to enter a store and tap on the top of
tinned goods, thus ‘turning the grocery shop into a Caribbean steel band’ as well as another
walk where participants had to ‘sing tunes around the different harmonics of neon lights’
(Schafer 1994: 212–213).
This interaction is further emphasized in several walks published in the European Sound
Diary (1975): here, we find some map-scores conceived for different cities comprising an
itinerary and instructions for listening to particular environments, but also for interacting
with their soundscapes or their acoustic and architectural qualities. The Vienna Soundwalk:
Evening in the Old Town, for example, starts in the St Stephan Cathedral asking us to listen
to its quiet atmosphere and to imagine the sound of its bell, but continues by suggesting to
enter a passageway and ‘move through it playing with your fingers or a pencil on the shop
shutters, grills on the floor, elevator grate, metal gate bars’ (Schafer 1977: 83), to whistle while
traversing an arch, to stomp on the wooden floor of a telephone booth. The instructions
for Hildegard Westerkamp’s A Soundwalk in Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver (1974)
follow the same direction. Westerkamp invites us to play Henry Moore’s metal sculpture,
to listen to the sound of our own footsteps, or to clap our hands underneath a bridge to try
to produce an echo and activate the acoustics of space.
In these early examples, soundwalking – an ambulatory auditory exploration of the
environment – was equally understood as a practice of ambulatory sound-making to
play the environment, to establish a process of reappropriation and interaction with sites
through action and site-specific sound-making. However, in the World Soundscape Project
practice, sound-making is often subordinated to listening, and ‘playing the environment’
while traversing it doesn’t become a research or artistic methodology in itself. Conversely,
this idea is often central in many ambulatory music and sound projects.
Michael Parsons’s Echo Piece (Canary Wharf) (2009), for example, is a site-specific
ambulatory composition for wind instruments in the homonymous district in London.
This open piece is composed of short single notes played by a group of performers with
trumpets, horns, and trombones ‘moving around and exploring the acoustic properties
of an open-air space’ (Center for the Aesthetic Revolution 2009). Players activate the
environment by evoking echoes from the sound-reflective surfaces of the glass buildings in
this financial area, developing a performance that becomes also a one-hour walk through
it. Thus, Echo Piece is based on an acoustic interaction transforming the city’s architectural
fabric into an expanded resonant chamber.
If Echo Piece makes use of traditional musical instruments, several projects use voice
to enter into a dialogue with the environment. Voice as a vehicle of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity, as the primary medium we use to communicate, to express ourselves,
to look for reciprocity, to enter into relationships with the others and the world. In Viv
Corringham’s Shadow Walks, for example, the exploration of the environment becomes
also a relational practice of vocal improvisation involving its inhabitants (Corringham
2010). For this series, which started in 2003, the artist asks local inhabitants to accompany
her on their favourite walk to tell their personal histories and memories on the places they
traverse. She records these conversations along the route and then comes back alone on the
same path improvising with voice. Her improvisation is based on the acoustic qualities of
the sites and their soundscapes, but is also the result of her meeting with the inhabitants and
their stories, recognizing the polyphonic nature of places. Voice becomes here a powerful
way to dialogue with the environment, thanks to its embodied materiality as well as to
its ‘paradoxical topology’ (Dolar 2006: 73) between inside and outside, between self and
the world. In other words, Corringham’s site-specific ambulatory singing brings to the fore
the negotiation of the interior and the exterior that is always already embedded in voice.
At the same time, it makes use of voice in its ‘post-linguistic’ form: voice beyond language
and logos, as pure sound, as vibration emanating from the body to diffuse and interact with
space and, as such, as a ‘sonorous self-revelation that overcomes the linguistic register of
signification’ (Cavarero 2005: 176).
This acoustic conversation between self and environment is also explored through
extra-aesthetic or anti-aesthetic acts and gestures. The sound of footsteps features in
many projects exactly with this function (see Biserna 2018). The step – the primary
physical contact between the walker and the environment – establishes an embodied
relationship with sites made audible through the sound of our footsteps. Generated
through the interaction between our moving body and the materials and surfaces
of the environment – between our feet and the ground and acoustic features of the
surroundings – this sound projects our presence in space, activating it through
sounding. As such, it continuously rewrites our auditory situation and actively
interlaces with the many other rhythms and auditory dynamics taking place in
urban space by means of our own personal rhythm, connected to our gait. katrinem’s
SchuhzuGehör path of awareness, for example, is a series of site-specific walks developed
in different cities around the world using this sound to investigate their structures
and their architectural and atmospheric qualities. Starting from an on-site study and
observation of local walking patterns and habits as well as from repeated explorations
of a chosen area, the artist plans a route – a ‘path of awareness’, as she calls it – designed
to emphasize the self-consciousness of the walker with regards to his relationship with
space through the interplay between sound events (footsteps) and the surrounding
architecture. Through guided walks and site-specific scores inviting the public to
wear their most resonant shoes, SchuhzuGehör path of awareness articulates a mode
of subjective listening based on the acoustic interactions between our feet and the
environment. The artist explicitly compares the shoes to musical instruments, asking
us to refocus our attention on our footsteps as if we were listening or participating in a
musical performance to recognize our dialogue with the city, to carve out an embodied
ecology, to locate ourselves in space, and to infiltrate the urban polyphony with our
own specific rhythm, along with those of other pedestrians.
Walking as sharing, reclaiming, and

occupying public space
This ‘amplification’ of our presence in the environment and interference with urban
space’s polyrhythms finds another framework in a large body of works in which walking is
discussed against the background of the dynamics of access to and sharing of public space.
In this perspective, walking is, first of all, a way of ‘being present in the public space’
(Gehl 2001: 135) and of reclaiming the ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre 1996). Secondly, it
becomes a way to encounter the ‘Other’, to expose oneself to the social, economic, and
cultural complexity of urban life as well as ‘all the difference of age, taste, background, and
belief that are concentrated in a city – and aroused by the diversity around them’ (Sennett
1992: 122). It is the ‘walking “between”’ as described by Franco La Cecla, ‘the democratic
walking of those who move in the city and meet both known and unknown people’ (La
Cecla 2011: 76); a way of being in the presence of the unfamiliar, of the unexpected, of the
stranger, thus enriching our experience and experimenting with forms of living together as
well as of friction and conflict.
The urban condition, here, is understood as a forum of interactions with strangers, a
platform for facing, recognizing, and supporting difference and complexity in the public
sphere, all interpreted as key elements of democratic life (Jacobs 1961; Sennett 1977;
Young 1990; among others). The street becomes a platform for public life and walking
a methodology to cultivate and reclaim it. As Rebecca Solnit states: ‘Walking the streets
is what connects […] the personal microcosm with the public macrocosm. […] Walking
maintains the publicness and viability of public space’ (Solnit 2001: 176).
This claim on the street as a primary site for sharing and participating in political life is also
at the heart of the (often sonorous) campaigns of several groups fighting for the enlargement
of the public sphere, such as Reclaim the Streets or Critical Mass. Their countercultural
and sometimes carnivalesque street actions often explicitly refer to Situationism for which,
through the dérive, walking became a dissensual practice aimed at analysing but also
transforming the environment of everyday life through collective participation. For the
situationists, walking and drifting were both a method for psychogeographic research and
a revolutionary tool, a way to counteract the functionalism, rationalism, and alienation
imposed on everyday life and urban planning (Sadler 1999).4 Their programme aimed at
the suppression of art into politics by radically transforming the city, its ordering, and its
power dynamics to finally transform its life.
This permeability comes back very often in the arts, where walking emerges primarily as
a privileged means to engage the urban in its many layers, crossing disciplinary boundaries,
abandoning institutional venues, and infiltrating the everyday. From the first Dadaist
excursions in Paris to the many contemporary walking artists, walking is above all an ‘act
of presence’ (Ardenne 2004: 88) in public space.5
Playing the city: Occupying acoustic public

spaces
Playing the city can also assume this role. In several music and sound projects ambulatory
sound-making becomes a tool to subvert the urban’s auditory order, to reclaim difference
and dissonance in public space, to promote and make audible collective presence and
action.
Urban soundscapes reflect wider principles of spatial organization that also correspond
to dynamics of power, control, and privatization. The sociologist Rowland Atkinson uses
the terms ‘sonic ecology’ to emphasize the power of sound and music to demarcate and
connote space according to patterns related to use, to the social, functional, and cultural
characteristics of the different parts of the city, as well as to their timing. In this way, the
city is organized into ‘acoustic territories’, namely, ‘spaces defined, owned or contested
by those who, relatively speaking, control the soundscape of public and private spaces’
(Atkinson 2007: 1910). In other words, the soundscape is not only organized but also
‘socially organizing’ (1907). Playing the city, making noise, in this regard, becomes a tactics
to reappropriate, activate, or unsettle these territories, interfering with these patterns and
disrupting the social organization of public space and life.
In the text/score Suonare la città (Playing the city), the Italian composer affiliated to
Fluxus, Giuseppe Chiari proposes precisely this:
playing the city is – can be – also playing through –
in the city
but playing the city can also be playing (direct object)
the city. Where the city is the object that receives the action of playing
where the city replaces the word violin
in the expression to play the violin
[…]
the city as an instrument
as a musical instrument.
(Chiari 1972, my translation)
For Chiari, the purpose of this intervention is very clear: he writes it six times in capital
letters: ‘to play out of tune’. The aim is to create interferences, to infiltrate the regulated
rhythms of public space to disrupt the order imposed on everyday life and to open
spaces for shared experimentation. ‘To interrupt a concert, a concert of people playing
conventionally the same score by heart’ (Chiari 1972). A purpose that is perfectly aligned
with the refusal of the autonomy of art for direct action in everyday life – or, better,
the constant connection between art and life – proposed by Fluxus. In this text and in
Suonano la città – an action presented at Campo Aperto in Como in 1969 –Chiari not
only abandons the institutions of music to invest public space and collaborate with the
inhabitants, he not only proposes extramusical gestures (such as tapping on shutters,
metal gates, etc.), but he also directly questions the urban condition in its entirety: its
limitations, its codifications, its regulations. Ultimately, playing the city is for Chiari a
joyful subversion of the imposed (auditory) order, a contextual act rewriting the urban
and its senses and the activation of a collective creativity diluted in social practices. The
city, in its physical, social, and political dimensions, becomes a context and a material. It
becomes an expanded instrument.
Between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, comparable actions were
developed in England among members of the Scratch Orchestra. Inspired by John Cage
and Fluxus, this collective, founded in 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons, and
Howard Skempton, experimented with improvisation, indeterminacy, and openness by
further radicalizing the redefinition of the pre-established divisions between composer,
performer, and public. The collective dimension and the participatory attitude of the Scratch
Orchestra led the group not only to move away from institutional venues but also to adopt
a much more explicit political agenda. In the Scratch Orchestra’s practice, ambulatory
sound-making appears in several verbal scores and itinerant projects, but the most striking
event in this respect is the Richmond Journey (1970), planned by Stefan Szczelkun and
presented in the general score as ‘a day long concert as a journey throughout Richmond’.
On Saturday, 16th May, the collective’s members invaded this borough following a path
Figure 17.1 Scratch Orchestra, Richmond Journey, 1969, programme. MayDay Rooms
Archives. Courtesy Stefan Szczelkun.
Figure 17.2 Scratch Orchestra, Richmond Journey, 1969, map with the itinerary. MayDay
Rooms Archives. Courtesy Stefan Szczelkun.
imagined as an allegory of a revolt (Figures 17.1 and 17.2). The route was divided into
eight ‘nodes’ corresponding to different areas and, on each section, a member proposed
collective actions in the form of scores or instructions. Stefan Szczelkun recalls:
We began by attempting to break the ‘claustrophobic spell of capitalist normalcy’: Richmond
High Street was to be disrupted! We would then pay respects to our ancestors before climbing
up through the residential district – recruiting deadened office workers. Our growing ranks
would proceed to the top of the hill, to Richmond Park, to celebrate our connection to nature
and reclaim the heights. After a break to eat we would descend through the steep Thames
meadows and follow the great river on to our destination – that benign archive of the earth’s
flora, Kew Gardens.
(Szczelkun 2019)
As Chiari’s text, the event aimed to infiltrate the neighbourhood’s life to subvert it
through actions such as intervening in Richmond High Street’s stores or awakening the
residential area by ringing doorbells, knocking on doors, and so on.
At the end of the 1960s, then, ambulatory sound-making enters music experimentation
to expand its contexts and practices. On the one hand, it becomes a paradigm of a wider
interest in ordinary – ‘infra-ordinary’ (Perec 1989), I would say – actions that characterizes
some of the tendencies of the period, from dance to visual arts. On the other hand, it
becomes a way to radically abandon cultural institutions and plunge into the polyphony
of the world, claiming public space as a field of intervention and embracing everyday life
through actions that could be compared to the situationists’ ‘constructed situations’: ‘a
moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a
unitary ambiance and a game of events’ (Situationist International [SI] 1958: 12).
This will to intervene in public space, to play the city while traversing it, continues
today in a wide range of ambulatory performances, although sometimes with a less utopic
tonality than in the projects mentioned before. Francis Alÿs’s Railings (2004), for example,
uses the city as an expanded instrument to be played while walking. For this performance
in London resulting in a three-channel video projection and a series of maps, photographs,
and sketches, the artist reveals a hidden urban rhythm and enters in resonance with space
by using a pair of drum sticks to play the railings enclosing the city’s squares and buildings.
The action makes audible this previously purely visual rhythm and amplifies the subtle
threshold between private and public space – between the space of the pedestrians and
the space that remains inaccessible – thus investigating and emphasizing persisting power
structures embedded in the city’s urban fabric.
Marches is a performance and series of scores developed by the artist Lawrence Abu
Hamdan in 2005 and presented in various cities, including London, Glasgow, Lisbon, and
Santarcangelo. As katrinem’s SchuhzuGehör_path of awareness, Marches uses the footstep
as a means ‘to exemplify the aural capacity to delineate space, treating architecture
like dormant music, awakening it through the act of walking’ (Abu Hamdan 2008: 3),
but this project intervenes in the city by means of a collective performance. A group
of performers meet and disperse in urban space according to the artist’s instructions
to interact with the architectures of the city and to create reflections, resonances, and
other effects. The performers wear special shoes made by the artist in collaboration with
artisans and designed to amplify this acoustic interaction. The performers’ trajectories are
also mapped out according to historical or sociological reasons: Abu Hamdan explored
the histories of the cities to find stories of parades, marches, or protests that took place
in the same area, thus allegorically echoing these past events. Therefore, the sound of
the footsteps – emphasized by the customized shoes – allows the artist to rewrite and
occupy the city, playing on its architectural and acoustic features as well as reverberating
its cultural, social, and political history.
A project by Ligna – consisting of radio, media, and performance artists and
theorists Ole Frahm, Michael Hüners, and Torsten Michaelsen – charges this collective
unannounced presence in public space through itinerant sound-making with an explicit
critique to its privatization and commercialization. The Future of Radio Art (2005) is an
urban intervention that took place for the first time in one of Amsterdam’s commercial
areas, with several performers wandering around, carrying plastic bags and mixing with
the crowd of shoppers. Yet their bags concealed ghetto blasters broadcasting a radiophonic
monologue for one voice. This voice dispersed in public space became a denunciation of
its increasing privatization, a commentary on urban space power dynamics as well as a
materialization of the potential of radio to connote and rewrite the situation of reception.
If Ligna’s project plays on the threshold between radio and public space and between the
aesthetic and the everyday sphere, other projects directly transcend art in political organization
and action. Take a Stand Marching Band, for example, is a street performance group initiated
Figure 17.3 Elana Mann, Take a Stand Marching Band, documentation of the Los
Angeles May Day march, 1st May 2017. Photograph by Nateene Diu. Courtesy the artist.
Figure 17.4 Elana Mann, Take a Stand Marching Band, documentation of the Los
Angeles May Day march, 1st May 2017. Photograph by Nick Popkey. Courtesy the artist.
by Elana Mann in 2017, on the occasion of the Los Angeles Women’s March on 21st January.
The group has joined marches and demonstrations amplifying their voice against Donald
Trump’s administration with the artist’s sculptures ‘hands-up-don’t-shoot-horn’ and the
‘histophone’: two prosthetic ‘instruments for the human voice retooled from musical horns
and megaphones in solidarity with social justice movements’ (Mann n.d.). Cast from the
human body, these sculptures cover the mouth of the speakers with one hand, while in fact
amplifying their voice thanks to a trumpet, metaphorically and materially counteracting the
silencing of people’s voices (Figures 17.3 and 17.4). Playing the city, here, becomes a gesture
of collective disobedience recalling a whole tradition of mobile sound-producing and vocal
tactics enacted in demonstrations and parades to interrupt the power structures of public
speech, to give voice to those who are usually unheard or to vocalize a radical disidentification
with the status quo by being present and audible through public space.
‘Presencing’ urban space

An urban soundscape can be defined as a shared ecology where the city’s material,
cultural, social, and political dynamics are audible and always open to multiple individual
and collective negotiations and interactions. In this context, the walking body always
establishes a plurality of auditory relationships. It perceives and reads the urban becoming
and its spatio-temporal multiplicity in a situated, affective, immersive way – such as in the
flâneur’s visual practice or in listening walks – but, at the same time, it always reappropriates
and rewrites its structure by interacting with its polyrhythm, its acoustics, its difference, its
ordering, its public and private territories and their permeability.
Ambulatory sound-making reinforces this interaction by amplifying a personal or
collective presence in public space and becomes a platform for self-representation, agency,
or transformation. This presence can be harmonic or disharmonic, producing consonances
or dissonances. It can carve out an embodied auditory geography, inscribing the body in a
conversation with the environment and establishing a dialogue with the city’s architectural
fabric and social life. It can project a radical dissent, challenging and subverting urban
representations, functions, and practices, questioning and disrupting the sonic order or
infiltrating and occupying the rhythms of public life. In any case, it is a matter not only
of perceiving and knowing but of dwelling and participating: of ‘presencing’ urban space.
Notes
1. Visual practice is fundamental to flânerie. Although in The Arcade Project it is possible
to find several observations on sound and the acoustic phenomena characterizing the
modern metropolis, Walter Benjamin himself affirms, ‘the category of illustrative seeing
[…] is basic for the flâneur’ (Benjamin 1999: 419).
2. On the contrary, the role of listening and hearing is often marginal even for the thinkers
who have most insisted on the bodily nature of walking. Le Breton, for example, devotes
a paragraph of his Eloge de la marche to the auditory dimension of urban space but
proposes a negative interpretation of it, while he recognizes the centrality of vision in the
intersubjective relationships typical of urban experience: ‘Urban sociability induces an
excrescence of the gaze and a suspension or residual use of the other senses’ (Le Breton
2008: 162). On the distinction between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, see Barthes (1982) and
Kassabian (2013), among others.
3. Moreover, in the same years of the WSP, in France CRESSON began to develop peripatetic
methodologies for research on sound effects in urban environments (Thibaud 2001).
4. The Situationist International (SI), formed in 1957, was an organization composed of
writers, artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, and active in several countries in
Europe up to its dissolution in 1972. The SI analysed and organized actions against
the alienation and commodification of everyday life under the regime of the Spectacle
and the capitalist mode of production. Accordingly, during the SI’s first phase, several
members worked on notions such as ‘unitary urbanism’, ‘constructed situations’,
and ‘psychogeography’ conceived as methods to study and liberate everyday life.
Psychogeography, in particular, was first proposed by Guy Debord (one of the founders
of the SI) in his Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography as ‘the study of the precise
laws and specific effects of the geographic environment, consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior of individuals’ (Debord 1955). Debord theorized the
behavioural and emotional impact of urban space on human beings and proposed to
analyse its effects to lay the foundations of a new environment designed according to
the desires of its inhabitants. The main tool for this study was the dérive, described in
the first number of the Internationale Situationniste as ‘a mode of experimental behavior
linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied
ambiances’ (SI 1958). Therefore, drifting – walking without an aim or goal, following
the attractions and desires arisen by the environment – became a method to experiment
with, register, and understand urban atmospheres and their effects on human behaviour
and affects, as well as the base of a new cartography and a subversive way to counteract
the productivity and consumerism imposed on everyday life through a collective practice
of disorientation, an experimental way of inhabiting places, and a different use of space
and time.
5. The literature on walking in the visual arts is quite extensive: Hollevoet 1992; Davila 2002;
Baqué 2006; Careri 2006; Evans 2012; O’Rourke 2013; Waxman 2017. Among exhibition
catalogues: Arasse 2000; Horodner 2002.
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18
Sound Installations for the
Production of Atmosphere as a
Limited Field of Sounds
Jordan Lacey
Introduction
The term ‘sound installation’ was introduced by Max Neuhaus, who ‘distinguishes the
genre from music by indicating that, in sound installation, sounds are “placed in space
rather than time”’ (Ouzounian 2008: 6). By this, he infers that a sound installation requires
no temporal structure, but instead facilitates the placement of sounds in space. Neuhaus
was a percussionist who worked with leading experimental composers (including John
Cage and Edgard Varèse), but he turned away from the concert hall becoming instead
interested in how the introduction of sounds into everyday environments could impact
listening (Neuhaus 2004). In doing so, Neuhaus took sound from the concert hall into the
streets initiating a new form of listening-based public art. It is this positioning of sound
installations as a spatial art form, and its concomitant recontextualizing of music, which is
of interest to the methodology presented in this chapter.
It should be noted that sound installations can be understood more broadly than this.
Ouzounian, who wrote a thesis on the theme of sound installation art, proposes:
Sound installations may be site-specific or not […]; they may include performance,
recording, or broadcasting elements; they may be installed across multiple spaces and times
[…] (or) installed in galleries, museums, electronic networks, and in myriad non-traditional
spaces.
(Ouzounian 2008: 33)
This is a rich but very broad definition of the term. To be useful for the methodology
discussed here, a focusing of intent is required. Sound installations, as understood in this
chapter, resonates most strongly with the third chapter of Ouzounian’s thesis, ‘Everyday
Spaces + Social Spaces’, which ‘traces the beginnings of sound installation art in relation
to early philosophies of everyday life and philosophies of social spatialization’ (Ouzounian
2008: 39). This is also the tradition my book Sonic Rupture: A Practice-led Approach to Urban
Soundscape Design (2016b) is connected with. The ‘sonic rupture’ concept applies affect
theory as a means to propose a method for creating networks of urban sound installations
that rupture everyday spaces to create new experiences and encounters. However, the sonic
rupture concept only briefly touched on the atmospheric and musical possibilities of sound
installation art, which will be more rigorously pursued in this chapter.
It is important to note that sound installations are understood to be distinct from
soundscape systems. Soundscape systems are multi-speaker electroacoustic arrays that
play back compositions and/or sound art works in public spaces (Harvey 2013; Anderson
2016). Primarily concerned with the playback of pre-composed compositions, soundscape
systems are not necessarily concerned with site specificity. They tend to be located in spaces
used frequently by the public and are, as such, in danger of competing with existing spatial
programmes (i.e. consumerism and recreation). Consequently, they can become sources of
annoyance even though the compositions themselves may be thoughtful and well executed
(Harvey 2013: 123). Compare this to well-known permanent sound installation art located
in underutilized, and thus uncontested, spaces: Times Square located beneath a subway
grill; Harmonic Bridge located underneath a traffic overpass; Neville Street Refurbishment
located in a (once) highly reverberant traffic and pedestrian tunnel;1 and, Fluisterende
Wind (Whispering Wind) – by Edwin van der Heide and Marcel Cobussen – a real-time,
generative installation that filters noise with human voice recordings to create ‘moments
when the wind seems to be whispering’.2 These are sound installations that reference
surrounding sounds to enhance typical listening experiences. They are intimately tied
to site-specific sounds and the transformation of perception, making them distinct from
soundscape systems that play back pre-composed sound works.
Sound installation as a soundscape

design tool
The concept of soundscape design (qua acoustic design) was a central contribution of
acoustic ecology, first proposed by Murray Schafer (1994) and the World Soundscape
Project (WSP). As I have previously argued (Lacey 2016b: 75–76), acoustic ecology has
been historically less successful in applying compositional techniques to the creation of
publicly situated sound installation art, due to its perception of noise as a negative urban
phenomenon. This is a consequence of acoustic ecology’s anti-urbanist tendencies (Sterne
2013; Ouzounian 2017), which leaves little room for the consideration of experimental
music and sound art techniques in the design of urban environments. However, in recent
years, the important role that sound installations, and sound art interventions, can play in
an urban design context has developed rapidly (Cusack 2012; Cobussen 2016; Lacey 2016a,
b; Ouzounian and Lappin 2016).
It is interesting to note that Max Neuhaus’s (and the world’s) first permanent urban
sound art installation, Times Square, was installed in 1977, which is the exact year that
Schafer’s book Soundscape: The Tuning of the World was published. Presumably, Schafer
Sound Installations for the Production of Atmosphere 317
would have known of Neuhaus’s sound installation works. (Neuhaus certainly knew of
Schafer’s book – see Neuhaus 2004.) Given his disparaging comments on Russolo’s and
Cage’s experimentations with urban noise (Schafer 1994: 110–111), one suspects Schafer’s
thoughts about Neuhaus’s work would have been equally dismissive. Indeed, we could
ask where soundscape studies would be today if the founders of the WSP, particularly
Schafer, had supported the possibility of site-specific sound installations such as Times
Square, itself rooted in experimental music traditions, as an innovative means to combat
the increasing domination of urban space by noise. Indeed, Neuhaus’s Times Square
deftly demonstrates how sound installations can be designed and located to create subtle,
yet transformative, listening experiences. For a more accessible (and less encumbered)
language for understanding the potential role of urban sound installation practices in the
design of urban environments, I turn to another theorist.
Sound installation as a new spatial music

I turn to Gernot Böhme’s atmosphere theory, and ways in which his concept helps rethink
sound installations as a form of site-specific music.3 Whereas Neuhaus sought to distinguish
sound installations from music, Böhme opens the possibility of sound installations as a
new way to think about and practice music. In so doing, his work locates the sound artist
as an active participant in the production of city atmospheres to affect the emotions of city
inhabitants (on this point, see Cobussen [2016] for further discussion4). In its simplest
understanding atmosphere ‘may be defined as tuned space, i.e. a space with a certain mood.
From here two more traits of the theory of atmospheres can be advanced: atmospheres are
always something spatial, and atmospheres are always something emotional’ (Böhme 2017:
2). And more specifically, in relation to its role as music: ‘Musique concrete and sound
installations, in particular, forced a revision of music theory and, moreover, changes in the
fundamental concepts of aesthetics in general (as concerned with) the notion of music as
environment art’ (168).
Taking these two quotes together, we can consider sound installations as a type of music
that simultaneously acts upon the environment and perception, in between which emerges
an ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’. This remains consistent with Neuhaus’s statement that sound
installations are spatial; however, we now have the opportunity to consider a sound installation
as a form of ‘spatial music’. This is not music generated from notation or predetermined
compositions, but music as an expression of the environment, or more accurately, intentional
re-expressions of the existing environment, enacted to enhance our aural perception of the
environment. This desire to rethink the meaning of music can be traced to the historical
efforts of experimental composers and sound artists. For instance, Edgard Varèse argued for
the liberation of sound (Varèse 1966); John Cage for the emancipation of sound (Cage 2011:
87); and, more recently, Marie Thompson applies affect theory to contextualize music as the
‘organization of sound’ (Thompson 2017). Similarly, sound installation art can be considered
the (re)organization of site-specific sounds to evoke new perceptions.
Böhme foregrounds two sound installation artists (both from the philosopher’s
home country, Germany), Sam Auinger and Hans Peter Kuhn, who have discovered
successful means for producing atmospheres. When speaking of Sam Auinger’s work
(including his collaborations with Bruce Odland), he writes that the use of resonant
pipes ‘reproduces in material form what might be regarded as the origin of music
altogether: the transformation of noises into tones by tuning’ (Böhme 2017: 187). My
only concern with this account is that notions of a ‘tuning of the world’ risk reducing
urban sound installation art to the expression of recognizable musical tones (to be clear,
I am in no way ascribing this limitation to the rich repertoire of Auinger’s work), which
is too closely aligned with perceptions of what music should sound like (i.e. tonal and
clean). However, in another passage Böhme speaks of Hans Peter Kuhn’s method of
sampling original sounds, which he then integrates into his spatial works. This he calls
‘environmental art, which has moved music into the realm of aesthetics of atmosphere’,
which ‘provides the simple answer that music as such is the transformation of physically
sensed space’ (Böhme 2017: 170–171, my emphasis). It would appear that Böhme has a
broad understanding of what music, in the context of atmosphere and environmental
art, can be.
Atmosphere as a limited field of sound

The concept of a ‘limited field of sound’ was introduced to me in a review of my book
by Nikša Gligo: ‘[Sonic Rupture has] opened a new possible view on the development
of music (as a limited field of sound)’ (Gligo 2017). After some email correspondence
with Gligo, and self-reflection in relation to my own practice, I have come to consider
it thus: a ‘field of sound’ can be considered the audible locus within which a sound
installation can be heard (its geographical reach), with the types of sounds radiated
by the installation being ‘limited’ to a relationship with the environmental sounds
originating in the space. This presents an approach to music that is relational, insofar
as it is dependent upon a relationship between existent and introduced sounds – a
(re)organization of sounds – to create augmented atmospheres that evoke new
perceptions.
This reveals a working methodology for the sound installation artist, working within a
soundscape design context, that can be understood as follows:
1 The purpose of a sound installation is to generate an atmosphere. Atmosphere is

the space that emerges between environments that generate ephemera (sound) and
human perceptions of that environment.
2 A sound installation applies a shaping or transformative technique, such as resonant
pipes, sampling strategies, or perhaps some type of material intervention,5 to generate
a new atmosphere as a limited field of sounds.
3 The affected limited field of sounds becomes a site of difference or encounter.
Within this transformed environment, new perceptions are evoked.
Böhme provides an interesting passage that contextualizes the ambition of this

methodology:
The specificity of atmospheres is best experienced when their characteristics stand out – not
when they have lapsed into something which surrounds us uniformly and inconspicuously.
They are experienced, therefore, through contrast, when one is in atmospheres which cut
across one’s own mood, or upon entering them, through the switch from one atmosphere to
another. Atmospheres are then experienced as ‘impressions’ that is, as a tendency to induce
a particular mood in us.
(Böhme 2017: 184)
Thus, atmospheres are most acutely perceived as a transition experience. These encounters
ignite new perceptions, by rupturing the typical uniformity of sounds experienced in
the contemporary city. I want to propose that Bohme’s ‘transitions’ suggest a new way to
consider those sound art installations that rupture small spaces for the diversification of
experience. It is the ‘switching’ of perception, upon transition from homogenous urban
atmosphere into a ruptured (by cause of a sound installation) atmosphere, that affords
alternative auditory experiences. The urban soundscape could consist of an interconnected
network of sound installations that rupture highly localized city spaces, to enrich our
sensory connections as we traverse the urban environment. I will now turn to two recently
produced atmospheres – the first an intervention and the second a public art work – that
act as case studies for the proposed methodology.
Two artworks generating atmosphere as a

limited field of sounds
It should be stated from the outset that my own work as a practitioner, to date, has been
focused on electroacoustic techniques; however, this is not the only means by which a
rupture can be created. Sculptural processes that might take advantage of resonant
properties and/or sounding materials are also powerful and should be considered as of
equal value (Lacey 2016a). I won’t be commenting on the details of the fabrication of the
following discussed works, or their inception, which is adequately covered elsewhere (Lacey
et al. 2017a, b). Rather, these descriptions are focused on the artistic intent to produce
atmospheres as a limited field of sounds for the purposes of transforming perceptions of
the urban environment.
Case study 1: Noise Transformation

Noise Transformation was a collaborative research project (for further details, see Lacey
et al. 2017a) that developed a sound installation technique for transforming roadside
traffic noise into a musical experience. It is an example of sound installations being applied
for a practical purpose, in this case a creative intervention as a means of ameliorating noise
annoyance. It is a working example of how soundscape design approaches can improve
listening experiences in small, localized urban spaces.
The work demonstrates how an atmospheric approach enables the simultaneous focus
on the spatial generation of sound and its perception, and encourages new thinking about
noise management. Typically, background noise sources are quantifiably measured to
determine if the sound pressure level (SPL) is above or below a predetermined amount.
The project industry partner would measure the SPL level of any location where a member
of the public reported traffic noise to be annoying.6 If the SPL was measured to be above
the minimum standards set by the state road network regulatory body (VicRoads, at the
time of writing), then the industry partner would act by double glazing the windows of
the occupant’s house and installing air-conditioning. The unintended impact is that people
become even more isolated from their outside environment by trapping themselves in
what could be described as a small acoustic bubble. An atmosphere we might think of as
defensive (though hopefully also homely) towards outdoor conditions.
Such a quantifiable approach demonstrates the limitations of treating sound at its
source rather than at the level of perception. By treating sound at the level of perception
our research team made an interesting discovery. By increasing the noise levels by 1 to 2
decibels more pleasing aesthetic effects were created, which led to positive associations
with a sound environment typically considered to be unpleasant.7 The method was
to capture road traffic noise with microphones. The captured noise passed through a
computer-based algorithm and/or sound design tool that reprocessed the audio signal.
This reprocessed signal was then played back through an accompanying speaker array
that increased the overall SPL by 1 to 2 deibels. At this point the acoustic engineers
involved in the project were outside of their comfort zone, given that they only know
one successful course of action: quantifiable reduction in SPL measurement. However,
through conversations with local community members by sensory ethnographers8
involved in the research (Lacey et al. 2017c) our research team found that the new sound
fields reduced people’s sense of anxiety. The same people stated that they would use
outdoor spaces (parks and balconies) more often if the traffic sounded more like the
transformed sound environments.
This discovery supports contemporary research by environmental managers and
engineers who are exploring new approaches to noise management (Brown 2016; Kang
2016). For instance, Lex Brown, at a talk for a transport and noise control industry
presentation I attended in Melbourne (2017), suggested (I paraphrase) that soundscape
managers might better consider noise as a resource rather than a waste. In fact, the
organization who invited him, VicRoads, were one of the many organizations who attended
the Noise Transformation demonstrations, at which one of the representatives suggested the
installations were ‘recycling noise’. This is an interesting insight that in my view resonates
with Brown’s suggestion that noise might be better managed as a resource. It demonstrates
a new creative way to treat noise: not just as an exterior phenomenon to be removed/
attenuated, but as a recyclable material that can be transformed into aesthetically pleasing
perceptions. It is an excellent example of how designing for mood/atmosphere – which
emerges at the interface of environment and perception – can be an effective alternative for
typical noise attenuation approaches, and an affirmation of Böhme’s statement that ‘music as
such is the transformation of physically sensed space’ (Böhme 2017: 170–171, my emphasis).
Case study 2: Touchstone: The Artwork Remembers

Touchstone is a publicly situated artwork completed by an interdisciplinary team of creative
practice researchers including a landscape architect, industrial designer, interactive systems
designer, and sound artist (for further details, see Lacey et al. 2017b). The project sought
to work with a local council to discover how integrating an artwork into urban design
approaches might encourage local populations to be more engaged with their environment.
Touchstone is an interactive artwork that is integrated into the plaza of a community centre.
It immerses listeners inside a sound field that is generated by two vibrating metal plates
and two in-ground speakers playing local field recordings. Twice a day (dawn and dusk)
the artwork creates a short performance for the community based on the amount of daily
interactions with the artwork’s central sensing stone.
To achieve this the entire suburb was considered to be the field of sounds with which the
sound installation would engage. I communicated with community members via a social
media page to determine what sounds they felt best represented their community. From the
received feedback, I generated a list of community sounds broken down into six categories:
environmental, rural, human, industrial, construction, and performative. A team of field
recordists captured these sounds in the local suburb, which were then integrated into the
artwork to play back during the dawn and dusk performance times. The phonographic
playback combines with the sounds of the vibrating metal plates to immerse listeners in a
limited field of sounds as determined by the geographical and audible reach of the artwork.
The dawn and dusk performances are determined by the amount of interactions that
have occurred each day, during which the metal plates vibrate in various ways depending
on the touching of a central sensing stone. The vibrating plates have the effect of physically
passing sound into the body, while virtual sine-wave generators radiate sympathetic
frequencies via the in-ground speakers into the ears. The effect has been described by
the artists and visitors as akin to a spacious and comforting sensation; a haptic-auditory
experience connecting ground with sky. A sense of expansiveness occurs as the atmosphere
seems to stretch beyond the immediate vicinity. This is an effect achieved by compelling the
sensing body to enter into a new relationship with its immediate environment: vibrating
ground, windswept land, and vast cloudy skies combine as interconnecting motions, which
weaves the body into its surrounding environment; and incoming suburban sounds mix
with a concentration of audio samples (derived from field recordings) that radiate from
the ground. Readers familiar with Sonic Rupture will hear in this description the notion of
rupturing the urban crust to expand the affective potential of the earth (Lacey 2016: 50–1);
indeed, poetically, it felt as if this had been achieved with Touchstone.
Touchstone is indicative of the possibilities of playing with the atmosphere approach.
In this case the larger suburban environment is contracted and collapsed into a confined
space, where an atmosphere as a limited field of sounds emerges to direct perception

outwards, into an awareness of land and sky. The artwork points to the role public artists
have in using sound to facilitate community engagement with atmospheric processes that
simultaneously design for perception and environment, rather than simply installing the
finalized outcome of a preconceived concept.
Conclusion
When applying sounds to urban spaces it is prudent for the practitioner to remember Neuhaus’s
statement that sound installation art is spatial rather than temporal. As such, sounds are
designed and placed to respond to spatial conditions without necessarily being concerned
about compositional narratives with beginnings and endings. This has been described in this
chapter as spatial music, wherein introduced and existent sounds co-mingle and intertwine
to reorganize environments to make new perceptual experiences possible. This is consistent
with atmosphere theory that considers atmosphere to be a spatial mood that emerges at the
entwined interface of environment and perception. In this respect the sound installation
artist considers both the spatial qualities of the environment, particularly its sounds, and the
possible perceptual response of the visitor. The benefits of this approach are provided by the
two case studies. Noise Transformation transforms existing noise sources into new auditory
experiences, which, as evidenced by the sensory ethnography assessment (see end note
8), improves aesthetic experience. Touchstone considers perception by assessing preferred
sounds through community consultation which informs the environmental expressions of
the artwork. Both examples are integrated approaches in which artist, environment, and
community coalesce to discover ways in which sound installations can produce affecting
atmospheres for those that encounter them. As such, the sound installation artist can
be considered a new type of spatial musician who reorganizes the sounds of the city to
simultaneously produce alternative atmospheres and affect new ways of experiencing.
Notes
1. For more information on these three works, see Lacey 2016a.
2. For more information on Fluisterende Wind, see Studio Edwin van der Heide n.d.
3. It should be noted that Böhme is featured in the first edition of the Soundscape Journal.
His work has been long known to acoustic ecologists as well as public sound artists and
atmosphere designers.
4. Cobussen states that ‘sound artists and artistic researchers are very well equipped,
indispensable actually, to the process of reimagining and co-designing public
urban spaces as sites that simultaneously provide for daily needs as well as facilitate
environmental comfort by affecting the moods and emotions of the ones traversing these
spaces’ (Cobussen 2016: 10).
5. See Lacey (2016a) for further discussion, in which I examine three approaches to sound
installation art: resonant, electroacoustic, elemental.
6. VicRoads, the key agency responsible for road traffic noise management in the state of
Victoria, Australia, seeks to limit noise next to new or improved roads at 63dB(A) L10
(18hr). For further information, see ‘VicRoads – Traffic Noise Reducation Policy’ n.d.
7. This is consistent with the public experiences of Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger’s work,
Harmonic Bridge. For further discussion, see Lacey 2016a.
8. Sensory ethnography uses techniques such as videography to collect qualitative data. The
employed techniques capture immediate sensory experience rather than questionnaires
or interviews that remove people from their immediate experience. For more
information, see Pink 2015.
References
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Planner’. Journal of Sonic Studies 11. Available online: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/
view/243093/243094 (accessed 15 May 2018).
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Brown, L. and C. J. Grimwood (2016). ‘Loci for Urban Soundscape Planning, Design and
Management’. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Congress on Acoustics, Buenos Aires,
5–9 September, 2016. Available online: http://www.ica2016.org.ar/ica2016proceedings/
ica2016/ICA2016-0233.pdf (accessed 15 May 2018).
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University Press.
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(accessed 15 May 2018).
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of Music 48 (1): 153–156.
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Raton, FL: CRC Press
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of Enduring Sound Art Installations’. Organised Sound 21 (2): 147–159.
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York: Bloomsbury
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Active Public Space Symposium Proceedings, 33–40. Available online: https://drive.google.
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Lacey J., S. Pink, L. Harvey, X. Qiu, S. Sumartojo, S. Zhao, S. Moore, S. Maisch, and M.
Duque (2017c). RMIT Acoustic Design Innovations for Managing Motorway Traffic Noise
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net/fluisterende_wind/ (accessed 3 July 2020).
Thompson, M. (2017). Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism. New
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5 (1): 11–19.
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trafficnoisereductionpolicy.ashx?la=en&hash=6C28650833D6FD178B03FC47E5C7B60F
19
Fragile Devices: Improvisation
as an Interdisciplinary
Research Methodology
Rebecca Caines
Basque-born noise improviser Mattin suggests that it is the place of the improviser to ‘go
fragile’, exposing yourself to ‘unwanted situations that could break the foundations of your
own security […]. Once you are out, there is no way back; you cannot regret what you
have done. You must engage in questioning your security, see it as a constriction […].
Keep going forward toward what you do not know, to what is questioning your knowledge
and your use of it’ (Mattin 2009). Being true to an improvisatory research methodology
requires an ethos which I define as a perpetual state of fragility (Caines, Kenny, and Seibel
2014). It is a commitment to move through and, with mistakes, admit naivete, and to let go
of control to create together with others. This commitment is something some researchers
are loathe to put into action, especially in public. Yet improvisation is utilized in rigorous
research projects across the globe. This chapter will discuss the dissonant and ‘fragile’ ways
that improvisation can act as a research methodology, with examples from my own work
using improvisation in socially-engaged sonic arts, creative technologies, and performance.
I argue that the improvisatory qualities of risk, active listening, collaborative response, and
the reconfiguration of mistake into creativity can form a strong basis for research; and can
also trouble disciplinary techniques and expectations; as well as productively disrupting
borders between art, research, and pedagogy.
Improvisatory beginnings
I come to improvisation as an artist, working initially in theatre, and then later in free
improvisation/creative music and sound art contexts. More recently I have utilized
improvisation in interactive installations, in creative technologies research, and in university-
and community-based teaching. The philosophies of improvisation, and the integration of
improvisation games, scores, and techniques from a range of disciplines help me to foment
creativity, both in a generative compositional sense, and when I am forming the content/
material of live improvised events. While my initial training was in theatre and performance
studies, my interdisciplinary work is now increasingly identified and located within the
emerging field of critical studies in improvisation (see Caines n.d.; and IICSI 2020).
I also frame my work as ‘community-based’ or ‘socially-engaged’, as all of my art and
research is made in partnership, addressing simultaneous social and artistic goals (Cohen-
Cruz 2000; Thompson 2012). I partner with other professional artists, researchers, and
scientists; and with community organizations, schools, welfare organizations, social
workers, activists, people trying art for the first time, those working outside art industries,
and/or people whose art has been forgotten, ignored, or erased. This kind of dialogical,
co-created work challenges ideas of authorship, and is predicated on a requirement that
we ‘respect the Difference of the other enough to question and make vulnerable [our] own
a priori assumptions […]. Genuine dialogical engagement is at least a two-way thoroughfare’
(Conquergood 1985: 9). This kind of practice requires negotiating the complex territories
of social practice, public art, relational art, and activist and applied interventions (Kester
2004; Bishop 2006; Prentki and Preston 2009; Helguera 2011; Jackson 2011). This kind of
work can explicitly or implicitly require elements of improvisation, especially adaptability,
flexibility, and co-creation. Improvisation thus provides me with the approaches, tools, and
techniques I need in all of the realms I work in.
Art/research methodologies: Tensions and

contradictions
In my graduate classes, I teach my students who are just starting out in research a fairly
standard approach: that ‘research methodologies’ must be rigorous, tested, accountable,
peer-reviewed frameworks for doing research, that bring theory and methods together,
and provide a strong, justified philosophical rationale for the choices being made.
Methodologies are also, of course, discursive tools of knowledge testing: ‘Methodology
therefore legitimates and delegitimates, validates and invalidates, approves and disapproves,
passes and fails, claims to knowledge and knowledge production. Methodology is the final
court of appeal in judging what counts as bona fide knowledge of something’ (Matsinhe
2007: 839). It is a key challenge for all of those working in contemporary research practices
to find appropriate research methods that question, expose, and navigate ethical boundaries,
and allow new knowledge to form.
The term ‘methodologies’ is often used to refer to a range of qualitative and quantitative
systems for undertaking social study (Denzin and Lincoln 2000). Methodologies may
incorporate statistical, experimental, ethnographic, analytical, and discursive practices; and
they involve a wide range of practical and critical tools. Researchers utilize and combine
tested methodologies, and/or join peer-reviewed debate to actively critique existing
Fragile Devices 327
methods or propose new combinations and frameworks. Proposed research designs are
usually evaluated against the strength and appropriateness of their methodology. Clear
research questions or precise methodological steps or actions are proposed initially, and
then tested. These questions and/or steps may be developed in advance, or can be created
during the research process with research participants; and can be based on discovery,
action, or intervention. New methodologies are rigorously debated within their respective
fields before becoming established and accepted. Whatever the discipline, many would
agree that ‘research takes place when a person intends to carry out an original study to
enhance knowledge and understanding’. It starts with ‘questions or issues that are relevant
in the research context, and it employs methods that are appropriate to the research and
which ensure the validity and reliability of the research findings’. An additional prerequisite
is that the research process and the research findings be ‘documented and disseminated in
appropriate ways’, and in some cases, that studies are also able to be repeated by others to
produce similar results (Borgdorff 2012: 54).
It can be problematic, however, to use these kinds of parameters to try to understand
the research that takes place in artistic contexts. While arts-based data gathering
methods in the social sciences, which are sometimes referred to as arts-based research
(ABR), or a/r/tography, are established methodological approaches that use art, theatre,
music, dance, film, and literature; the results are not the same as professional art (Finley
2005; Leavy 2008). A/r/tographic researchers do not need to engage in artistic training
regimes; or satisfy professional art contexts, etc. in order to produce results that are
recognized in the field of ABR. In contrast, in artistic research in fine arts contexts like the
sonic arts, research questions sometimes arrive at the end, with the final artworks, or even
afterwards; not in advance. Artists work in order to see what the work is about, and often
aim to develop unique working processes that are not always transparent or transferable.
Writing is not necessarily involved. The peer reviewers for art may be art juries made up of
professional peers; funding bodies; reviewers, curators, and gallery directors; record labels/
producers; festival committees; and professional colleagues attending the events. Artistic
methods are often deliberately eccentric, experimental, personal, and non-generalizable,
and research conditions are often unable to be repeated. When pressed many artists
would acknowledge that concepts such as attention to process, rigour, interaction with
their discipline, and peer review, are all still key to producing quality outcomes (Horowitz
2014). Frames such as ‘research creation’, ‘practice-based research’, or ‘practice-led research’
have been helpful for some artists to articulate their methods (Smith and Dean 2009).
For others, terms such as ‘research design’ and ‘methodology’ will always remain alien
to the work that artists do, even if this work is located within academic contexts, such
as universities, or even if the work is funded by academic research bodies. For some, the
utilization of research language is a symptom of giving in to the creeping centralization,
standardization, and bureaucratization of universities; or can risk instrumentalizing art
rather than allowing it to exist on its own terms (Elkins n.d.).
In recent years, there has been some momentum to find ways through these seeming
contradictions, by acknowledging artistic research as a distinct methodological stream in
academic contexts, to be considered in parallel to scientific or social science methodologies

(Slager 2009b; Journal of Academic Research [JAR] 2010; Biggs and Karlsson 2012).
Examining literature in this area, artistic research can be understood to share at least some
of the following characteristics:
● Artistic objects as outcomes
● Non-linguistic outcomes
● Preverbal/tacit/pre-reflective/preconceptual work
● Intuition
● Emotion
● Embodiment
● Contradictory, unfinished, confusing, disturbing aims
● Attention on aesthetic considerations
● Epistemic/hidden knowledges and forms of expression
● Applied implementation
● Connection to artistic histories, professional contexts, and training.
Artistic research methods are sometimes divided into subcategories. While language may
differ, it is common to differentiate research-for-creation (for example, developing or
discovering techniques and materials, drafting and testing versions, etc.); from research-
from-creation (producing art in order to allow for new conditions for analysis). Other
categories include: creative presentations of research (such as alternative ways to show data);
and creation-as-research (research undertaken through and by practical artistic work)
(Chapman and Sawchuck 2012: 15–20). Borgdorff famously defines artistic research as ‘the
articulation of the unreflective, non-conceptual content enclosed in aesthetic experiences,
enacted in creative practices and embodied in artistic products’ (Borgdorff 2012: 47). I do
not think Borgdorff ’s focus on ‘non-conceptual content’ adequately covers the breadth of
modern artistic research, given the strong conceptual nature of many contemporary artist’s
works. Henk Slager provides a little more nuance, when he suggests that ‘the most intrinsic
characteristic of artistic research is based on the continuous transgression of boundaries in
order to generate novel, reflexive zones’ (Slager 2009a: 198).
Improvisation as a research methodology

Improvisation is a well-known artistic method, present across most cultures and practices
(Bailey 1980; Nettl and Russell 1998; Albright and Gere 2003; Frost and Yarrow 2007;
Landgraf 2011). Improvisation has been a core element in many significant movements
in music and sonic arts, theatre, dance, visual art, literature, film, and interdisciplinary
practices; ranging from those in the institutional canon, through to avant-garde outliers,
and folk contexts (Dean and Smith 1997; Caines and Heble 2014). Improvising activity
also takes place in everyday practices and non-arts contexts (Sawyer 2007; Peters 2009).
In addition, growing literature in the discipline of critical studies in improvisation has
Fragile Devices 329
emphasized the social impacts of improvisational models and approaches (Lipsitz, Fischlin,
and Heble 2013; Lewis and Piekut 2016; Siddall and Waterman 2016).
Improvisation is only more recently being discussed explicitly as a distinct research
methodology. Nisha Sajnani, for example, articulates her own research method as a
combination of improvised theatre techniques drawn from Developmental Transformation,
Playback Theatre, and Theatre of the Oppressed. She suggests: ‘When situated as research,
improvisation functions as a kind of “disciplined empathy”, inviting researchers to engage
in an iterative process of identifying emergent issues and to respond with a corresponding
design that permits further exploration’ (Sajnani 2012: 83). For Stephen Levine, it is
improvisation’s ability to resist certainty that attracts him to using it as his research
methodology:
Even so-called qualitative research now looks for results that are ‘evidence-based,’ i.e.,
conclusions that are clear and distinct and that can be proven beyond any doubt. The
aesthetic attitude which is embodied in an essentially improvisational research method can
never be validated in this way. This is both its limitation and its strength.
(Levine 2013: 27)
The Canadian-based research network, Improvisation, Community and Social Practice

(ICASP 2007–2013), and its subsequent formation, the International Institute for Critical
Studies in Improvisation (IICSI 2013–present), have been providing a sustained laboratory
context for building knowledge on improvisation as research, with research sites across
the globe (ICASP 2009; IICSI 2016). One example of interdisciplinary IICSI research is
the work of law scholar Sara Ramshaw and musician/sonic arts researcher Paul Stapleton,
and their team, on the Translating Improvisation Project. Ramshaw and Stapleton used
improvised music forms to help train professionals in child protection to be better at
their jobs, while simultaneously working to understand the limits of both law policy and
of improvised music scores (Ramshaw et al. 2018). As IICSI director Ajay Heble states:
‘Improvisation has become a vital model for the analysis of political, cultural, and ethical
action and dialogue’ (Heble 2005). More and more academic and artistic research networks
are emerging that actively ground their philosophies and practices in the improvisatory,
highlighting the need for rigorous methodological inquiry in this area.1
Breaking down the steps

In order to aid researchers unfamiliar with improvisatory art practices, and artists
reluctant or unsure about research terminology, I have sketched out some broad steps
below for building a research design, and then I have mapped them on to what I see as
the corresponding steps in improvisatory approaches. I hope this can aid in articulating
a broad improvisatory methodology that applies to both written and artistic research
settings. At each step, I have included examples from my own sonic and interdisciplinary
research projects.
Developing research questions

Active listening/improvising with
To improvise is to improvise with, with others, with ‘enabling constraints’ (Stravinsky 1946:
49), with spaces, and with new systems or interfaces. The first step to this responsive work is
to rethink what it means to listen. A distinction is drawn in scholarship between involuntary
hearing (the reception of audible signals and comprehension of familiar aural contexts)
and involuntary listening (the active, attentive, heightened state of awareness to new sonic
information). Phenomenologist Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, ‘if “to hear” is to understand
the sense […] to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one
that is not immediately accessible’ (Nancy 2014: 6). Listening is one of the key traits of the
improviser, both for performers and for scholars who analyse improvisation. Improvisers
cultivate active listening, in order to be ready to respond to unknown material and develop
new forms. Improvising musicians lean in to listen for the moments that will form the basis
of their collective sound-making (Fischlin 2009: 2), or listen to the acoustic environment
for new kinds of sounds and sonic relationships (Oliveros 1995: 19); and improvising
dancers and theatre artists listen for offers from space, body, and co-performers to build
from (Foster 2003: 6).
Composer, improviser, and scholar Pauline Oliveros, made it her life’s work to grow
the practice of what she named ‘Deep Listening’, a practice that she believed applied to
much more than just her artistic work. Deep listening is ‘listening in every possible way to
everything possible—this means one hears all sounds, no matter what one is doing’ (Oliveros
1995: 19). Oliveros and her collaborators aimed to ‘cultivate a heightened awareness of the
[…] environment, both external and internal, and promote experimentation, improvisation,
collaboration, playfulness and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth’
(see Deep Listening Institute 2014). Oliveros explained the practice of deep listening as
simultaneously improvising with sound and ‘expanding your listening to continually
include more’ (Oliveros 2015). Listening is thus seen across disciplines as a key element of
any improvisatory practice, and is central to an improvisatory research methodology.
Broadly speaking, an improvisatory methodology requires that researchers first see
who is there, find exactly what they offer and need, and then utilize a process of active,
‘straining for more’, through interdependent and expansive listening. Research questions,
offers, themes, and prompts can then be built from this improvisatory listening activity,
whether the outcomes are to be written, artistic, or multimodal. This listening activity
continues throughout the research and dissemination process. This process may be aided
by using listening tools, exercises, and practices drawn from improvisatory music and
sonic arts, and it can also incorporate interdisciplinary approaches to listening that take
in lessons learned from other research modalities (Back and Bull 2003). It is, then, the
task of the researcher to improvise with their collaborators and the spaces they work in,
responding to the precise needs and conditions, while making room for their input to
completely change the research focus and direction. In theatrical terms, this openness
Fragile Devices 331
is often articulated as continually ‘accepting offers’, or incorporating a stance of ‘yes,

and … ’ (Spolin 1969; Halpern and Close 1994), while in music and sonic arts it might
be better understood as ‘not reacting exactly, but being overwhelmed by what happens
and thus breaking, releasing, splitting open […] not reacting, inter-acting’ (Ninh 2010:
66). In this way, improvisatory methodologies may have links with those social science
methodologies that are also grounded, iterative, or participatory.
In my research projects, listening to develop collaborative research questions, and
then improvising with these questions has taken many forms. In the sound art project
Community Sound[e]Scapes, for example, I listened with communities in Australia,
Northern Ireland, and Canada to develop new kinds of soundscapes responding to site/
space/place. Researchers and participants used audio recorders, soundwalks, deep listening
exercises, digital audio workstation (DAW) software, and a co-created online interface for
improvising with acoustic recordings, to listen to each other. We also utilized other kinds of
listening practices such as informal, collaboratively created community needs assessments,
interdisciplinary sound and site-specific theatre workshops, indigenous storytelling, and
even mixed-ability bike rides (Caines 2015). In all five community partnerships, and with
the other collaborating artists, listening together and improvising with each other, the
constraints of each community radically changed the research process. This produced at
times unstable responses that productively challenged control, brought power relations
into view,2 and produced new creative and written research opportunities, guided by what
Bull and Back call ‘thinking with our ears’ (Back and Bull 2003: 3).
In a more recent project entitled ImprovEnabled, I collaborated with my research
partner, cultural anthropologist Michelle Stewart, and a range of community partners, in
order to explore improvisation as a tool for recovering the lived experience of the complex
disability, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) (Caines and Stewart 2017). We initially
aimed to use workshops in music and theatre with applied social science interventions,
to push back at unjust, dated, and uneven systems that leave people with FASD and their
parents and caregivers in untenable situations. Stewart and I, and our partners, however,
had to learn how to listen across and between the differences that separate art, research,
and applied approaches. This resulted in unexpected new methods and outcomes.
In our initial project, we worked with adult participants in a support group. Participants
included those with lived experience of the disability, families, support workers, and staff.
Stewart and I had to try to understand each other’s ideas of what acceptable research
outcomes could be, which differs widely between our research disciplines. In artistic
research, for example, the production of new forms of improvised music could be an
acceptable research outcome in itself, while in a social science context, musical workshops
would be included in a range of methods for gathering data that would then need to be
analysed and written up at a future stage. There was also significant scepticism from staff
and agencies around whether improvisation and art would be useful in community settings
which are so often focused around direct management of issues. We had to listen together
to co-develop plans with our partners that incorporated all of these different perspectives.
We held information sessions, and then co-designed the theme and approach with the
agencies and frontline staff, and with members of the support group.
In one workshop we used improvised theatre games from Forum Theatre to listen to
scenarios of lived experiences of stigma and isolation with the group. We then followed
this with an exercise in free improvised music and drawing. The participants were given
a verbal prompt, and some drew pictures, while others created music on tablets using a
range of different apps as instruments. Those playing sounds were given assistance to try
making long, short, sharp, or flowing sounds on their different instruments, and to listen
to each other to build the piece together around the theme. As the exercise was repeated,
those drawing would respond to what they heard played, and those creating music would
respond to the pictures. All the prompts were drawn from thoughts that were expressed in
the earlier theatre games. One example of a prompt was the question: ‘What does it feel like
to not be listened to?’ All people in the room improvised, including staff members, support
workers, and researchers. Stewart led a discussion at the end of the session to learn more
about the experiences that people had been expressing in the artistic work. In interviews
following the project, we were told that staff were particularly affected by the ways these
exercises brought out stories and expressive capacities that had not been seen before.
The results of this project are now being directly applied, in order to create new supports
and advocacy strategies. Recordings of the improvised music created in the session
described above have been played back in other settings across Canada and internationally
(including to government working groups) to share the lived experiences and inequities
faced by those with FASD and advocate for change. A free downloadable community
improv toolkit with games developed in these sessions was released in September 2018
with community organizations and is now being used globally.3 One group is currently
adapting the toolkit and findings from the first project to create peer-to-peer mentoring
on advocacy and life skills for teens. Another group formed from this project has worked
with researchers from the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast (Northern Ireland), to
explore the possibility for improvised music and theatre in immersive spaces both to aid
in understanding sensory differences and to build on the strengths of those with different
listening capacities. Listening and collaborating to each other, using improvisation, has
radically changed the original research plans and enabled new kinds of research to happen.
Building a research design, testing, and

implementation
Risk / real-time collaboration / integration of
improvisation techniques
Improvisatory methodologies are based on risk and trust. Waterman suggests of improvised
musicians:
All their decisions are made in the moment […]. The possibility of failure is always imminent,
because the process demands such a high degree of self-exposure. Improvisation is most
Fragile Devices 333
satisfying when the conditions of trust exist that allow participants to risk everything in the
moment of performance. This means that improvisation is an arena of social interaction and
accountability.
(Waterman 2014: 59)
Of course, risky situations are often something researchers are encouraged to avoid. There
are real risks to people to be negotiated in research, particularly in interdisciplinary or
community engaged research where vulnerable people can be hurt. In universities, we
work in risk-averse spaces and policies at all points, and severe consequences are held up
for those who work recklessly. As improvisers, however, we simply cannot be risk-averse.
The kind of risk we take when improvising is, however, immediately accountable to others,
and is collaboratively created and supported. This risk is built on reciprocity that needs to
be earned. The research design, testing, and implementation phases of an improvisatory
project must make us sensitive, aware, and attune to risking together. Decisions must be
made together, and both dissonance and responsivity are key.
Improvisation methodologies use new kinds of research and pedagogy tools drawn
from art contexts and can combine them in new ways. In my recent research, for example,
short-form improvised theatre games have been used to create new sound art performances
(Caines, Kotowich, and Schenstead 2015); automatic writing exercises have shaped focus
group interview structures (Caines and Stewart 2017); and artists have engaged live with
audience’s written notes at a conference to create paintings and music onstage about
indigenous and settler truth and reconciliation issues in Canada (Brownridge 2018). In
the Creative Technologies programme that I have been leading at the University of Regina,
improvising artists working with computer scientist and engineers have demanded
impossible technologies that push engineering into new directions, and technologists have
demanded new kinds of ‘enabling constraints’ on artists through new invention, making
different research outputs possible. Engineer Craig Gelowitz’s work with improvising sound
artist Kim Morgan on adapting sound projects to public spaces is an excellent example, as
each of the researchers had to find innovation in their own discipline for the project ideas
to be realized (see Gelowitz, Morgan, and Benedecenti 2008).
One pedagogical example that combines different kinds of improvisation approaches is
the Creative Technologies class ‘Introduction to Sound Art’, which is co-taught by Gelowitz
and me. In this class, a mix of students from software systems engineering and fine arts
learn sonic improvisation techniques from artists such as Jon Stevens and Pauline Oliveros,
alongside learning software and physics related to acoustic phenomena. Lessons include
a mix of improvisatory artistic workshops exploring sound creation, manipulation, and
performance, and lectures. Students often find it difficult at first to work together across
disciplinary divides, but they produce sound art projects that have combined engineering
and improvisation techniques in interesting ways. Student final projects have, for example,
included new improvisation scores using Twitter, audiovisual interpretation software
generating improvisations from user-inputted text, multichannel sound sculptures that
record user vocal improvisations and reinterpret them, and a range of game-based art
works using sound, based on trust, risk, and real-time decision making. Students report
approaching their own disciplines differently after taking the class; many engineers
acknowledge that exposure to, and experience in, creative, improvisatory activities has
changed the way they approach collaboration and project design.
Another example would be The University of Regina iPad Orchestra research and teaching
project. I began this project in 2012 with two colleagues, David Gerhard from the Department
of Computer Science, and Pauline Minevich from the Department of Music.4 The class is
centred on teaching free improvisation techniques, graphic scores, conducted improvisation,
and sound art. This learning is coupled with technological lessons about the iPad, lectures
on the history of improvised music, and laptop and mobile device orchestras. Weekly jam
sessions focus on teaching wider improvisation skills but contain material drawn from a
range of sources. These include experimental music techniques and prompts, including
Fluxus scores, and contemporary game and conducted improvisation structures; jazz and
free improvisation; short- and long-form theatrical and performance art improvisation (see
Spolin 1969; Johnstone 1987; Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes 2011); live drawing and painting
(see Schlanger 2018); and hip-hop practices such as sampling, beatmaking, MCing, and
beatboxing. Students, most of whom have never improvised before, create a concert of
improvised music and sound installation at the end of the semester, where they play iPads and
smartphones coupled with more traditional instruments, as well as utilizing laptops, visual
art, theatre, and app and interface development. A connected research project has allowed the
knowledge gained in the classroom to be taken into other contexts, including research projects
in community settings where the iPad offers new capacities for those with limited mobility.5
These classes have required social improvisation to occur alongside artistic improvisation.
At times in the classroom this has meant negotiating complex intercultural protocols to
share traditional knowledges, learning from students in campus inclusion programmes,
and sharing radically different political views. Finding institutional and pedagogical ways
to run and sustain these kinds of programmes, and meeting such different curricula and
research needs has been a rewarding challenge for the researchers/instructors, requiring
constant adjustment and adaptation, and at times the deliberate disruption of everyone’s
expectations. Improvisatory research designs, testing, and implementation can be guided
by improvisatory actions of give, take, lift, support, and disrupt.
Outcomes
Reconfiguration of mistake
The hardest part of an improvisatory methodology is the constant and deliberate awareness
of mistakes. In many research methodologies, errors in process are to be announced
and accounted for, bracketed, avoided where possible, or used as cautionary tales. In
improvisation mistake is the fruit of the work. What is useful in an improvisatory research
methodology is the idea of seeking mistakes as material. Rather than erasing them, we
learn and highlight, interrogate, play with, poke at, create with, our errors, our failures, our
disasters. Whilst most research is based in some way on experimentation, I would argue
Fragile Devices 335
that not many methodologies actively seek mistakes, nor are keen to keep revisiting and
building from them once ‘lessons are learned’. A too narrow understanding of improvisation
approaches, however, might imply that ‘there are no mistakes ever, only material’, but of
course, errors can happen. People can be hurt, power abused, trust lost, and people’s lives
affected. People can also fail to improvise together, slip into easy, comfortable, and pedantic
routines. They can step all over each other to dominate and belittle, ignore advice, or
make truly horrible, context-blind work. A rigorous methodology based in improvisation
requires an ethics of responsivity and accountability.
I have written elsewhere in more details about the ethics of mistake in community-based
sound art projects, with reference to an extension of the Community Sound [e]Scapes
project that was entitled Community Sound [e]Scapes: Northern Ontario. This project took
place in 2012 with First Nations partners in Northern Ontario, Canada. I was complicit
in many mistakes in that project. Yet communities have found ways to make the project
sustainable and useful, including finding new ways to work with the sound techniques we
developed together on future projects, such as mapping land and resource use in remote
communities (Caines, Kenny, and Seibel 2014). One quote, by a young participant in the
project who faces significant disadvantages, continues to remind me of the importance of
being able to acknowledge and move with mistakes. She suggested: ‘The more broken you
are, the more you can fit in. You can find a different puzzle piece from a different puzzle and
make it fit to another puzzle and it will still look cool, right? […] I like making mistakes,
because mistakes […] they can’t define you […]. That’s survival’ (Caines et al. 2013a).
Evaluation
Returning to active listening
One important area of methodological inquiry is being able to track when we have succeeded
or failed in our goals. Improvisatory models suggest that to evaluate is actually to return to
the start of the methodological cycle, once again making a commitment to active listening,
and agreeing to continually ‘strain for more’ in order to understand what has happened
and is happening. Evaluation in the arts, and especially in socially engaged arts, is difficult;
perhaps improvisatory methods can offer new ways to think through how we understand
‘success’ and ‘failure’ through cycles of improvised listening, creating, and responding.
Some last thoughts . . .

A chapter like this can only briefly sketch out the ways that improvisation can form a
methodological framework. In each step, however, this kind of approach can offer a
methodological grounding to those working in research in both artistic and academic
settings. It is clear that improvisatory methodologies cross back and forth between linguistic
and non-linguistic forms, between genre and resisting genre. In the examples I have discussed,
improvisation can also hold different needs, expectations, and desires together. Improvisatory
methods in my work help me to expose uneven power relationships through collaboration
based on mutual input and benefit. They undermine the idea that one artist, principal
investigator, or team owns the knowledge or controls the parameters. Finally, improvisatory
methodologies can help me to navigate through thornier, binary oppositions in thinking
about research and art. I do not argue that all research should be applied or instrumentalized.
As an improviser, I understand that leaving people alone to play, experiment, and be obscure,
and do ‘what they need to do’ is an important way to ensure that ‘innovation’ can actually
take place. This is as true in social or hard sciences as it is in art. Cultures of surveillance – in
order to ensure that research has measurable, applied impacts – is increasingly understood to
hinder rather than support quality research output (Spooner and McNinch 2018). However,
like Norman K. Denzin, I also agree that the stakes for us working in universities and other
research contexts should be very high. Research needs to matter.
There is a need to unsettle traditional concepts of what counts as research, as evidence,
as legitimate inquiry. How can such work become part of the public conversation? Who
can speak for whom? […] Can we forge new models of performance, representation,
intervention, and praxis. Can we rethink what we mean by ethical inquiry? Can we train a
new generation of engaged scholars and community leaders? What counts as scholarship in
the neoliberal public sphere? Can we imagine new models of accountability, how do we talk
about impact, change, [and] change for whom?
(Denzin 2017: 8)
Improvisation may be one methodological approach that can hold the desires for freedom
and accountability in productive tension, and cross back and forth between play, rigour,
and positive impact – perhaps a kind of temporary, fragile device for ensuring creative and
critical response.
Notes
1. See the Transdisciplinary Improvisation Network (UK), and the Institute for
Improvisation and Social Action (US/Mexico), as well as the ongoing work of the Centre
for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) at Oxford University, as examples
of emerging research networks based in improvisation research.
2. Regarding this topic, see Battesti, in this volume.
3. Over one hundred groups have downloaded the free kit ‘Playing to Our Strengths’, from
locations in Canada, the UK, the USA, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
The researchers have also been working directly with groups in Canada, the USA, and
Northern Ireland who are using the kit in long-term programming.
4. Since Minevich has retired from the university, improvising vocalist Helen Pridmore has
now joined the project.
5. For a detailed description of improvisation in sound art pedagogy, with further examples
from both these classes and community-engaged research projects, see Caines 2019.
Fragile Devices 337
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20
‘The Music Comes from Me’:
Sound as Auto-Ethnography
Darla Crispin
The singer composes the end

Elektra, having heard the figure long ago, here takes it as her own, transforms it into melody,
into a musical phrase of great beauty; in transforming it, what is she but a composer, teasing
substance out of a dormant and common seed?
—Carolyn Abbate (1989: 126)
‘Ob ich die Musik nicht höre? Sie kommt doch aus mir’ (Do I not hear the music? It comes
from me). So sings Elektra in her final moments; the vengeance she sought having been
achieved, this utterance stands as the ultimate linguistically articulated gesture of her
existence. Yet, this music that she claims comes from her does not stop upon her falling
silent but continues as a manifestation of her state of being. She dances to her death in a
stylized state of transport, with the music ‘coming from’ her in so reified a form that the
final cadence of the opera, a resolution from E flat minor to C major, is replete with evil: the
‘whiteness’ of C major awash with the blood of Orestes’ avenging purge.
Much has been written about Elektra as a work that epitomizes the ‘language crisis’ of
the twentieth century. Strauss’s opera is itself a trope of modernity, a modernity which –
ironically – has generated a wealth of extraordinary works, from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Lord Chandos Letter to Arnold Schoenberg’s incomplete Moses und Aron. Its significance
is not confined to the way it handles structures related to language; it also has implications
in terms of the institutionalization of art, which was generative of increasingly reflexive
art works, alongside politicized materiality articulated through the genre of the manifesto.
The concern of this chapter is not to recount the particular set of modernist landmarks
referred to above, nor to reread Elektra itself, but to respond to some of its cues in order to
explore aspects of reflexivity, reflection, and auto-ethnography as they are currently being
transformed within the field of artistic research in music. In light of current geopolitical
events, it would seem that we are lapsing into a new kind of ‘language crisis’ for our own
century, manifested in the problematizing of words and their truth content. Through the
advent of ‘fake news’, and coincident with a rise in nationalist sentiment and party-political
ruptures, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a meaningful discourse other

than within the echo chambers of one’s own belief network. In thinking about how such
global phenomena might relate to the seemingly narrow and protected world of artistic
research, it is informative to compare the travails of artists in the last years of the ‘long
nineteenth century’ with those of their counterparts operating in a new millennium, both
to detect commonalities and to remark upon their differences.
Elektra’s final claim, her assertion of performative authorship from within a work that
her own utterance and action is about to bring to an end, is far from the only example in
Western classical music of its ‘fourth wall’ being pushed at from within. Music possesses a
special capacity to comment upon itself, and this has made it a site of exposure for irony
and incongruity, with musical language critiquing from within the forms which contain
it. But the twentieth-century language crisis also brought the particular spectre of silence
in its wake. If Theodor W. Adorno could assert that Elektra articulated an affirmative
formula for a negative world, manifested in a divided musical spirit and ruined by fixity
and externality, then we might conclude that the failure of communication in Elektra, in
the non-connection of its characters’ rhetorics, is the opera’s ultimate success (see Adorno
1965: 14–32, 1966: 113–129). As Carolyn Abbate states: ‘Hearing, not hearing, hearing lies,
silence: the opera Elektra is a play upon sounds, voices, and music itself, a play upon the
collected utterances of its characters’ (Abbate 1989: 107).
Hearing, listening, and reflexivity

In Abbate’s essay on Elektra, in which the aspects listed above are explored alongside a
concise musical analysis, she points to the ‘obsession with hearing’ as integral both to the
creation of the opera and to the viability of a critique that departs from the textual and
moves towards the performative. As she suggests in her study, hearing involves a cognizant
presence that operates in the light of language, the possession of a species of understanding
that unfolds via both a textual literalness and a trans-textual irony. Elektra’s power, her
right to the claim of ‘composer’, stands alongside our willingness to understand her as such,
something that relates to our sense that she transcends the opera itself:
What sets Elektra apart is, perhaps, our sense of another power, the ‘polyphony beyond
counterpoint’ of the voice that shadows the text, the voice of the music, the narrator’s
semiotic voice, the vocal personae. Above all, Elektra is a clamor of tongues, and Elektra’s
voice among many, sings in animated, sonorous congress.
(Abbate 1989: 127)
The idea of ‘sonorous congress’ highlights a paradox: that the resistant, refractive
language of Elektra’s voice remains part of a larger entity – one that functions as it should;
her destruction ‘works’ in the context of a piece that must be about that destruction as
something emergent from her own being. The imperative of ‘hearing’ constantly brings
forward its opposing state, that of the silence which is Elektra’s ultimate destination. More
Sound as Auto-Ethnography 343
disturbingly, it conjures up shadows around deafness as both the involuntary and the
willed inability to hear. As such, this inability can be, at certain times, an accompaniment
of resistance, at others, a denial of freedom of choice.
Reflexivity – our need to ‘hear’ things on our own terms – is stylized in Elektra and, in
a wider sense, has come to represent aspects of our being in the world. The interactions
of Elektra and her sister, Chrysothemis, their lack of connection during their dialogues,
shed light upon our contemporary predicament of being unable to hear any voice that is
unlike our own; their non-identical languages indicate a high degree of self-reflexivity,
although Elektra’s treading beyond the compositional boundary could also be read as a
positive gesture, a movement beyond her own, merely reflexive, language. In a wider sense,
such a move potentially remakes the relationship of character and performer in the light
of sound itself, something with implications beyond the opera – and perhaps even beyond
‘composed’ music altogether.
It is surely not unreasonable to locate the examination of a remaking in the light of
sound itself within a field of study that gives prominence to sound. Sound studies has
emerged as an important field in contemplating sounded phenomena; it enables us to
conceive of music in a more wide-ranging way than has been possible within the more
traditional disciplines of theory, analysis, and historical musicology that have dominated
musical scholarship in the West.
The field of sound studies was, in part, developed to address the effects of a broadening
conception of what constitutes music, and to mitigate some of musicology’s perceived
shortcomings when applied to music outside the Western classical tradition. It has
encouraged new views and approaches to come to light when addressing work beyond
the confines of the Western musical canon, many of which operate outside the forms and
conventions of standard music science. But it has also provided insights into contemporary
practices within Western art music, such as those of free improvisation, that are moving
away from score-reliance towards non-text-based realizations:
Music studies are numerous, of course, but audio culture is a diminutive interloper, a
newcomer adding conceptual breadth and perspective through its concentration on
aspects of auditory experimentation (in all fields of music), so-called sound art, the voice,
experimental sound work, the phenomenology and philosophy of listening and so on.
(Toop 2016: 70)
A complementary and superficially contrary trend to the growth of sound studies is the
rise of historically informed performance, which seeks to recover ‘authentic’ past practices,
drawing upon whatever evidence takes us closer to the ideal of experiencing earlier
repertoire in the manner it was received by contemporary audiences. But sound studies and
historically informed performance are more accurately seen as different manifestations of
a common emphasis upon sound, its generation and reception. In wanting to hear earlier
music as closely as possible to the ways in which it resonated in the buildings where it
was first performed, in the ears of its first listeners and in the mind of the composer who
conceived it, we are asserting the primacy of sound among the elements that make up its
very identity.
Of course, authenticity has become a notorious territory of controversy, both in terms

of the reliability of historical sources and, perhaps more fundamentally, because even if we
can faithfully recreate the external parameters within which the music originally sounded,
there is nothing we can do to recalibrate our own consciousness to that of the earlier
listener. In this case, it is not so much a matter of ‘the music comes from me’ and more that
‘the music must resonate through and within me’. The inescapable intervention of the self
gives rise to an auto-ethnographical dimension to sound, and this, in turn, accounts at least
in part for the ethically charged discourses that surround authenticity.
As a result, the discipline of sound studies has a contribution to make to an emerging
debate around ethics in performative musical scholarship, questioning not just what kind
of music is included or excluded and, in academia, what kind of work is deemed to merit
valorization, but also which sounds and, inextricably interwoven with this, whose voices
are heard in this new milieu and which remain stifled. Sound studies has not offered fluent
solutions; instead, it has brought a new and necessary layer of complexity to the music
sciences. The conceptual application of its orientations – beyond script and form, towards
sound itself and the resulting ethical implications – has the potential to elicit quite different
readings than those analytical practices that are oriented towards score-based practices.
It is important to note that, within music theory, aural analysis has become normalized,
particularly as a mode of working within performance studies. As a rule, however, this
still returns the readings to the score, and still relegates the performer to the third-party
role. A focus upon sound as a more abstract, in the sense of de-textualized, phenomenon
allows us to take greater account of reflective practices; auto-ethnography, in turn, gives
disciplinary tools for this kind of work, although reflection itself has merit even prior to the
application of an ethnographic apparatus.
Reflection has also emerged as an important tool within the sphere of artistic research
and there, too, auto-ethnography is beginning to gain ground as a concept which artist
researchers find useful in their work. But, as will be discussed, this has only exacerbated
the tensions between traditional research and its artistically rooted counterpart. There
is, perhaps, the potential for a revitalized retrospective musicology informed by sound
studies to generate a rapprochement, retaining a form of disciplinary distance, but having
this inflected – and even opposed – by practices adopted from artistic research, in which
the artist must give an account for her- or himself. An emphasis upon sound, in contrast
to opposing approaches that rely either upon text or upon human agency, with the one
excluding the other, may have the capacity to merge reflection, auto-ethnography, and
more familiar methods of analysis, thereby generating an inflected hermeneutics that can
both embrace and go beyond the sound worlds of Western art music. Within sound studies
itself, calls have been made for this fusion of approaches:
Anthropologist Tim Ingold has welcomed the new flourishing of sound studies, but with
certain reservations. He argues that the term ‘soundscape’ coined by R. Murray Schaefer for
educational purposes in the 1960s and now in common usage, is flawed, because it places
the listener at an objectified distance from what is in fact immersive and so reinforces the
artificial divide commonly erected between mind and matter.
(Toop 2016: 70)
Why does the music of the past, arguably saturated with hermeneutics, with interpretative
readings, need such a multifaceted inflection of approach? One of the reasons is an ethical
one. The application of methods from the more recent past may allow us to recover or renew
certain kinds of access to more distant pasts. This becomes one way to address more recent
problems in music academia around both ‘deskilling’ and the denigration of ‘expertise’. If the
discipline of sound studies prompts us to consider the auditory landscape as we encounter it
here-and-now, its focus upon experienced sound opens doors to new historical teleologies,
rather than merely recounting their anachronistic aspects. This is an important opportunity
for music scholars, whether their disciplinary focus be upon sound, score, or both.
Hearing, listening, and artistic research

If Elektra’s claim of self-authorship could be seen as enmeshed in the twentieth-century
language crisis as exemplified in music, then its potential foreshadowing of the performative
turn could correspondingly be seen as having a counterpart in the rise of artistic research in
music. After all, artistic research has become concomitant with innovations around musical
language and notions concerning its ‘truth content’ and has also been a driving force behind
various innovations in art-making. Western art music is sustained but also challenged by
the standard locations of its developmental, pedagogical, and professional practices: music
conservatoires and music departments affiliated with colleges and universities, orchestral
concert halls, and opera houses. These institutions, and many others, are woven into
entrenched cultural and social spaces and, as such and in their different ways, all have
influences and impacts upon the sociopolitical structures of which they are a part.
At the time of writing, the institutions of Western art music share in common, and across
national boundaries, a sense of their work being scrutinized by those eyes that seek utility,
profitability, political advantage, and ideological control. Yet, what appears to be a vulnerable
position actually affords researchers affiliated to such institutions and their practices
opportunities to develop exemplary work in a microcosm, addressing precisely the most
contentious areas with a view to challenging essentialism. Indeed, in doing so, they can enrich
a wider interdisciplinary evidence base in which it is argued that, far from being ‘non-essential’,
the arts and humanities are needed more desperately than ever to safeguard the evolution of just
societies. Just as Elektra is an opera that critiques the genre of opera, artistic research in music
institutions can critique those institutions, going deeper, and potentially interrogating the very
aspects of musical materiality which form the basis for core structures in musical culture.
Listening to the voices: Institutional ethics

The paradox of this critique from within, especially in the conservatoire setting, is that the
fundamental material for this kind of substantial claim emerges from very specific, often
self-reflexive, work that finds echoes in more universal arguments: the ‘personal becoming
political’ (Hanisch [1970] 2006),1 as first articulated within the second-wave feminist
discourses of Carol Hanisch, which became a touchstone for the feminist movement in
the 1970s.2 It is significant that music conservatoires have, in some instances, become a
focal point for the exposure of the networks of interpersonal power and its abuse that
can arise in cultures where the individual, with their own unique qualities – one might
say their ‘voice’ – is foregrounded. The debates, both internal and more public, that such
exposures have prompted are not merely about the righting of past injustices; they concern
the very nature of institutionalized knowledge and activity, which is why the close temporal
proximity of the discourses on artistic research in music and the #MeToo debates has high
educational, social, and ethical significance.
Within arts training institutions, the development of artistic research brings with it a set of
concrete educational questions that necessarily challenge the paradigms of master-apprentice
training, whereby the learner receives and accepts the established wisdom of their teacher
rather than progressing by the formulation and resolution of their own artistic hypotheses. If
the performer is, in part, the author of their own performances, the same applies to the music
student’s authorship of their own learning. Questions concerning the extent to which students
might co-create and lead their own learning are not susceptible to satisfactorily resolution but,
on the contrary, must remain open as an evolving approach to how curriculum development
is to take place within a ‘no longer so young’, rather volatile disciplinary background. If artistic
research is to substantiate its propositions for re-conceptualizing claims to authorship, for
example, then this ethical aspect must come to the fore.
Similar dilemmas await performers upon entry into the profession. Consider the
work and the roles of contemporary music performers today. Many belong to ensembles
presenting highly complex music in which the Werktreue model is maintained to an almost
exaggerated degree through the often-lively interventions of the composers with whom
they work – sometimes to such a degree that the performers become more like composerly
extensions. While this is far from the case in many such collaborations, it happens often
enough that resistance has emerged, especially as new music opens up to improvisational
and composed interventions by the performers themselves in, for example, the development
and execution of specific extended techniques. This has resonance in the compositional
manifesto of Jennifer Walshe, whose text ‘The New Discipline’ claims, controversially, that
music now belongs in a wider, more theatrically-based conceptual space:
While Kagel and others are clear ancestors, too much has happened since the 1970s for that
term to work here. MTV, the Internet, Beyoncé ripping off Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker,
Stewart Lee, Girls, style blogs and yoga classes at Darmstadt, Mykki Blanco, the availability of
cheap cameras and projectors, the supremacy of YouTube documentations over performances.
Maybe what is at stake for the New Discipline is the fact that these pieces, these modes of
thinking about the world, these compositional techniques – they are not ‘music theatre,’ they
*are* music. Or from a different perspective, maybe what is at stake is the idea that all music
is music theatre. Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are
part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether
subconsciously or consciously. That it’s not too late for us to have bodies.
(Walshe 2016)
One of the tools needed for the kind of enquiry that can generalize out from the specifics of
Elektra and begin to address the agenda set by Walshe and others is a more considered view
of the nature of ‘hearing’, one that goes beyond the ‘obsession with hearing’, in Abbate’s
phrase, which pervades Elektra and which finds articulation as an adjunct to a manifesto
for progress. This needs to be set alongside deeper discussion of views on the differences
between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, discussions that address these terms not merely from an
etymological standpoint but, in particular, in the light of human experience, since ‘ways of
hearing are notoriously subjective’ (Toop 2016: 67). Of interest here is Anahid Kassabian’s
study, Ubiquitous Listening – Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity, which develops
the topic of ‘ubiquitous musics, these musics that fill our days, [and] are listened to without
the kind of primary attention assumed by most scholarship to date’ (Kassabian 2013: xi,
emphasis in the original). Interestingly, for the purposes of the current study, the launching
point of Kassabian’s argument is the redefinition of listening as:
A range of engagements between and across human bodies and music technologies, whether
those technologies be voices, instruments, sound systems, or iPods and other listening
devices. This wipes out, immediately, the routine distinction between listening and hearing
that one often finds, in which the presumption is that hearing is physiological and listening
is conscious and attentive. I insist, instead, that all listening is importantly physiological.
(Kassabian 2013: xxi)
This core claim is not without its problems. ‘Listening’ may, indeed, imply the active,
cognizant engagement of the mind in contrast with the more passive phenomenon of
‘hearing’; in another sense, however, this apparently passive receptivity could also be read
more favourably as generating the vital potential for a deeply embedded and genuinely
empathic understanding that brings sound into embodiment prior to the crystallization
of judgement. In music, this prelinguistic realm is one site of the tacit knowledge that has
the capacity to both carry and communicate. From this perspective, we might wish to
dispute the claim that ‘we could probably all agree that hearing is somehow more passive
than listening’ (Kassabian 2013: 8, emphasis in the original). Furthermore, the sharp divide
delineated and deconstructed by Kassabian is already under scrutiny and deconstruction
within Western art music itself; one of the points about Elektra is that it problematizes
precisely this malleable space as part of its musical language via the potential composerly
claim of its central character; cracks and crevices are already appearing in the delineation
of roles and this has consequences for what ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’ might become.
Kassabian’s study, however, does open up the field not only to a reconsideration of the
‘ubiquitous musics’ that are its central concern but also to the matter of the identities of
their makers. I would argue that it also prompts a contemporary consideration of how
the work of artistic researchers engenders a call for a better, ever-evolving understanding
of the reflexive work that often accompanies their art-making but equally often embodies
it. Some kind of rapprochement between ‘hearing’, ‘listening’, and ‘aural reflection’
would seem to be apposite, not least because of the embeddedness of each in identity
formation. If, indeed, ‘identity is the trace of affect’ (Kassabian 2013: xxvii) then an
enquiry into these three activities in relation to both the artistic research project and
its associated practices of reflection (and, even, of auto-ethnography) may assist us in

understanding developments in the field. Perhaps more importantly, such an enquiry
may be an important adjuvant to a call for a more trenchant criticality as the field of
artistic research matures.
If we ask how reflection, as a tool to be wielded by the artistic researcher, might
articulate excellence without disregarding the marginal, we see that such a question is not
merely about research: it is really about how we become more fully realized human beings.
The twist is that, in artistic research, we are primarily looking at ways in which personal
reflection, auto-ethnography, and self-reflexivity can continue to be developed as viable
approaches to the conducting of musical research. Ends and means are reversed. By giving
an expository voice to those artists who have previously felt divested of viable languages
and by more readily admitting to academia those who experience themselves as being on
the periphery – and by doing so without precipitately regarding these actions as passing
harsh judgement upon the knowledge, practices, and practitioners of the past – artistic
research may enrich the personal lived experience of such individuals; but it does so in the
name of advancing and deepening our collective understanding of the art form at which
it is directed.
Taking ‘sound’ and ‘tone’ personally

But, again, the collective and the personal are interdependent in a whole range of subtle
ways. The idea that it is the sound of Elektra’s voice that composes a new reality is contingent
upon the vocal specificities of the singer giving voice to her character in the drama; this
foregrounds the idea of the importance of a personal sound, a specific ‘tone’ through
which a performer is able to make a unique contribution to the world-creation of a musical
composition. In this context, listeners are also involved in their apprehension of sound as a
specific kind of personal exposition. This aspect of performance, namely the nature of ‘tone’,
has been the subject of a great deal of debate. The notion of the development of ‘tone’ – that
is to say, of an attractive, desirable sound, the kind which Glenn Gould described with
irony in an interview as ‘burnished, singing, tone’ (Gould quoted in Payzant 1997: 109) – is
still fundamental to many of those involved in the training of musicians in the institutions
of Western art music. In the nineteenth century, the development of good tone with respect
to pianism was enshrined in numerous ‘method’ books in which ‘tone’ was explored as a
specific topic, and the achievement of its desirable attributes was made possible by various
means, from finger exercises to using arm weight effectively. The development of this kind
of thinking with respect to how the pianist must make the instrument ‘sound well’ may
be said to have reached an apogee with the publication of the chapter ‘On Tone’ within
Heinrich Neuhaus’s highly regarded and still influential tome, The Art of Piano Playing. The
continued relevance of this book is significant for the current argument in its assertion of
the centrality of ‘tone’ both for musical creativity and as an element that is revelatory of a
performer’s personality:
I repeat: both the average pianist and the great pianist, if they only know how to work,
will acquire their own individual tone quality which corresponds to their psychological,
technical and physical make-up, and will never be a warehouse of ‘universal’ tone or any
kind of technical perfection. There are, luckily, no such phenomena.
(Neuhaus 1993: 80–91)
To highlight that this view is far from unanimous, one only needs to consult Payzant’s
account of Glenn Gould’s more architecturally conceived pianism:
It may come as a surprise that Gould is not seeking beautiful tone. This, after all, is what most
musicians look for when they go shopping for an instrument. They play a note and listen to it
and pronounce it beautiful or not. But Gould says that he is not interested in beautiful tone
in this sense: ‘As long as the piano has a good action, the sound isn’t too important’.3
(Payzant 1997: 109)
Gould’s rationale has resonances with contemporary scientific investigations that debunk
the idea that tone can be radically altered through remaking gestures and touch; this
argumentation is linked more generally to a critique of the performer as authoritative
contributor in Western classical music. But to ignore the aspect of tone as an adjunct of
musical expression seems problematic; for classical performers, bypassing it denies us
insight into aspects of the subjective nature of music-making that can actually be integral
to our better understanding of how a musical performance is conceived. If we believe
that musicians can not only be banally identified but actually take on their very identity
through the sounds they create, it is a logical progression from this to conclude that the
tone possessed by a performer is not merely something overlaid upon the musical material
which they perform but becomes fused with that material to create a unique synthesis. Such
an idea foregrounds the notion of the performer as co-creative with the composer, with
tone standing as a prime agency in terms of the contribution that the performer brings to
the creative ‘table’: the performer through her sounds co-creates the compositional world;
‘the music comes from me [the performer]’.
It is, perhaps, in an example such as that of Gould’s pianism that we can argue for
a sounded quality so specific that its implications go far beyond the reproductive, the
mimetic, to something more like original creation itself. The evidence of this is in the
implication of ‘copying’. Those pianists who attempt to emulate Gould will be ‘found out’;
his sounded world is specific and hyper-personal, far beyond the ‘family resemblances’
that emerge when generations of pianists are part of a single ‘school’. For example, while
many fine pianists emerged from the studio of Theodor Leschetizky, the Polish pianist
and teacher, they were as remarkable for the diversity of their personalities as for the
similarities in their physical approach to the piano, based around economy of means,
the elimination of inessential movement, and the common heritage identifiable in the
resulting sound (Brée 1997).4 Leschetizky’s methods, and his sound, could engender
and sustain a rich genealogy of family likenesses. Gould’s sound, however, has a creative
urgency and an authorial absolutism that renders it resistant to emulation in an art
form that requires originality of sound and tone. A fascinating question, that cannot
be explored in depth here, is the extent to which the detected ‘copying’ of his sound
approach on recordings forms a kind of ‘plagiarism’ or whether it is merely a product of

poor artistic originality, and thus a qualitative fault.
The discipline of sound studies has played an important and necessary role in detaching
musical creation from various performative frameworks of the past that have seemed
relentlessly confining, limiting legitimate authorship to specific groups while impeding the
creative expression of others. This contribution is evidenced in important collected texts
that sketch out the widened terrain for inquiry.5 However, something has been bypassed
in this move, such that there remains an impediment to the ongoing discussion of the
performer as author within the context of the burgeoning field of artistic research. Still,
the very fact that scholars are engaging in this kind of work demonstrates an attitudinal
shift that has taken place over a number of years and for a variety of reasons. For example,
transformations in musicology itself have catalyzed moves in this direction. On the one
hand, they have done so by re-problematizing the identities of those whose stories have
hitherto been exposed as exemplary, suggesting that the musical past ought to be regarded
as permeable, open to infinite rereading. On the other hand, these transformations have
stimulated a similar problematizing of our contemporary identities, proposing that those
doing the ‘reading’ ought to more overtly acknowledge their presence and power as readers.6
One of the early signs of this shift was the emancipation of ‘biography’ as a vehicle for
remaking musical identities and for exposing the identities of those who had previously
been invisible and on the margin. This has refreshed the view of the musical landscape
and enriched our sense of the interdependent cultural ‘eco-systems’ from which canonical
artists generally emerge while, at the same time, reinforcing a sneaky feeling that some of
these artists are canonical for good reasons.7
The ‘tone’ of discipline-formation

There is, however, a danger. When one is part of the process of discipline-formation, one
sees how initially idealistic hopes are all too easily traduced for reasons of practicality and,
alas, of competition for often-scarce financial resources. It was hoped that those directly
engaged in the creation of art would find ways of articulating their questions and sharing
their knowledge, rather than remaining the largely mute subjects of scholarly study by
others. The idea was not that artistic research should replace music analysis or musicology,
but that its questions – and therefore its methods of answering them – would simply be
different. There was, we thought, room for all and scope for each kind of research to enrich
the others. This is the idealistic frame with which most of us are by now familiar.
But to appropriate such a loaded word as ‘research’ is to raise a whole series of assumptions
about the kind of activity that is being envisaged; moreover, insofar as these assumptions
may then be confounded by the new paradigms being proposed, it is a challenge to decades,
indeed generations, of privileged status, carefully guarded standards, and vested interests.
The proponents of artistic research were challenged to provide explanations for what they
thought they were doing and this had the effect of moving the terrain of engagement
inexorably from practice to discourse. Thus, there arose a fresh battle in the eternal war
around words and how they are used.
Some practitioners struggled with the conventions of scholarly discourse; they had a
vocabulary for their practice but it was rougher and more intuitive than that of the scholars.
Crucially, it was rooted in the reality of their direct practical experience; for them, there
was no need to be squeamish about articulating their arguments in the first person and
with reference to their subjective experience. Meanwhile, music scientists looked upon
these efforts with increasing disdain, uttering the term ‘me-search’ with thinly disguised
scorn. For the reflective practitioners, personal experience is capable of illuminating the
inner recesses of their creative actions; for sceptical scholars, its beams are simply reflected
back off the image of the subjective ‘I’, dazzling the beholder and therefore serving not to
illuminate but to distract and obscure.
This polarizing of the terrain of discourse led to an increasing defensiveness and
created the conditions for the next wave of enquiry, which, I believe, is happening now,
on the European continent at least. This began with artistic researchers venturing into the
territories of social science and philosophy, and finding verbally resonant and therefore
reassuring validation for their ideas in respected writers from these fields; now, it is taking
the reverse form: that is, the taking over of the artistic research space by social scientists
and Continental philosophers. Once again, practitioners are fearful of having others speak
on their behalf.
‘Tone’ beyond boundaries

That being said, many of these kinds of writing are illuminating and have an artful poesy
about them – even aspects of performativity that blur further the boundaries. Consider
this reflection on the pianism of Thelonious Monk:
Let us say for a moment that Monk evokes or conjures, at the very same time he perverts, the
reflection of a powerful form of reasoning hailing from the dawn of ages. He is playing with
its shadow, its ghost. I can only offer, as is, the gripping hypothesis of one who has listened
to Monk very closely.
(Szendy 2016: 43, emphasis in the original)
Peter Szendy’s musings on Monk, within his book Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies,
demonstrates both the pas de deux involved in a philosophical investigation of ‘hearing’
and ‘listening’ in light of a rereading of history that allows the body (human and
otherwise) to be taken into account, and an idiosyncratic style of writing that is reflexive
and autobiographical. His well-researched critique of organology is ‘embodied’ within the
unorthodox prose of self-reflection and analysis – and this lack of orthodoxy, for me at
least, becomes part of its authority.
So, we see how highly charged the issues of self-reflexivity in music research
work can be. It is clear that, while self-reflexivity opens up research to new kinds of
conceptualizations and researchers to new challenges, it is also risky; even its better
manifestations will be dismissed generically by some, while poor examples will only
serve to reinforce prejudices about its inability to measure up to a dominant perception
of what research should be. Furthermore, if one is to contextualize this kind of work in
light of the specifics of auto-ethnography, the particular rigours of that research process
need to be kept in mind:
First, like ethnographers, autoethnographers follow a similar ethnographic research process
by systematically collecting data […] analyzing and interpreting them, and producing
scholarly reports, also called autoethnography. In this sense, the term ‘autoethnography’
refers to the process and the product, just as ‘ethnography’ does. Second, like ethnographers,
autoethnographers attempt to achieve cultural understanding through analysis and
interpretation. In other words, autoethnography is not about focusing on self alone, but about
searching for understanding of others (culture/society) through self […]. The last aspect of
autoethnography sets it apart from other ethnographic enquiries. Autoethnographers use
their personal experiences as primary data.
(Chang 2008: 48–9)
The developing corpus of work in artistic research has yet to fully subject itself to the
disciplinary structure that is delineated above; in general, work of an auto-ethnographical
leaning remains situated in a more amenable frame that ‘invites the reader into the lived
experience of a presumed “Other” and to experience it viscerally’ (Boylorn and Orbe 2016:
15). This foregrounds the qualitative over the quantitative, with the further complication
that, within artistic research work, reflection is generally enmeshed in the material nature
of the art itself.
A brief case study on reflective practice

Although problematic, this aspect is of importance to the field in offering scope for
disciplinary innovation. Indeed, there is, at least, one country in which personal reflection
is not only encouraged as part of the research process; it is a mandatory element of the ƒ–
the artistic research PhD in Norway. Among the Nordic countries, Norway was the most
emphatic in enshrining such artistic development – without any justificatory apparatus
of additional research connotations – as not just a right but an obligation of artistic
practitioners working in higher education. As part of this thinking, an ‘artistic fellowship
programme’, distinct from the ramifications of the PhD, was evolved. Recently, this
programme has been adapted to enable it to be granted full PhD status. Ratified in January
2018, the PhD in Kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid nevertheless continues to reflect Norway’s
emphasis upon developmental processes embedded in socially conscious educational
philosophies and practices. This PhD does not require a thesis; it consists of the making
of art, coupled with personal reflection upon the processes that lead to that art. And this
reflection does not have to be in the form of writing, although few in the music field have
yet ventured far beyond text in their submitted reflections.8
Reflexivity, subjectivity, autobiography – these have all coloured artistic research work
in Norway, but the results have been only variably successful. Thus, the matter of reflection
itself has become a research question for the National Programme – a programme that
pays its fellows a salary and offers generous opportunities for post-doctoral group projects.
A report commissioned by the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (NARP) authored
by Eirik Vassenden in 2013 revealed that the reflective work of the research fellows generally
emerges in the form of practical consideration of three areas, with the relative emphasis
upon these areas being different according to the work of those writing them:
1 The relationship between their own artistic practice and the surrounding field;
2 The relationship between their own artistic practice and the problem of articulation;
3 The relationship between their own artistic practice and their personal experience
of theoretical work and reflective work. (Vassenden 2013: 31)
Vassenden articulates the challenges; many involved with artistic research would find this
kind of discussion familiar:
How [do we] put into words the experience of developing an artistic project or doing artistic
work? All such attempts at articulation involve the writer […] finding a good and expedient
language with which to describe his or her experience, a language that will also make it possible
to share this experience theoretically and cognitively. A language that enables not only the
sharing of experience, but also the discussion and problematization of the experience, so that
the creative practice, filtered through a different medium, also becomes visible to the creative
subject. In this perspective, the attempts at articulation are based on an underlying literal
interpretation of ‘reflection’ which can function as a mirror, but also as a contrasting element.
(Vassenden 2013: 4–5)
So, we can see that the NARP has moved to develop a critique of what reflection might be,
recognizing that this, in itself, is important research work. But this does not mean that its
research candidates find negotiating their studies plain sailing.
A future for listening, reflection, and an

evolving artistic research attitude
When we request self-reflexivity, what we are asking is difficult. It entails nothing less
than a ‘search for voice’, in addition to the other challenges of method and rigour which it
raises. It is Vassenden’s view that, within the NARP at least, while the self-reflexive, auto-
ethnographical texts of the artistic research fellows can ‘display new and unorthodox ways
of reflecting’, he also finds that ‘few candidates have really succeeded in situating their
projects within a larger reflection space’ (Vassenden 2013: 32). His specific reference to
‘a reflection space’ is important here; it is, perhaps, a signpost towards what must happen
next in the development of discourses around artistic research work: to understand the
importance of the reflective elements in disclosing aspects of the work that are essential
to a deepening of perception concerning that work, while – paradoxically – removing the

focus upon the ‘self ’ of that work, and even in reflective work, in order to consider how it
‘speaks’ in the wider world and as itself, rather than as its maker:
To know the limits of acknowledgement is a self-limiting act and, as a result, to experience
the limits of knowing itself. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility, and
of generosity, since I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot fully know, what I could not
have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others who
are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves.
(Butler 2001: 28)
This ‘listening attitude’ within reflection would appear to be integral to the evolution of
artistic research work towards a new stage in which the matter of the self is simultaneously
central, yet non-essential. It also reminds us that the nature of such ‘knowing’ has elements
of ‘humility’ and ‘generosity’ that are sorely needed within academic discourses and beyond.
Notes
1. The essay is accessible online with a new introduction by the author written in 2006.
It forms a locus for reflexive research questions, something that has ramifications for
certain kinds of auto-ethnographical research work.
2. The current relevance of this motto is placed into sharp relief by the emergence of the
#Metoo movement, which has developed first as an articulating platform for survivors
of sexual harassment and abuse and, more recently, as a significant site for a new kind of
resistance to discrimination more broadly.
3. Payzant also cites Jock Carroll: ‘“I don’t think I’m at all eccentric,” says Glenn Gould’
(Weekend Magazine 6 [27]: 11).
4. Brée, an assistant of Leschetizky, wrote down the principal aspects of his piano
instruction, but the book is perhaps most suitably approached as a memorial to the
master than a definitive guide to his approach to pianism, which is much less specific
than the notion of a ‘method’ implies.
5. Such volumes include Michael Bull and Les Back’s The Auditory Culture Reader, and
Georgina Born’s Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience.
6. This set of transformations has included the emergence of the ‘New Musicology’ in which
musical study is placed within a more culturally contingent context, as articulated by such
exponents as Joseph Kerman (who is viewed as one of its originators), the feminist writers
Susan McClary and Marcia Citron, and the ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl, amongst an
increasingly large and influential array of scholars dealing with numerous vanguard topics,
from mainstreaming queer theory to developing pop music studies as a serious sub-
discipline. Artistic research, with its links to the ‘practice turn’, parallels these developments.
7. See, for example, Tatjana Marković and Vesna Mikić’s edited volume (Auto)Biography
as a Musicological Discourse, in which the diverse range of contributions is inflected by
the particular situatedness of the editors and thus sheds light on the re-emergence of the
musicology of their region following military conflict and ethnic divisions, meaning that
the editorial work has an auto-ethnographical underpinning.
8. An index with links to artistic research reflections of research fellows on the KUST
programme may be found online: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/314097/314098
(registration required).
References
Abbate, Carolyn (1989). ‘Elektra’s Voice: Music and Language in Strauss’ Opera’. In Derrick
Puffett (ed.), Cambridge Opera Handbooks: Elektra, 107–120. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Adorno, Theodor W. (1965–66). ‘Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864’. Perspectives of New
Music (Fall–Winter): 14–32; (Spring–Summer): 113–129.
Born, Georgina (ed.) (2013). Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private
Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boylorn, Robin M. and Mark P. Orbe (eds) (2016). Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting
Cultural Identities in Everyday Life. London: Routledge.
Brée, Malwine (1997). The Leschetizky Method: A Guide to Fine and Correct Piano Playing.
New York: Dover Publications.
Bull, Michael and Les Back (eds) (2016). The Auditory Culture Reader. 2nd edition. London:
Bloomsbury.
Butler, Judith (2001). ‘Giving an Account of Oneself ’. Diacritics 31 (4): 22–40.
Chang, Heewon (2008). Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Hanisch, Carol ([1970] 2006). ‘The Personal Is Political’. In Shulamith Firestone and Anne
Koedt (eds), Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, with new introduction by
Carol Hanisch, 1–5. Available online: http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html
(accessed 16 November 2018).
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1995). The Lord Chandos Letter. Trans. Michael Hofmann. London:
Penguin.
Kassabian, Anahid (2013). Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention and Distributed Subjectivity.
Marković, Tatjana and Vesna Mikić (eds) (2010). (Auto)Biography as a Musicological
Discourse. Beograd [Belgrade]: Fakultet Muzicke Umetnosti.
Neuhaus, Heinrich (1993). The Art of Piano Playing. London: Kahn & Averill.
Payzant, Geoffrey (1997). Glenn Gould: Music and Mind. Toronto: Key Porter Books.
Szendy, Peter (2016). Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies. Trans. Will Bishop. New York:
Toop, David (2016). ‘Each Echoing Opening; Each Muffled Closure’. In Michael Bull and Les
Back (eds), The Auditory Culture Reader, 63–71. 2nd edition. London: Bloomsbury.
Vassenden, Eirik (2013). ‘What Is Critical Reflection? A Question Concerning Artistic
Research, Genre and the Exercise of Making Narratives About One’s Own Work’. For the
Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Available online: http://artistic-research.no/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/What-is-critical-reflection.pdf (accessed 20 August 2018).
Walshe, Jennifer (2016). ‘The New Discipline’. Notes for Borealis Festival, January 2016.
Available online: http://www.borealisfestival.no/2016/the-new-discipline-4/ (accessed
10 November 2018).
356
21
Sound beyond Representation:
Experimental Performance
Practices in Music
Lucia D’Errico
There is a specific moment in the everyday practice of music performers which contains, as
if compressed and ready to be propelled, an enormous creative potential: that in which they
are just about to perform the first note of a score. In this moment, something is going to be
produced, a materialization of sonic waves is about to be generated by the friction between
physical bodies, and in turn rebounded, amplified, reverberated by a concatenation of
other bodies. The instrumentalists’ bodies are in contact with other physical bodies
assembled with different materials: wood, metal, varnish, plastic, anodes, and cathodes.
Several bodies are attending and influencing this moment – the body of the room, the
bodies of possible listeners. In this suspended hiatus, in the tangency with the sonic event,
music performance appears in its fully productive function, an aggregate of material
components and quasi-material forces directed towards the generation of the unexpected.
At the same time though, in spite of the cruciality of this hiatus, the instrumentalists are
also far from facing the unexpected. The performance starts, the first note is produced:
imagine that from this moment on all of these bodies are not anymore hovering on the
brink of the possible, now rather seeming to move across the performative space as if
anchored to a fixed track, where any incident or accident modifying the prescribed path
is an undesirable disruption. What has happened between the two moments, between the
density of possibilities swarming in the moment before the first note is produced and the
secure set of probabilities characterizing the moment just after that?
Thinking of the space that a performer is facing before the production of a sonic event
as an empty one is to a certain degree a misconception. On the one hand, the performer
The reflections contained in this chapter would not have been possible without the research done as part of the project
‘Experimentation versus Interpretation: Exploring New Paths in Music Performance in the Twenty-First Century’
(MusicExperiment21 n.d.). The reader who wishes to further explore some of the notions contained in this chapter will
find more material in D’Errico (2018) and Assis (2018).
is indeed entering a space of silence that promises to unfold as complete openness to

creativity. On the other hand, this space is not empty – it is actually overfull. Even before the
first sound is produced, an array of conventions, relations, traditions, habits, norms, rules,
vetoes (most of which are unspoken) coagulates in the space, tracing a path to be followed
ahead of time. If, on the one hand, this balance (or tension) between predictability and
emergence is common not only to any kind of music-making but also to the constitution
of art in general, on the other hand, in the performance of Western notated art music such
process takes on specific and explicit contours. This specificity is linked to the polarity
between the two sides that are at the core of notated music – what Igor Stravinsky in the last
lecture of his Poetics of Music calls ‘two states of music: potential music and actual music’
(Stravinsky 1947: 121), or more simply said, composition and performance. Crucially,
each of these sides or states responds to operational modalities and forms of inscription
that show no conformity with one another. What Stravinsky calls ‘potential music’
is mainly epitomized and expressed by the score – then, it takes place through mental
and algorithmic categories (notation) and on material inscriptions that are visual, linear,
perceived as bi-dimensional, and most importantly, not sounding. By contrast, music that is
‘actualized’ in the performative act comes about in and through a form of materiality that
is incommensurable to any kind of mental category: the vibratory, haptic, n-dimensional
spatial and corporeal dimensions of sound and gesture.
In traditional approaches to Western notated art music, the role of sound and of
performance is regarded as the execution, recitation, transmission, or interpretation of an
already sedimented musical text. At the intersection between notation and the above cited
unspoken array of stabilized conventions, the performer detects precise spots to channel
sound, punctual parameterizations to reduce the infinite set of possibilities allowed by the
multifariousness of the sonic event. From this perspective, performance gets deprived of
much of its creative potential, its function appearing as the concrete sonic representation of
an already known structure. This chapter proposes a different vision of music performance
of past musical works, where sound and gestures are not anymore regarded in their
reiterative, reconstructive, or representational function, but they rather become a locus of
experimentation, where ‘what we know’ about a given musical work is problematized and
reconfigured.
In what follows, I will investigate how the current modes of music performance are
governed by a specific way of enacting a relationship between the incommensurable
dimensions of (mental) notation and (material) sound. In the first two paragraphs, a
critical stance on Stravinsky’s considerations about performance will be useful to take two
fundamental steps. First, it will be necessary to unmask the delusion according to which it
is possible to establish a stable and bi-univocal relation between notation and sound. We
will see how sound always exceeds and saturates the categories of notation, and how such a
stable relation, far from being a given, is culturally, historically, and aesthetically fabricated.
As a consequence, there cannot be such a thing as a ‘neutral’ or ‘right’ way of relating sound
to the algorithmic system of notation, but instead potentially infinite creative choices. In
this respect, I will propose the existence of a multitude of ‘regimes’1 of music performance,
each with its own specificities, operating ways, and modes of relating to the existent. The
Sound beyond Representation 359
second step will be the observation of the two main paradigms of music performance:
that of ‘execution’ (which Stravinsky advocates for) and that of ‘interpretation’ (which
he denounces as almost fraudulent). I will argue that both paradigms are indissolubly
linked to the practice of interpretation (in a broader, non-strictly musical sense), even
if they enact different relationships to it. Finally, after examining the characteristics and
implications of each paradigm, in particular as regards their relation to the production of
sound, I will propose a third, more productive, step: a move beyond both paradigms, in
the constitution of a performance practice that takes sonic materialization not as a form of
representation (however complex and refined) of already-known structures but as a means
for experimentation and reconfiguration of the known.
Several regimes of music performance

According to Igor Stravinsky, the division of music into ‘potential’ and ‘actual’ states
is articulated in such a way that actualization requires from the performer ‘the strict
putting into effect of an explicit will that contains nothing beyond what it specifically
commands’, given that ‘the composer’s will [be] explicit and easily discernable from a
correctly established text’ (Stravinsky 1947: 122–123). In other words, this vision implies
a direct correspondence between musical text and sound, between mental and material,
between visible/readable and audible. But how is it possible that two dimensions that are
incommensurable with each other have a relationship of identity? What dictates direct
resemblance between a score and its performance, given the fact that their inscription
occurs through materials and modalities that show no conformity with each other?
The situation portrayed by Stravinsky seems to suggest that sound is already present
in the written score, nakedly available for a faithful portrayal by a neutral and transparent
‘executant’. He actually execrates the arbitrariness of the kind of performer that he calls the
‘interpreter’, who takes the liberty to deviate from the explicit command of the musical text
and to wander off in self-indulgent ‘sin[s] against [the] letter’ (Stravinsky 1947: 122–124).
Even the acknowledgement that music notation fails to unambiguously express all aspects
of its sonic enactment (‘no matter how scrupulously a piece of music may be notated […] it
always contains hidden elements that defy definition, because verbal dialectic is powerless to
define musical dialectic in its totality’) does not put in question his belief in the possibility for
the ‘executant’ to provide a verbatim ‘translation into sound of his musical part’ (Stravinsky
1947: 123–124). Notwithstanding this problem, in advocating for the neutral executant
and in condemning the interpreter, Stravinsky is accepting for granted the delusion of
representativity: what is commanded on paper can have a bi-univocal relation to materiality,
what is ‘represented’ (in the score) and what this ‘represents’ (sound) can be identical to one
another. Though, the neutrality that Stravinsky wishes for is far from being a given.
Sonic reality is incommensurable to the fixed parameterization implied by notation –
incommensurable in an almost mathematical sense: no matter how refined, detailed,
enriched the notational system, there will always be a sonic remainder that does not
lend itself to segmentation and compartmentation. Sound and notation miss a common
submultiple. Thus, there is always the need for a system of references external to notation
to reduce this irrational (again, in a mathematical sense) remainder, engendering a
conventional way of shaping sounds according to given parameters. The illusion of a neutral
transmission between the two states is therefore made possible only by the already cited
array of former practices, rules, vetoes, traditions, all of them stratifying into a convention so
strong as to substitute itself for the only thinkable possibility, for ‘reality as it is’. Stravinsky’s
discourse on transmission and neutrality seems to ignore (perhaps deliberately so) two
fundamental passages: first of all, that such a convention needs to be fabricated, and thus it
implies a creative and productive act non-dependent on that of the composer, and rather
encapsulating it; second, that this convention is by no means the only one afforded by the
musical text, and that instead there are potentially infinite ways of relating the two ‘states’
of music to each other. Stravinsky himself is already proposing two possibilities, that of the
executant and that of the interpreter – even if the latter is for him unacceptable.
Instead of proposing one single, supposedly ‘neutral’ possibility of relating notation and
sound, I put forth the existence of a large and potentially infinite number of ‘regimes’ of
music performance. Each regime is not absolute and abstract, but rather linked to specific
cultural, historical, and geographical conditions, characterized by specific rules, but also
by the possibility to change, become mixed with, and transform into other regimes with
changing circumstances. This said, it is important to note that at a given time one regime
can acquire such a pervasive power as to come to coincide with its own epistemic landscape,
and therefore, within such a landscape, to substitute itself illusorily for an absolute reality.
This is the case with the regimes of execution and interpretation, which have detained (and
still today detain) such a power over the field of the performance of Western notated art
music. This is why, before actively constructing and proposing an alternative to them, it is
important to analyse and understand their model.
Execution and interpretation

Despotism and neutrality: The regime of execution
With its supposed faithfulness to the score and to the will of the composer, the regime of
execution is the one promoted by Igor Stravinsky. This regime is characterized first of all by
a vision of the musical text as an enclosed, self-sufficient system. The composer that does
not tolerate unfaithfulness from a performer will write a kind of music that ‘seeks to express
nothing outside of itself ’, whereas ‘the musically extraneous elements […] invite betrayal’
(Stravinsky 1947: 125). What is explicitly stated through notation must be transmitted to
the audience by the performer, who is regarded as a neutral mouthpiece of the intentions
of the composer. This enclosed musical system must not lend itself to being anchored to
any knowable portion of what lies outside of music. However, since what is commanded
on paper by the composer has no sound, an executant wishing to pursue faithfulness will
try to shape the sonic matter by intersecting other layers of signs to the notational level: the
signs of the instrument (its musical-anatomical interface), the signs of anatomy (fingering,
breathing, etc.), the signs of the metronome, the signs of the tuning system, the signs of
the tone system, the signs of the performance treatises, those provided by music analysis,
by music history, by organology, etc. The problem, though, is that those circles of signs,
never reaching the unclassifiable complexity of sound, potentially expand in an infinite
entropy, referring only to one another and unhinged to any form of sounding materiality.
At the same time, this abstract network of signs, however detailed and exhaustive, will
never measure up to the infinite variability of the materiality of sounds and gestures that
constitute performance. That is probably why Stravinsky admits that behind notation there
are ‘hidden elements that defy definition’ (Stravinsky 1947: 123). But these hidden elements
are far from being acknowledged by him as the immanence and incommensurability of the
sensuous occurrence of sound – what would amount to granting the performer infinite
liberty and infinite perversion of the musical text. This hidden core is rather postulated as
a kernel of truth concealed behind the text, contemporaneously (and paradoxically) both
clearly inferable from it and infinitely disguised behind it. What orientates the executant is
then a sort of oath of loyalty towards the composer, or ‘a point of conscience’ (Stravinsky
1947: 123). The executant has to satisfy the composer’s will, which ultimately coincides
with the absolute sense of the musical work, hidden beneath the infinite layers of signs and
unreachable because always defying definition. The composer, then, is like an absent god,
whose face is hidden and unrepresentable through signs, and as such remains obscure,
unknowable. That is why a secondary system is needed by the executant: the system of
interpretation,2 where a sign or a group of signs is connected to some sort of materiality,
thus interrupting the continuous proliferation of circles of signs which menaces to lead
away from the centre of the musical system (the composer’s will). A network of secondary
authorities invoked by the executant assures the ‘correct’ interpretation, to even out
arbitrariness and provide orientation in indecision. In his article ‘Beyond the Interpretation
of Music’, Laurence Dreyfus provides a possible list of these authorities. Following ‘(1) the
composer who creates the work’ and ‘(2) the musical text which is commonly a stand-in
for the composer himself ’, he identifies authorities such as:
(3) the teachers and music directors who transmit the authority of the composer or the text;
and (4) superior, usually older musicians whom one emulates […] (5) performers’ traditions,
as in the assertion that this is the way we have always done it; (6) musicological rectitude
(if one is so inclined to defer to it); (7) musical structure (as defined by music theorists and
analysts); and something called (8) musical common sense. All these authorities conspire to
validate interpretations, to assure us that we are doing the right thing, and to help pass on
interpretative practices to the next generation.
(Dreyfus 2007: 254)
Here we have some concrete examples of the network of relations overcrowding the space of
performance and securing the executant to the absolute predictability of what is commanded
(already-said) by the score. Thanks to all these authorities, the perilous gliding from one
sign to another is blocked by a group of signs disclosed by the interpretative guarantors.
The escape into subjectivity: The regime of

interpretation
Beyond execution, there are performers who take liberties from what is commanded by
the musical text, escaping its enclosed system of signs. Those are the ones anathematized
by Stravinsky as ‘interpreters’: the regime of interpretation in music performance is
characterized by this move away from the centre/composer’s will, a move regarded as
unacceptable in the regime of execution. Interpretation manages to give a positive value to
arbitrium and to the infinite entropy of the circles of signs. The interpreter’s relationship
to the musical work becomes passional and subjective, and subjectivity gains precedence
over the centre of the supposed composer’s intentions, substituting it. Instead of faithfully
repeating what is explicitly commanded through notation, the interpreter becomes a
‘subject’. As such, he or she allows extramusical elements to enter the performative scene:
emotions, personal experiences, relationality to spaces and to social practices, all elements
that affect and shape the sonic and gestural utterance. A new reality is fabricated in the escape
from the closed system of notated signs, and a subject-interpreter constitutes itself who is
capable of identifying with such reality. In this subjectification, though, the interpreter
fails to acknowledge the artificiality and arbitrariness of such reality, exchanging it for
‘reality as is’. The interpreter shapes a musical world that is made to coincide with the score;
in turn, the musical text is internalized, no longer regarded as an infinite layer of signs
concealing the kernel of truth of the composer’s intentions. The score gets inscribed in the
interiority, becoming a terrain of passion: the interpreter assimilates it, makes it ‘breathe’,
gives it a pounding ‘heart’. From this internalization of reality follows a completely different
function of interpretation (in the non-musical sense), which not only dispenses with the
composer’s will but also with secondary authorities, to become direct interpretation. Inside
and outside are made to coincide, the subject infinitely reflects itself onto – and is in turn a
reflection of – its own internalized outside.
In giving pre-eminence to subjectivity, the interpreter accepts to ‘betray’ the will of the
composer. This betrayal could even happen at a not-so-conscious level, as in the Wagnerian
performer as alter ego or proxy (Dreyfus 2007: 264), where the interpreter substitutes
themselves for the composer claiming an ability to capture the composer’s ‘spirit’ by means
of a superior identification. According to this delusional model, ‘Wagner recommends
intuition and empathy to decipher intentions lying behind the musical notation, a method
which – though unacknowledged – is still by far the most widely practised in the classical
musical world at large’ (264). It is as if the performer-subject was doubled by its own
reflection in its inner reality: in obeying one’s interiority, the interpreter ascribes it to the
musical work, and vice-versa, the reality of the musical work (for example in the form of
musical common sense) is internalized and substituted for one’s own interiority. This kind
of performer may believe they are more faithful to the composer, in that they are invested
of the composer’s ‘spirit’. If the secondary authorities of the regime of execution resembled
pedantic and bureaucratic priests, the interpreter is rather like a prophet who has heard the
composer’s voice in the desert of their interiority.3
By liberating the sonic utterance from the self-referential system of the centralized
composer’s will and secondary interpretational authorities, interpretation seems to
provide a creative and productive alternative to the despotic system of the regime of
execution. However, the liberation of creativity that it pursues is not fully fledged. This
regime keeps reinstating a dialectic relationship between the ‘objective’ side of notation
(even if interiorized) and the ‘subjective’ side of the performer’s interiority: a sort of
continuous self-reflection, by which the performer recognizes themselves in a musical
text that they are mirroring. The regime of interpretation is in turn a closed one, where
the infinite potentiality of the materiality of sound and performance is again reduced and
domesticated. The only difference is that this time the interpreter, rather than obeying an
absent external authority, is obeying oneself.
A locus of experimentation
So far, I have limited myself to observing the current modes of performance in Western
notated art music. But there is a fundamental difference between tracing an existent status
quo and operating a change in it. The reflection on regimes of music performance, on the
conditions in which they are generated, and on their specificities and operative ways is a first
fundamental step. Understanding that regimes are not normative but contingent, and that
they can transform into one another, is a second, more profound step, which however is still
not enough for producing a change in the modes of conceiving and making performance.
One more step is necessary: the constitution of a different mode of music performance, one
that, instead of representing the existent, constructs an existent that is not yet there. This
new mode establishes a different relationship with the musical givens expressed by the score:
but not because it institutes a new system, or a new ‘regime’ made of different but equally
stabilized and bi-univocal relations, but because it faces the materiality of performance, and
its incommensurability with systems of signs, as a terrain of experimentation.
The word ‘experimentation’ refers here neither to the historico-geographical acceptation
of ‘Experimental Music’ nor to scientific or parascientific approaches to performance, based
on data collection and observation of quantifiable phenomena. Rather, it designates a general
but specific attitude, that of the artist who is not content of inhabiting pre-given systems,
and of carrying out partial shifts in them, but rather aims at reconfiguring ‘what we know’
about the field of knowledge and of practice in which he or she is operating. Importantly,
such an experimental attitude is particularly hard to achieve inside the mainstream modes
of music production. For a musician inhabiting given paradigms regulated by established
social, political, and historical structures, it is difficult to exit, to reconfigure, or even to
acknowledge them as ‘regimes’. In its metastable definition, in its fluidity between artistic
practice and conceptual thought, in fostering unfinished thinking rather than definite
knowledge, the field of artistic research is a particularly fertile ground for experimentation,
contributing to a fundamental transformation of the role of the musician, and allowing
them to exit the postures and disciplinary territories inherited from tradition.
In traditional regimes of music performance, both ‘states’ of music – notation and sonic
enactment – are regarded as already stabilized entities, and by virtue of this an executant
or an interpreter can make of sound a ‘representation’ of notation (or a composer make of
notation a ‘representation’ of sound). This stability, this low degree of motility in the system
of performance, describes the situation I portrayed at the beginning, where the performers
are channelling into an already formalized system the different bodies and forces that
are at play in the moment before performance. A view of the musical text as fixed, and
of the musical work as an ontologically defined entity, cannot but envision a performer-
as-executant, approaching it as a closed, self-sufficient system (the ideal work described
by Stravinsky) in which the relation between score and sound/gesture is bi-univocal and
stabilized. Approaches to music performance that mobilize the fixity of the musical work
by setting it in dialectic dialogue with the subjectivity of the performer will generate only
a performer-as-interpreter, segmenting the process of performance by engendering the
infinite recoiling of the musical text into interiority, and vice-versa. In the experimental
approach proposed here, musical works as codified by notation cease to be considered as
instructions to be obeyed, or as fixed structures to be interiorized and mirrored. Rather,
they become dynamic reservoirs of forces, functions, traits, and materialities. As a dynamic
system, the musical work is indeed ‘embedded’ in its physical and semiotic formalizations
and codifications, but at the same time not coincident with them. From such a system, it
is possible to extract elements (material or functional) that in the moment of performance
get reconfigured, reassembled, and rethought. The performer is no longer concerned with
what the work (or the composer for it) ‘thinks itself to be’, and stops relying on primary or
secondary authorities – in a few words, he or she stops interpreting.
A concrete example of my practice in this sense is the research project Powers of
Divergence (D’Errico 2018),4 where I amplified the unbridgeable divergence between
codification and materiality, rather than minimizing it according to an existent convention,
or even by fabricating a new convention. In this artistic research project, I addressed the
performance of past musical works (among which, pieces by Giulio Caccini, Claudio
Monteverdi, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Robert Schumann) through sounds and gestures
unrecognizable as belonging to the original works as an interpreter or executant would
approach them. Instead of relying on the culturally constructed regimes through which
symbolic categories are bi-univocally connected to material events, this practice exposes
the arbitrariness of such regimes, together with the boundaries of its epistemic implications.
Thus, performance becomes a sonic ‘image’ that relates to what is different from it (the
score) by means of difference, and not by attempting to construct a (supposed) identity.
In this process, internal resemblance is negated, together with the idea of composition as
origin (and creation) and performance as its telos (and reiteration). Instead of inhabiting
the subject–object relationship of interpretation, where sounds mirror the score and the
score already encompasses its sonic result, the musical work and the performer affect each
other by means of externality. From this mutual affection, the sonic result emerges as a
third state, neither subjective nor objective, in which the performer mobilizes themselves
towards the work, but also the work gets transformed in turn by the encounter with the
performer.
This renunciation of the representational mode of music performance implies a

rethinking of the role of notation in relation to sound, or in other words, of the whole
relationship between symbolic and material dimensions. In traditional interpretation,
the performative act – including its sonic manifestation – has already been ‘thought’ by
notation: pre-shaped by the symbolic, performance makes a ‘text’ of itself.5 Renouncing the
textual power of notation immediately involves a set of aesthetic and mediatic implications.
The performances realized in this experimental framework are designed to elicit an
unheard dimension, to bring about forces and traits embedded in, but not expounded by,
the musical work regarded as a dynamic system. This unheard dimension does imply a
creative musical act that has some similarities to a compositional act – and, as I trace this
similarity, the limit of the current mode of thinking about creative hierarchies in music
becomes evident: the creation of unheard sonic combinations is currently taken to be the
prerogative of the composer, whereas performers have to limit themselves to reproduction
and representation. In order not to fall back into either ‘execution’ or ‘interpretation’,
however, such an act of musical creativity cannot take place through notational means, but
it has to be carried out as performance, through the materials and operative ways that are
part and parcel of the performative act. In Powers of Divergence, I faced the necessity to make
use of modes of inscription that would bypass – at least partly – notational codification.
The experimental performances have been carried out as a complex mixture of practices
including electronic sound generation and processing, sampling, and semi-improvisatory
actions, and of strategies such as playback and the design of sonic scores. Moreover, the
sonic quality of these performances is also fruit of a specific aesthetico-epistemic choice.
The sounds produced have to defy to some extent the intelligibility that is associated with
the ‘sonic texts’ of interpretation, and therefore also the highly codified sonic parameters
characteristic of what can be named, in David Davies’s (2011) term, the ‘classical paradigm’:
intonation, loudness, stability of sound emission, minimization of parasite noises,
etc. By contrast, the sounds that are part of these new, divergent performances swarm
with micro-variations and instabilities. The performer willing to embrace this notion of
experimentation is therefore ready to carry out performance as a truly constitutive act, but
preventing the reproducibility and transmissibility of a traditional notated ‘composition’ –
and with it also the authorial and authoritative role of the ‘composer’. The performer is an
‘active’ agent, by dint of their creative choices and material actions, but also ‘passive’, as they
let themselves be affected by the relationship with the musical work, being traversed by it,
as it were. In this recursive state, which is neither action nor passion (and both), predefined
agencies are blurred and suspended, interpretation and subjectification jeopardized.
It is actually crucial to underline, as a final remark, that in this experimental mode the
segmentation between composer as creator and performer as reproducer ceases to be
effective. This traditional division inevitably leads to a fixed musical regime, be it despotic
(execution) or dialectic (interpretation). The performer who surpasses these categories
becomes instead an operator, the agent of a critical act that becomes a constitutive (and
therefore purely creative) act. Critical because it observes and problematizes current modes
of thinking and making music; constitutive because it operates not through theoretical
approaches and detached observations, but through the concrete design and material making
of performances. The operator is thus a figure where multiple roles converge. Not only are
they encapsulating both the creative and performative figures of music-making; they are also
capable of exiting the traditional terrain they come from and at the same time still inhabiting it
in order to understand and criticize it. The operator exits music through music, in a trans- and
metadisciplinary approach able to become anti-disciplinary, by disrupting and renegotiating
pre-existing disciplinary boundaries. Beyond representation, execution, and interpretation,
beyond closed and self-sufficient musical regimes, the operator reconfigures materials and
forces into unexpected sonic and performative events. They leave behind the vision of
performer as observer, reproducer, recitator, reconstructor, or enunciator of the existent, to
instead reconfigure musical works into new configurations, producing a new existent.
Notes
1. The term ‘regime’ is adopted from the fifth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, titled ‘587 B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs’ (1987:
111–148). In particular, my reflections on the regimes of ‘execution’ and ‘interpretation’
have been deeply influenced by the considerations on what Deleuze and Guattari name
the ‘signifying regime’ and the ‘post-signifying regime’.
2. In the general sense of the word, interpretation is a fundamental component of
the musical regime named here ‘execution’. In the strictly musical sense, the word
‘interpretation’ acquires a more specific meaning. For a thorough discussion of the terms
‘execution’ and ‘interpretation’ in music, and of their history, see Danuser 2015.
3. For the distinction between the function of the priest and of the prophet and their
relation to interpretation, cf. the fifth plateau in Deleuze and Guattari (1987). The priest
is the secondary authority providing interpretation in the ‘signifying regime’, whereas the
prophet covers a parallel but different function in the ‘post-signifying regime’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 114–118 and 123–125).
4. For an online multimedia documentation of the project, see Orpheus Institute n.d.
5. Herman Danuser proposes that ‘interpretation is based on texts and leads to texts’,
where the case of recording would even lead to the production of a ‘sonic text of a work’
(Danuser 2015: 187). I would take Danuser’s suggestion even further: not only when
a musical work is being recorded does interpretation lead to sonic texts. The idea that
sound can entail a textual dimension is precisely what makes interpretation possible in
performance (D’Errico 2018: 15).
References
Assis, Paulo de (2018). Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance Through
Artistic Reserch. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Danuser, Herman (2015). ‘Execution – Interpretation – Performance: The History of a
Terminological Conflict’. In Paulo de Assis (ed.), Experimental Affinities in Music, 177–196.
Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Davies, David (2011). Philosophy of the Performing Arts. Foundations of the Philosophy of the
Arts. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
D’Errico, Lucia (2018). Powers of Divergence: An Experimental Approach to Music
Performance. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Dreyfus, Laurence (2007). ‘Beyond the Interpretation of Music’. Dutch Journal of Music Theory
12 (3): 253–272.
MusicExperiment21 (n.d.). ‘About’. Available online: https://musicexperiment21.eu/ (accessed
6 July 2020).
Orpheus Institute (n.d.). ‘Powers of Divergence’. Available online: https://orpheusinstituut.be/
en/powersofdivergence (accessed 6 July 2020).
Stravinsky, Igor (1947). Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. Trans. Arthur Knodel and
Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
368
22
Performing Centrifugal Sound
G Douglas Barrett
Introduction: Front, back, side to side

Sound encircles and is encircled by movement, language, desire, bodies, and history.
Between 1982 and 1984, the artist Adrian Piper staged a series of events in which she taught
small and large groups of participants how to dance to funk music while pedagogically
intervening into and counteracting commonly held attitudes towards the art form especially
as they related to race and class. Taking place initially around small dinner party tables
with one to seven guests and later expanding to larger university groups of up to sixty
participants, these Funk Lessons used the performance-lecture format while combining
music, dance, and performance through an incipient form of what we might today call
‘social practice’ art (see Bishop 2012). Presented alongside interviews, news footage, and
other musical performances, one such event staged in 1983 at the University of California,
Berkeley, was the subject of Piper’s 15-minute video work Funk Lessons with Adrian Piper
(1984). Roughly ten years before Piper’s first Funk Lessons, John Baldessari stared into
a video camera as he sang Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969), a work that
consists of thirty-five written declarations intended as a kind of meta-commentary on
the then-burgeoning movement of conceptual art. Addressing the viewer, he explains the
premise of the work and refers to his singing of LeWitt’s Sentences as a ‘tribute’ to the artist.
He then proceeds to sing LeWitt’s Sentences each set to one of several existing pieces of
music including the American national anthem, a series of folk tunes, and various popular
melodies. When he gets to sentence nine, he proceeds to the tune of Camptown Races,
‘The concept and idea are different, DOO DA, DOO DA … , ’ but messes up and restarts
it, twice. Repetition, circularity: as a song cycle, Baldessari Sings LeWitt is of the refrain.1
Finally, roughly a year after Baldessari sang LeWitt, Vito Acconci followed suit with his
video performance Theme Song, which comprises a close-up of the artist as he lies on a
living room floor smoking a cigarette singing along to a series of songs by The Doors,
Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Kris Kristofferson. As the music plays in the background,
Acconci speaks with and over each song’s lyrics as he deploys a series of sexual advances
directed at the viewer while he curls his body around the frame. Not unlike some of his
other works of the era, Acconci reveals a confrontationally scopic dimension of the song,
already a historically significant expression (in both vernacular and high art song guises)
of heterosocial desire. Enveloping the viewer, Acconci wields such a libidinal-gravitational
pull through the coercive violence of a musicalized gaze.
Sound (art) theory appears perhaps as a fitting context in which to analyse these three artistic
works, as indeed several other works by these artists have been considered in this context.
Throughout these accounts, the sonic is circumscribed as an alternative to contemporary visual
art’s supposed privileging of visuality which these works, by various means and to varying
extents, are said to undermine. Fred Moten, in his study of Piper’s work, for example, reaches
the somewhat counterintuitive and synaesthetic thesis that, ‘sound gives us back the visuality
that ocularcentrism had repressed’ (Moten 2003: 235, emphasis removed). Indeed, Piper’s Funk
Lessons draws our attention to one of the most important yet disproportionately denigrated
achievements of African-American culture, a musicality whose proper sensory register,
despite for instance Piper’s focus on movement and dance, is often understood as belonging
to sound. In his pathbreaking Phonographies, along these lines, Alexander G. Weheliye argues
not for African-American musical practice per se, but for a broadly construed sonic blackness
encompassing artistic traditions ranging from slave spirituals to literature to film to R & B and
contemporary hip-hop, as central to (yet also paradoxically outside) of modernity (Weheliye
2005: 5). Meanwhile, Seth Kim-Cohen recently announced a call for submissions to his 2016
College Art Association panel ‘Singing LeWitt: Sound and Conceptualism’, taken on the
whole as an homage to Baldessari. In the accompanying text, although sound is ‘constitutive
of its cultural, historical, and political lifeworlds’, it is also often embraced ‘because it evades
visual art’s deferrals to representation and signification, sidestepping the appropriations and
reifications of commodity’ (Kim-Cohen 2016: 11). Despite Baldessari’s ongoing engagements
with music and LeWitt’s less frequently acknowledged references to composition,2 Kim-
Cohen appeals not to the work’s musicality but rather, alongside the work’s conceptual status,
suggests a tension between sound and its purported distance from the visual.
Sound (art) theory, through its generalization of artistic works and cultural practices and
objects into sensorial strata, furthermore, can be read as an attempt to avoid the thorny problem
of the above-described works’ fluidity between and across the cultural-artistic registers of high
and low. After all, sound stripped of its significance in artistic practice seems not to carry such
baggage. In his seminal sound art theory text Background Noise, Brandon LaBelle discusses
Acconci’s work from this period in terms of the acousmatic voice but also in relation to pop
music. Referring to Acconci’s notorious Seedbed (1972) and Claim (1971), works that explore
related forms of violently confrontational masculine sexuality, LaBelle contends, ‘it is not
about a pure jouissance of speech but a libidinal sociality that aims to blare out, like pop music
from a car stereo, echoing Acconci’s own statement that “the new model for public art is pop
music”’ (LaBelle 2006: 119). Yet rather than pursuing popular music itself as a site for such
public art, or indeed for an analysis of Acconci’s work, it is the art form’s spatial resonances,
emblematic of a broader trend in Anglo-American sound art theory (Engström and Stjerna
2009: 11–18) that LaBelle foregrounds. Above and beyond the spatial or musical, though, it
is the sonic that these analyses privilege. Distributed along its strictly sensorial axis, sound
becomes the gravitational centre around which a plurality of art works and cultural practices
variously rotate. Sound, in such accounts, requisitely oscillates centripetally.
Performing Centrifugal Sound 371
The problem of how to counteract such a centripetal pull, indeed how to overcome
the formalist/formalizing tendencies sound art (theory) inherits from the modernist
discourse of medium-specific formalism has been an important effort especially in recent
sound art theory texts. For instance, Kim-Cohen has proposed an ‘expanded sonic field’
as an adaptation of Rosalind Krauss’s schema from her seminal 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in
the Expanded Field’ (Kim-Cohen 2009: 39–40), itself adapted from the semiotic square
invented by French-Lithuanian linguist and semiotician Algirdas J. Greimas in 1966.
Although it suggests a migratory expansion of medium opposed to the inward pull of
medium specificity, such a model nevertheless seeks to conserve medium – sculpture
in Krauss’s case and sound in Kim-Cohen’s – as its primary site of artistic organization.
Meanwhile, in his oft-cited argument for a materialist/realist sound art, ‘Beyond
Representation’, Christoph Cox insists that the sonic arts, due to a quality of concreteness
over abstraction – and indeed contra the kinds of textuality and conceptuality for which
Kim-Cohen advocates – necessitate ‘not a formalist analysis but a materialist one’. Cox
further calls for an account, extended from and in line with post-minimalism and
conceptual art, not of the sonic in isolation but of ‘sound and the other arts’ (Cox 2011:
148–149, emphasis in the original). Ostensibly contradicting one another in terms of
privileging either sound’s conceptual or material status, Kim-Cohen and Cox nevertheless
align in their differently articulated rejections of a contracted sonic field. Yet despite
these thinkers’ general self-identification within sound art theory as anti-formalist, when
seen within the larger context of contemporary art, these frameworks, I want to argue,
ultimately adhere to a formalism at a historical remove from yet strictly homologous to
medium-specific modernism. In this sense, to draw on Krauss’s later elaborated category,
sound (art) theory remains by definition pre-‘postmedium’.
What kind of sonic methodology, then, does not depend, however tacitly, upon the
concept of medium? Whether materialist, idealist, or based on affect, sound (art) theory
seems axiomatically subject to a kind of centripetal pull towards a medium-specific
ontology of art based on the formal division between mediums. The notion of sound
as an independent artistic medium first emerged during the 1950s and 1960s,3 just as
contemporary art began its radical critique of medium in works of canonical conceptual
art, which further contributed to what Krauss (2000) labelled the ‘postmedium condition’.4
Against medium-specific formalism, contemporary art proposed, and in many ways
achieved, a radically generic art whose governing concept was no longer based on the
division of materials bound to discretized sense modalities (de Duve 1993: 145–198;
Osborne 2013: 76; Osborne 2017: 279). In addition to conceptual art, performance
participated in this shift away from centripetal medium and, along with music, paved the
way for intermedia, Happenings, Fluxus, and other heterogeneous forms such as social
practice. This chapter proposes the category of ‘centrifugal sound’ as a way to understand
art practices that include sound but reduce its centrality through extra-sonic materials
deployed in performance. Through readings from art history, contemporary art theory,
musicology, and sound art theory, alongside a consideration of Piper, Baldessari, and
Acconci, the chapter listens from the periphery and finds not an absence but a movement
towards conceptuality and the social.
Around in circles
Sound, as oscillatory, comes in waves; fundamentally of the refrain, it returns us to the
past. The historiography of medium-specific Modernism, and its relation to sound, then, is
our first point of departure. As early as 1939, critic Clement Greenberg would argue in his
notorious 1939 essay, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ that the artist must turn ‘his attention away
from common experience’, which was merely representational, and ‘in upon the medium of
his own craft’ (Greenberg 2003: 532). Through a generalized reinvention of the concept of
‘medium’, which Greenberg extended a year later in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ from the
work of eighteenth-century German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Greenberg sought
not only to avoid the discursive, or ‘literature’, but to map the specificity of each medium
to human sensory experience. ‘There is a common effort in each of the arts to expand
the expressive resources of the medium,’ Greenberg contends, ‘not in order to express
ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible
elements of experience’ (Greenberg 2000: 65). Each medium was to be matched up to a
corresponding sensation, for example painting to sight, sculpture to space, music to sound,
film to movement, etc. Such a positivistic schema seeking to catalogue the ‘totality of the
aesthetic’ (Osborne 2013: 80) appears less than surprising given the trajectory staked
out in subsequent structuralist-inflected reconceptions of medium seen decades later,
for instance, in Krauss’s ‘sculpture in the expanded field’. Greenberg was, according to
Osborne, ‘a structuralist of medium’ (80). The historical triumph of this schematization
would ultimately set the stage for its defeat in conceptual art’s radically generic concept of
art, while also leading to medium specificity’s afterlives in various revivals of formalism
and in the more recent discourses of sound (art theory).
Sound, conceived as a category of artistic practice (or even as a non-artistic cultural
activity), appears then as a kind of belated species of medium specificity’s taxonomic
construction of art as a genus divided into discrete mediums organized according
to the separation of the senses. One reason for this belatedness was that medium
specificity was already, in Greenberg’s account, an extension of the ‘sonic’ in music,
more specifically in the ideology of absolute music. Beginning in the early nineteenth-
century writings of the group of German Romantic thinkers (Wackenroder, Tieck,
Novalis, Jean Paul, Schlegel, and E. T. A. Hoffmann), instrumental music, which was
later termed ‘absolute music’, had been elevated ‘from the lowest to the highest of all
musical forms, and indeed of all the arts in general’ (Bonds 1997: 387). In the process,
the movement effectively constricted the pre-modern ‘intermedial’ form of music as
harmonia, rhythmos, and logos (harmony, rhythm, and language) to a monosensorial
art form based on pure instrumental sound (Dahlhaus 1989: 8).5 Discussing absolute
music’s role in the development of the avant-garde and medium-specific Modernism –
and echoing Walter Pater’s notorious 1888 statement concerning art’s supposed striving
towards the condition of music – Greenberg contends
music as an art in itself began at this time to occupy a very important position in relation
to the other arts. Because of its ‘absolute’ nature, its remoteness from imitation, its almost
complete absorption in the very physical quality of its medium, as well as because of its
resources of suggestion, music had come to replace poetry as the paragon art.
(Greenberg 2000: 65)
Already by the 1810s, absolute music discourse had envisioned a sound art avant la
lettre. Nevertheless, these roots of medium specificity in early nineteenth-century music
discourse didn’t prevent artists, curators, and theorists roughly a century and a half later
from ‘discovering’ sound, again.6
Another reason for sound art’s belatedness is that it first emerged in the 1960s just as
conceptual art had begun its radical dismantling of medium in the work of artists such
as Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, John Baldessari, and Adrian Piper. Conceptual art, along
these lines, sought to move beyond the constraints of particular mediums, not only in
the sense of their ‘dematerialization’ (Lippard 1973: vii) but also in an attempt to escape
the gravitational pull towards medium emblematic of Greenberg’s medium-specific
Modernism. ‘If one is questioning the nature of painting’, Kosuth contends, ‘one cannot be
questioning the nature of Art’ (Kosuth 1991: 18). A tension inheres in Kosuth’s invocation
of a privileged and deracinated ‘Art’ to support his critical negation of painting, a move
that metonymized his attempt to transcend the material fixity of artistic mediums.7 The
postmedium condition was Krauss’s term for the impasse generated by medium-specific
Modernism on the one hand, and the complete obliteration of medium heralded by a certain
strand of conceptualism on the other. As a response to this impasse, Krauss proposes that
artists must reinvent or rearticulate mediums through a form of ‘differential specificity’
(Krauss 2000: 56). In the process, she takes issue with Kosuth’s overarching category of
‘Art’, while also substantially breaking with Greenberg’s medium specificity. Ultimately,
the movement of contemporary art has been not in the direction of a re-entrenchment of
medium but, rather, in its overcoming in the form of a radically generic art at once both
post-conceptual and postmedium.
Against medium-specific Modernism, contemporary art has pursued a radically generic
art as a decisive departure from the structural mapping of artistic materials to discretized
sense modalities. Drawing from his reinterpretation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Osborne
defines contemporary art’s rearticulated genericity as
determined (1) historically and negative-dialectically, as the ongoing retrospective
totalization, from the standpoint of the present (‘the latest art’), of the multiplicity of
individual works making up the system of negations of previous works which is the history
of art: negations of the ontological significance of (especially, conventionally received)
mediums standing to the fore within this multiplicity, since the mid-to-late 1950s. It is
determined (2) by the speculative ‘idea of art as such’ – in its opposition to empirical reality –
as the regulative conceptual unity of the aforementioned permanently ongoing process of
retrospective unification; a process that is governed by ‘laws of movement’, rather than a
simple selective aggregation, the laws of movement of a multiple collective singularity.
What stops this generic ‘art’ from functioning as a bad abstraction is an emphasis on its
collective, internally differentiated, relational and concretely historical characteristics. This
unity is ‘not abstract,’ because as Adorno put it, it ‘presupposes concrete analyses, not as proofs
and examples but as its own condition.’ In this respect, the idea of art is given through each work,
but no individual work is adequate to this idea, however ‘preponderant’ that idea may have
become over individual works themselves. The ongoing retrospective and reflective totalization
of distributive unity is necessarily open, fractured, incomplete and therefore inherently
speculative. It must include the afterlife of mediums within a post-medium condition.
(Osborne 2017: 279)
A radically generic contemporary art, then, emerges first as a negation of the ontological
significance of medium specificity, that is, a negation of art defined as a closed taxonomy
of mediums, in favour of an ongoing process that reconstructs an open totality from this
closed multiplicity. It avoids the problem of becoming a ‘bad abstraction’ through a reflexive
and internally conflicting process of concrete self-analysis which upholds its requisitely
fractured and incomplete status. As suggested in the tension between the concepts of the
‘generic’ and ‘specific’ themselves, contemporary art’s genericity is explicitly at odds with
medium specificity. As Osborne explains, ‘medium-specific modernism ontologizes the
plurality of the arts as mediums in such a way, seemingly, as to block the very possibility of
attributing significant critical meaning to the concept of art in general’ (Osborne 2013: 80,
emphasis in the original). Finally, a process of becoming-generic must therefore include a
retrospective analysis of medium as the postmedium condition since contemporary art’s
genericity is one result of its ongoing critical negation of modernist medium specificity.
One may nevertheless ask whether such a conception of a radically generic
contemporary art is an accurate description. Indeed, the example of sound (art theory)
on its own is perhaps enough to contradict Osborne’s model. If contemporary art has, in
fact, attained such a radically generic condition, then why do we see such a proliferation
of sound – as one of art’s supposed species – across its discourses and institutions? Add
to that the problem that sound itself appears as an internally fractured discourse wherein,
although often variously claiming and claimed by contemporary art, many of its theorists
and practitioners see their work as a species not of art but of music. It’s interesting to
note, then, that the chapter of Osborne’s The Postconceptual Condition from which the
above-quoted excerpt is taken, ‘The Terminology in Crisis: Postconceptual Art and New
Music’, appeared first in response to an invitation to speak at a conference on new music
(Wirklichkeiten, Stuttgart, Germany, 19–21 May 2016) to address the problem of music
and post-conceptual art. Against an enclosed, quasi-medium-specific ‘music qua music’, he
proposed that a ‘music qua art’ would indeed resemble a post-conceptual music (Osborne
2017: 271). This was around the same time that I proposed my own solution to the problem
of post-conceptual music as critical music after sound (Barrett 2016). To the objection that
a post-conceptual music would be subject to the same criticism as contemporary sound,
namely as an anachronistically conceived species of a radically generic contemporary art,
the more fundamental and important paradox should first be acknowledged wherein,
again, music itself provided a model for the medium specificity out of which contemporary
art’s current post-conceptual genericity had initially emerged (Barrett, forthcoming).
Here it is important to note that Osborne’s schema is not descriptive nor merely
prescriptive, but rather exists as a critical determination that turns on art’s contemporaneity.
This is not simply a topological account of what one might expect to find across today’s
heterogeneous field of art – for instance, who’s included in this year’s biennials, etc. – but
an actual judgement about what, among all the noise out there, should be included in the
category of actually existing contemporary art, what makes art genuinely contemporary.
What does make contemporary art contemporary is its criticality, when art is ‘addressed
in some way or another to the contemporaneities of the present’; here these are, in terms
of a dual periodization, ‘artistically post-1960s and geopolitically post-1989’ (Osborne
2017: 269, 337):8 on the one hand, the victory of conceptual art’s radical genericity over
medium-specific Modernism, on the other, the end of the Cold War and the victory of
global neoliberal capitalism. Today, sound, inclusive of its dual life in new music and
contemporary art, has become omnipresent in the proliferation of sound art Master of Fine
Arts programmes, sound art awards, sound art exhibitions, and sound art theories, not
to mention the continued zombie-like march of academic new music institutions’ similar
dedication to sound as a medium. Setting aside new music, the insistence of sound art on
becoming a species of a contemporary art that has otherwise mutated radically beyond
such a medium-specific taxonomy appears not only as a symptom of sound’s belatedness,
but sorely evinces its lack of contemporaneity. Sound leads us in circles.
Back around again

Centrifugal sound seeks to counteract this circularity as an incipient effort to account for
contemporary art’s audibility while simultaneously guarding against the centripetal pull
towards medium as an anchoring categorical determinant, especially but not exclusively
of the kind found in medium-specific Modernism. It allows for a discussion of sonic
features (e.g. the soundtrack of a film or the incidental sounds of a performance) without
foregrounding such phenomena as a kind of evaluative rubric. Centrifugal sound therefore
oscillates in a direction opposite sound art theory’s movement towards establishing
sound as an independent medium of contemporary art. Spinning outward from this
lure of categorical stability, the centrifugal enacts not amplification of an input signal but
destructive interference up to full phase cancellation. Virtually equivalent to an imaginary
number, centrifugal sound is a kind of conceptual-rhetorical placeholder, an oxymoronic
category that by definition pursues an escape from its own categoriality. Not unlike Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome, it seeks, through a form of self-cancellation,
to uproot the categorical hierarchies implied in its own coining: a line of flight from a
kind of semantic whirlpool whose centripetality is set on seducing its inhabitants (recall
Acconci’s Theme Song) towards specificity. Rather than grouping together a set of practices,
entities, objects, events, senses, histories, concepts, discourses, persons, etc., it suggests
the opposite: the objects and phenomena to which it is applied do not necessarily belong
together. Centrifugal sound only hints at fleeting intersections of shared characteristics.
The centrifugal is an archetypically weak theory that demands supplementation across
a broader artistic, sensory, and discursive field. A trojan horse on/in the field of sound,
centrifugality not only skips out from the groove-locked repetitions of modernist medium
specificity but, at an extreme, dislodges itself from the sounding apparatus entirely.
The flipside of the centrifugal, its counterspin, is the contention that sound, and
by extension medium, remains viable as a strong organizing category for both artistic
practice and as a site for the cultural analysis of non-artistic/cultural practices. Its most
tenacious artistic proponents accord with what Seth Kim-Cohen criticizes as ‘sound art
fundamentalism’ (Kim-Cohen 2013: 1242) which describes limit cases that argue (through
practice or theory) for sound art as a rigidly defined medium ultimately indistinguishable
from the epitome of Greenbergian Modernism. Along these lines, Kim-Cohen is right
to criticize such fanatical strains of centripetal sound in artists such as Francisco López.
Meanwhile, those studying non-artistic sound culture in sound studies often argue for
sound as a kind of counter-hegemony, especially with respect to the visual. These arguments
tend to go something like this: the visual has dominated Western (or even global) culture
for so long that we must, in response, become attuned to the sonic culture that such visual
dominance occludes. In its place, we must establish the primacy of sound because, for any
number of reasons, it allows us to experience the world differently and thus produce more
profound, or at the very least different, theorizations about it. Yet rather than representative
of a breakthrough epistemological movement, such forms of anti-visuality, as Martin Jay
(1993) has outlined, have existed for at least a century. Fred Moten’s otherwise fascinating
study of Piper evinces an exemplary form of such anti-ocularcentrism (‘Sound gives us
back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed’) (Moten 2003: 235). The ways that
racism works sonically as well as visually, racism’s ‘visual pathology’, have doubtless been
central to Piper’s work (Piper 1999b: 177, quoted in Moten 2003: 234).9
Yet Piper has also been formative to conceptual art’s radical negation not only of the
visual (and indeed the aesthetic as such) but also to the overcoming of a medium-specific
Modernism inclusive of both visuality and sound.10 These accomplishments themselves,
far from merely producing formal distinctions, have helped to establish the conditions of
possibility for her critical work on race: specifically, a transdisciplinary, (proto-)postmedium
artistic practice foregrounding, yet not limited to, the conceptual. In her 1988 essay, ‘On
Conceptual Art’, in addition to discussing her work’s resonances with that of LeWitt,
Piper describes her practice not in terms of medium but as a turn to language. Within
that category she includes ‘typescript, maps, audio tapes, etc.’ in order to explore ‘objects
that can refer both to concepts and ideas beyond themselves and their standard functions’,
while also ‘draw[ing] attention to the spatiotemporal matrices in which they’re embedded’.
Such an approach, although articulated years after she initially presented Funk Lessons,
has ultimately underpinned her work since the 1960s, which has variously confronted
the multiple material and conceptual strata along which race and racism have operated,
especially in the United States. In the same essay, indeed, she concludes that, ‘Racism is not
an abstract, distanced issue out there that only affects all those unfortunate people. Racism
begins with you and me, here and now, and consists in our tendency to eradicate each
other’s singularity through stereotyped conceptualization’ (Piper 1999a: 240–241). One of
the various ways Piper has combated such stereotyped conceptualizations is through her
extensive body of work based on the politics of racial passing and performativity.
Along with conceptualism, performance has also assisted the broader shift away
from medium’s centripetal pull. Not unlike music, performance can be said to lack an
essentializable sensory register or even material substrate, except for perhaps the body (as
we’ve encountered especially in body art). We see performance often as much as we hear
it, smell it, or on occasion touch it and taste it. But a categorization of performance based
on the separation of discrete sense modalities, as was the case with medium specificity,
seems to miss the mark. One needn’t explain the awkwardness of calling Rirkrit Tiravanija’s
events in which the artist cooked and served Thai food ‘taste art’. More pointedly, such a
determination can be said to appear at the wrong level of mediation, since such work was
ultimately read as intervening into art’s very relationality (Bourriaud 2002). In the video-
mediated performances of Piper, Baldessari, and Acconci, sound appears as one element
among many and lacks the centripetal pull of medium, especially as related to the senses, as
an organizing concept. Performance not only yokes together various sense modalities but
is often construed across divisions between the fine and performing arts.
Yet, like sound, a residual logic of medium specificity can be found in recent theorizations
of the result of performance’s transformation into post-relational aesthetics and social practice
art. In her widely influential Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop risks a somewhat catachrestic
formulation of social practice art as using ‘people as a medium’ (Bishop 2012: 2, 39, 284).
(Compare this to Henry Flynt’s ‘concept art’, a relatively under-discussed prefiguration of
conceptual art, which Osborne describes as a ‘medium-based conception of conceptual art’
[Osborne 2013: 103; see also Joseph 2008: 153–212]). Despite a certain accuracy in describing
social practice works in which people are indeed used in a manner not unlike paint, the
concept of medium here seems somewhat out of place. Such a phrase may nonetheless
point to the kinds of configurations social practice inherits from the performing arts and
pedagogy, both sites of social distillation at a certain remove from medium.
One of the primary establishing contexts of social practice, as Bishop defines it, is the
critical pedagogy movement, an initiative that has worked since the 1960s to transform the
structure and policies of education through open and participatory strategies and alternative
pedagogical structures (see also Freire [1968] 2014; and Rancière [1987] 1991). Note that
Bishop included Piper’s essay ‘Notes on Funk’ (1983–1985) in her 2006 Whitechapel volume
Participation, an important precursor to Artificial Hells. Along these lines, Piper (1999a:
196) uses her ‘pseudoacademic’ performance-lecture format to counter-narrate common
misperceptions about funk, and by extension black culture, by working against stereotypes
and biases distributed across racial and socio-economic divisions. Piper thus foregrounds
music’s sociality in addition to its polysensory and transmedial dimensions. Another of
Bishop’s points of departure for social practice art is music and the performing arts. She
locates the roots of social practice, not unlike Shannon Jackson (2011), in theatre practices –
Bishop goes as far as to situate her project as ‘rethinking the history of twentieth-century
art through the lens of theatre rather than painting (as in the Greenbergian narrative) or
the ready-made’ (Bishop 2012: 3) – focusing on avant-garde groups such as the Italian
futurists. But of equal interest are the ways in which music figures in this art-historical
narrative: Russian music theorist Arseny Avraamov’s Hooter Symphonies, in which factories
were ‘conducted’ from rooftops; and the Russian Persimfans, conductorless orchestras
that began in the 1920s, which sought to rethink the hierarchical relationships between
ensemble performers established by the existing orchestral music canon (Bishop 2012:
63–66). Piper’s Funk Lessons unites the sites of music – inclusive of its ties to movement
and dance – and critical pedagogy in a conceptualist (proto-)social practice.
In addition to performance, music can also figure as a site for centrifugal sound if music
is rearticulated along the lines of contemporary art’s radical genericity. Such a reconception
of music departs from both new music and sound art through a rejection of sound as an
anchoring medium and through a privileging of criticality. Post-conceptual music, what
Osborne calls ‘music qua art’ and what I have defined elsewhere as critical music after sound,
is one way of describing such a rearticulation of music that accounts for the centrifugal
status of medium in light of contemporary art’s postmedium condition.11 At the same time,
such a notion of post-conceptual music would subject its objects of description to the test
of contemporaneity as art’s historically specific conditions of criticality. The three works
respectively from Piper, Baldessari, and Acconci, while they contain centrifugal sound,
can also rightfully be described as post-conceptual music. Piper’s proto-social practice
work mobilizes musicality’s social/pedagogical form as a vehicle for combating racism
using lecture-performance, video documentation, and collective movement. Meanwhile,
Baldessari Sings LeWitt unearths the latent musicality of early conceptual art in his song
cycle through an homage that oscillates between the solipsistic and the social. Finally,
Acconci’s Theme Song further probes the song form by exposing a coercive sexual violence
in the pop music hits of the 1960s and 1970s. Again, sound appears as an element of each of
these works, but of equal importance are the ways language, video, and performance give
way to a critical contemporaneity. Sound is present yet only centrifugally.
We have seen then how centrifugal sound, despite its tentative and temporary status
as a strategic placeholder notion, can figure as a viable concept for contextualizing
sound’s appearance in contemporary art without returning us, however wittingly or not,
to the centripetal pull of medium. First acknowledging Greenberg’s role in establishing
medium specificity as an ontology of art based on the separation of sense modalities,
we then considered sound’s prefiguration as music within this discourse: the influence
of absolute music on the very construction of medium specificity, and hence sound art’s
belatedness when it first appeared in contemporary art in the 1950s and 1960s. A further
source of belatedness, it turns out, was sound’s insistence on becoming a species of art
just as conceptualism began a process of overcoming medium specificity in favour of
contemporary art’s radical genericity. It is in this context, as I’ve argued, that sound must
sustain a form of peripherality by consistently spinning outside of itself, destabilizing
its axiomatic tendential pull towards the stability of medium as a governing concept.
Performance has paralleled this unseating of medium through its own decentring of the
sensory in favour of social practice’s critical engagements. Finally, the centrifuge cannot
operate within a vacuum and must appeal to a contemporaneity, with all of its implicit
risks and precariousness, that is the manifest outcome of our historical present: that is,
on the one hand, a contemporary art still working through the radical transformations
of the post-war avant-garde and conceptualism into contemporary art’s post-conceptual
postmedium condition; and, on the other, the triumph of the neoliberal world order (with
its burgeoning neo-fascist spawns), which itself demands a discursive and radically generic
art up to the task of undoing the present’s most vexing aporias. As a sonic methodology,
centrifugality begins this paradoxical process marked by destructive interference and

tactical phase cancellation. Centrifugal sound comes full circle by spiralling outside of
itself and into the now.
Notes
1. For my full argument on Baldessari Sings LeWitt’s status as an art song cycle, see Barrett
2016: 77–86. The reference here (which isn’t an explicit a part of that argument) is to
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 310–350).
2. In 1969, the same year he authored Sentences on Conceptual Art, LeWitt writes of his
practice, ‘I think of it more like a composer who writes notes’ (LeWitt n.d.).
3. Seth Cluett (2013) lists roughly ten sound-themed exhibitions between 1966 and 1972.
4. Krauss’s A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition is based
on her 1999 Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture at Birkbeck College, London. The ‘post-
medium condition’, Krauss’s critical target in the book, refers to the ‘international spread of
mixed-media installation [that had] become ubiquitous’ (Krauss 2000: 20). Her corrective
is ‘differential specificity’, which calls for the reinvention or rearticulation of mediums (56).
5. ‘Oration, harmony, and rhythm’, or oratione, harmonia, rhythmus, appears in Marsilio
Ficino’s 1491 Latin translation of The Republic (see Bonds 2014: 11; see also Chua 1999).
6. Georgina Born criticizes this paradigm of ‘discovery’ in discussing sound (art) theorists
as ‘portray[ing] sound as awaiting discovery, as a radical new paradigm, as incipient in
existing work (etc.): as a year zero’ (Born 2015).
7. Despite authoring numerous textual works, Kosuth has never completely abandoned
material forms. His Art as Idea as Idea series, which began in 1966, consists of single
words and their respective definitions rendered as photostat prints. Nevertheless, for
Kosuth the material form remains secondary, as he claims, ‘I never wanted anyone to
think that I was presenting a photostat as a work of art […]’ (Kosuth 1991: 30).
8. Contemporary art’s contemporaneity, however, is a much more complex problem that
Osborne addresses elsewhere and elaborates more fully (Osborne 2013: 15–36, 2017:
14–89; see also Barrett, forthcoming).
9. For a recent historical study of race and racism’s aural dimension, see Stoever 2016.
10. On conceptual art’s negation of the aesthetic, see Osborne (2013: 37–70). Moten does
discuss Piper’s conceptuality but almost exclusively in relation to the problem of objecthood
and Michael Fried’s position on minimalism, for example, ‘in the end, Piper’s conceptualism
allows her rich historical animation of the minimalist object’ (Moten 2003: 242).
11. Elsewhere I propose the term ‘musical contemporary art’ (see Barrett, forthcoming).
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382
23
How to Cut Up a Record?
Paul Nataraj
Sound records, records sound

The tension between sound as transient matter and its commodification through different
physical and now digital formats has always been my particular fascination. In trying
to apprehend meaning from a sonic experience, we have to be aware of listening in the
present moment, whilst simultaneously reaching for sound’s becoming, and equally trying
to remember what we have just heard. An active listening then requires us to experience
the now-ness of sound. There has been an argument that the recording process is reductive
to this experience, because much is lost in an attempt to capture the natural transience and
space of the sonic. John Cage famously said that ‘records are like postcards to the extent
that both “ruin the landscape” – they destroy the experience of one’s surroundings’ (Grubbs
2014: 46–47). For Cage and others the beauty of sound is inherent in its immediate presence,
in its now-ness. Repetition in the form of a record for example, could be conceived as being
the death of the musical experience. Theodor Adorno, for example, wrote, ‘the phonograph
record is an object of that “daily need” which is the very antithesis of the humane and the
artistic’ (Adorno [1934] 2002: 58). For Cage the postcard is never as good as the holiday,
but what if it was possible to vividly experience a different beauty of that holiday through
imagination and memory. Indeed, what if replaying the memory of the holiday makes it
extra special over time? What if repeatedly looking at the beauty of the postcard across the
years of someone’s life can render the holiday ever new, exciting, and different, through
simply engaging with its representation? Seen through this metaphor, the record becomes
so much more than a simple sound carrier. As David Grubbs writes, ‘it isn’t about the tune
so much as how it gets across, and what previously unimagined sounds wind up in the
grooves of a record’ (Grubbs 2014: 96–97). For the majority of people recordings are their
way into the world of music, and music provides a foundation of how they listen to and
through the world, and so should be studied with commensurate respect.
Besides these ‘previously unimagined sounds’ the record’s initial purpose is to
transcribe the mysterious Ur-language of sound itself sealed within its surface. It is a
groove drawn from the physicality of sound, in a form that is semiotically other; outside
of the literary perception of human communication, yet able to transmit the beautiful
detail of a sonic gesture across time and space. As different formats have come and gone,
it seems fitting that the record has endured as a system for capturing the materiality of
sound. Yet the form itself is a manifest paradox, the durable nature of the material is
seemingly at odds with the ephemeral object that it holds. Yet both, sound as floating
phenomenon and its aesthetic trace as the groove, have a mythic, indefinable, somehow
magical quality, meaning that on a record, content and form are also perfectly matched.
These interesting attributes, peculiarities, and qualities that this marriage has produced
mean that the record is filled with contradictions, in its social, political, economic, and
aesthetic contexts. This coupled with its multifold functionality as print artwork, book,
sound storage, and sound reproducer, give the record a unique ‘thing’ power that still
contains many secrets about the ways we interact with music’s materialities. Because
of these varied uses and, through the social significance of its creation, rule, demise,
and resurgence, the vinyl record has proved itself to be a popular cultural sign of great
complexity. I would agree with Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward who argue that
the record be elevated to the level of icon, things they describe as being ‘potent objects
whose surfaces do not simply represent hidden data and communicate information
but constitute and transmit sensuous experience without which no culture can exist’
(Bartmanski and Woodward 2015: 175). Due to its longevity the record has been an
important sensuous sidekick in the cultural and sonic journeys of a great many people,
building their cultural competencies and capital over their lifetimes. As Brandon LaBelle
states, ‘sound studies takes such ontological conditions of the sonic self and elaborates
upon the particular cultures, histories, and media that expose and mobilize its making’
(LaBelle 2010: xx). My own practice led research project You Sound Like a Broken Record
(YSLABR) was a practice led interrogation of the ontological resonances of vinyl record
culture, and draws from LaBelle’s assertion to focus on the ‘sonic self ’.
Personal records
Jean Baudrillard makes the point that ‘human beings and objects are indeed bound
together in a collusion in which the objects take on a certain density, an emotional value –
what might be called a “presence”’ (Baudrillard 1968: 14). So behind the sign, or the object,
which, for Baudrillard is always transient, fleeting, momentary, and often insubstantial,
there exists the meaningful energy of relationships. As Jane Bennett has shown in her work,
one can see materiality as being ‘as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much
intensity as extension’ (Bennett 2010: 20). We could say then, that objects are produced as
entities in communion with our daily lives, our practices and us. In other words, we are
knitted into feedback loops of multifaceted significations alongside the things we use. The
object is our marker of time; it is the depository of self, and remains as partner and griot,
helper and confidante through the chaos and constantly changing intrigues of our lives. As
we collect the objects around us, so significantly they collect us.
How to Cut Up a Record? 385
The record is an evocative object that allows us to see the exertion of Bennett’s ‘force’ or
vibrancy. It is a cultural hobo that holds a dialectical position as both a symbol of cultural
subversion and a product of the mainstream music industry, remaining equally totemic
in both paradigms. The record has an energetic multiplicity for its users and takes on new
relevancies over the years of ownership. It presents each listener with an individuated space
through which to engage with their personal version of a musical experience. The record
produces new shapes of listening for us, as Evan Eisenberg writes, ‘when a record is fitted
over the platter, a transparency or slide is fitted over a segment of space and time. The effect
is a double exposure’ (Eisenberg [1987] 2005: 206). The record does this, not only through
providing a private point of listening but also by acting as a transportation device taking
us back to the time of writing, playing, and production, through the hands of all those who
have held, owned, and listened before, it is a private yet collective dialogue.
In 1986 Kittler warned that ‘data flows once confined to books and later to records and
films are increasingly disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences,
are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are
only left with reminiscences, that is to say stories’ (Kittler 1986: xxxix). In YSLABR I went
out to find these stories in order to expose a flip side of the record. Much of the literature
on vinyl has thought about the record in relation to connoisseurship, expertise, musical
marketing strategies, generic subversion, or the more recent ‘vinyl is back’ zeitgeist (Harvey
2017: 586). All these approaches are valid and essential to better theorize the continuing
multistrand narrative of vinyl’s ongoing story, but they all commonly look to the voices of
experts to give insight into the way in which vinyl operates, or has previously operated. My
interest, however, was in the way in which personal memory can be inscribed by the object,
and to explore the ways in which the individual is able to consolidate or even perhaps gain
agency during this process. The Popular Memory Group working in the early 1980s at the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, UK, wrote that
There is a common sense of the past which though it may lack consistency and explanatory
force, none the less contains elements of good sense. Such knowledge may circulate, usually
without amplification, in everyday talk and in personal comparisons and narratives. It may
even be recorded in certain intimate cultural forms: letters, diaries, photograph albums and
collections of things with past associations.
(Popular Memory Group [1982] 2006: 45)
It is exactly this unamplified knowledge that the YSLABR project was trying to plug into.
I was interested in those people whose few records languished in a bedding box at the
bottom of the bed, and no matter if they were ever played, they were never getting thrown
out. It was these stories and the correspondent records that I wanted to find. I hoped
that by unearthing the stories locked into these grooves I might hear some trace of the
interweaving voices that make up the complex ontology of the vinyl record.
Michel de Certeau has posited, very much in the lineage of Roland Barthes’ (1977)
thinking, that ‘the text has a meaning only through its readers; it changes along with
them; it is ordered in accord with codes of perception’ (Certeau 1984: 170). With a record,
it is not just the musical text that is assembled at the moment of listening, because, as
Osbourne (2012) points out, the song pressed onto a vinyl record becomes thought of
as that vinyl record. Indeed that vinyl record is the conduit for the moment of listening
to take place, and we have to embrace it in order to get to the sound. Consequently,
through this amalgamation of song and material, the processes of meaning making for
music has historically been bound into the space of ownership and usage. Yet, in its
materiality the record cannot be disentangled from the industry that produces it, and
the mechanizations that allow for its production and distribution. Those indelible traces
of industrial power relations remain as it moves into the private space of listening, but
are reinvigorated and transformed by the presence of the self, reformulating the object
through its everyday use. The record becomes a tool of identification, a personal space for
reinvention, a platform for a renegotiation of our relationship with the world around us,
a mode of resistance. Just buying a record can be an act of rebellion; it is commensurate
with a certain worldview. Where or who you buy it from, if it is new or second hand,
swapped, saved up for, gifted by someone, whether you have a turntable to actually play
it or not, if it is your first or your 2,500th, all these factors add to the narrative and give
an insight into our relationship with the world and the sounds that we choose to fill it
with. It opens up questions as to how the sounds that we purchase impact on the way in
which we live our lives, either in resistance or acceptance, in protest or compliance? Also,
how do these particular sounds find us, and what kind of practices do we use to try and
understand them?
The vinyl record is a meeting place, the point of convergence between a constellation of
actors. Each one of these voices, including our own and that of the artist, is in dialogue with
those of our family and friends, our rooms, that particular sound system, an argument, a
conversation, our hopes, dreams, successes and failures, not to mention the sound of that
individual piece of plastic. Alongside this we have conversations with radio presenters,
journalists, graphic designers, TV shows, documentaries, authors and a host of others
whose expertise we use to better understand the sounds that emanate from this mysterious
piece of disc. All these dialogic elements make up the sound of that piece of vinyl. The songs
that come spiraling off the record’s surface are intertwined with the multivalent soundings
of these memories, actions, people, spaces, and places. As our attitude and relationship to
each of them changes over time, each voice becomes repositioned, the changing the sound
of the mix of the record. The record might flatten musical hierarchies but the dynamics
of our personal topographies can be exhumed from a dig beneath the surface of those
uniform cardboard jackets. As Bartmanski and Woodward point out, ‘physical records
record more than just sounds. As their obdurate condition allows them to last and outlast
their owners, they can record history, personal and collective’ (Bartmanski and Woodward
2015: 176). Using the process of ethnographic interviews I wanted to try and get to the
collective through the very personal. I felt that the best way to approach this and previous
questions would be to speak to individuals about a record that they felt held a special place
in their heart. I wanted to find the story of that one record that had been saved from or
might have saved its owner from the wreckage.
I placed a series of advertisements, in various real and virtual spaces, to ask for
volunteers who would be willing to be interviewed and importantly give me a prized
record. My request garnered records and interviews from fourteen respondents. All
interviews were recorded then transcribed, with all transcripts being checked by the
respondent, to ensure the accuracy of each account, before I continued with the practice
element of the work.
Record breakers
After completing the interviews and transcripts I engaged in a sculptural practice, using
an awl to carve a transcription of the respondent’s story back onto the surface of the
record to create a unique object, a vinyl palimpsest. In so doing I hoped to better expose
the multifarious strata of significations that make up this complex and vibrant object. As
Sarah Dillon states, often times there can be a ‘lack of clarity in unearthing the ontology
of someone’s relationship to the object so instead the palimpsest provides us with a
sense of “merging”’ (Dillon 2007b: 4). I would argue that this ‘sense of merging’ deepens
our understanding of the social, political, historical, and poetic context of the object
and allows us to hear ‘several people writing together’, in the words of the authorial
murderer, Barthes (1977: 144). The beauty of using the palimpsest as metaphor is a
gestalt complexity where each individual participant – I think here of participants also
as sounds, writings, videos, and the explanatory paratexts connected to the record –
are nominally sealed beneath the next user. Yet throughout, each participant’s voice is
faintly audible through the morass of enmeshed experiential fibres that make up its ever-
changing surface.1
This practice can be seen in a direct lineage of compositional approaches that Caleb Kelly
refers to as ‘cracked media’ works. For Kelly, a cracked media artist is ‘the experimentalist
who is prepared to extend his or her instrument to the point at which it breaks, perhaps
never to be used again in the manner in which it was intended’. They embrace, ‘this risk
of sometimes great loss’, and turn it ‘into great gain as traditional and commonplace
sound practices are themselves transformed, extended and expanded’ (Kelly 2009: 6). My
work is also based on the Burroughsian premise of the cut-up: to physically explore and
unlock the materiality of the record so that it might reveal something about the secrets
of ownership trapped inside its grooves. To bypass the sounds that already exist there,
or at least to bring the object and its story into relief, the inscriptions form a new sonic
companionship, the scratch along with the present sounding material. The records play
out the combined voices vying for position, the tension between music and the industry,
sound and materiality, and themes of resistance through personal ownership, freedom,
and constraint. It shows artistic practice as a way of unseeing and re-seeing the object
through a radical intervention. As Kelly writes, ‘for new meaning to be created a crisis or
catastrophe must occur, or perhaps an accident, that will focus the elements of chaos into a
singular focused emergent menacing. Noise is then filled with all future possibilities’ (81).
In the case of YSLABR, my respondents have stored up this noise, it has been waiting in the
wings, in readiness for its starring role.
Cutting across the record’s groove is like damming a valley, stopping the natural flow
of information down this channel, interfering with the signal, pinching the recorded
voice in mid flow, upsetting the rhythm, preventing the player, or the instrument, or the
machine from reaching its rightful place down the line, rudely interrupting. The click of
the scratch breaks the music’s linearity; it becomes an anathema to the once inviolable
communion between the listener and the ghostly representation of the disembodied voice.
The scratch flips the subject back into reality, exposing the media, upsetting the illusion of
transparency. This break in the system speaks to the agency that is shared by both object
and its intervener, and represents a transgression against a prescribed model of playback.
I see all of my respondents as having and exercising such agency. It is evident in the
stories they tell about the gifted records. Through the YSLABR project this agency became
clearer, and the inscriptions instantiated its essence through the action of the artist. As
Claude Levi-Strauss explains of the bricoleur, ‘he speaks not only with “things” […] but
also through the medium of “things” giving an account of his personality and life by the
choices he makes between limited possibilities’ (Levi-Strauss 1966: 21). It could be argued
that by working with the materiality of the record as bricoleur, I was privy to the ‘moment
when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute idol
speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny’ (Bennett 2010: 2). These were
private, invisible, and transparent moments, shared with me through the conversation
I had about the records, and it was my job to expose them through the transformative
transcription.
A shelf of records is filled with stories, and indeed when we look towards them we can
imagine, or possibly even hear the voices of, these ‘mute idols’. My respondents told me
stories of family histories, tales of how and how not to live, messages of morality carved
into the psyche of each listener and communicated through the grooves of each record in
their collections. The stories very clearly illustrate how the ‘pure’ groove is compromised
by the concrete external noise of context and aggregating tales. Each record is a bricolage,
a composite, a fluidly increasing rhizome, a construct of a series of struggles occurring
in different times, places, and spaces overlaid onto the surface of the object, all of whose
noises are sucked in, pressed, and trapped by the groovy hieroglyph. Hidden in there are
specific human value systems, political leanings, compassion, empathy, fear, anger, and all
the experiences of growing up and trying to find and maintain your place in the chaos of
the world. My palimpsestual intervention, my scratch, my introduction of noise, may just,
as Eisenberg writes,
derail the music’s progress; but surface noise could turn any piece of music into such a
struggle of order against chaos, of the human spirit against the flailing of the blind, but far
from mute universe. There are works whose plot line remains […] hopelessly intertwined
with the subplot of a long, insistent scratch.
(Eisenberg [1987] 2005: 212)
I would argue that every work that has been owned and used by someone somewhere
is ‘hopelessly intertwined’ with our noisy interventions. For the music can never escape
our social and emotional specificities, it is constantly in dialogue with them. With every
listen we replay the environment, invoke our memories, and are experientially moved,
and it is the record that collects all this metadata, and in some way helps us to make
sense of it all.
‘Popcorn’ tactician
Kelly, Certeau, and Levi Strauss, in ‘cracked media’, ‘tactics’, and ‘bricolage’, respectively, are
thinking about the small, non-engineered, non-institutional, creative acts of subverting the
status quo. For Certeau this could simply be a rhetorical or discursive gesture as ‘the thin
film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play of spaces’ (Certeau 1984: xxii). By
focusing on the fleeting and apparently inconsequential, he provides the means of resistance
for everyone. In so doing he outlines a model with which to negotiate one’s own material
environments in order to temporarily free oneself from the oppressive world of capital.
According to Certeau, one does not enter into this negotiation chanting overtly political
slogans but, rather, through ‘making do’. One is able to adopt the dominant language and
subtly change it to fit one’s own needs, and in so doing attacking the hegemonic platform
upon which the language one is using originally stood. This is a notion that chimes with
the actions of a bricoleur who ‘addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from
human endeavors’, reinventing ‘the material means at his disposal’ (Levi-Strauss 1966: 19).
Through this ‘making’, ‘assembling’, and ‘cracking’ we assert individuality and at least some
semblance of freedom, for ‘the weak must constantly turn to their own ends forces alien
to them’ (Certeau 1984: xix). We take that which oppresses us and we make it our own. In
doing so we are able to remodel our lives and ameliorate the process of alienation.
For example, Andreas, a 53-year-old sound engineer originally from Italy, shows how
the record itself can act as a tactical weapon in the practice of everyday life, against the
orthodoxies of tradition. Below, Andreas tells the story of how he acquired the record
‘Popcorn’ by La Strana Società that he donated to the YSLABR project (Figure 23.1):
In my home it was strictly forbidden to listen to pop music. It was absolutely a sin. In my
house you could only listen to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and so on. This was a good thing
because actually at seven, eight, I could sing all four symphonies of Brahms, and so on.
Anyway, it was really a sin, you couldn’t even know, not to say the name of Beatles, because
‘what are you saying?’ So I got a small AM radio at ten and then I began to discover a real
world outside with good music, not Handel, not Bach, but it was good music. Suddenly
I discovered ‘Popcorn’. Now ‘Popcorn’ was more a way to demonstrate the new Moog
instrument, the new synthesizer instrument, rather than the song itself, but it had success.
The first group that recorded ‘Popcorn’ was the group Hot Butter and then many others
made covers, in Italy it was made by the group La Strana Società, The Strange Society, and I
fell in love with the song. It has some qualities, some contrapuntal qualities, it’s not so bad,
it’s very well written, it’s very well played. So at twelve I decided I wanted to have this disc,
and so I went to my father and I told him, ‘Pappy, I would like to buy this record,’ and it was
a disaster. Everybody in the house was suddenly sad, and what are we going to do with this
guy? It is incredible they phoned to family friends and they came to our house, and I could
listen and they said, ‘Well be patient it’s just a disc, it will not destroy his life.’ A disc, a single
disc, it was that. And my mother said, ‘but you have a recorder why don’t you record it?’
(Andreas, interview with author, 2013 [hereafter Andreas 2013])
Eventually his parents did allow him to buy the treasured disc although, they ‘did not speak
to me for a week’ (Andreas 2013). This was a price worth paying however, because the record
was ‘the key to access the outside world, because otherwise this would not have been possible’
(Andreas 2013). This purchase represents a tactical act of subversion in the everyday,
from the everyday. A way of separating Andreas from the draconian rules of his family
environment, for ‘my family was a very sad family, everything was heavy’ (Andreas 2013).
For Certeau a tactic ‘must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions
open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises
in them. It can be where it’s least expected. It is a guileful ruse’ (Certeau 1984: 37). The
Figure 23.1 ‘Popcorn’, La Strana Società – inscribed record by Paul Nataraj.

crack that appeared for Andreas was the gift of an AM radio. His parents could not have
imagined that he would use it to access this new ‘popular’ world outside of the confines of
the family home and traditional ideology. Yet Andreas had found a way to expose this crack
by physically manifesting the world that he had heard in the ether, purchasing the record
and bringing the offending object into the home. It is extremely important when thinking
about the resonances of the vinyl disc and its symbolic power to note that Andreas’s mother
was happy for him to have a recording of this music, but not actually own the disc. To have
the record was to actually buy into a stratum of society with which his family did not want
to be associated, La Strana Società indeed. As Andreas explains, pop music ‘was something
which could ruin the good society. The good society listens to Mozart, bad boys listen to
the Rolling Stones, this was the grounding’ (Andreas 2013). Certeau explains, however,
that the gains made by employing these tactics are short lived, ‘producing a sudden flash’
(Certeau 1984: 87–88). For Andreas also, this would seem to have been the case. For now
he is working in the field of classical music, as a producer and engineer, and although he
describes it as ‘boring’, it would seem that the sugary ‘Popcorn’ did not compromise his taste
so completely as his parents might have thought.
Crushed grooves
In the first instance then YSLABR collects records and their connected stories. It then
takes these stories and reinterprets them through sculptural practice to produce a piece
of visual art. These palimpsests are also ‘cracked’ instruments, and provide the sounds
for compositions that make up the final YSLABR works. I will explain below some of the
thinking behind this final part of the practice.
I recorded the playback of each record and then sifted through these sound files for
fragments of sound that I felt spoke to the stories of my respondents. As the compositions
are sound poems attempting to express the feeling of the stories that were shared with the
record, its owner, and now myself, all these materials are brought together in the creation
of the final sonic pieces. These are intertwined with my own personal relationship to music
and a very clear acknowledgment of my own limitations as a composer, as I have no formal
training in music. Below I outline the compositional process in just one of the tracks,
‘Badgewearer’.2
I have engaged with a bit of musical borrowing to realize the musical aesthetic for the
‘Badgewearer’ sound piece. This is a technique well used by many composers down the
years. Charles Ives is a famous example, as is the inimitable Erik Satie. For example, in his
Pièces froides written in 1897, he ‘takes as his source material the well-known Northumbrian
folk tune “The Kneel Row”. In lieu of simply quoting the jaunty melody, Satie adopted its
easily recognized rhythms, then recomposed and reharmonised the melody as if to conceal
the source’ (Davies 2007: 67–68).
In ‘Badgewearer’, the rhythmic backbone of the whole work is based on the drum
pattern from the 1987 track ‘Top Billin’ by Audio Two. This song placed at number one
in ‘Hip-Hop’s Greatest Singles by Year’ for 1987 in Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists (Jenkins
et al. 1999: 321). I absolve my guilt for this particular theft by placing the blame with
my respondents because their stories contribute to my compositional motives and the
conceptual intentions of each piece. So in this instance I chose ‘Top Billin’ as my source
template because my respondent Tony was a huge punk fan during the early 1980s, a
musical choice that had caused his Dad, an opera fan, a few sleepless nights. He recounts
that his Dad ‘was pretty Draconian you know, he went through the records and there was
a couple of things that had dodgy covers and he just wasn’t happy with me listening to
it’, but he goes on to note that ‘it wasn’t banned, it was kind of vetted’ (Tony, interview
with author, 2015 [hereafter Tony 2015]). He then tells me that his own son is listening
to the French hip-hop artist Black M, and ‘it was just horrific stuff, it was like I cannot, I
just don’t want it in my house for a start’ (Tony 2015). Tony clarifies that the misogynistic
lyrical content was the thing that he was averse to, adding that his attitude to it is ‘more
of a parenting question, than a music thing’. He goes on to say that because of his own
involvement in punk, ‘you know “pretty vacant” and all this kind of nihilism, I can
understand the concern [from my own parents at the time]’ (Tony 2015). So, in my role
as participant observer, and to maintain the dialogic relationship of the material in this
work, I started to think about my own experiences of the music I listened to that annoyed
my parents. ‘Top Billin’ by Audio Two was right up there, alongside another family
favourite ‘Straight Out the Jungle’ by, as my Dad used to call them, ‘The Jungle Buggers’,
or for purposes of accuracy ‘The Jungle Brothers’.
One could say that the form of ‘Top Billin’ makes it a difficult listening experience
for those not versed in the sonic language of hip-hop. The song is quite simply a
repeated beat with a rapped vocal line and echoed vocal samples chanting the phrase
‘Go Brooklyn!’ playing throughout: no melody allowed. The factor that made ‘Top
Billin’ a standout work in the 1987 hip-hop landscape was the structure of the beat.
Instead of having an accented snare drum on the second and fourth beat, which was the
convention with most hip-hop at the time, ‘Top Billin’ plays a kick drum on one, two,
and three, then lets the snare hit on four. At the opening of the track there is no hi-hat,
so the work is made of a very sparse, heavy hitting, funky, loquacious, and memorable
beat pattern that is the complete antithesis to the popular music’s melodic tradition.
The track is ‘raw’ hip-hop: a beat and an MC. This is further emphasized by the drum
track filling the sonic field. My parents hated it so I felt it to be perfect as template for
the ‘Badgewearer’ piece.
After I had decided on a rhythmic template derived from ‘Top Billin’, I started to structure
the track according to a story that Tony had told me from his own musical past. The record
that Tony had given me, and which was now providing the sonic material for this work,
was the first album from his own band, Badgewearer. Based in Glasgow and a product of
the post-punk movement, they had some critical acclaim during the early 1990s; ‘it was our
press that made us stand out from the other bands. Cause we’d kind of been recognized by
others, by the music press’ (Tony 2015). In describing Badgewearer’s music, Tony says, ‘we
wanted to be, it’s an old cliché you know, we wanted to be original’ (Tony 2015). Structure
was one of the ways they attempted to do this. ‘We wanted changes on three and five rather
than four, no middle eight, we didn’t want choruses, basically we wanted […] to write
songs in a different way so that the audience didn’t know what to expect’ (Tony 2015). But
as Tony points out, ‘the thing with that is, you can only go so far before it becomes totally
contrived I think’ (Tony 2015). I began to structure ‘Badgewearer’ with this in mind and
I attempted to achieve a balance between changes that somehow made sense, but were
unexpected and challenged the pounding repetition of the Audio Two inspired beat. In
some ways the fragmentary playback of the record itself made this slightly easier because
it broke the linearity of the songs anyway. In the drums themselves I made micro changes:
in every bar notes have been pushed just out of time by milliseconds, either before or after
the beat, to replicate the human inaccuracies that would be heard in someone playing their
instrument live. So the piece moves through a series of ever changing sections, with the
intention of never allowing the audience to become comfortable in their listening, but to
stop the track from feeling ‘contrived’.
In ‘Badgewearer’ I am also invoking a tension between this present use of the record, the
fallibility of his memory of the record, and the materiality of the record itself. I use Tony’s
recorded voice to narrate this relationship after three and half minutes of the ‘Badgewearer’
track, which has by this point gone through a number of different changes itself. He
recounts the journey from his first Leo Sayer record to actually having a vinyl record of
his own music saying, ‘from Leo Sayer to that moment was fucking significant. You know
to have it in my hand, you know to think I’m now contributing to the library of stuff that’s
out there […] so when it arrived, well that was a great feeling’ (Tony 2015). Just before
Tony starts to speak, we hear a loop that occurred whilst the record had been playing
as it got trapped between engraved words. At the start of this loop the singer screams
‘Why?’ so this word occurs at the start of every repetition. The loop then fades away behind
what sounds like a synth pad, but is in fact just a very short fragment of a guitar note that
has been passed through a reverb unit that pulls out the inherent frequencies to create
washed out tones. I used this same sound earlier in the work to bring about a sense of
calm and balance to a group of quite hard and unforgiving sounds. I wanted this ‘synth’
sound to lift us away from the screaming invocation of the previous phrase and introduce
listeners to our protagonist. Tony’s voice is itself abstracted as I recorded it directly from
the phone during our conversation. The high-pass filter of the telephone receiver gives the
voice an otherworldly quality and is a signifier of distance in and of itself, also laden with
resonances of the connection between recording and telephony in the nascent days of its
development. Due to the distortion in the recording, it is at times difficult to hear exactly
what Tony says. However, this can add to, rather than diminish, the overall communicative
potential of the track. As musicologist Maarten Beirens notes, cutting and manipulating
speech brings about ‘more direct access to the expressive content, transmitted by the voice,
but hidden by the semantic system of the words’ (Beirens 2014: 221). In order to segue
back to the music and maintain the idea of the rhizomatic development of these pieces, I
used an echo chamber on Tony’s voice saying ‘feeling’, which is then matched by an echoed
and delayed drum fill. These echoes morph into one another as both music and voice have
equal opportunity and worth in meaning creation, as is the leitmotif for all the stages of
the YSLABR work.
As the track ends we hear Tony’s voice again, saying ‘but the feeling evaporated as soon
as I put it on because the sound was terrible’. The word ‘terrible’ echoes off into the distance,
it disappears into a space where we can’t follow. We are left to contemplate the statement
without ever being either literally or emotionally close to it. As he and his frustration drift
away from us on the wave of the echo, the discontent in Tony’s voice is palpable. I wanted
to include this not only to bring a loose resolution to the track but also to provide a sense
of ambiguity as to which record he was talking about. For the listener could assume that he
is referring to the track of which he is part, and in some ways they would be right, because
in this case he has been a part of the sound of this record before it was even a record. This
injection of ambiguity plays with the combinatory authorship that is at the heart of the
YSLABR work.
I also wanted to use Tony’s quote to give an extra layer of emotional synergy between
the elements of this piece. Luc Ferrari states that ‘after being processed in the studio, a
conversation with someone is not recognizable as discourse, yet it retains its discursive
value […] the feeling that can transpire from a word trembling faintly in the voice: to
me all that carries meaning’ (Ferrari quoted in Caux 2002: 48). Here we can hear the
disappointment and frustration that Tony felt when first playing his record. This emotional
content is imbued with new significance as he is surrounded by the sounds of that very
record, expressed in significantly new textures and shapes.
The play-out groove

Maybe Cage was right about records, perhaps they are as useless as postcards. It could well
be that they are reductive for the artist who conceives of their art as only existing in the
now. But YSLABR has found the record to be rich and dynamic in both production and
reproduction. It is full of fluid reassessments of its own position, and its lapidary potentials
have provided many with the opportunity to fulfil a desire to remake the apparatus. Not
only the artist but, as I have shown, the owner too, has been able to take the record off
the shelf, out of the store, and in that very moment of connection, reappraise its status as
commodity, opening it up to the possibility of becoming resistant material. In this way the
record has provided a mirror to reflect our inner anxieties across its surface tension. Even as
one of the most static of the technologies that facilitate sonic replication and copying, many
small but significant victories have been won inside the sleeves and grooves of our record
collections. The format provides a different set of affordances for resistance, ones that are
once again becoming prevalent in new contexts. If the music industry is the wicked witch,
trapping and enslaving music, with inbuilt obsolescence and unabating newness, then
YSLABR contributes an original approach to its ontology, teased apart from the layers of the
collaborative palimpsest of the record. This new approach reveals a fluid and ever-evolving
rhizome that is apotropaic to such industrialized and canonical constraints. My new
approach to the vinyl record could pull us out of a streaming wormhole, to re-evaluate the
richness of our listening world, and personal listening histories. We are resistant together.
Notes
1. For a more detailed discussion of YSLABR and the notion of the palimpsest please see
Nataraj, P. (2018) ‘Surface Tensions: Memory, Sound and Vinyl’, in M. Bull (ed.), The
Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, pp. 257–268. London: Routledge.
2. To hear this and all the other YSLABR tracks, see Nataraj 2019.
References
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Works by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Steve Reich’. Contemporary Music Review 33 (2):
210–222.
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Kelly, C. (2009). Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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24
Directing Listening:
Sound Design Methods from
Film to Site-Responsive Sonic Art
Ben Byrne
Introduction
Sound design is ubiquitous in contemporary urban life. It is paired with soundtracks in
audiovisual media of all kinds, from theatre, movies, television, and radio, to podcasts,
games, online media, and public screens. It is also used in all manner of devices and apps
to draw our attention and communicate information, from mobile phones and social
media that buzz, ding, and whistle to get our attention, to fire alarms, tram bells, and so
much more. These uses of sound design may at first seem disparate but they share a focus
on drawing attention and directing response, be it to a particular character on screen, a
message online or a vehicle headed towards you. Sound is expected to ground you in what
is going on and tell you how to feel about it – that the character just entered from the left
to the surprise of the others on screen, that a welcome missive from a friend has landed
in your pocket or that a car is coming and you best move, now. However, sound design
often involves much more than this and there exists a body of methodological writing
and established methods of practice. Although most often developed and employed in
and around film, such as in the work of theorist Michel Chion and sound designer Walter
Murch, these approaches are intimately linked to sonic art practices, both in their histories
and because of how they are employed by contemporary artists.
Despite its increasing ubiquity, sound design as a term suffers from a lack of definition,
describing a vast array of sonic practices and roles. There exists a number of key texts around
sound design and film, including in particular Elizabeth Weis and John Belton’s Film Sound:
Theory and Practice (1985), Rick Altman’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992), Michel
Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994), and David Sonnenschein’s Sound Design:
The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema (2001). Leo Murray’s
Sound Design Theory and Practice: Working With Sound (2019) surveys the field, attempting
to connect theoretical discourse with practical experience and knowledge. There exists also
an ever-increasing number of texts that explore different approaches to and applications for
sound design. Andy Farnell’s Designing Sound (2010) is one example, which takes a focus on
using procedural audio – programmatically generated, that is – for the production of sound
objects rather than specific recordings, sounds that can be procedurally generated as desired
rather than existing as linear, temporally determined tracks. Jean-François Augoyard and
Henry Torgue’s Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (2006), meanwhile, provides
a catalogue of sonic effects, or auditory experiences, and details the use of key examples of
these across a variety of disciplines, linking sound design to architecture and urban design,
psychology, music, and more. However, there is little work beyond that of Holger Schulze’s
Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design (2019) that seeks to examine the diversity
of contemporary sound design practices and their associated labours. In the face of this,
Murray (2019: 11) suggests addressing sound design’s lack of definition by taking it to mean
simply, and broadly, the ‘deliberate use of sound’.
In this chapter I will set out some key principles of sound design for audiovisuals, using
the film Apocalypse Now (1979) as an example. I will then link audiovisual sound design
and sonic art practices, using my own works to demonstrate ways in which sound design
effects and methods can be employed in sonic art. In my installation works Murmur (2016)
and The Flood (2017), as well as with my release Malfeasance (2017), I employ a variety
of techniques to create specific sonic effects, in particular extension as defined by Chion,
as well as delocalization and ubiquity as defined by Augoyard and Torgue. Here I will
articulate how the staging of these effects serve as methods that can be employed not only
in narrative audiovisual contexts but also in site-responsive art, in which it serves to direct
the listening of audiences, facilitating encounters with existing sonic ecologies.
Sound design in film

Michel Chion’s theories are especially influential where the role of sound design in
audiovisual work is concerned, for film in particular. In the foreword to the English edition
of Audio-Vision, celebrated sound designer Walter Murch declares of sound design for
cinema: ‘Whatever virtues sound brings to the film are largely perceived and appreciated by
the audience in visual terms’ (Chion 1994: viii, emphasis in the original). Chion, however,
sets out audio-vision as he understands it, addressing it as a specific mode of perceptual
reception that is necessarily multisensory (xxv). He then goes about constructing a
language with which to understand the role of sound, of sound design, in audio-vision.
Chion proposes a number of key principles and sonic effects for thinking and practicing
audio-vision, including added value, synchresis, and extension (Chion 1994: 5, 87, and 129).
Added value, for Chion, is a concept that refers to the ‘expressive and informative’ detail that
sound confers upon an image, producing an effect seemingly natural to what is seen (5).
Synchresis denotes the perception of an immediate relationship between what an audience
hears and sees, an audiovisual effect in which added value is particularly significant, and
Directing Listening 399
which is very commonly employed as a deliberate sound design method (5). Extension,
meanwhile, refers to the effect created when sound is employed to broaden the concrete
space of the film beyond the borders of the frame (87). Chion also points out that sound in
cinema is predominantly vococentric: it privileges the voice over other sounds (5).
Murch’s work in the opening sequence of director Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse
Now, and its subsequent versions Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and Apocalypse Now Final
Cut (2019) is an excellent example of Chion’s sound design principles. Murch contributed,
and is credited for, the ‘sound montage and design’ as well as serving as one of the editors,
purportedly the first instance of a credit for sound design in cinema. Interviewed by Michael
Ondaatje in The Conversations, Murch explains of his role in the opening sequence: ‘That
became my job: to create an abstract, dynamic, visually arresting scene’ (Ondaatje 2002:
61). The film opens with a slow-motion shot of a jungle in flames, helicopters circling,
fading into a close up of Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard in a hotel room in Saigon, lying
on a bed looking up at a ceiling fan. A synthesized version of the helicopters’ chopping
rhythms serves as their sound, and in turn becomes the sound of the fan overhead before
merging into a recording of a helicopter seemingly flying past outside of the room and
out of shot as Willard gets out of bed and walks to the window. This is delocalization, as
Augoyard and Torgue term it, in which the ubiquity effect they define, and I will discuss
later, through which the sound seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at the same
time, leads to moments in which ‘the listener knows exactly where the sound seems to come
from, while at the same time being conscious that it is an illusion’ (Augoyard and Torgue
2006: 38). Demonstrating Chion’s principles, effects, and methods clearly, the synchresis, or
conjoining, of the synthesizer sounds with first the helicopters and then the fan, give added
value in that they connect what Willard can hear and see in the room – the fan – with his
experiences in the Vietnam War, during which the film is set, before explicitly extending
the sonic environment when they morph into the sound of a helicopter outside. Chion
claims that the point of audition in film, like the point of view, can have both a spatial and a
subjective designation, that is where the audience is hearing from, which can be difficult to
pinpoint given sound’s atmospheric characteristics, and from which character’s perspective
they are hearing (Chion 1994: 89–90). In Apocalypse Now the audience hears what Willard
hears, almost exclusively, which thus directs their listening.
Willard’s narration, which anchors the film’s story line, then begins, supporting Chion’s
claim of vococentrism despite the greater role of sound design to the film. ‘Saigon, shit,
I’m still only in Saigon.’ The narration is a kind of internal monologue, as the phrasing
of even its opening line indicates, a monologue that the audience listens in to, hearing
from Willard’s perspective as we do in the rest of the sound design of the film. The sound
of Sheen’s voice in the narration indicates this too, with its intimate quality achieved via
deliberate very close microphone placement in the studio and mixing of the vocal track
to all three speakers behind the screen, where other dialogue is placed only in the centre
speaker (Ondaatje 2002: 64–65). Interestingly, in ‘Apocalypse then and now’, based on
sections from the then forthcoming The Conversations, when asked about whether the
original script for the film called for narration Murch is attributed as commenting ‘Willard
had an internal voice’ (44), while in the book Murch comments ‘Willard spoke to us’ (63).
Both are accurate where the film is concerned, and this is significant because we, as an
audience, listen with Willard rather than just to him.
The scene also features the use of the sound of crickets to depict the psychological
presence of the jungle for Willard, leading to a chaotic climax in which The Doors’ song
‘The End’, that had scored the jungle-shot opening, re-emerges and pushes the action to
a traumatic peak. The sound of whistles being blown authoritatively outside among the
bustle of the city – presumably directing traffic – slips away and is replaced by the initially
similar crickets. Sound is used here and throughout the film to guide the listener, directing
their gaze but also their ears, one sound leading into another. The sound of crickets is
gradually filled out, creating what Chion calls an extension of the sonic environment of the
film, extending the concrete space of the film well beyond the borders of the screen and
Willard’s visual field, but also inward, into the character’s experience and memory (Chion
1994: 87). Chion credits Murch with speaking to his use of a version of this extension
effect in the film as well, though not using the same term (87). Indeed, Murch provides a
thorough description of the sequence in an interview with Frank Paine, ‘Sound Mixing and
Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Walter Murch’ (Weis and Belton 1985: 356–360). At the
same time, as Murch has himself pointed out, if we question the location of the crickets in
the logic of the film ‘They’re nowhere. They’re in Willard’s head’ (Ondaatje 2002: 245). The
crickets we hear, and the jungle they precipitate, are, therefore, sonic effects, as Augoyard
and Torgue define them, effects created by way of specific sound design methods.
Murch endorses the importance of manoeuvres such as those articulated in Chion’s and
his own work, arguing that it is necessary to ‘stretch the relationship of sound to image
wherever possible’ because ‘the danger of present-day cinema is that it can crush its subjects
by its very ability to represent them’ (Chion 1994: xix, emphasis in the original). Film,
Murch claims, lacks the ‘sensory incompleteness’ of other forms, such as music, radio, and
literature (xix–xx).
I find that the issue Murch identifies persists in sonic art, regardless of its perceived
relative incompleteness. Sound reproduction – from recording to sound design – is used
to represent sonic experiences, to allow us to hear them in ways that we couldn’t otherwise,
but that can also supersede them, creating reproductions that usurp their sources in our
lives. Sound design – the deliberate use of sound – can, however, be used to craft audio-
visual experiences for listeners that go beyond representation, as we can hear, and see, in
the work of Murch and his collaborators. Similarly, sound design can be used in sonic
art to stretch the relationship between sounds. In this way, sound design methods can be
deployed in site-responsive sonic art to create environmental encounters.
Sound design in site-responsive sonic art

Ubiquitous as sound design is in contemporary life, sonic art – be it experimental or avant-
garde music, radio art, or sound art – is not generally something that comes to mind when
sound design is raised. A prevailing sense of sound design as functional and art, especially
sonic art, as anything but, divides the two conceptually. It stands to reason, however, that
design is ideally artful, and much successful art is well designed, and further that a broad
approach to sound design, such as Murray’s (2019: 11) ‘deliberate use of sound’, leaves room
for its use in the arts more widely. Moreover, while sound design and art seem separate
fields there exists a long and rich history of contact between them.
Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, for instance, known for his intonarumori (noise-generating
instruments) and for his accompanying manifesto written in the early twentieth century,
‘The Art of Noises’ ([1913] 2009), is suggested as the first noise artist. His instruments,
though, were built to replicate modern sounds, the noises of industrial Europe, in keeping
with the practice we now know as sound design. Also, Suzanne Ciani, a very early adopter of
the Buchla synthesizer and a celebrated electronic musician, is at the same time the creator
of the Coca-Cola ‘pop ‘n pour’ sound logo, for which she used her instrument to produce
a now iconic bubbling effect, a story told in Michelle Macklem’s Lost Notes documentary
podcast episode Sonic Sculptor: Suzanne Ciani (Macklem 2019). ‘We didn’t know the words
“sound designer” back then,’ Ciani reflected in an interview with Hannah Nemer (2017)
for the Coca-Cola website. What is more, Murch details hearing the musique concrète of
Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry around age ten and being profoundly influenced by it,
as well as attending some of experimental composer John Cage’s concerts with his father
(Ondaatje 2002: 7–9).
I have myself produced a series of works, across a number of media, which employ
sound design methods to produce site-responsive works that direct listening towards
surrounding sonic ecologies – Murmur (2016), The Flood (2017), and Malfeasance (2017).
This approach has become intrinsic to my practice following earlier work, sound designing
a short sound work for theatre, Too (2012), written by Cynthia Troup and performed by
Carolyn Connors, for which I used a ten-channel speaker system to gradually shift the sound
of a detuned radio onstage into a torrent of noise from all corners of the theatre, and giving
site-responsive performances, such as Merri Creek Drain (2015), in which I performed
from within a storm-water drain to an audience across the creek. Where Chion’s theories
are key to Murch’s cinema, Augoyard and Torgue’s are to analysing my work, though the
interplay between all is significant. Eschewing the vococentrism Chion identifies, the
works all employ pink noise to produce subtly shifting bodies of sound that merge with
the sound of the environments in which they are presented. These environments, ranging
from an urban art gallery to a remote riverside and the variable listening environments
chosen by record listeners, are thus brought forward in the mix, so to speak, drawn into
the foreground for audiences.
Pink noise is the name given to noise containing every frequency theoretically audible
to humans, from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz, with an inverse relationship between frequency
and volume. It is also known as 1/f noise, where f is a given frequency, as this fraction
expresses the power of each frequency in the noise. Bass frequencies are loudest, with
volume decreasing with increasing frequency. It thus differs from white noise, the sound
of, for example, an old analogue television that hasn’t been tuned, or is set to a station that
is no longer broadcasting, snow covering the screen. White noise is a sharp sound, notable
for its high-frequency content. It contains every frequency from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz
at equal power but we hear the high frequencies as louder, and thus the noise as sharper,
because humans don’t perceive all sounds equally. Pink noise, with its inverse relationship
between frequency and volume, sounds, at least to us humans, more balanced in its mix
of high and low frequencies. While white noise is often called static and sounds harsh
and electronic, pink noise sounds like the ocean, rain, or the roar of a city. It sounds like
everything at once and nothing in particular.
Murmur was a stereo procedural audio installation presented at the RMIT Spare Room
gallery in inner city Melbourne, Australia, from 15 July to 18 August 2016. Custom-coded
in SuperCollider, which was then run on a Raspberry Pi computer, the piece produced
a delicate but continuous sound through subtractive synthesis. It generated a pink noise
signal and used band-pass filters and envelopes to create layers of sound that moved only
very slowly and were at times barely perceptible, both due to the low volume and because
I designed the overall morphology of the sound to mimic that of the noise spilling into the
gallery space from the urban environment within which it is situated, from the crowd at the
opening to traffic and rain outside.
The Flood, in contrast, was a durational procedural audiovisual installation developed
and presented at Bogong Centre for Sound Culture (BCSC), in Bogong Village in the high
country of Victoria, Australia. Included in the BCSC’s PHANTASMAGORIA festival and
exhibition for a month around Easter 2017, it was staged at an outbuilding next to the
East Kiewa River that runs below the village. Bogong Village was created to support the
Kiewa Hydroelectric Scheme. It is surrounded by a national park and has no permanent
residents, but is home to a hydro-electric power plant. The plant is built into the ground
beneath the village, which overlooks Lake Guy, created by the damming of the river as
part of the scheme and into which the river runs. Developed during a residency at BCSC
in late 2016, the work stages a flooding of the outbuilding with sound and light. I attached
transducers all over the corrugated metal building, so it would effectively function as a
speaker, but also filter and modulate the frequencies of the generated noise, and I used
projectors to rear-project into the windows, three in all. This audiovisual system was driven
by a Raspberry Pi running a program custom-coded in the software Processing, which
generated synchretically connected abstracted images of an unstable water surface and pink
noise, which would rise and fall up and down the windows and in volume unpredictably
each night from sunset until dawn.
Malfeasance, meanwhile, is a seven-inch record released on my Avantwhatever label in
2017, available only by gift or direct request, which is composed of the fluctuating pink
noise of a found data file. The sound fades in gradually and is of generally low volume such
that it blends with its surrounds when played. The release was produced using a hand-cut
lathe method, meaning there are subtle differences between each copy. The records will
wear faster than pressed records, adding further layers of manipulation to the noise.
All these works employ what Augoyard and Torgue term ubiquity, a term distinct from
Chion’s use of ubiquity. In their book Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, they
describe the effect as one that ‘expresses the difficulty or impossibility of locating a sound
source’ (Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 130). In the most common version of the effect, they
detail, the sound seems to come from both everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
Less common, they continue, is a variant in which sound seems to come from both a
particular source and many sources (130). It is the more frequent type of the effect that can
be observed in Murmur, The Flood, and Malfeasance, though arguably they can produce
moments of the latter too. In each it is possible to sense the work itself as a source of sound,
but at the same time the sound is heard as coming from the surrounding environment; it
seems to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular, directing listening outward.
The use of broad band noise to create a sense of ubiquity is a key method in my work.
Interested not to compose in a traditional sense so much as to create spaces for listening in
which the sonic events of the world may be encountered, sculpting pink noise offers me a
way to mimic and blur the boundaries between existing sounds. This involves using filters
and envelopes to shape the sound, a method of composition more focused on removing
material than adding it. This is a process that I deliberately seek to control only lightly
too, be it via software-based stochastic processes such as I employed in the coding of
envelopes for Murmur, the use of the materials of a site to filter sound as occurred with my
use of transducers for The Flood, or the indeterminacy of working with found sound and
especially degradable media as I did for Malfeasance.
Augoyard and Torgue note that ubiquity is well served by sound, given it cannot be seen,
but specify ‘diffused, unstable, omnidirectional sound’ as presenting an intrinsic tendency
towards the effect (Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 130–131). Spatialized and filtered noise,
such as that in my works, fits the bill. Although Augoyard and Torgue point out that while
many background sounds are ubiquitous in a particular situation, including the noise of a
city, listeners tune them out and
for the ubiquity effect to occur, we must consciously look for the source location of the sound,
and fail, at least for a moment, to identify it […]. The listener is in search of information. The
ubiquity effect is based on the paradoxical perception of a sound that we cannot locate, but
which we know is actually localized.
(Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 131)
Murmur, The Flood, and Malfeasance all produce sound that is known to be localized –
emerging from speakers, an outbuilding, and records respectively – but which at first cannot
be located, and which even when located blurs with the surrounding sounds to delocalize
listening once more. The sound they produce is diffuse, unstable, and omnidirectional due
to the use of filtered noise to produce a constantly shifting mix of frequencies, as well as
multiple speakers or transducers, especially in the case of The Flood and its use of the
materials of the building itself to propagate the sound.
Farnell details how listeners localize sound in his book Designing Sound (2010: 79). He
cites three ‘general rules’: high-frequency sounds with short attacks are easier to localize
than low sounds with longer attacks; it is easier to localize sounds outside than in small
rooms where there are many reflections; and listeners locate sound more successfully if
they are able to move their heads around to get different ‘takes’ on the sound, principles
echoed in the work of Augoyard and Torgue. All three of the works I discuss here work with
continuously shifting pink noise, with layers of filtering fading in and out with relatively
long attack times, making localizing the sound difficult in keeping with Farnell’s first rule.
Murmur also used a very small room, making the most of the delocalizing effect of the
reflections produced by the close walls, as outlined in Farnell’s second rule. In all three
cases the listener is free to move, indeed not only their head but by moving around the
space, which according to Farnell’s third rule will help listeners to locate the sound but at
the same time exposes them to the environmental sounds with which the works blur. The
works are thus designed to disrupt listeners in their attempts to localize sound.
This, in turn, contributes to the works achieving delocalization. In the case of Murmur,
the visual cue of the wall-mounted speakers suggests a source that is then contradicted by
a sense that the sound is coming from outside, through the entryway to the space. With
The Flood, the window projections suggest the outbuilding as a source but the multiple
transducers disperse the sound so that it is hard to pinpoint if it indeed is the source,
diffusing the sound into that of the nearby river. Malfeasance stages a source with the record,
player, and sound system, but the merging of the sounds produced with environmental
noise may lead listeners to question that assumed source.
Augoyard and Torgue identify urban and architectural environments as obvious
locations for the experience of ubiquity effects due to their multiple surfaces and spaces
contributing to the delocalization of sound sources (Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 131–132).
This was evident in the urban environment surrounding the RMIT Spare Room gallery
in Melbourne, where Murmur was presented and also, to an extent, in that of Bogong
Village where The Flood was installed, as, though it is a remote location and could not be
described as urban, it is nonetheless a heavily built environment due to the power station.
Malfeasance, however, clearly does not control its environment, though its release on a
record certainly guides it. In each case, the works extend the listening space of audiences
through a deliberate delocalization of sound and accompanying sense of ubiquity, which is
supported by the material realities of their locations.
The delocalization of sound sources and accompanying sense of ubiquity I achieve
in these works further contributes to an extension of listeners’ sonic fields. Engaging
peripheral listening that might otherwise be unconscious, the works then draw links
between sounds in a given location, constructing a sense of interconnection and ecology.
That simultaneously brings to the foreground sounds listeners might otherwise tune out,
and develops an awareness of the sounds around and beyond those. This is the same
method of extension as that theorized by Chion and employed by Murch. However, I use
it not to extend narrative space but to shift the listeners’ attention, engaging them with the
expanded auditory space they inhabit.
Augoyard and Torgue distinguish between two listener positions in which the ubiquity
effect might be experienced: from within a given sonic environment and from outside of it.
They argue that in the first situation the experience of ubiquity is linked to a ‘multiplicity’,
real or imagined, of surrounding sound sources, while in the second situation it is the
distance from sources and propagation effects that cause sounds to become delocalized
(Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 132–133). I propose here that my works demonstrate a third
possibility, that of the effect positioning a listener in an extended sonic environment, as
Chion (1994: xix) proposes is possible in film, connecting their immediate surrounds,
be they a small room or a riverside, with a sense of distance beyond the sensible field of
vision and audition. These works stretch the relationship between the sound produced and
its assumed sources, in line with Murch’s call for creative uses of sound design methods.
Rather than communicating what is going on by giving emotional cues, sound is used
to complicate and highlight the listening experience. The works do not represent sonic
environments but create sonic effects by way of sound design methods that refer listeners
to the surrounding environment. They engage listeners directly with the sounds around
them and their interrelationships.
Sound design is increasingly common, in contemporary life and art, and sound design
methods and effects such as synchresis, delocalization, extension, and ubiquity can be
employed in site-responsive sonic art. This is demonstrated in my own work with the use
of pink noise, subtractive synthesis, and indeterminate processes. As Augoyard and Torgue
note, ‘ubiquity, by its very definition, supposes active listening’ and so ‘if there is a “sound
object,” it cannot be immutably perceived by a passive receptor organ; it is constructed
and “realized” by an active ear that creates it as such’ (Augoyard and Torgue 2006: 135).
Addressing audiences as active listeners is key to my work and use of sound design, as it is
to that of sound designers such as Murch in film. Delocalization, extension, and ubiquity,
understood as both sonic effects and methods, can be used to induce an awareness of
this active listening, encouraging listeners in their sonic explorations. As Murch claims
‘listening to interestingly arranged sounds makes you hear differently’ (Jarrett 2000: 4).
Beyond representation, in site-responsive sonic art this supports a directing of listening
towards listeners’ sonic environments, engaging them with the multiplicity of complex
sonic ecologies in which we live.
References
Altman, R. (1992). Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.
Apocalypse Now (1979).[Film] Dir. F. F. Coppola. USIUA: United Artists.
Augoyard, J.-F. and H. Torgue (eds) (2006). Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sound.
Trans. A. McCartney and D. Paquette. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. C. Gorbman. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Farnell, A. (2010). Designing Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jarrett, M. (2000). ‘Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch’. Film Quarterly 53 (3):
2–11.
Macklem, M. (2019). ‘Sonic Sculptor: Suzanne Ciani’. Lost Notes [Podcast]. Available online:
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/lost-notes/sonic-sculptor-suzanne-ciani (accessed
22 August 2019).
Murray, L. (2019). Sound Design Theory and Practice: Working With Sound. New York:
Routledge.
Nemer, H. (2017). ‘“Pop ‘n Pour”: This Electronic Music Pioneer Created the Sound of Coke’s
Beloved Bubbles’. Coca-Cola Company. Available online: https://www.coca-colacompany.
com/stories/meet-suzanne-ciani-the-legendary-creator-of-cokes-pop-n-pour (accessed
22 August 2019).
Ondaatje, M. (2001). ‘Apocalypse Then and Now (Interview)’. Film Comment 37 (3): 43–47.
Ondaatje, M. (2002). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. London:
Bloomsbury.
Russolo, L. ([1913] 2009). ‘The Art of Noises’. In L. Rainey, C. Poggi, and L. Wittman (eds),
Futurism: An Anthology, 133–139. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Schulze, H. (2019). Sound Works: A Cultural Theory of Sound Design. New York: Bloomsbury.
Sonnenschein, D. (2001). Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound
Effects in Cinema. Seattle, WA: Michael Wiese Productions.
Weis, E. and J. Belton (1985). Film Sound: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia
University Press.
25
Sound, Space, and Pneumatic
Valves: Using Pneumatic Valves as
Sound Sources to Create Spatial
Environments
Edwin van der Heide
One day a very simple idea came up in my mind: to use pneumatic valves as sources
for sound production. I imagined that it would be possible to use the valves as a kind of
loudspeaker. A loudspeaker moves its membrane forwards and backwards in relation to its
rest position. While the movement of the membrane follows the waveform of the sound
signal to be produced, local air pressure changes are being created that propagate as sound
waves through the air. I envisioned that it would be possible to create a comparable effect by
releasing pressurized air through electrically controlled pneumatic valves. By controlling
the valve, the amount of air that passes through is being varied. When an air compressor
is used in combination with a pressure tank a reservoir of compressed air is created with
a pressure higher than the environmental pressure. This compressed air is then supplied
to the inlet of a pneumatic valve of which the outlet is open, meaning that the compressed
air is released into the environmental air. The idea is that this would result in a pressure
increase similar to the membrane of the speaker moving forward.
An idea and its consequences or realization are two different things. My experiments and tests
to use pneumatic valves for sound production have resulted in two different sound installations
that are both presented outdoor. The installation Pneumatic Sound Field uses a large horizontal
grid of pneumatic valves above an audience; the installation Schwingungen – Schwebungen uses
pneumatic valves to drive acoustic horns that are placed in a field that the audience enters.
The valve versus a loudspeaker

In order to create a situation that is somehow comparable to a speaker, the valve needs to
be able to open and close very fast, just as the membrane of the speaker can move very
fast. The opening and closing of the valve results in a changing air pressure at the outlet of
the valve that corresponds to the waveform of the to-be-produced sound. With this set-up
there are nevertheless a number of differences to how a loudspeaker behaves. First of all,
we can only create pressure increases and no pressure decreases. This is not necessarily
a problem but it means that there is a continuous ‘offset’ resulting in a part consisting of
continuous wind instead of sound pressure waves propagating through the air. Secondly,
there is no good coupling between the pressure released by the valve and the pressure in
the air surrounding the outlet of the valve. This means that most of the pressure coming out
of the valve results (again) in wind and doesn’t translate to, and result in, sound pressure
waves in the air. It is possible to create a much better transfer of the energy by placing a
horn in front of the valve. The shape of the horn makes it possible to connect a big surface
of air to the small outlet of the valve. This way most of the present energy is transferred into
sound pressure waves.
The human voice is also pneumatic

Originally, I didn’t think of this but the use of a pressurized tank in combination with a
pneumatic valve has similarities to the human voice. Our lungs provide air pressure to our
vocal cords that open and close with the frequency of the pitch that we produce. This is
similar to a valve opening and closing at that same frequency. After the vocal cords follow
the throat, nose, and mouth to shape and filter the sound and transfer the energy to the
surrounding air. The wind ‘offset’ that is the result of the valves only being able to increase
the surrounding pressure is equally present in the principle of the human voice. While we
sing or speak we also release air.
The ideal of a loudspeaker is to be a universal and thereby generic sound source. In
Between Air and Electricity, Cathy van Eck, a composer, sound artist, and researcher in the
arts, describes that loudspeakers (and microphones), when used for reproduction, ‘should
act like transparent devices, adding no sound of their own’ (Van Eck 2017: 38).1 The human
voice is the opposite of this: a voice is unique to a certain person. This can be attributed to
the personal properties and qualities of the involved organs and also to the particular way
they are controlled. We could say that the properties and qualities of the involved organs
correspond to the qualities of an acoustic instrument and that how they are controlled is
comparable to the personal (style and) skills of a musician.
Two types of valves

While exploring the possibilities of pneumatic sound production I came across two
different types of valves: discrete ones that have just two states – open and closed – and
valves whereby the opening can be proportionally controlled. The binary nature of the
first would make it comparable to a speaker where the membrane only has two possible
positions. We could call this a one-bit speaker. The valve is only able to produce pulses with
Sound, Space, and Pneumatic Valves 409
a variable length including square wave-like tones with a variable pulse width. On the other
hand, the proportional valve is able to continuously change its opening and thereby vary
the amount of pressure that is being released. This behaviour is more similar to a speaker
that can continuously change the position of the membrane in time without being limited
to specific positions. Where the membrane of a speaker has a rest position and can move
forwards and backwards the proportional valve cannot create pressure decreases and will
therefore have to be half-open as its rest position. From there on the opening increases and
decreases following the amplitude of the to-be-produced signal. As mentioned before this
results in a permanent flow of wind.
The valve as musical instrument?

We can make a distinction between musical instruments that have unique and specific
features and loudspeakers that are supposed to have universal and generic properties.
If we would have to characterize the discrete and proportional valves in this context
it would be logical to say that the discrete valve has a very specific behaviour and the
proportional valve can be used in a (more) generic and universal way. A difference between
musical instruments and loudspeakers, that we have not touched upon yet, is that musical
instruments not only (re)produce sound but also generate sound. Speakers, however,
are supposed to produce sound that is not generated by themselves. The electrical signal
separates the sound generation and the sound production from each other. By doing this,
there is no inherent interaction between the two. (However, this doesn’t mean that no
interaction can be created; think, for example, of feedback.) The generated sound is ‘fed’ to
the speaker(s) in a one-directional way. This observation allowed me to play a bit with how
I could interpret the role of the discrete valve. Yes, discrete valves have a very specific (and
limited) behaviour that is thereby similar to musical instruments but I could still argue that
they act as speakers because we use them to (re)produce sound and not to generate sound
themselves. Playing a rich sound signal with a complex waveform on the discrete valves
would result in a heavily distorted production of it. However, since there is no interaction
between the generation of the signal and the sound production, I would argue that the
valve is not fully playing the role of a musical instrument. I could even take another step in
my argumentation and say that the role of the two-state valve is comparable to the role of a
loudspeaker when I intentionally send a signal that already has a discrete two-state nature
itself. In this case the valve is fully capable of producing the generated sound and acts like
a ‘perfect’ loudspeaker. Perfect, really? Well, in the installation Pneumatic Sound Field it is
not so perfect because the air travelling through the valves meets a lot of small and sharp
corners that create friction, which results in a form of hissing. It is possible to reduce this
hissing with special pneumatic dampers, but for this installation I decided to keep it. I
would say that since the hissing is generated by the valves themselves I cannot just claim
that the valves only produce sound. They play both roles, and following this reasoning they
act both like speakers and musical instruments.
Acoustic and visual localization

One aspect that I really like about the discrete two-state valves that I have chosen to use
for Pneumatic Sound Field is that they are very small (37 millimetres × 29 millimetres ×
12 millimetres) (see Figure 25.1). They produce a sound that has a certain strength and
directness to it, resulting in an impact that one wouldn’t expect from such a tiny object.
We have a natural tendency to trace where a sound comes from, independently whether
it comes from an acoustic source (such as the human voice, an acoustic instrument, or a
car driving by) or from speakers. Speakers are usually relatively large and thereby visually
really present. Although there are many moments in the composition for Pneumatic Sound
Field where it is easy to localize the sound as coming from the positions of the valves, the
audience often asks where the sound comes from since they cannot visually understand
that the sound is produced by such a small object. I believe that not knowing where the
sound comes from, or having an auditory experience that has a strong (spatial) presence
that doesn’t relate to what we see, emphasizes our perceptual focus on listening, the spatial
perception of sound, and the auditory perception of space. In other words: when we know
the sound comes from speakers with fixed positions, we will focus less on the spatial
information of the sound.
Figure 25.1 The pneumatic valve used in Pneumatic Sound Field. Photograph courtesy
of Studio Edwin van der Heide.
The speaker as spatial source versus an

acoustic window
Speakers can be used in various ways, for example to position the sound (and represent
the produced sound) in space. In this case the speaker is not only producing sound
but the sound is also intended to be perceived as coming from the position of the speaker.
The speaker forms the spatial source of the produced sound. A well-known example of
such speaker use is the guitar amplifier. Speakers however, can also be used to mediate
a spatial experience. Think, for example, about listening to an orchestra recording on a
stereo speaker set-up. In this case the speakers do not act as the spatial positions where the
sound is intended to be positioned and spatially originates from; the speakers are used to
mediate the spatial experience of the orchestra playing, including the acoustics of the hall it
is playing in. In other words, the acoustic behaviour of the recording (or simulated) space
is part of the mediation. In this case the sounds are not intended to be perceived as coming
from the speaker but the speakers function as a window to another space. This other space
can be a completely different one than the listening space (i.e. listening to an outdoor space
or a concert hall in a living room, or listening to an indoor space while being outdoors),
but it can also be similar to, or even be, the listening space itself. We could say that there
are two extremes regarding the function of a speaker: situations in which the speaker plays
a sound in the space and functions as a spatial sound source similar to an acoustic sound
source, and situations in which the speaker plays exactly what the listener is intended to
hear. The last situation takes place in its extreme form when listening to headphones.
Pneumatic Sound Field

The installation Pneumatic Sound Field consists of a rectangular grid of seven lines with six
valves each, at a height of 4.5 metres above the audience. The spacing between the valves on
a line is 1.70 metres while the distance between the individual lines is 3.33 metres. Together
this results in structure with a width of 10 metres (the lines are a little longer than the space
needed for the six valves) and a depth of 20 metres (see Figure 25.2). Each of the valves is
controlled individually and forms its own channel. Together the valves form a 42-channel
installation. Every sound or impulse can originate from any position inside or outside of
the grid and propagate through the plane of valves by using individual delay times for
each of the valves. The idea behind this set-up and approach is the possibility to play, in
a structural way, with the arrival times of the played sounds in relation to the audience
members’ (changing) positions, and to make this part of the compositional approach.
These differences in arrival time result from a software-based system in which each of the
valves has its own delay time. However, the perceived differences for the audience also
depend upon their position in relation to the valves.
Figure 25.2 Pneumatic Sound Field during DEAF07, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen,
Rotterdam, 2007. Photograph courtesy of Studio Edwin van der Heide.
Sound localization and interaural time

difference
One of the reasons for our ability to hear and localize sound in the space around us is that
small differences in time occur between a sound arriving at our left ear and that same sound
arriving at our right ear, depending on whether the sound source’s position is to the left,
middle, or right of us. These differences are called interaural time differences (Blauert 1997:
204–206). A sound originating from a position to the right of our head will arrive at our right
ear before it arrives at our left ear because it has to travel a little further to reach the left ear (the
speed of sound in air is approximately 340 metres per second). In a stereo loudspeaker set-
up, small time differences between playing a sound from the left and from the right speaker
can be used to spatialize that sound and create a phantom source location in between the two
speakers (De Boer 1940: 50–51; Franssen 1964: 32). This principle is called time delay stereo.
Using time differences between the left and the right speaker up to 3 milliseconds can make
one experience the phantom source originating from the left speaker, anywhere in between
the two speakers or originating from the right speaker (Franssen 1964: 32).
The precedence effect

The precedence effect (also called ‘Haas effect’ or ‘law of the first wavefront’) is the effect
that, although a sound produced in a reverberant environment reaches us via many
different paths, each with its own travel time, we will localize the sound at the origin of
the first wavefront that reaches us (Ruth et al. 1999: 1633). Most often this is the direct
sound (the sound that travels from the source directly to the listener) since the reflections
of the sound take a longer time to reach the listener. Not only do we localize the sound at
the origin of the first wavefront reaching us, the reflections seem to fuse with the original
sound. In other words, we usually don’t hear the reflections as separate sounds but as part
of the sound. However, when the delay time between two instances of a sound exceeds
30–50 milliseconds, we will start to perceive them as separate from another in the form of
an echo (Blauert 1997: 224–225).
Wave field synthesis

Wave field synthesis (WFS) is another approach to sound spatialization using loudspeakers. It
aims to ‘synthesize’ and (re)create the spatial shape of the wavefront in the air. By using lines
of loudspeakers with small distances between them it is possible to synthesize (and thereby
recreate) the spatial shape of the waves of sound sources both behind and in front of the line
of speakers (Berkhout 1988: 979–981). Where time delay stereo aims to create differences
in arrival time between the two ears, WFS uses slight time differences between the many
speakers, not to directly address our ears but to synthesize and thereby physically (re)create
the spatial shape of the waves in the space. This principle only works when the spacing
between the speakers is smaller than one quarter of the wavelength of the frequencies present
in the to-be-produced wavefront. A larger spacing results in what is called ‘spatial aliasing’,
meaning that the synthesized wavefront has a different shape than intended.
Back to Pneumatic Sound Field

The grid of Pneumatic Sound Field is not intended to function as a generic spatialization
system but as a field in which spatial phenomena take place that are based on differences
in arrival time of impulses and tones. The perception of these phenomena depends on the
position of the listeners since they are closer to certain valves and further away from others
and thereby influencing the differences in arrival time.
In Pneumatic Sound Field impulses are generated that originate from a certain position
inside or outside of the grid of valves and travel with a certain (variable) propagation speed
through the surface of the grid. A way to imagine the propagation is looking at a stone falling
in the water and watching the circular waves expand around the origin of the stone hitting
the water surface. The propagation speed of the impulses can correspond with the speed
of sound in air, but it can also be faster or slower. When the speed is infinitely fast, all the
valves receive exactly the same signal and open and close simultaneously. The reason I just
referred to wave field synthesis is that it uses the same metaphor of the stone falling into the
water to simulate sound sources at positions behind and in front of the line of speakers. The
set-up of the valves in Pneumatic Sound Field is not suitable for WFS because the distance
between the individual valves is too large and spatial aliasing will occur. Besides that WFS
requires the use of the speed of sound in the air for the exact calculation of the delay times
for the speakers and Pneumatic Sound Field applies a variable propagation speed. I could
say that Pneumatic Sound Field is intentionally misusing the physical foundation of WFS
and exploiting the obtained artefacts as sonic and spatial material.
Let’s take a look at some different scenarios:
1 An infinitely high propagation speed (all valves play the same signal and at the same
moment in time)
When the audience stands in the middle of one of the long ends of the grid and the impulses
originate from the middle of the other side of the grid I can play with their perception when
I change the propagation speed (the simulated speed of sound). As mentioned before, all
valves will receive exactly the same signal when the propagation speed is infinitely high. This
means that the sound that comes from the valve that is the closest to an audience member
will arrive first, and the further away a valve is, the later it will arrive. What became clear
from the above-mentioned precedence effect is that we will localize the sound source at the
origin of the first wavefront that arrives at us, meaning that we will localize the sound at the
valve that is the closest to us. From the time delay stereo effect one could learn that when
the sound of one valve arrives to one of our ears a tiny bit earlier (or later) than the sound
of another valve to the other ear that we can perceive a phantom sound source that has a
position in between these two valves. When all the valves open and close synchronously, the
largest time difference between the closest and the furthest valve is the travel time between
the two corners of the grid that are diagonally opposed to each other. The distance between
these valves is (8.5 metres × 20 metres = 21.73 metres), and with a speed of sound of 340
metres per second this takes 0.064 seconds. As mentioned, as part of the precedence effect
we perceive two identical sounds as separate from each other when they are more than 50
milliseconds apart. In this example this would never happen because 64 milliseconds is the
maximum possible time between the first and the last impulse; the impulses from all the
valves arrive in between this interval, meaning that perceptually they all merge together.
Wherever the audience is or moves, they will localize the sound at the valve that is the
closest to them. This means that one could say that the position of the sound source keeps
on following them while they move under the grid. Since all the valves play the same sound
I could argue that the sounds from the valves that arrive after the sound of the valve that
arrives to the audience first can be seen, and therefore perceived, as reflections of the sound
that arrives at us first. Following this reasoning, combinations of the impulses arriving to us
at different times could be interpreted as different acoustic effects.
2 A propagation speed of the impulses in the grid that is identical to the speed of sound
in the air
If the audience stays in the same position as in the previous scenario and the impulses
are played again from the side of the grid opposite to where they stand but now with a
software-generated propagation speed that is identical to the speed of sound in the air, what
will happen is that the impulses from the valves that are the closest will arrive at one’s ears
at the same time as the impulses from the valves on the other side of the grid. This means
that a listener is exactly at the point where the perception of the position of the source
turns over from the valve that is the closest to the valve where the impulse originates from.
When the software-generated propagation speed is decreased a little bit more the sound of
the valve from where the impulse originates will always arrive before the impulse is played
by the valves close to the listener (including all the valves in between the origin and our
position) and one will localize the sound at its origin (as opposed to the valve that is the
closest). When listeners now change their position in the grid without changing the origin
of the impulses that propagate through the grid the arrival times of the various impulses
will change accordingly, but the impulse from the origin will nevertheless always arrive
first. When one listens at the origin itself the impulses are travelling away from instead of
towards oneself. This means that the arrival times at one’s location is the sum of the actual
speed of sound in the air and the software-generated propagation speed.
The two examples above show that one can play with how we spatially perceive impulses
propagating through the grid and where the origin of these impulses is localized. In both
examples, we will perceive an impulse propagating through the grid as a single event
meaning that the individual impulses are associated with each other and not heard as
individual events in time.
3 Slowing down the propagation speed
When the software-generated propagation speed is slowed down more, a point is reached
where the impulses propagating through the grid are heard as individual events instead of a
single event with a certain spatial quality. This happens when the time differences between
the individual impulses arriving at one’s ears are larger than 50 milliseconds. As a result,
the propagation will be perceived as a rhythmical pattern in space since the individual
impulses of the individual valves are perceived and localized as separate events. A spacing
between the valves of 1.7 metres translates to a generated propagation speed of (1.7/0.05 =)
34 metres per second (or less) which corresponds to 1/10 of the speed of sound in the air.
The three examples above show that varying the software-generated propagation speed
leads to distinctly different perceptions of the impulses propagating the grid. We are used
to interpret what we hear in relation to the actual speed of sound in the air. When the
propagation speed is changed in the software, a continuum is being created between
aspects involving both the spatial and rhythmical perception of sound. Furthermore, what
we hear partially depends on the listening position in relation to the generated pattern.
So far, I have been speaking about individual impulses that have an origin in- or
outside the grid and that propagate with a certain speed through the grid of valves. The
transition between perceiving two identical impulses that have a short delay time (less
than 50 milliseconds) between each other as one sound event and with a longer delay time
(more than 50 milliseconds) as separate events is not only valid in the context of the spatial
perception of sound and sound localization, but also in the context of the perception of
pitch versus the perception of rhythm. When an impulse is repeated at a frequency lower
than 20 hertz (20 times per second), we perceive it as a rhythmically repeating pulse. When
it is sped up to frequencies faster than 20 times per second, we will hear it as a tone with
a certain pitch. In our perception the individual impulses merge into a single continuous
tone. This transition happens at the same time interval as the hearing of individual impulses
in space. A frequency of 20 hertz corresponds to a repetition cycle of 50 milliseconds.2
The installation Pneumatic Sound Field uses the above phenomena and transitions in
perception not just to create compositional material but as a perceptual grammar that
is explored in a compositional context. Impulses propagating the grid can perceptually
transform into rhythmical spatial patterns and thereby create a continuum between the
spatial perception and localization of quickly propagating impulses and the rhythmical
perception of impulses that propagate slower. Furthermore, the composition exploits the
perceptual difference between repeating impulses in time and perceived continuous tones.
Important questions were: Can this approach result in aesthetically meaningful and
interesting material? How do we compose for such a system? What are the different
sonic possibilities and how should they be classified? How do we create developments,
oppositions, and surprises? Over the years multiple pieces have been composed for the
system discovering different aspects of the installation without the need of changing or
expanding the system itself.
Schwingungen – Schwebungen
The installations Schwingungen – Schwebungen and Pneumatic Sound Field share the use
of pneumatic valves for their sound production. At the same time, the installations are
opposites in what sounds the valves produce and how the spatial behaviour and experience
of the sound is approached.
Horns in front of the valves

The valves used in Pneumatic Sound Field are very small and have a direct and relatively
strong sonic impact that one would not directly associate with such a small object. The
energy source for the produced sound is a 1,000-litre tank filled by a compressor that
keeps the pressure in the tank at about 7 bar (100 psi). With a pressure regulator at
the output of the tank the pressure supplied to the valves can be set. Both the tank
and the compressor are placed away from the installation, invisible to the audience.
Although the sonic impact of the valves is relatively high, the efficiency is low, and a lot
of the air pressure that gets released does not result in sound pressure waves, it becomes
movement of air (wind) instead of a temporary displacement (sound pressure waves).
This is because all the energy released by the valve only touches a very small surface of
air since the opening of the valve is very small. The mismatch between the two is called
an impedance mismatch. The same problem would occur if we had a subwoofer with a
tiny diameter but with a large amplitude. One way of getting a better coupling between
the released pressure and the air surrounding the valve is to place a horn in front of the
valve outlet. The use of the horn not only improves the efficiency of the translation into
Figure 25.3 Schwingungen – Schwebungen, bonn hoeren, Bonn, 2015. Photograph

courtesy of Studio Edwin van der Heide.
sound waves: the bigger the output surface of the horn, the lower the frequency at which
this efficiency is being achieved. This means that the bigger the horn, the better it is at
producing low frequencies. When the valves in Pneumatic Sound Field produce a low
frequency, the higher harmonics of the tone have more energy in them than the lower
harmonics, and there is little energy present in the fundamental itself. For Schwingungen
– Schwebungen I designed two types of horns: the first type is an exponential wooden
horn with a length of 3 metres and an output surface of 3 metres wide by 1.2 metres
high; the second type is a circular aluminium horn with a diameter of 1.25 metres and a
height of 30 centimetres at the output (see Figure 25.3). The circular horn is driven by a
valve placed at the centre of the horn and radiates the sound in a full horizontal circle.
Where the large wooden horn can produce frequencies down to 50 hertz, the circular
aluminium horn produces frequencies down to about 120 hertz.
The proportional valve

For Schwingungen – Schwebungen I chose to use (the aforementioned) proportional valves,
which can have any position between being fully closed and fully open. This makes it
possible to produce signals with a continuously changing amplitude, similar to what a
loudspeaker can produce by moving its membrane. Also, where the hissing resulting from
the friction of the air passing the discrete two-state valve in Pneumatic Sound Field forms
an important part of the installation, I decided to use pneumatic dampers at the connection
between the valve and the horn for Schwingungen – Schwebungen. These dampers don’t
fully dampen the hissing but reduce it substantially.
Pure tones
Where I was using sharp impulses and square waves containing a lot of overtones as
sound material in Pneumatic Sound Field, I was particularly interested in using pure
tones, also called sine waves (sine waves are called pure tones because they do not contain
any overtones) for the installation Schwingungen – Schwebungen.3 The choice to use the
proportional valves in combination with the horns did not originate so much from the
ambition to be able to produce ‘any’ sound by means of a generic pneumatic loudspeaker
as much as to be able to produce pure tones by means of pneumatic sound generation.
Sound localization of pure tones

Our ability to localize sound is dependent on a combination of factors. We are good at
localizing attacks and impulses especially when they have energy in the middle and higher
range of the frequency spectrum. This counts for single impulses but also for tones that have
many overtones like square and sawtooth waves. Pure tones on the other hand are (more)
difficult to localize especially when they don’t have an attack (sharp onset). The Dutch
physicist Nico Franssen wrote in his book Stereofonie (1962) about a perceptual illusion
in which a pure tone that starts in the left speaker and gets immediately panned to the
right speaker was localized as continuously coming from the left speaker. This perceptual
illusion was afterwards called the Franssen effect. The physicist William Hartmann and
communication scientist Brad Rakerd further researched the experiment and showed,
among other findings, that the Franssen effect only works in reverberant environments
and fails in an anechoic environment (Hartmann and Rakerd 1989: 1366–1373). This
is relevant because the acoustic properties of an outdoor environment are in between a
reverberant and space and an anechoic situation.
Standing waves
One of the causes of the Franssen effect are the standing waves that build up because of
the signal from the speaker(s) reflecting in the room. The direct sound and its reflections
interfere with each other in the space, resulting in standing wave patterns with nodes and
antinodes at specific positions throughout that space. These standing waves don’t build
up in an anechoic room nor in an outdoor space that has no nearby walls or objects, since
there are no reflections and therefore no interferences. When the same tone is played
from two speakers, each with its own position in space, standing waves occur because
the signals from the two speakers each arrive at different times at each position in that
space. When two identical tones coming from two individual speakers have a slightly
different pitch the result is a beating between the tones. Furthermore, positions in space
where the tones add up and positions where they cancel each other out are shifting. Both
positions form (moving) lines in space that originate from a position in between the
loudspeakers. The composer Alvin Lucier has used standing waves and beating between
pure tone oscillators and/or instruments extensively. In an interview with Douglas Simon
about his piece Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas he describes the
following situation:
Each person in the audience perceives the waves moving by at a different time. One other
fact I have to tell you is that the direction of the movement is toward the low speaker. For
example, if you have one oscillator at 1,000 Hz and the other at 1,001 Hz, the hyperbolas
[lines of cancellation] will move toward the 1,000 Hz speaker.
(Lucier and Simon 1980: 133)
Schwingungen – Schwebungen is using the same standing wave principle to create spatial and
moving interference patterns in an outdoor space. It does so by generating a pair of tones
each corresponding to its own horn with its own position in space. The difference is that
the sounds used in Schwingungen – Schwebungen are not only pure tones but do sometimes
contain some overtones. If two identical tones with overtones would be slightly detuned in
relation to each other, each of the overtones would beat with its own speed and there would
not be a clear standing wave pattern. In order to overcome this, the two signals are not
detuned but one signal is shifted in frequency linearly in relation to the other. This means
that all the overtones have the same frequency shift and thereby the same beating speed.
Sound localization, standing waves, and

wavelength
From the Franssen effect I learned that, in the case of pure continuous tones, the standing
waves are in the way of localizing the sound at its source. This results in a perceptual effect
that could be described as if the sound is floating in the air. The distance in space between
the lines where the two sounds add up (antinode) and the lines where the same two sounds
cancel each other out (node) depends on the wavelength of the produced frequency.
Higher frequencies have a shorter wavelength resulting in smaller distances between the
alternating lines of nodes and antinodes. At a frequency of about 1,000 hertz the distance
between the lines corresponds approximately to the distance between our ears. That means
that it can occur that we hear the tone at its loudest at one ear while it is at its softest at
the other ear. When this pattern is moving in space because of a small frequency shift
between the two signals (or when we move) it seems as if the sound is moving through or
floating around our head. The standing waves occur in regions where the loudness of the
two sources is relatively similar. At locations where one of the sources is much louder than
the other, for example when we stand in front of one of the two horns playing the signals,
we will localize the sound as coming from that horn instead of floating in space.
The composition
Schwingungen – Schwebungen has a generative nature and is created in real time according
to certain rules. It is build-up of phrases with a variable duration that overlap each other.
Each phrase consists of a tone with a certain pitch developing over time and a frequency
shifted version of this tone where the amount of this shift also develops over time. The tone
and its frequency shifted version are played on two separate horns thereby creating the
moving interference patterns in space.
The installation Schwingungen – Schwebungen is set-up in a rectangular field. Two
large wooden horns are being used, one on the far-left side of the field and another on the
far-right side. In the field between these two horns the five circular aluminium horns are
placed. As mentioned before the horns are always used in pairs. A phrase can either be
played on the two wooden horns or on a combination of two cylindrical horns. A horn
that is in use by one pair cannot simultaneously be used by another pair. This means that a
maximum of three phrases can overlap: one phrase on the wooden horns and two phrases
on the circular horns. Hence there is always at least one circular horn that is not playing.
When a phrase is using the wooden horns, the resulting interferences occur in the field
between the two horns, that is, where the circular horns are placed. The interferences of a
phrase played on a pair of circular horns fills the space around these horns.
Discussion
Both Pneumatic Sound Field and Schwingungen – Schwebungen are installations that were
not envisioned before. They came into being as a result of many experiments, thoughts,
and reflections originating from my fascination for the idea that pneumatic valves could
be used to produce sound. What intrigued me was that using air pressure to create air
pressure changes seemed to be a more direct and fundamental form of creating sound than
moving a membrane in a loudspeaker.
While experimenting I have followed two opposite approaches. I have been studying
the specific qualities and limitations of different valves and I have been questioning their
generic qualities: does a valve exhibit specific behaviour that is interesting to explore and
use in a musical context or can it be seen as seen as something universal, similar to what
we expect from a loudspeaker? Here we touch upon the question whether a valve can be
regarded as a musical instrument or not, and whether it is meant to be audible (present)
or inaudible. The opposite approaches were used as a method to study their specific
qualities without the intention to result in two different and complementary artworks as
it eventually did. The first version of Pneumatic Sound Field originates from 2006 and
Schwingungen – Schwebungen from 2015. For Pneumatic Sound Field I have chosen to use
the specific qualities and limitations of the discrete valves as point of departure for the
contents of the work. In Schwingungen – Schwebungen the use of the proportional valves
in combination with the dampers and horns are means to create a more generic form of
sound production; it is closer to the ideal of being able to produce any sound and mediate
the to-be-produced signal in a more transparent way.
The discrete and binary nature of the valves in Pneumatic Sound Field implies that I
could only use time as its domain for the creation of content. Time describes the duration
of a discrete pulse or the frequency and pulse width of a to-be-produced square wave.
Fast repeating impulses result in the perception of pitched sounds, while slow repeating
impulses are perceived rhythmically. The extreme limitations of the valves resulted in the
idea to use a grid of multiple valves and to develop a model in which patterns spatially
propagate through the grid at different speeds. In this way different relations between time
and space could be created. The propagation speed is variable and defines how fast (in
time) an impulse travels through the grid of valves. Fast propagation speeds result in the
perception of single events with specific spatial qualities; slower ones result in rhythmical
patterns in space. Small time differences between the valves determine where and how the
audience will locate the impulses produced by the valves. Changing position in relation to
the valves changes the arrival times at which the sounds from the valves arrive at one’s ears
and thereby how the event will be perceived.
The compositional content of Pneumatic Sound Field has developed from the qualities
of the discrete valves and the behaviour and possibilities of the propagation model. It is the
process of experimenting and reflecting that has led to the development of the installation
and its content.
Despite the more generic possibilities the combination of the proportional valves,
dampers, and horns offers in Schwingungen – Schwebungen, this installation uses the set-
up in a very specific and limiting way. Just as the limitations in Pneumatic Sound Field
functioned as a driving force for the development of its content, the same counts for
Schwingungen – Schwebungen. The sound material is limited to the use of pure tones and
triangle waves. Furthermore, the principle of spatial interferences (standing wave patterns
moving in space) between combinations of horns is being used to place the audience in the
middle of the spatial interferences that take place in between and around the horns. The
possibilities and limitations of this approach are used to develop the content of this work.
It is interesting to observe how different the two works have become. Pneumatic Sound
Field creates a very strong, and I would say, concrete spatial presence – a sensation of
presence that is so strong that it is almost physically present and gives the idea that one
can almost touch the sound. The spatiality in Schwingungen – Schwebungen is much more
ephemeral. The sound seems to float in the space around the listener but does not get a
physical quality. This is an interesting paradox: whereas the valves in Pneumatic Sound
Field are visually hardly present, the sound has a strong sense of presence. The horns in
Schwingungen – Schwebungen, on the other hand, are visually very present, but the sound,
resulting from the spatial interferences between them, is more ephemeral and not directly
recognized as coming from the horns.
Let me end with a methodical remark. The artworks and principles addressed in this
chapter are not just the results of prior knowledge but are mostly developed while working
with the materials used in the installations and while reflecting upon my experiences.
Notes
1. It is important to mention here that Van Eck aims for the opposite in her book. She
investigates the use of microphones and speakers as musical instruments instead of
reproduction.
2. The same transition happens when looking at a sequence of images in a movie. When the
frame rate is slower than 18 images per second we will see them as individual still images
but when we play them faster we will perceive a moving image. The individual images
merge into something that we perceive as continuous.
3. There are two ways of describing a sound containing overtones. We can speak about
the fundamental frequency in combination with overtones or about harmonics. In the
last case the first harmonic corresponds to the fundamental and the second harmonic
corresponds to the first overtone. When a sound contains overtones all these overtones
can be regarded as individual pure tones.
References
Berkhout A. J. (1988). ‘A Holographic Approach to Acoustic Control’. Journal of the Audio
Engineering Society 36 (12): 977–995.
Blauert, J. (1997). Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization. Revised
edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
de Boer, K. (1940). ‘Stereofonische Geluidsweergave’. PhD thesis, Delft.
Franssen, N. V. (1964). Stereophony. Eindhoven: Philips Technical Library.
Hartmann, W. and B. Rakerd (1989). ‘Localization of Sound in Rooms IV: The Franssen effect’.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 86: 1366–1373.
Litovsky, R. Y., H. S. Colburn, W. A. Yost, and S. J. Guzman (1999). ‘The Precedence Effect’.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 106: 1633–1654.
Lucier, A. and D. Simon (1980). Chambers: Scores by Alvin Lucier. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Van Eck, C.(2017). Between Air and Electricity. New York: Bloomsbury.
26
The Overheard: An Attuning
Approach to Sound Art and Design
in Public Spaces
Marie Højlund, Jonas R. Kirkegaard,
Michael Sonne Kristensen, and Morten Riis
Introduction
Recent research in sonic interaction design and sound art has called for an ecological
and enactive methodology that entails investigations of actors and the interrelations with
their respective environments as attuning ecosystems (Franinović 2012). We take up this
challenge by proposing an attuning approach as a methodological framework capable
of accommodating both the multisensory atmosphere and the active engagement of the
enactive user through practice-based experiments. Through the project The Overheard, we
explore and develop the attuning approach in practice and present selected perspectives
unfolding strategies of ‘ecological overhearing’.
Atmospheres and attunement

There is a growing interest in atmospheres as a field of research, related to the broader field
of nonrepresentational research ranging from philosophies of atmospheres (Bollnow 1943;
Böhme 1995) over analyses of urban sensory environments (Thibaud 2011; Stenslund 2012;
Edensor 2016) to the applied orchestrations of architectonic settings (Wieczorek 2013;
Kinch 2014; Stidsen 2014). The existence of atmospheres in everyday experiences is often
taken for granted and thus remains unnoticed. Yet, in recent years scholars have argued
that atmospheres are vital to our everyday experiences of places and situations (Pink and
Sumartojo 2018). The attuning approach to sound art and design takes its starting point in
an understanding of atmospheres as affective attunements.
One of the central figures in the research area of atmospheres, the French sociologist
Jean-Paul Thibaud, suggests that we do not perceive atmospheres as such. Rather, we
experience atmospheres as ‘a sensory background that specifies the conditions under
which phenomena emerge and appear’ (Thibaud 2011: 212). In this sense, atmospheres are
comparable to the weather or light. As such, we grasp the atmosphere of a place ‘before’
or ‘beneath’ our rational understanding and intellectual assessment of a place (Pallasmaa
2012). Atmospheres constitute our immediate all-encompassing experience of ‘finding
oneself in environing worlds’ (Böhme 1989: 9), involving our entire range of senses but
often unnoticed by direct attention, although still experienced in an immediate and yet
complex manner. In other words, an atmosphere should be understood not as an abstract
concept, a metaphor, or as the property of things, but as a relational ‘thing’ or ‘quasi-thing’.
As atmospheres are mostly something one is not aware of, something affective and prior
to will and cognition, how can designers and artists work with them actively? As one cannot
simply decide to delete atmospheres, Heidegger suggests that agency towards existing
‘Stimmungen’ must be exerted tactically in a mediated fashion through ‘Gegenstimmung’
or ‘counter-attunements’ (Heidegger 2002: 136). Thus, a consideration of attunement and
counter-attunement in the listening domain is instructive for working with atmospheres
as a design and artistic practice. According to Heidegger, a counter-attunement can only
emerge if it resonates with an existing attunement. If one is to be affected by a counter-
attunement, this counter-attunement needs to connect with the existing attunement. In
this way, facilitating counter-attunements demands a disjunction between one ‘there’ (an
existing attunement) and another one ‘here’ (a counter-attunement). A counter-attunement
can thus only be achieved by creating an object or event of affective attachment in an
existing attunement that challenges it from the ‘inside’.
Literature scientist Jonathan Flatley suggests how such objects of affective attachment
can be brought into being by drawing on Daniel Stern’s identification of affective
attunement between parent and infant (Flatley 2008: 504). In the interplay between parent
and infant, mirror expressions are essential building blocks in the infant’s experience of
intersubjective relatedness and communion with the world and other humans (Stern
1998: 138). Characteristic of affective attunement is that this mirroring cannot be based
on identical mimicking, but it must give the impression of imitation, though translated
into similar gestures in other modes or senses, for example from sound to movement.
This cross-modal aspect is important because it shows the infant that the parent not
only understands what the infant does, but also how it feels, and therefore the cross-
modal attunement is focused not so much on the outside behaviour of the infant but on
the quality of the inside feelings. Due to its cross-modal character, affective attunement
happens by way of amodal equivalences such as intensity, shape, and rhythm (Flatley 2012:
516). Getting close to patterns of intensities and rhythms between the different objects and
actors in a situation sets the ground for a sense of being-together. Flatley concludes that
promoting affective attunements through sensible exposures and rhythms can therefore
facilitate counter-attunements.
However, following Heidegger, counter-attunements would require a disjunction in
the existing attunement. Thus, we argue that Flatley’s suggestion that affective attunement
The Overheard 425
can set the ground for counter-attunements needs to be revisited. For that purpose, we
propose to turn our attention to Stern and his second category of attunements termed
‘purposeful misattunement’. When a parent engages in purposeful misattunement, the
aim is to be with the child through affective attunements, but then to change the level
of activity or affect through intentionally over- or under-matching the intensities and
timings of the infant. Such attunement demands that the parent ‘slips inside’ the infant’s
state of feeling ‘far enough to capture it’, and then misexpress it enough to alter the infant’s
behaviour, ‘but not enough to break the sense of an attunement in process’ (Stern 1998:
148–149). This two-way process corresponds to Heidegger’s claim that in order to set the
ground for counter-attunements we first need to capture the existing attunement. Second,
Heidegger’s idea of disjunction by offering a new object or event of affective attachment in
the existing attunement corresponds to Stern’s concept of purposeful misattunement as a
way to intentionally change the existing attunement by slightly over- or undermatching the
amodal equivalences.
Later in this chapter we will present examples of how this is employed in practice. Before
doing so, we unfold how to stage counter-attunements in the listening domain through the
concept of ‘ecological overhearing’.
Ecological overhearing
‘Ecological overhearing’ has its basis in perceptual theory and the notion of peripheral
attention. Distracted listening based on peripheral attention1 has the potential to integrate
someone in space and the events taking place in that space. This is also described in Gernot
Böhme’s (2000) article ‘Acoustic Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Study of Ecological
Aesthetics’, which suggests a peripheral mode of listening characterized by a feeling of
‘Ausser-sich-sein’ (being outside yourself).
Artist, writer, and theorist Brandon LaBelle highlights the sonic background as
participating in overlaying ambiguity on built space, acknowledging how the senses are
always navigating through different layers that require different types of attention, which
sometimes can be productive, while at other times not. This overlapping ambiguity is
denoted as ‘productive mishearing’ (LaBelle 2010: 180) or ‘overhearing’ (LaBelle 2015),
constituting a generative and constructive ground on which new relations and surprising
encounters can take place. Overhearing introduces a shared and messy space and adds
multiple perspectives, as there is always sound outside the frame of attentive listening.
Echoing Michel Serres’s elaborations on background noise, LaBelle argues that overhearing
forms an essential part of our experience of everyday environments. Overhearing is not
to be considered a passive hearing as opposed to an active listening to a non-conscious
background, but a necessary ground on which a signal is heard, and therefore part of the
relation and a productive component in any information transmission.
Common to Böhme’s and LaBelle’s accounts is that peripheral sonic experiences
resituate our relation to figure and ground, to foreground and background, by operating
on the peripheries of perception. This view promotes an understanding of overhearing

that is more complex than just ‘not-hearing’; it suggests an ecological understanding of
overhearing as our peripheral and attuning mode of listening through which we vaguely
sense our surroundings, thus constituting a way to feel part of those surroundings. Both
Böhme and LaBelle emphasize that we need to relearn this skill for ecological overhearing,
as most people today tend to focus on a simple signal/noise dichotomy. Thus, we propose
to facilitate such learning process by opening the affective zone in the listening domain
to counter-attunements through a two-step process. First the listener catches the existing
attunement, and then a purposeful misattunement is introduced by way of over- or
undermatching the sonic intensities in order to reconfigure the habitual background/
foreground relations through ecological overhearing.
The philosophical and conceptual framework for the attuning approach combines
theories on atmospheres, attunement, and ecological overhearing based on a relational
ontology. This integration couples the entanglements of the complex atmospheric quality
of a space with an understanding of human beings as embodied, enactive, and situated. The
human and the world are co-constituted through exploratory attunements based on prior
experiences and resulting in refined attunements such as new appraisals and habits. From
an ecological perspective, attunement becomes a key concept capable of accommodating
the combination of the enactive and the focus on atmospheres.
The Overheard
The purpose of the project The Overheard is to explore and develop the attuning approach
in practice and present selected perspectives as unfolding strategies of ecological
overhearing. Put briefly, the project comprised six publicy available, site-specific sound
installations across a central region of Denmark during Aarhus 2017 – European Capital
of Culture. The sound installations could be visited both physically on site and virtually
through a website streaming high-quality, real-time audio from the different locations.
The website allowed listeners to create their own soundscape by blending the sound
installations (Figure 26.1).
All of the sound installations were very different, as were the locations and the artists
commissioned to make them. In the following, we will describe the project’s framework,
its objective, and how the concepts of ecological overhearing and affective attunement can
be experienced in the resulting interventions and assessed as design strategies in future
projects dealing with public sound installations as a means of transforming an existing
sonic environment.
The Overheard was initiated not as a research project but as an artistic, cultural project
with a broad public impact. The involvement of Aarhus University brought the research
dimension into the project in the early stages, but the project’s identity was kept in the
artistic, experience-oriented domain. This frames an initial methodological point in
relation to balancing research and art. Many research projects that apply different sorts of
The Overheard 427
Figure 26.1 Screenshot from The Overheard website. By The Overheard.
artistic methods and interventions have a structure where the research method delimits
and dictates the design of the intervention to first and foremost fulfil the goal of data
harvesting, and only secondly to solve the problem that is actually being investigated.
Starting the other way around – trying to ‘solve the problem’ instead of trying to do
research – has been an important driving force in this project and may actually have
pushed the research outcomes closer to applicable results than a traditionally controlled
experiment would have done. Therefore, collecting massive amounts of empirical data
was not the key focus of the project. Rather, we wanted to investigate whether combining
artistic and design-research in a process called curation would at all yield solutions that
evoke attunement and ecological overhearing, and if so, how these attuning mechanisms
were revealed.
The first part of the curation process was a dialogue with the involved municipalities
where they suggested possible locations for the interventions. The main criteria was that
each environment should include complex sonic qualities, with traces of both technology/
civilization and nature. The curation was carried out through a selection process in which
the works of sound artists were critically assessed against the qualities of each of the chosen
places. The process was a reversal in comparison to curation in the traditional sense, as
the purpose was not to display a piece of sound art in a somewhat ‘neutral’ exhibition
site, but to use sound art to create and condition an atmosphere with the potential to
establish experiences of ecological overhearing and to supply agency to engage in affective
attunement. A key element in the process was to ensure complete artistic freedom, thus
trusting the skills, experience, and intuition of the artist; if artistic processes are to be
integrated in a research project, they should not be governed by non-artistic agendas.
In the following we describe and analyse two of the installations, Forest Megaphones and
4140 Voices, in terms of ecological overhearing and affective attunement. Furthermore, we
describe the web-based audio stream, as that part of the project adds further to the staging
of the attuning mechanisms.
Forest Megaphones
Forest Megaphones, by Estonian artist Birgit Öigus, comprises three wooden megaphones,
2.5 metres tall and 3 metres long. The place chosen is a glade on a small island, 80 metres
across, in a beautiful forest area with lakes and streams. The place is flanked by a relatively
busy road, adding a sonic component of tyre and engine noise to the sonic environment
of birds, wind, water, boats, and people (Figure 26.2). What separates the megaphones
from most other sound art is that they don’t produce any acoustic signal themselves but
nevertheless transform the sound of the place.
While it is not discussed in detail as to how the skill of overhearing is to be acquired anew,
Forest Megaphones proposes a way of enacting this type of overhearing by design. The symbolic
shape of the cone signifies sonic amplification, that is, the iconic old hearing aids, gramophone
funnels, volume control icons, etc., hinting for people to listen to the environment. The
busy road is visually hidden behind trees and thus would typically fall into the category of
overheard sounds that do not so much bring to mind their representational value but appear
more like noise. As the megaphones invite listening more carefully and directing the attention
to all sounds, both the ones within and the ones outside normal attentional focus, the reduced
signal/noise dichotomy is revealed and questioned, and the noise from the cars is equalized
with the birds and water sounds. Hence the installation challenges what is often termed the
bifurcation of nature (Whitehead 1920: 20) and offers the listener an affective potential to
engage in the perceptual (re-)acquisition of a relational appreciation of the atmosphere.
Forest Megaphones invites the listener to engage in a process of counter-attunement,
and the first step of catching the existing tuning happens through ecological overhearing.
Through an elevated attention to the atmosphere – by means of acoustic amplification
and physical, tactile, and visual engagement – the foreground/background relation is
shifted. The next step of counter-attunement is created by the possibility to invert the
engagement and use of the megaphones for amplifying one’s own sound and echoing
them back into the existing soundscape as over- or undermatched responses that shape
the soundscape anew. This process may reveal the atmosphere as a dynamic and ever-
changing assemblage of sounds in which the listener does not only listen, but also has
agency to contribute to and transform the sonic ecology. The process of attunement
and counter-attunement facilitates new actions and behaviours and the possibility to
relearn a refined attunement and experience the different layers of listening through an
The Overheard 429
Figure 26.2 Forest Megaphones by Birgit Öigus. Large wooden megaphones placed in
the city of Silkeborg, Denmark. Photograph by Malte Riis.
engagement with the megaphones. This can happen in many ways, and from watching
people interacting with the megaphones it became clear that the approaches were as
diverse as the number of participating visitors. Individuals engaged differently than
groups, kids engaged differently than adults, and first-time visitors engaged differently
than returning visitors. The refined attunements also revealed themselves in different
forms, either through articulated dialogues and discussions, tacit knowledge, positive
memories, confusion, or bodily experience.
4140 Voices
The sound piece 4140 Voices by Marie Højlund and Morten Riis is a composition written
especially for a memorial monument at Mindeparken, Aarhus. The material is based
on the recordings of citizens of Aarhus reciting the names of the 4,140 Danish soldiers
who fell during the First World War. These names are engraved in the stone walls of the
memorial monument. Through the composition of voices, a new sensory connection is
created between the present-day inhabitants of Aarhus and their history. Reciting creates
a vibratory sensibility that enables the audience to relate in a sensorial manner to the
names engraved in the limestone. The names become more than mere letters when they
are activated through sound (Figure 26.3).
Merely from looking at the picture of the monument, one can imagine a rather strange
acoustic phenomena arising from the echoes and reverberations occurring between the
circular stone walls in the monument. Twenty-four equally spaced speakers – mounted
on the top rim of the monument – pour the sound of the endlessly reciting voices into the
acoustic space. As one enters into this massive, translucent sonic ambience, it is impossible
to separate out singular voice components. It is only possible to identify vague contours
of names or syllables, with the individual, recited names concealed and withdrawn. Since
Figure 26.3 The memorial monument at Mindeparken, Aarhus. Photograph by Malte Riis.
The Overheard 431
it is impossible to register the actual meaning of the words, the sonic impression must be
sensed by means of an overhearing strategy. The exact names flee the centre of attention
and thus become part of the present atmosphere, just like traffic noise in the street or a
humming radio next door. The sound is present, perceived, and registered as a part of an
ecological sonic reality, peripherally overheard and yet constituent of our sense of being
here now. The lack of direction or centre leaves one without an obvious focus of attention
and brings about a mode of overhearing in which one is ‘forced’ to give in to not-hearing
the sonic present.
When entering the monument, the promoted mode of listening, the overhearing, is also
a state in which one attunes to the place. The sonic atmosphere is vibrant, shimmering, and
omnipresent, and has an out-of-this-world feeling due to the unusual acoustics. But what
does it add to the monument? How is it transformed?
The monument itself (without the sound of the voices) has been there for more than
eighty years. It has a devout character as it stands in silence through time carrying the
names of the fallen soldiers. It is a very well-designed monument for contemplation and
reflection, but as generations grow up in peacetime without any first-hand experience
of war, the monument also fades away as something historical, pointing back in time at
how things were. In that light, the addition of 4140 Voices challenges the historicity of the
atmospheric mode of the monument by translating the names carved in stone to words
spoken by people living from one modality to another.
This process can be understood as a counter-attunement that takes place between
the monument and the voices, and that is what visitors can tap into when entering. The
sound of the voices has something to tell the audience. There is a message or an urgency,
something that may be experienced as an intentionality from the monument directed
towards the listener. Now the names are not just to be read from the walls at will, but they
call out and bring about a relational potential that visitors can act upon. This is where the
affective attunement comes into play. The visitors’ agency is locked to their bodies and
their ability to move around, as they realize that the sonic texture of the voices changes
with every slight movement. The sonic phenomena invites visitors to move around
along the walls of the monument where the names of the soldiers can be read. Getting
closer to the walls also means getting closer to individual speakers, and suddenly the
full pronunciation of names can be traced in the stream of voices. By changing physical
position, one can shift to the foreground what was initially ascribed to the overhead
background. This effect, that a sound source stands out when it is approached, is obvious,
but it is a clear example of the aforementioned effect where sensory stimuli promote
bodily movement in a process of affective attuning. The overhearing mode of listening
thus initiates a cycle: one catches the tuning of the atmosphere and moves towards the
sound; the movement changes the sonic experience and creates a reconfigured point
of overhearing. The implementation of the voices seems to have made visitors more
prone to touching the engraved names and sometimes even, when sinking into their own
thoughts, moving their lips and whispering the names of the fallen, as a way of joining
the choir of the atmospheric voices.
Reflections on the paths ahead

The attuning approach seeks to facilitate an ecological overhearing that increases
possibilities for engaging in place making by affecting the collected sensory stimuli that
define a certain place. It thereby provides a powerful framework that does not build on
a polarity between the environment and the human perspective. The attuning approach
offers an expanded capacity for coexistence through ecological overhearing as a way to
support potential solutions to a variety of problems relating to well-being and health. One
example of a pertinent problem, to which we address our attention in a final note, is sound
control from a quality of life perspective.
Over the last century, most research on noise in public and shared spaces has focused
on explaining how people become stressed and fall ill owing to noise pollution. The most
common strategies focus on noise abatement through regulations based on quantitative
assessment. However, in recent years the growing field of sound studies and the soundscape
approach have prompted a shift in terminology from noise to sound related annoyance,
and from noise reduction to a quality of life perspective. This shift should be seen as a
response to the limitations of earlier regulative approaches, for example corresponding to
the noise reduction approach in hospitals that has not been successful in solving general
noise problems (Andringa et al. 2013). A significant example of this shift towards a quality
of life perspective is the EU COST project ‘TD0804 Soundscape of European Cities and
Landscapes’, which introduces a soundscape approach as a new paradigm (see Fiebig and
Schulte-Fortkamp, in this volume). This change in focus connects to the growing interest
in the broader field of sound studies, where sound design is not only considered to be a
technical sound-internal skill but also must be thought of in its broader entanglements
with cultural, historical, philosophical, and technological contexts.
The growing focus on sound environments in research seeks to account for the
increasing sound-producing artefacts in everyday life, and a lack of education and
knowledge on how sound plays a significant role in the constitution of our current state of
mind, and not only as externally existing stimuli supplying more or less useful or enjoyable
content. The quality of life perspective emphasizes the crucial roles that empowerment
versus confinement plays in forming our overall appraisal of sound environments by either
enhancing or preventing us from acting upon intrusive sounds. In this way, the emerging
soundscape approach seeks to account for a substantial part of noise annoyance explained
by so-called non-acoustic factors or higher-level cognitive factors (Davies et al. 2012: 15).
Studies have shown that an important non-acoustic factor is the feeling of being in control
of – or being exposed to – noise as an explanatory factor in people’s coping mechanisms
(Bijsterveld 2008: 254; Andringa et al. 2013). The paramount concern has thus moved
from noise reduction to providing a wide diversity of acoustic opportunities, for example
sound art installations in public spaces, focusing on design parameters such as control,
motivation, and empowerment (Andringa et al. 2013: 17).
Many recent and ongoing research projects seek to develop ways of realizing these effects
in practice. However, although the theoretical perspectives are shifting and developing
The Overheard 433
rapidly under vivid debates, there is still a massive lack of concrete operationalization
and evaluation of real-life experiments (Kang et al. 2013: 9). While our demonstration
of the attunement approach has been unfolded in an aesthetic context, the fundamental
principles and arguments apply readily to health-related topics. For instance, sound-related
annoyance in hospitals is deeply intertwined with a negative affective attunement and a
lack of ecological overhearing possibilities. Counteracting the experience of noise should
therefore also take a starting point in counteracting the negative affective attunements
by facilitating counter-attunements and providing possibilities of ecological overhearing.
The attuning approach also points to the potentials of enactive technology, art, and
design as tools for accommodating zones of overhearing by creating direct encounters with
existing atmospheres in which our engagement with them can set the ground for affective
attunement. Technology should therefore not be hidden or considered neutral as it offers
a direct way to make the environment responding and malleable to our dwelling practice.
Art and design can work together with technology, not as decoration but as tangible places
for such encounters to unfold. In this way, the division between technology as a supposedly
neutral and transparent tool and art as providing space for reflection in the imagination
disengaged from the current lived experience becomes brittle.
When art, technology, and design become places for encounters and not only act as
representations or media for some other use, they can operate as ruptures in our habitual
modes of being and in our habitual subjectivities. The rupturing encounter contains
a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, which leads to new ways of
experiencing this world (O’Sullivan 2006). The zones of overhearing present places for
such ruptures to occur, as tangible and malleable interfaces that operationalize the co-
creations of atmospheres for those involved. In this regard it is important to notice that
the rupture is not experienced as violent or transgressive, as the term might imply. On the
contrary, the transformation that it introduces might not even be noticed as it operates on
the affectual level as something intuitive and poetic (Lacey 2016: 16). Take as an example
the aforementioned Forest Megaphones. Engaging in the attuning/counter-attuning process
is the rupture that the megaphone offers, and the transformation that it leads to embeds
itself in new habitual ways of being.
The attuning approach can thus be employed as a methodology to demonstrate how
the creation of counter-attunements involves breaking down habitual experiences through
affective attunements in order to help people reconfigure auditory background and
foreground relations. Exposing people’s own agency to shift perceptual perspectives, to
discover the peripheral mode of attention, to attune to an existing atmosphere, and to even
activate counter-attunements as a way of transforming and interacting, supplies a level of
control and acts as a strategy for coping with the atmospheres of everyday life.
Note
1. We refer here to the Finish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s idea of peripheral vision.
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436
27
Sound on Sound: Considerations
for the Use of Sonic Methods in
Ethnographic Fieldwork inside the
Recording Studio
Paul Thompson
Introduction
The recording studio has been overlooked as a potential site of study within the field of
sound studies and across other academic disciplines too. Consequently, there is a limited
amount of published research involving ethnographic fieldwork inside the studio (some
notable exceptions include Hennion 1990; Fitzgerald 1996; Meintjes 2003, 2004; Porcello
2004; Gibson 2005; Williams 2007, 2009; Bates 2008; Thompson 2016, 2019). A critical
reason for this dearth of study inside recording facilities is because the recording studio
is designed to be isolated both acoustically and socially (Thompson and Lashua 2014). In
her rich ethnographic study of Downtown Studios in Johannesburg, South Africa, Louise
Meintjes noted that: ‘the studio is remote and exclusive. It is closed to outsiders except for
haphazard, enticing ingressions like mine and those of friends of the music-makers who
might drop in for a session or a moment’ (2012: 270) and so researchers’ first challenge is
in gaining access to a recording studio session.
Once inside, researchers are challenged to consider how the medium of sound can be
used to represent the multimodality of recording studio fieldwork. In so doing, researchers
need to ‘rethink the ocularcentrism through which anthropology has generally constructed
knowledge about culture’ (Kheshti 2009: 15) and find new ways to explore the cultural field
of the recording studio through sound. The following chapter draws upon the author’s
experiences of conducting ethnographic fieldwork in recording studios in the UK, Canada,
and the USA and offers some useful insights into the recording studio as a space for sound
studies and suggests a number of pragmatic approaches in capturing the aural ecology of
the recording studio.
Sound and the studio architecture

The majority of recording studios have two principal areas of operation: the control room
and the live room. The control room typically houses the vast array of recording equipment
needed to capture the performances of the musicians, which includes the mixing console,
speakers (referred to as monitors), computers, tape machines, and sound processing
equipment that the engineer can access during a recording session. The live room is often
larger as it has to accommodate performing musicians (which in some cases may be an
entire orchestra). The two rooms are acoustically separated from each other to avoid sound
transference between them. Communication between the rooms is achieved visually, often
through a large acoustically sealed window, and sonically through a talk-back microphone
on the mixing console and the headphones of the musicians.
From an acoustic perspective, the control room and live room are normally designed
differently reflecting their specific purpose. The control room is often significantly less
reverberant than the live room as engineers and producers require a space that reduces the
amount of sound reflections from the surfaces of the room to prioritize the direct sound from
the studio monitors. In this way, engineers and producers can make critical judgements on
microphone quality, microphone positioning, the sonic qualities of a musician’s instrument or
the accuracy of a musician’s performance. The live room is typically more reverberant, often
designed with more reflective materials such as wood, in order to help musicians deliver their
performance, as acoustically dead environments can be very uncomfortable to perform in.
Live rooms sometimes have moveable design features to alter the acoustics of the space with
reversible or movable acoustic panels, carpets, or curtains to ‘liven’ or ‘deaden’ the acoustic
depending upon the requirements of the recording session. It is through its characteristic
architecture that the recording studio places an overtly sharp focus on the quality of sound:
The acoustics mark the studio as a space out of the ordinary. But its distinction is not
only derived from its focus around a sense other than the eye […]. The studio also draws
enchantment from the very quality of the sense it privileges.
(Meintjes 2012: 272)
This privileged medium operates within three distinct and interrelated sound worlds: (1)
the control room, (2) the live room, and (3) headphones. For researchers interested in the
aural ecology beyond these main sound worlds there are also often a series of ‘backstage’
areas such as the lounge, the kitchen, the hallway, the parking lot – these are the areas
that don’t appear to be directly related to studio work but where interpersonal dynamic
interchanges occur and where a lot of rich sound material can come from.
Accessing the sounds of the studio

Although highlighted as one of the central issues within empirical research (Hammersley
and Atkinson 1997), it is startling that the issue of accessibility isn’t foregrounded in
previous studies of the recording studio (with the exceptions of Meintjes 2003, 2012; and
Sound on Sound 439
Bates 2008), particularly as the issue of accessibility is ongoing throughout the entire
process but is ‘often at its most acute in initial negotiations to enter a setting during
the “first days in the field”’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1997: 54). Issues of accessibility
within my first recording studio study were evident from some of the initial exchanges
of contact between the intended participants and myself. The social world of recording
studios, and consequently their sound worlds, can be largely inaccessible for even
the musicians who wish to record in them (both financially and socially), so gaining
access to a recording studio both socially and physically can be a challenging task for
an ethnographer. A fundamental reason for this is that recording studios are ‘sealed’
facilities in several ways: firstly, they are often constructed to be separated acoustically
from their local environment so that sound doesn’t disturb nearby buildings or residences
and, most importantly, so that sound does not enter the recording studio and hinder the
recording process. Secondly, recording studios are not public spaces (like a city square
or a town library) and so physical access to them is limited and gained only by invitation
from the engineer, producer, or from the studio manager or studio owner. Thirdly and
fundamentally, the recording studio during a recording session is a place of work in
which studio personnel and musicians require an environment that is private and free
from distraction, which allows them to create an intimate setting and thereby maximize
effective collaboration and communication.
Gaining access to a recording session can be the most challenging obstacle of all,
particularly because a recording session is often limited to only those involved in the
recording process. Any additional individuals in the recording studio may become a
distraction, affect the flow of the session, or disrupt communication between the studio
personnel. In her ethnographic study of female popular musicians Mavis Bayton (1990)
identified the importance of privacy in the practice room in order to enable effective
collaboration and to resolve any issues. In a similar way, recording studios are intentionally
secluded with access limited to only those involved in the recording process. For an
ethnographer who is not directly involved in the recording process there is little opportunity
to gain access to the sounds of the recording session.
My own initial attempts to gain access to a recording studio session began with an
exploration of my personal network of recording engineers and record producers who were
either previous colleagues of mine or friends of these colleagues. I assumed that having a
background as a practitioner would prove to be useful when seeking permission to conduct
ethnography in the recording studio and my first contact was a commercially successful
record producer working at a recording studio in Liverpool. He showed some interest
when discussing the intended research, however, when I asked him if he would mind me
observing an upcoming recording session the response was tentative and he expressed a
preference for me to only observe bands that were not signed to a record label. He was
concerned that if signed bands were involved there might not only be an infringement
of copyright but additional people from the recording studio might need clearance from
the record label or management company concerned. In response I suggested that I could
perform menial tasks in the studio, such as setting up microphones or coiling cables, which
might help to remove the explicit role of the ‘observer’ or ‘listener’ in the room. He was
adamant that he would already have enough personnel for the session but agreed to a
follow-up phone call to arrange a meeting and discuss the project further. However, after
numerous failed attempts to get in touch, I decided to explore other possible contacts.
In an attempt to learn from my initial attempt to gain access to a studio session, I
emphasized to other potential record producers that observation wouldn’t get in the
way of the record-making process. These responses were also justifiably hesitant because
‘unfortunately, my studio is too small to have an extra person’ and ‘the bands I work with
are signed so the label won’t want anyone else involved’ (personal communication, 2011).
It was evident through my efforts to gain access to a recording studio session through my
network of engineers and record producers, that as the ethnographer I had been positioned
as an outsider. The role of outsider in the recording studio has an identifiable tradition in
popular music where at best you are surplus to requirements and at worst you are considered
to be negatively impacting the flow of a session. Engineer Dan Turner explains that:
The studio is often such a private, intimate place that any outsider inevitably changes the
way you operate, often directly influenced by the circumstances of the session […] it can
completely ruin your day […] any outsider can change the whole atmosphere and often get
in the way.
(personal interview, 2012)
Record producer Phil Harding adds that:

Having an outsider in the room when I’m working with an artist in the studio would be
too compromising. You want to give your client and your artist the best performance from
your side and you’re going to feel compromised if there’s an outsider in the room. I have had
situations where I’ve had to ask the artist to either get their friends to leave or not come in
next time. On the other hand, I can certainly remember for instance Toyah Wilcox, when I
was engineering with a producer and a group of her session musicians, her boyfriend would
often come in and constantly make comments […] that’s so difficult, who’s going to say to
Toyah ‘don’t bring your boyfriend?’
(personal interview, 2012)
Both the responses from engineers and producers, and the initial failure to gain access
to a recording studio session, highlighted that although engineers and record producers
facilitate the needs of the musician and act as intermediaries between the artist and the
industry, they are not the gatekeepers to a recording session. As identified by both Dan
Turner and Phil Harding, the gatekeepers to a recording studio session are the musicians
who are recording in the studio. Sonic ethnographers should therefore begin their search
for a recording studio by approaching the musicians on the session first as this will ease
negotiations with engineers or record producers at a later date. If the musicians are the
main client and are paying for the studio time then it’s even more likely that access will
be granted once you’ve gained permission from the recording musicians. Creating a
rapport with musicians before the studio session may also help in creating a more cohesive
atmosphere in which the researcher isn’t adversely affecting the flow of the session. The
challenges of gaining access to a recording studio session described above not only show
some of the mechanisms of recording studio practice but also highlight some of the power
relations and social hierarchies that can operate covertly within a recording studio context.
Sound on Sound 441
Sound and social relations

The social and physical issues that surround gaining access to a recording studio session serve
to illustrate the unique social imperatives that govern recording studio practice. Because
ethnography demands immersion into the social context of interest, the ethnographer’s
position within the recording studio session, both physically and socially, in other words
‘the ethnographic self ’ (Coffey 1999), must also be addressed. The primary intention of
any research is often to avoid influencing the natural processes that occur in the setting,
which in the instance of sonic ethnography, means attempting to maintain a primarily
‘listener’ position. This however can prove difficult as it isn’t always possible (or desirable)
to be a continual ‘fly-on-the-wall’. The close proximity of the studio participants means
that avoiding conversation or social interaction could adversely affect the atmosphere
and the natural social exchanges that occur during a studio session. This is no more acute
than when the researcher may be asked, ‘What do you think?’ after a particular take of a
performance. For this reason, discussing the expectations of the research and explaining
the researcher’s position to the participants is necessary before the fieldwork begins.
In my own research (Thompson 2016), I was able to explain my researcher position
during a pre-production meeting between the band and the record producer. Pre-
production is typically the stage before the musicians enter the studio and allows the band
and record producer to sketch out what they plan to do over the course of making the
record. Pre-production ‘serves as a vital preparatory stage during which an image of the
record’s shape and tone is developed, even if only in a rough form’ (Zak 2001: 137). During
the pre-production meeting, I invited the band to ask questions about the research, which
allowed their role and the researcher’s role to become less ambiguous and dispelled the
band’s initial assumption that they would have to behave or perform in a particular way
to avoid any contact with me or my sound recording equipment. Without discussing this
during pre-production, the participants may have found the presence of a researcher in the
recording studio unsettling, which in turn could have undesirably altered the flow of the
recording session. This is commonly referred to as ‘observer effects’ and these interactions
with the field and its participants have historically been viewed as a negative attribute of
ethnographic research because:
They indicate a ‘contamination’ of the supposedly pure social environment being studied
(Hunt 1985). Some methodologists advise qualitative researchers to hone an awareness of
possible observer effects, document them, and incorporate them as caveats into reports on
fieldwork (Patton 2002). Others encourage ethnographers to seek out explicitly evidence of
observer effects to better understand – and then mitigate – ‘researcher-induced distortions’
(e.g., LeCompte and Goetz 1982; Spano 2006) […]. The possibility that the ethnographer can
both have an effect and by doing so tap into valuable and accurate data is seldom explored in
contemporary literature on methods.
(Monahan and Fisher 2010: 358)
Building relationships through social interaction during a recording session has proved to
be an important aspect of my research in the recording studio. Rather than ignoring the
participants and minimizing observer or ‘listener’ effects, developing a rapport with those
involved can allow greater access to their thoughts and ideas that would not be possible
through listening to a sound recording alone. In addition, discussing other artists’ work,
technologies, and practices, can also help to frame the participants’ musical references, musical
influences and importantly their musical performances. A non-participatory perspective on
field relations may restrict access to ‘rich data in the field’ (Monahan and Fisher 2010: 370),
may lead to ‘failing to understand the orientations of the participants’ (Hammersley and
Atkinson 2007: 87). The underlying role of the researcher is therefore ‘not to determine “the
truth” but to reveal the multiple truths apparent in others’ lives’ (Emerson et al. 1995: 3–4).
Whilst participation and interaction can prove fruitful in gaining greater insight into
the sound world of the recording studio it should also be considerate to the social situation
and the established conduct of the recording studio. This is commonly referred to as ‘studio
etiquette’. Etiquette is described as a ‘collective social knowledge – “no one taught us these
rules” – the rules are learned through long years of socialization’ (Sawyer 2000: 18) and
studio etiquette is a general expectation of all recording studio personnel who support the
recording process. Signature Sound Studios offers the following on studio etiquette:
Knowing when it is appropriate to communicate in the studio is perhaps one of the most
important concepts to grasp […]. On the other hand, knowing when to be silent is also
very important. For example, when an engineer is in the middle of a recording or mixing
session – even if he or she is just listening back and not hands-on doing something – do not
interrupt by asking questions, making comments, or any other unnecessary noise. Any of
these actions might break the engineer’s concentration and he or she will probably not be
very pleased with you. Your best bet when you find yourself in a recording session is to be
silent, observant, and readily available if your help is needed.
(Signature Sound 2011)
The expectations and recommendations described above are not only relevant to studio
apprentices; they are suitably applicable for listeners conducting sound research in the
recording studio. Observing studio etiquette is necessary to allow all the participants to
communicate effectively between each other, for the engineer and record producer to
make critical judgements on the musicians’ performances and to maintain a degree of
naturalness in the field setting. Observing studio etiquette is not only an essential part
of effective social integration during a recording session, it also governs the timing and
opportunity for informal interviews and exploratory conversations. Knowing when to ask
a question becomes a useful skill that develops as the researcher becomes more familiar
with the working practices of the participants throughout the process.
Capturing the sound of the studio

Conducting sonic research in the recording studio presents some unique social and
logistical challenges that are fundamentally related to the distinct architecture of the
recording studio and the social setting of a recording session. The construction of a typical
Sound on Sound 443
recording studio creates a division between the control room and the performance space
‘with a glass window that isolates the sound of one world from the other’ (Williams 2011).
This presents a challenge to the researcher who is only using one microphone to record
the sound of the recording studio. If listening is taking place in the control room as the
musicians are recording then it is only the sound of the control room that is captured and
not the actions and interactions in the live room. Therefore to fully appreciate the sound
worlds of the recording studio capturing the sound of both the control room and the live
room can help to gain a perspective on what the performing musicians experience, and
similarly in the control room in order to record the sonic experiences of the engineer
and the producer.
In visual anthropology, the point of view offered by a single camera invites questions
of ‘where shots are to be taken, whether the camera should be fixed or mobile, whether a
single focus is to be adopted or whether the focus should vary; and if so when and how’
(Hammersley and Atkinson 2007: 148). It also questions the representation of a single view
based on the researcher’s relationship to the field and their fieldwork: ‘the ethnographic
self ’ (Coffey 1999). Capturing the sonic ecology of the recording studio too presents the
same logistic as well as political and social aspects of representation, which Roshanak
Kheshti labels ‘aural positionality’ and ‘although sonic representation could be said to be
less reductive and more ambiguous than visual representation, sonic representations of
culture nonetheless include an imposed layer of meaning mediated by the body and ears
of the ethnographer, recordist, editor and producer’ (Kheshti 2009: 15). In choosing what
to focus a microphone on, researchers knowingly or otherwise are therefore engaged in
aural positionality, which can often be influenced by the type of microphone or recording
techniques used.
Binaural recording is a method that uses two microphones arranged to capture sound
in a similar fashion to the human ear. There are expensive and inexpensive versions
of binaural recording, from using a dummy head with two, omnidirectional precision
microphones placed inside a moulded set of pinna that models a human head, or using
a stereo pair of microphones that can be positioned either side of the researcher’s head.
In Kheshti’s case, using a microphone attached to the researcher situates her own aural
positionality as ‘the vantage point from which my body and the attached microphone
hear the sounds that are recorded and re-presented in the context of my ethnography
impacts what listeners hear when they listen’ (Kheshti 2009: 15). In a recording studio
situation binaural microphones placed near to the researcher’s ears may provide a lifelike
representation of the acoustic space of the studio but may limit where the researcher
can capture sound based on the size of the studio or the particular situation during the
studio session.
Using a single microphone that can be extended away from a recorder may offer
more flexibility to the researcher to capture parts of the studio’s acoustic ecology beyond
where the researcher can reach. Although limited in its single perspective, it allows a
greater exploration of sound in the studio space and, in addressing aural positionality,
the position of the researcher’s microphone may be determined in consultation with the
engineer, producer, or musicians. This may help to both remove some of the researcher’s
representational-bias and directly involve those whose sonic world you are attempting to
capture. Consulting the engineer may also help the researcher gain some insight into their
particular process for positioning microphones during a session and some of the things
they consider when doing so.
Finally, although it may present a technical challenge to the researcher, another useful
way of addressing aural positionality is through the use of multiple microphones at
the same time. Using a computer, audio software, a series of microphones positioned
around the studio space, and an audio interface (that converts microphone signals
into digital signals), the researcher can effectively capture different perspectives of the
acoustic environment in a single recording session without the need for the researcher
to move between the studio’s multiple spaces. One distinct advantage of using multiple
microphones to capture the acoustic ecology of the recording studio is that they are
naturalized within the space; that is, studio participants expect to see microphones
throughout the space and therefore a researcher’s microphone wouldn’t be considered
out-of-place or particularly conspicuous.
Sound on sound in the studio

The permanence of recorded sound is a distinct affordance as the entirety of each recording
session can be repeatedly played and replayed, allowing our focus or attention to be changed
each time the audio is played. This can also serve to identify sonic events that may not have
been evident in situ. Multi-perspective microphones provide an opportunity to capture
different aspects of the acoustic ecology of the recording studio and, once reassembled
for listening, may offer the researcher an alternative to solely writing about the culture
of studio recording. Kheshti labels the practice of focusing on cultural acoustics ‘acoustic
ethnography’ or ‘acoustigraphy’, which ‘like ethnography, is a form of writing culture, with
an emphasis on sound over other media, or sound alongside other media with a particular
sensitivity to sonic culture’ (Kheshti 2009: 15).
Using the medium of sound to capture the sonic interactions of a space that
privileges sound over any other sense has some distinct advantages, not least that it
is a space designed for recording, controlling, and processing sound and therefore
allows the researcher to capture high-resolution sound recordings with reduced
extraneous noise or sound reflections that can mask speech intelligibility. Rick Altman
reminds us though that ‘according to the choice of recording location, microphone
type, recording system, postproduction manipulation, storage medium, playback
arrangement, and playback locations, each recording proposes an interpretation of
the original sound’ (Altman 2012: 229). Analysing the recorded sound of the studio
therefore requires consideration for the context, the situation, the positionality of the
microphone and the researcher and the ethical implications of recording audio in the
studio. Firstly, contextualization of the recordings is needed to highlight particular
details because:
Sound on Sound 445
With a camera it is possible to catch the salient features of a visual panorama to create
an impression that is immediately evident. The microphone does not operate this way. It
samples details. It gives the close-up but nothing corresponding to aerial photography.
(Schafer 2012: 99)
Because of the lack of visual information from a sound recording it may not be possible
to know who is present during the recording and including a map of the studio space, the
location of the microphone (or microphones) and a general layout of where participants
were can help to provide important contextual information for both the researcher and
the listener. The position of studio participants can change over the course of a recording
session, which can then in turn alter what is captured, and so updating maps and diagrams
as a recording session progresses can help to provide both a visual record and some useful
context to the sound recordings.
Analysis of the situation is also key to contextualizing the recorded sound captured in
the studio. Sound can tell us a lot about a recording studio situation; there may be times
of intense sonic activity or periods of almost total silence and this can be dependent upon
the time of day, the purpose or type of recording session, and whether or not the audio was
captured towards the beginning of a session or towards the end. Long periods of silence,
for example, where no one is listening to playback, discussing another take, or generally
interacting may underline a particularly tense atmosphere. Laughing and general joviality
may indicate that things are going well – having an understanding of the studio participants
and their personalities can help significantly in these assessments and developing a social
rapport will go some way to help these analyses.
The type of sonic interactions can also tell us a lot about the positionality of the
researcher or the recording device. For example, collecting sound in the control room is
likely to relate to sound engineers and record producers; musicians do enter the control
room throughout a studio session but a lot of the time the control room is the domain of the
sound engineer, the record producer and associates of the process such as record company
representatives, band management, partners of the band. Conversely, whilst engineers and
producers enter the live room to adjust microphone positions or discuss alterations to
performances, arrangements, or lyrics, etc. with performing musicians, sound in the live
room will typically relate to musicians and their sonic experiences of the recording process.
Importantly, there are ethical implications for capturing the entirety of a recording
session both prior to gaining ethical approval form participants and after the data has been
gathered. Audio recordings capture conversations and the overall sonic environment of
the recording studio but, because of the naturalization of the microphone in the studio,
participants often forget that recording is taking place and can sometimes reveal intimate
details, offer private information, or make remarks about other participants that aren’t
intended to be heard. It is therefore imperative that any of the recorded audio is scrutinized
before it is replayed to any of the other participants to avoid any unnecessary harm or
distress. This is most important where instrumental or vocal performances are being
discussed and care must be taken to introduce the background of the discussion in order
to contextualize the comments of the participants.
Conclusion
The recording studio is an exciting and varied acoustic space in which to conduct sonic
ethnography and capture the sound of the rooms, the equipment, and the interactions of
its inhabitants. There are three main sound worlds in the recording studio as well as a series
of ‘backstage’ areas where a lot of rich sound material can come from. The recording studio
however is fortress-like both acoustically and socially and therefore gaining access to a
recording session is a challenge for researchers. Although engineers and record producers
facilitate the needs of the musician and act as intermediaries between the artist and the
industry, it is musicians that are the gatekeepers to a recording session and permission
should be sought from them first. If the recording musicians are paying for the studio
time then it is even more likely that access will be granted from other participants, such as
engineers or producers, once permission has been granted from the recording musicians.
Once inside the recording studio, conducting sonic research presents some unique social
and logistical challenges because of the recording studio’s architecture and the social setting
of a recording session. A single audio recorder, a single microphone, or a binaural recorder
attached to the researcher can adequately capture the sound of a single sound world of
the studio but using multiple microphones allows the researcher to capture the acoustic
ecology of the recording studio from various perspectives and, because microphones are
naturalized within the studio space, researcher’s microphones wouldn’t be considered
particularly conspicuous.
Finally, analysing the recorded sound of the studio requires consideration for the context,
the situation, the positionality of the microphone/researcher, and the ethical implications
of recording audio in the studio. In reassembling the captured sounds for playback, sound
ethnographers should consider each of these aspects in turn to creatively and responsibly
present the ‘acoustigraphy’ of a recording studio session.
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28
Ecological Sound Art
Jonathan Gilmurray
Throughout the course of human history, the arts have always reflected the prevailing
concerns of their time; and in the twenty-first century, humanity’s growing awareness of
ecological issues such as biodiversity loss, pollution, environmental justice, and climate
change has been expressed in an explosion of ecologically concerned works across every
area of arts and culture. In literature and the visual arts, this trend has been recognized
in the establishment of new fields of practice, such as eco-art (Weintraub 2012; Brown
2014; Cheetham 2018), ecofiction (Dwyer 2010; Levin 2011; Raglon 2012), and ecocinema
(Gustafsson and Kääpä 2013; Rust, Monani, and Cubitt 2013; Murray and Heumann
2017). As in other art forms, sound artists have also been creating works that address
contemporary ecological issues; however, an equivalent ecological movement has yet to be
recognized in sound art, resulting in its exclusion from the wider discourse surrounding
the cultural response to ecological issues. The current chapter sets out to address this issue
with an examination of this growing contemporary movement, which it will term ecological
sound art.
In other areas of the arts, the defining characteristic of ‘ecological’ or ‘eco-’ works is their
central focus upon ecological concerns; thus, in keeping with this, the following may be
given as a basic definition of the field under discussion:
Ecological sound art describes a modern movement within sound arts practice comprising
works whose form, content or subject matter demonstrates an active engagement with
contemporary ecological issues.
In order to expand upon this basic definition, this chapter will proceed to analyse a
representative sample of ecological sound works, with the aim of identifying some of the
common characteristics and core methodologies of this urgent and flourishing new field.
Perhaps the most pressing ecological issue being faced today is that of climate change,
one consequence of which is the melting of the ice at the North and South poles, leading to
the rise of global sea levels. This issue is addressed by a number of sound artists whose work
utilizes the sounds made by melting glaciers, such as Douglas Quin’s FATHOM (2010),
which features underwater recordings of glacial ice at the Arctic and the Antarctic; a
number of Jana Winderen’s works, including +4°C (2007), Evaporation (2009), Energy Field
(2010), and Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone (2018), in which her recordings of Arctic
glaciers are underpinned by drones, which give the feeling of being submerged beneath
the icy waters; or Daniel Blinkhorn’s frostbYte cycle (2012–2015), a suite of compositions
whose microsound aesthetic invites comparisons between the cracking and popping of the
polar ice and the sonic palette of glitch music. One of the key aspects of all of these works
is the way in which sound communicates the dynamics of the glacial melting process.
Approached from a purely visual perspective, a glacier appears to be literally ‘frozen’, its
melting too gradual to be perceived in real time. In contrast, the sonic dimension of glacial
melting facilitates our understanding of it as a dynamic process, happening ceaselessly and
progressively, encouraging the sense of urgency with which it is so vital that we learn to
regard and respond to climate change.
Other sound artists have created installations or performative works which enable
audiences to bear witness to the process of glacial melting happening right before their ears,
in the here and now. Katie Paterson’s Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007) provides audiences
with a telephone number connecting them to a hydrophone submerged beneath the
glacier of the title, enabling them to listen to it melting in real time, with the very personal
medium of a ‘one-to-one’ phone call collapsing the geographical distance between the
listener and the glacier. Paterson’s related work Langjökull, Snœfellsjökull, Solheimajökull
(2007), meanwhile, involves recordings of three melting glaciers being pressed onto records
made from their own refrozen meltwater, which are then played on turntables until they
completely melt, re-enacting the glacial melting and reminding us that, while recordings
can be played back to give the illusion that their subject is in the room with us, when the
glacial ice itself is gone we will be unable to simply return the needle to the start.
Another work to physically re-enact the melting of an Arctic glacier is Max Eastley’s
Glacial Soundscape (2005), just one of a number of sound works resulting from his
involvement with the Cape Farewell climate arts project. Eastley’s work consists of two
large blocks of ice with stones embedded in them suspended over an amplified aluminium
sheet, creating a constant dripping sound as the ice melts, with the sporadic loud bangs
created by the falling stones communicating that the melting of a glacier is not always a
gradual, steady process but can also be sudden and violent in nature – something which
also creates for the audience a constant feeling of nervous anticipation, enacting the anxiety
which we perhaps should be feeling when we contemplate the melting of the Arctic ice.
Finally, Cheryl E. Leonard’s performative work Meltwater (2013) from her suite Antarctica:
Music from the Ice (2009–2014) combines field recordings of the disappearing Marr Ice
Piedmont glacier with the sounds made by a number of icicles suspended over amplified
Pyrex beakers and Petri dishes, creating steadily increasing patterns of rhythmic dripping
as they melt in the warm, man-made climate of the concert hall, mirroring the real glacier
melting as a consequence of the global warming caused by climate change. Further, Leonard
and other performers play instruments made from materials gathered from the Antarctic,
including Adélie penguin feathers and bones, referencing the decline in penguin colonies
being caused by the changing climatic conditions and progressive disappearance of the ice.
As well as enabling us to bear witness to the dynamic process of ecological disaster
unfolding before our ears, some works of ecological sound art also feature the sounds
Ecological Sound Art 451
being made by those who bear at least partial responsibility for the damage being done.
Max Eastley’s ARCTIC (2007), another outcome of the Cape Farewell project, comprises
twelve works composed from sounds captured by Eastley on the expeditions, including not
just the natural sounds of the Arctic but also the industrial noise of the Barentsberg coal
mine, something which both challenges the common notion of the Arctic as an empty,
silent wilderness and draws attention to the tragic irony of its being a location for the
mining of fossil fuels, our use of which is one of the major causes of the climate change
which is causing it to melt. Moving away from the polar regions, meanwhile, Dark Sound
(2016) by Mikel R. Nieto documents the impact of the oil industry upon the Amazon
rainforest in Ecuador, with the sounds of insects, frogs, and birds becoming gradually
replaced by those of generators, pumps, and drills, mirroring the way in which the oil
industry is progressively obliterating the rainforest, and raising the spectre of a future in
which the rainforest, along with all of the animals and people that live there, may one day
no longer exist.
Another source of the destruction of the earth’s forests is revealed in David Dunn’s The
Sound of Light in Trees (2006), which provides a window into the complex soundworld of
the pine bark beetle, whose rapidly increasing numbers due to climate change are causing
the decimation of the population of piñon pines in New Mexico. However, the CD release
of their squeaking and clicking sounds constitutes only one aspect of Dunn’s work: he
discovered that playing the recordings back to the beetles and combining them with
nonrepeating synthetic sounds had a profound effect on their neural system, causing them
to cease their tunnelling and feeding behaviours and even shutting down their reproductive
cycle, enabling him to use them as an environmentally friendly form of pest control, and
resulting in a work of ecological sound art which also constitutes a remedy for the problem
it highlights.
While the above works showcase the sounds of ecological destruction, others highlight
the sounds of the living creatures that are threatened, or have already disappeared, as a
consequence. The sounds of various extinct and endangered species form the basis of
works such as Suspended Sounds (2006), created for the inaugural Ear to the Earth festival
in New York, which features eight-channel compositions by artists Joan La Barbara, Joel
Chadabe, Alvin Curran, David Monacchi, Aleksei Stevens, and Rama Gottfried; and Maya
Lin’s sound sculptures The Listening Cone (2009) and Sound Ring (2014), two of the works
in her multifaceted ‘last memorial’ project What is Missing? (2009–present). The many
aquatic species which live in the earth’s coral reefs, meanwhile, are the focus of both Jana
Winderen’s Silencing the Reefs (2011–2014) and Leah Barclay’s Sonic Reef (2017–present),
two ecological sound art projects which each explore the changing soundscapes of the reefs
and their ecosystems in a variety of ways including field recordings, compositions, concerts,
installations, and workshops, promoting greater understanding of these environments and
how they are being negatively impacted by human actions.
Other sound artists have turned their attention to the plight of the earth’s birds. Krista
Caballero and Frank Ekeberg’s installation Birding the Future (2013–present) involves the
creation of an immersive soundscape from the calls of extinct and endangered bird species
specific to each region in which the work is presented. In the work, the calls of the extinct
species feature as straight field recordings, presented as a simple memory of what has been
lost, while those of the endangered species are modified to form Morse code messages
warning of their impending fate, their density steadily decreasing over the course of the
work in line with projected rates of extinction to the end of the century. Sally Ann McIntyre,
meanwhile, has realized several sound works focused upon the extinction of birds native
to New Zealand: Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild (2012) consists of recordings of
the silences of stuffed specimens of five species of birds rendered extinct as a result of the
European colonization of New Zealand; Huia Transcriptions (2012) is a recording of a music
box placed in a forest playing a reproduction of the song of the Huia bird, based on a written
transcription made shortly before it became extinct in 1907; and Huia Notations (like shells
on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded) (2015) features a recording of a piano
playing the bird’s song cut to wax cylinder (the only sound recording medium available
while the bird was alive) and played back on an Edison phonograph, a fragile medium
which will eventually destroy the sound through its own playback.
Another creature whose numbers are in steep decline due to human actions is the
honeybee – a fact which has serious consequences for a multitude of other species,
including our own. Amhrán na mBeach (Song of the Bees) (2014) by the duo Softday is
a performative sound work focused upon the ecological threat posed by colony collapse
disorder, combining eight-channel recordings from inside a hive with a musical score
based on scales which are ‘in tune’ with the bees; while Resonating Bodies (2008–present),
a multifaceted arts project conceived by Sarah Peebles and realized in collaboration with
a number of other artists and ecologists, combines multimedia installations, community
outreach projects, and educational initiatives focused upon pollination ecology, with
works including Bumble Domicile (2008), an installation combining a live audio and video
feed from inside a hive, a soundscape made from audio transformations of the bees and
live data visualizations based on the DNA sequences of the pollen; and Audio Bee Booths
(2009–present), a series of nesting cabinets for wild solitary bees incorporating headphones
through which visitors can listen in to the sounds they are making.
While the work of these sound artists encourages an attitude of concern for the future
of other species, others have focused upon promoting a greater awareness of the ways in
which our own species also suffers the consequences of our abuses of the earth’s ecosystems.
Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places (2006–2012), a ‘sonic journalism’ project
which investigates the soundscapes of sites that have undergone major ecological damage,
features at its heart a number of recordings from the Chernobyl exclusion zone, revealing
it to have developed a somewhat complex ecological identity. On the one hand, we hear
the soundscape of what appears, in the absence of humans, to have become an ecologically
thriving wilderness, home to a wide variety of animals; however, the other side of the story is
also represented by the poems and songs performed by the town’s evacuees, who are unable
to return home. Another of Cusack’s sonic journalism projects, Soundscapes of Water Use
and Abuse (2012–present), explores the implications of various ways in which humans
make use of this precious natural resource, including the ecological damage caused by the
dredging of the Thames Estuary, and the consequences of the damming of the Tigres and
Euphrates rivers in Turkey by hydroelectric companies.
The practice of damming major rivers to produce electricity – something which is

being done in a number of places around the world – brings with it serious ecological
justice issues, something which has also been explored by works of ecological sound art.
The Dam(n) Project (2011–present) is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project chronicling
the damming of the Narmada River in North India by hydroelectric companies, and the
impact this has had upon the many communities – comprising over thirty million people –
who depend upon the river and who have consequently been displaced. Underpinning
the project are Leah Barclay’s sound works, which combine recordings of the sounds of
the river with testimonies and songs from the local communities gathered in non-violent
protest, and which have been presented both as a site-specific sound installation, and as the
soundtrack to a contemporary dance work and a documentary film, both entitled Zameen.
In Graciela Garcia Muñoz’s El Sonido Recobrado (2014), meanwhile, the sounds of Chile’s
largest and most powerful river, the Baker, which faces exploitation from a proposed
hydroelectric plant, are played back over twenty-eight speakers set in the bed of the Petorca,
a river which has been completely dry since the 1990s as a consequence of being illegally
dammed and drained by mining and agriculture companies, causing ongoing problems for
local communities.
Returning to the issue of the melting Arctic ice, Holly Owen and Kristina Pulejkova’s
audiovisual work Switching Heads: Sound Mapping the Arctic (2015) investigates the
impact of this phenomenon upon the human community of the Norwegian city of Tromsø,
located within the Arctic Circle. Over the course of the work, the city is explored by an
ice sculpture of a human head with binaural microphones implanted in its ears, listening
in both to the soundscapes of the place, and to interviews with local people talking about
the ecological, social, and economic impacts that the melting of the Arctic ice will have on
their lives. The use of the binaural format, meanwhile, means that the ears of the ice head
become our ears, creating an embodied connection and personal identification with it;
and as it appears in various states throughout the film, from its fully frozen and perfectly
rendered form to an unrecognizable block of slush, we find ourselves personally invested
in its well-being, willing it not to melt, creating a powerful conceptual resonance with the
fact that the well-being of humankind – most immediately in places such as Tromsø – is
reliant upon the Arctic ice remaining frozen.
Another sound work to combine polar soundscapes with interviews on the theme of
climate change is Sonic Antarctica (2009), in which Andrea Polli juxtaposes her Antarctic
field recordings with the voices of climate scientists discussing their research, as well as
their own personal feelings about its implications. The data being studied and discussed
by the scientists, meanwhile, is also integrated into the work through the technique of
sonification, with Polli translating it into a sonic palette of electronic bleeps and rhythms,
something which functions on a conceptual level to enable a sensorial encounter with the
data which, as the scientists explain, holds dire implications for the human race. Polli has
also realized a number of other sonification-based works of sound art utilizing different
types of ecological data, such as Heat and the Heartbeat of the City (2004), an interactive
work which allows the listener to explore a sonification of projected temperature increases
in Central Park caused by global warming; and her Airlight trilogy (2006–2007), which
involves the sonification of data from air quality monitoring stations in Taipei, Socal,
and Boulder to create real-time aural representations of the levels of various atmospheric
pollutants. Taking a similar approach to this last issue, meanwhile, is Wesley Goatley and
Tobias Revell’s installation Breathing Mephitic Air (2017), which sonifies air pollution data
gathered from the area surrounding the site of its exhibition at Somerset House in London,
transforming it into a surround-sound soundscape whose different sonic elements convey
the levels of different pollutants in the air which visitors themselves have just been breathing.
Various approaches to the sonification of climate change data also form the basis for
James Wyness’s If We Do Nothing (2017–present): the first of the work’s ‘models’ combines a
slowly rising electronic tone mapped to CO2 emissions with a falling tone mapped to glacier
ablation spanning the years 1880 to 2050, with the predicted tipping points coinciding with
the limits of human hearing; while the second model maps recordings of stories and myths
in the native languages of the Arctic region and scientific texts on climate change onto
scientific and ethnographic data. Two other models, in the planning stage at the time of
writing, will also involve the sonification of data measuring the disappearance of Arctic sea
ice, and comparisons of rural and urban pollution levels in Scotland. Softday, meanwhile,
use sonification in a pair of works exploring issues of water pollution in Ireland: Nobody
Leaves till the Daphnia Sing (2009) focuses upon the issue of contaminated drinking water
supplies, combining live sonifications of the activity of daphnia magna water fleas, insects
commonly used for the analysis of water and soil toxicity, with the performance of a score
generated from eighteen years of data from water samples around Ireland; while Marbh
Chrios (Dead Zone) (2010) takes a similar approach to the investigation of the dramatic
increase in oceanic ‘dead zones’ (areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine
life), featuring the live sonification of ecological data from two such zones combined with
the performance of a score based on eight years of related marine and environmental data.
Another ecological sound work which combines sonifications of ecological data with
scores performed by live musicians is Matthew Burtner and Scott Deal’s Auksalaq (2012), a
multimedia opera featuring a number of Matthew Burtner’s ‘ecoacoustic’ works, in which
he employs a variety of strategies to translate ecological materials and processes into sound
and music. The work’s subject matter centres upon the effects of climate change upon
Alaska and the Arctic; however, another key component is its wider philosophical theme of
ecological interconnectedness. Different parts of the work are performed simultaneously
in a number of different locations and brought together over high-speed internet networks,
functioning as a metaphor both for being impacted by geographically distant events and
for people in different places working together to achieve a common goal. The audience is
also invited to actively participate in this cooperative staging, as a specially designed app
called NOMADS (Network-Operational Mobile Applied Digital System) enables them to
contribute to aspects of the performance via their own laptops and mobile devices, such as
during the work’s opening movement, when each member is given control of the speed and
pitch of the sound of a single droplet of glacial meltwater; thus together, the whole audience
forms a melting glacier. As well as making the performance an interactive experience, this
forms a powerful metaphor for the way in which we are all responsible, in a small way, for
a tiny element of our changing climate; and how, when all of our seemingly insignificant
individual actions are combined, it can result in the melting of an entire glacier – or even,
eventually, the entirety of the Arctic sea ice. Auksalaq thus becomes a work which is not
just about highlighting ecological problems but also about emphasizing a sense of personal
connection, both with the earth’s threatened ecosystems and with each other, thereby
fostering a sense of empowerment, and encouraging us to take collective action in order to
help preserve them.
This encouragement to consider our personal connection to the earth’s threatened
ecosystems also lies at the heart of David Monacchi’s Fragments of Extinction (2002–
present), an ongoing project which utilizes high-definition ambisonic recordings of the
soundscapes of the earth’s three remaining areas of primary equatorial rainforest, both for
their preservation as a form of ‘sonic heritage’, and for use within Monacchi’s own ‘eco-
acoustic’ sound works. The project has been the subject of a documentary film, Dusk Chorus
(2017); and its latest development utilizes Monacchi’s patented ‘eco-acoustic theater’, a
domed space designed for immersive listening which exists both as a portable touring
structure and in a permanent version installed at Denmark’s Naturama Natural History
Museum. Within the theatre, Monacchi’s three-dimensional soundscape recordings
and compositions are paired with live spectrogram visualizations that demonstrate the
principle of Bernie Krause’s ‘Acoustic Niche Hypothesis’ (1987), which states that in a
healthy ecosystem the calls of each species sound within their own specific frequency or
temporal niche so that all can be heard, much like the different sections in an orchestra – a
delicate balance which is increasingly being destroyed by the encroachment of humans
upon the rainforest ecosystems and their soundscapes. However, Monacchi’s work also
strives towards the positive and hopeful principle of healthy coexistence in the form of
his own contributions to the soundscape, performing electronic improvisations by way
of infrared sensors reading the movements of his fingers. Crucially, the sonic content of
these improvisations is carefully confined to the available acoustic niches in the rainforest
soundscape, thus creating a powerful metaphor for how humans might learn to approach
the earth’s natural ecosystems guided by the principles of listening, of understanding, and
of learning how to humbly and harmoniously integrate into an environment, being guided
by the healthy operation of the ecosystem as a whole.
Another sound artist who utilizes technology as a tool to help us learn to live more
responsibly and conscientiously in our relationship with the earth’s ecosystems is Leah
Barclay, whose work comprises a number of ongoing, multifaceted ecological sound art
projects. Sonic Explorers (2012–present) engages young people in ecological sound art
through field recording and composition workshops, live performances, and sound
mapping; while River Listening (2014–present) takes the form of an interdisciplinary art-
science project, combining the scientific study of the soundscapes of various rivers as a
means to measure their health and biodiversity with sound art which enables audiences
and communities to learn about and connect with the rivers where they live through
talks, workshops, and interactive soundwalks delivered via their mobile devices, with
recordings, compositions, and live hydrophone streams geotagged to specific locations
along the length of the river. Rainforest Listening (2015–present) takes a similar approach,
with geotagged soundwalks made up from over one hundred individual recordings of the
Amazon rainforest embedded in prominent city locations such as Times Square and the
Eiffel Tower, encouraging listeners to consider the ways in which our actions in the city
might impact the rainforest in another part of the world, in a place other than ‘here’, and in
a time other than ‘now’. Of course, this principle applies not just to humanity’s ecologically
irresponsible and destructive actions, but also to the positive action we choose to take,
something which Barclay’s work crucially facilitates by enabling listeners to use their
mobile device to donate to the Rainforest Partnership – an non-governmental organization
(NGO) which works with rainforest communities to help conserve the forest – whilst still
in the moment of engagement with the work. Finally, on an even larger scale is Biosphere
Soundscapes (2012–present), a multifaceted project exploring the soundscapes, ecology,
and environmental health of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves, pivoting on three core
systems: BioScapes Residencies, which bring together selected artists, researchers, and
scientists to explore and map the soundscape of a biosphere reserve, share knowledge,
work on creative outputs, and engage with local communities; BioScapes Labs, a series
of workshops exploring specific research questions around the soundscape ecology of
biosphere reserves; and the BioScapes Community, an online resource which acts as a
platform for the dissemination of the project’s outputs, including an interactive sound map
and educational resources. In their scope and ambition; multifaceted, interdisciplinary, and
collaborative nature; combination of a local and global focus; holistic ecological outlook
combining artistic, scientific, and political concerns; community engagement; educational
benefit; multiplatform delivery; global reach; and overall artistic and ecological integrity,
Leah Barclay’s works represent perhaps the most powerful and effective model for future
ecologically concerned sound artists to aspire to.
Common characteristics of ecological

sound art
Having explored the topics, tools, and techniques of a representative selection of works
of ecological sound art, a number of common characteristics may now be identified,
indicating some of the core methodological principles of the field.
1 The use of listening as a pathway towards greater ecological understanding.
Listening to the sounds of an environment or ecological phenomenon is frequently used

within works of ecological sound art as an intuitive, experiential means of learning more
about the functioning of the earth’s natural ecosystems and the problems they are facing.
2 The promotion of an ecological mode of listening.
The soundworld found in works of ecological sound art directs us towards an ecological
mode of listening, in which our focus moves away from isolated objects or things in favour
of the dynamics of ecological processes, interactions, and interrelationships, and which
thus facilitates a sensorial awareness of the principles of the interconnected ecosystem.
3 A prioritization of listening over sounding.
Ecological sound art is commonly centred upon the artist’s own investigative listening, with
the work functioning as a channel through which to share their listening and learning with
others. This principle involves a degree of humility on the part of the artist that equates to
a tangible ecocentrism, in which the focus of the work is shifted away from the artist, and
onto the environment, ecosystem, or ecological phenomenon being explored.
4 The use of sounding as a metaphor for ecological coexistence.
When ecological sound art does incorporate the sounding of humans, or of man-made
instruments and technologies, this tends to be used as a metaphor for learning how to
positively coexist with other elements of the environment within a space of ecological
commons, guided by the principle of the healthy and harmonious operation of the
ecosystem as a whole.
5 A form that functions as an ecosystem.
The ecological principles explored in works of ecological sound art are often exemplified
by a work which itself functions as an ecosystem, comprising a number of interconnected
parts whose interaction determines the final form of the overall work. This principle
also involves an element of ecocentric humility on the part of the artist, as it necessitates
relinquishing a certain degree of control over the precise form and content of the work.
6 A blend of art with science, of ecology with environmentalism.
Works of ecological sound art tend to be inherently interdisciplinary in nature, blending

the investigation and experimentation of science with the creativity and expression of art,
and combining the principles and dynamics of ecology with the causes and concerns of
environmentalism.
7 A combination of the educational with the philosophical.
In their engagement with contemporary ecological issues, works of ecological sound art
frequently combine the informative or educational with the emotive or philosophical, thus
leaving audiences with both an enhanced understanding of contemporary ecological issues
and the emotional impetus to do something about them.
Conclusion
While it would be absurdly optimistic to claim that sound art is the answer to solving
climate change, halting deforestation, or preventing pollution, it is also imperative that we
do not merely relegate these urgent issues to the fields of science and politics, but that we
learn to engage with them in every aspect of our lives, in which regard our arts and culture
have an immensely significant role to play. Ecological sound art, in its wide variety of
approaches towards this end, represents a vital and thriving contemporary field of practice,
with a growing number of artists creating sound works which aim to help us to open our
ears to ecological issues, to listen to and understand the warning signals, and to explore
ways in which we might learn to live more harmoniously within the ecosystems of which
we are a part, and upon which we all depend.
References
Brown, A. (2014). Art and Ecology Now. London: Thames and Hudson.
Cheetham, M. (2018). Landscape into Eco Art: Articulations of Nature Since the ’60s.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Dwyer, J. (2010). Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction. Reno, NV: University
of Nevada Press.
Gustafsson, T. and P. Kääpä (eds) (2013). Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of
Ecological Transformation. Bristol: Intellect.
Krause, B. (1987). ‘Bioacoustics: Habitat Ambience and Ecological Balance’. Whole Earth
Review, 57: 14–18.
Levin, J. (2011). ‘Contemporary Ecofiction’. In L. Cassuto, C.V. Eby, and B. Reiss (eds), The
Cambridge History of the American Novel, 1122–1136. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Murray, R. L. and J. K. Heumann (2017). Ecocinema and the City. Abingdon: Routledge.
Raglon, R. (2012). ‘A Green Turn: Western Canadian Writers and Ecofiction’. Canadian
Literature 214: 132–134.
Rust, S., S. Monani, and S. Cubitt (eds) (2013). Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Weintraub, L. (2012). To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet. Berkeley, CA:
29
Hydrophonic Fields
Jana Winderen interviewed
by Stefan Helmreich
In this interview, musician and sound artist Jana Winderen talks with anthropologist
Stefan Helmreich on how she thinks about – and technically apprehends – Earth’s
contemporary undersea realm, a realm that, in the age of climate change, is transforming
in its temperature, its creaturely ecologies, its acidity – and its sounds. Winderen is well
known for her recordings and compositions in and about underwater realms, celebrated
for pieces of sound art and music that transport listeners into unfamiliar submarine and
subaquatic zones. Helmreich has written on sound and sensibility in submarine spaces and
on the unusual history of underwater music (see Helmreich 2009, 2012).
Some of Jana Winderen’s notable compositions and releases include:
● The Noisiest Guys on the Planet (Ash International # Ash 8.1). Cassette, 2009/2010.
● Energy Field (Touch # TO:73). CD, 2010.
● Debris (Touch # Tone 45.4). Vinyl, 2012.
● The Wanderer (Ash International # Ash 11.8). USB, 2015.
● The Listener (Ash International # Ash 12.5). USB, 2016.
● Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone (Touch # Tone 65). CD, 2018.
Her multichannel installation works include: ‘UltraField’ (2013), ‘Dive’ (2014), ‘bára’
(2017), and ‘Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone’ (2017 and 2018).
Many of Winderen’s pieces/recordings are available through Touch (n.d.) or through
Winderen’s bandcamp site (Winderen n.d.). It should be said that attending a performance
or installation of these works will offer a much more dimensional experience than these
digital documents.
Stefan Helmreich (SH): How did you arrive at underwater recording/composition — both
as a mode or genre you wanted to explore and as a practice to which you wanted to
dedicate yourself?
Jana Winderen (JW): I have always been occupied with the ocean, and also with fresh
water. I was a child in the 1970s and grew up in the 1980s, and I lived by a lake, the
largest lake in Norway, Lake Mjøsa, which I watched become almost strangled by algae
overgrowth over the years.
I originally thought I wanted to become a marine biologist and so I studied mathematics,

chemistry, biochemistry, and fish ecology at the University in Oslo. But I then studied
Fine Arts at Goldsmiths in London. In my second year, I decided to stop making physical,
bounded art objects and to start to make art pieces using more ‘immaterial’ materials, like
sound, light, and air – which of course had a long history in art practice. When I started
doing this, though, I was unaware that such work might also fall into a genre of music.
That came later.
By the early 2000s, I had begun to work with interactive sound installations, driven
by different kinds of sensors and triggers. Through the use in my installations of
piezoelectric sensors (which can detect sound pressure differences), I became aware
of the piezoelectric technology inside of hydrophones, which are a kind of underwater
microphone. As I began to use hydrophones, I became interested in testing the limits
of these devices. I would freeze them in ice and record the melting of the ice around
them. I went on an early recording trip with musician and sound recordist Chris Watson
and the director of Touch, Mike Harding, during which we explored an ants’ nest with
hydrophones. I recorded in all sorts of places – under the sand as waves washed over a
beach, in mud, inside trees (where I could hear woodpeckers and insects) – but mostly
underwater, at different depths, under and inside glaciers down to 90 metres under the
sea ice in Greenland.
I remember once, quite a long time ago, during one winter, in more than a metre of
snow, we brought a boat to the edge of the ice-covered shore of Lake Mjøsa and rowed
out into deep water. I had two hydrophones at that time, and I placed them at different
depths. At 30 metres down, a singing sound showed up, surprising me. It was the first
time I had experienced the extreme difference of sound at different depths. Exploring
sound in water is almost always more interesting in the vertical direction than it is in the
horizontal direction. This is probably something all creatures living underwater know. It
was around then that I started to think about invisible but audible landscapes under water,
sound spaces that I believe fishes, crustaceans, and mammals use to orientate themselves.
We know that whales have a sound channel underwater, where the sound waves they
produce and receive bounce up and down, without losing energy. That channel exists at
a particular depth, depending on things like temperature, salinity and pressure – and it
means that whales’ sound and hearing can carry over enormous distances. Humans seem
to be ignorant of the damage and destruction we inflict with our engines, our sonar, or
with our air guns for seismic testing – to say nothing of the detonation of bombs. Many
of these sounds can be extremely destructive to the creatures living in the sea. I am trying
with my work to point towards ecosystems that are often overlooked because of human
ignorance or because we are missing a language for talking about them. Thankfully more
and more people are becoming aware of the ocean world and its sound. People now know
that fish also communicate and experience sound.
So, my mode is exploration. I don’t think of hydrophone recording as a ‘genre’. It has
simply been through investigation that I have come upon the hydrophone as a tool for
finding different, less obvious sounds, the sounds of creatures we do not think of in terms
of sound, or that are so small we do not hear them, in frequency ranges we do not perceive
[…]. There are endless areas to explore: listening to insects underwater, exploring fish
perception, thinking about how all these things are affected by rising carbon dioxide
levels, what will happen to undersea populations with sea ice melt […]
Hydrophonic Fields 461
SH: Right. And your work ranges really fascinatingly along these different domains and
in these different registers. I guess my question about genre was animated by my own
listening to things like David Dunn’s ‘Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond’, a
collage of recordings of aquatic insects in ponds in North America and Africa, Erik De
Luca’s [In], a collection of compositions of underwater recordings around the Florida
Keys, and Annea Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Danube River. And because I’ve gotten
kind of obsessed with tracking these things down, I also think, with your mention of ice
melt, of Peter Cusack’s Baikal Ice, Andrea Polli’s Sonic Antarctica, and Wendy Jacob’s Ice
Floe. My gathering of all these things together as ‘genre’ is probably much more about
how I encounter these pieces – which is as a listener – than it is about what you and I are
talking about right this moment, which is about how you create your works. But staying
in ‘genre’ for a spell, are there key composers/recordists/sound artists whose work you
find inspiring or appealing as you think compositionally?
JW: In Vienna in the 1980s there was a great underground scene, people building their
own instruments, making concerts. In 2003, I got to know Carl Michael von Hausswolff
through a workshop called ‘Sound as Space Creator’. Later, this became the project ‘freq_
out’, which I have been part of ever since and through which I met fantastic artists and
composers. I also met Mike Harding, one of the directors of Touch, with whom I later
worked and through whom I got to know Chris Watson, BJ Nilsen, Philip Jeck, and other
artists on the Touch roster. I’m of course aware of other artists working with underwater
materials, and I appreciate and listen to their work, but my first inspirations are usually
from scientific papers, which I can say more about in a moment.
SH: OK, we’ll get back to that for certain! I do like this trajectory you’ve just mapped out,
from underground to underwater music and from art to science […]. Let me leap over to
technology for a moment then, to the question of how you create your works. What field
recording methods have you found essential for capturing underwater sound? What do
you listen for in the recordings? And what is the most surprising thing you have found in
the marine settings you explore?
JW: You develop as you go along, through the challenges you meet. You learn how to pack
your equipment in minus 40 degrees Celsius, or when it is 99 per cent humidity, for
example. You also learn work habits that permit you to acquire the sounds for which you’re
searching – not being interrupted by human-made sounds, for example. Sometimes, I
need to go out at 4.00 a.m., when most people are sleeping.
My technique will also be very different depending on whether it is boiling hot or very
cold (and, in Arctic regions, whether I am in danger of being attacked by polar bears!). In
the Caribbean, the most sensitive hydrophones are too much for the singing humpbacks
and will overload recording levels completely, and one can hardly hear details of toadfish
and crustaceans. The same hydrophones will be perfect in still water environments,
though. The best will be a time when there is no wind, when I can concentrate completely
on small sounds underwater, and start to listen to the richness and complexity in fish
environments.
What do I listen for? I listen for things I haven’t heard before. Let me tell you about
a sound that freaked me out, though – the sound of the ‘seal scarer’. I was travelling
with music students from Glasgow to record on a flameshell reef off the Isle of Skye in
Scotland. I was expecting to hear the crackling and popping sounds of crustaceans, the
sounds of water filtrating through shells, cod grunts, haddock knocking, but when I put
my hydrophones under the surface, I immediately heard a sharp, metal-against-metal

kind of sound screaming in my headphones. I had to turn the recording level down
quickly. I asked the guide who was in the boat what on Earth this sound was, and he told
me that it was the ‘seal scaring’ audio device. These devices are situated there, he told me,
to scare seals away from fish farming pens. It turns out that in Scotland, there exists a law
that once the fish farmers have tried everything to scatter seals from around fish farms,
they can shoot them. To my mind, it would make more sense to have an anti-predator
net installed, though I have heard that these are expensive to maintain. Still, it is quite
incredible that the horrendous sound of the ‘scarer’ is permitted to play 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, in the seal habitat, where the seals have been living for far longer than
the fish farms have been in place. I later contacted a maker of seal-scaring audio devices
and he was devastated to learn how the devices were being used, since he had hoped that
they would be used to save seals from being shot – not used as an excuse or warrant for
when to shoot seals.
SH: That’s really distressing. But it does open up to the next question I wanted to ask you,
which is about what you do with the sounds you collect. What messages do you want them
to relay? How do you think about reanimating, composing, and reproducing underwater
sound? And how do you think about doing that for the generally (airy) settings of human
listening?
JW: I think in terms of stories. I try to give the compositions a sense of travel, movement
– of moving from above to under water, for example, or from warmer to colder areas.
Of course it’s best to take people there, and even to go underwater with them. At the
moment I am working on a project where I am emphasizing bone conduction through
the technique of putting an oar to the head to listen to underwater sound environments.
A while ago, I read a story in the journal Nature about how amphibian hearing,
developed to be able to listen underwater, evolved, in some lineages, towards hearing in air.
When ancient polypterid fishes (which some people have called ‘Darwin fishes’) began to
move onto land, they started to breathe through the tops of their heads, with their breathing
apparatus eventually becoming an ear (see Graham et al. 2014). I became interested in the
possibility that our inner ear is similar to the inner ear of fish.
I have just started to investigate this again. I grew up close to my grandfather, who was
an ear, nose, and throat specialist doctor, and I remember him putting a tuning fork on
my head to check the hearing through bone conduction. I still have those tuning forks,
and I find it fascinating to test your inner ear like this, through the bone structure. In fact,
my project for the Thailand Biannual this year is based on this knowledge. I’m calling it
‘Through the Bones’, and it is based on listening (through bone conduction) through an
oar to the sea around Greenland as well as through an oar to the sea around Thailand.
SH: Mention of evolution and of the physiology of hearing prompts me to return to your
mention earlier that some of your first inspirations for work are often drawn from
scientific papers. What role does reading into various scientific literatures on ocean
ecology play for you?
JW: This is essential for me to understand and learn. I used to study science, so I recognize
stuff from biochemistry, mathematics, fish ecology. I read papers online, or ask
scientists questions, through mail, phone, or in in-person meetings. Also important are
the collaborations and contacts I have in the industry that makes the equipment, the
developers of hydrophones for example.
SH: That’s really interesting, that meeting of science with technology and of both with
sound creation. One thing that is exciting about your work is the way you seek out and
gather hydrophonic sounds and then employ them in composition. I take it to be very
different from what someone like Francisco Lopez did on his 1993 CD Azoic Zone, which,
while it promises ‘a soundscape journey to the life and environment of abyssal organisms’,
is, from what I can infer from the liner notes, largely made of synthesized and treated
sounds, not hydrophonic recordings (though Lopez is an ecologist, so may have a sense
of what things could sound like so deep). What sort of practice – documentary, aesthetic,
scientific? – is composing with hydrophonic recordings for you?
JW: The compositions are not documentary. Though I tell stories, I do not want or expect
listeners to follow the same story as I do. Most people have not heard underwater sounds
before, at least not this implied or literal.
But much depends on the format in which I present the sounds or compositions. If
I do a talk, I will identify the sounds: ‘This is cod,’ ‘This is a Sperm whale,’ or ‘This is a
bulldog bat echolocating.’ I approach all that differently in releases – like Energy Field – or
with an eighty-channel installation like ‘Dive’. It’s different again if I do a commission for
radio.
Though I am inspired by science, my method, really, is not a scientific method at all. I
am far too disorganized for that! I ask questions but I am not expecting to find answers. I
propose hypotheses but am not systematically trying to find evidence in the classic sense,
but am rather trying to encourage more questions and curiosity.
One hypothesis around which I have done several works proposes that one can listen to
the health of a river through listening to underwater insects. Freshwater biologists are now
counting underwater insects in order to say something about the condition of the water,
discovering that some will survive certain pollutants, while others will not. Same with coral
reefs; in my project with TBA21 Academy, ‘Silencing of the Reefs’ (2011–2014), I suggested
that it is possible to listen to the sound of fish, crustaceans, and mammals on and around a
reef to determine whether it is a healthy or dying reef.
SH: It’s useful, as you’ve started to do, to think through specific works. Maybe we can turn to
specific pieces that you’ve been working on and presenting lately. I know that you had an
installation up in Vienna in 2017 – which has also been shown in 2018, in LeFresnoy – an
installation called ‘bára,’ where ‘bára’ is Norse for ‘wave’. Tell me about that.
JW: For the ‘bára’ installation, I was commissioned by TBA21 to use the whole of two large
spaces at Augarten, a Vienna venue, so I thought of letting the piece work as a sonic
portrait of an ocean wave that washes through two rooms. The content of the piece is
based on recordings I made on various field trips from the North Pole to the Caribbean.
Since this was a group show with many other audiovisual works and objects in the space,
I decided that the wave of sound would come in once a day, timed according to the wave
of tidal change nearest to Vienna. I hoped to remind listeners of the relationship between
humans and the tide, and of how the moon influences our bodies, which consist of around
70 per cent water. It was a practical solution to have the sound piece coexisting with all the
other sounds in there, but the timing worked well, with other pieces turned off once a day
when ‘bára’ washed through the space.
I mixed it specifically for those two rooms in Vienna, with an Ambisonic Decoder
by my collaborator Tony Myatt, made particularly for that speaker setup. We had twelve
speakers in each room plus four SUBs (subwoofers). We used these technologies to create
a ‘sphere of sound’ around the audience. Interacting with the acoustics of the space, the
idea was that one becomes less aware of the speakers – the set up lifts the sounds up and
off the speakers, letting sound move more freely in the room. I wanted to create a sense
for the listener of being immersed in the sound – and of not necessarily needing to be in a
‘sweet spot’, a concept with which I have problems, since it introduces a hierarchical sense
into the space. I rather try to make pieces work in different spots of a room, to encourage
people to explore their surroundings. I can make the mix fit into different speaker set-
ups, too, whether I’m using four speakers or one hundred. I do make the compositions
beforehand in my studio, though I know from experience it will change very much when
I am on site.
Thinking back to ‘bára’, the two rooms in the Vienna space were very similar physically,
but the feel of each space was quite different. One was very edgy and unsettling. The other
was calmer. I think this had to do with the installed art objects. I had to change the mixes
for each space drastically from what I had prepared in my studio, with one room needing
to have fewer sonic details, and the other having more. In the end, the rooms worked well
together. For the opening, I made a live version of the piece, but that was again a very
different mix, since it was such a different situation, with lots of people moving around.
Just as working in the field often means that I have to seek out times and places
where humans are not making a lot of noise, so too did I think about that here in the
performance space. There was always so much going on – it is a continuous problem, to
get enough time by oneself to work on the composition for any particular space. Even if
you tell people you need it to be quiet, they start to whisper. I often end up working at
nights in gallery spaces.
In the setup of ‘bára’ in Le Fresnoy, for the exhibition OCEANS, I had a fantastic
time. It was a wonderful space to work in, and I had two whole days to work alone in this
fantastic huge space with the twenty-four speakers plus four SUBs set-up. I was able to
fine-tune the piece, so it was a total joy!
SH: One of the things that strikes me about ‘bára’, which I’ve been listening to in the
admittedly suboptimal setting of my own home, is that you mix sounds from both below
and above the water (the waves crashing, for instance). How do you think about ‘where’
you’d like listeners to ‘be’ as they listen to a composition that has their (airy) ears tuned to
a range of above-and-below water sounds?
JW: I move between under and above water, and I try to keep some feeling of this movement,
and some pulse in the pieces. Since I am not an experienced diver, I need to go up for
air, and so I build breathing breaks into my pieces. Still, many underwater sections in my
pieces can last longer than I can hold my breath, in reality.
In ‘Dive’, in the Park avenue tunnel in New York, I knew people would enter the tunnel
from one direction, so I wanted to have above water sounds crashing to the beach in
the beginning and in the end of the tunnel, so people would have the feeling they were
leaving the familiar sound of waves crashing on the beach behind them as they moved
through eight different underwater environments going to deeper and deeper waters in
the middle, then they would rise to the surface again, reaching the end, and getting out of
the water leaving the tunnel through the crashing waves.
In Energy Field you start on land, then dive in through the ice, swimming underwater,
then coming up for air diving again and so on – this is how I am thinking, but it does not
mean that the listeners need to think the same story as I do. It so much depends on the
format of how I make the composition, if it should be more like a collage, a more static
situation you enter into, or if it will move and have a beginning and an end, as a more
concert or release kind of situation.
And it depends on how much ‘human’ sound I bring in. When a ship passes in one of
my pieces, or the listener can hear the seal-scarer audio device I mentioned before, these
sounds are present to contrast the small sounds of the fish and crustaceans – giving you
an idea of the difference in intensity – and also to help me talk about the issues they raise
or the particular problems they point to.
SH: Yes, I was wanting to get back to that, after hearing your harrowing story of the seal
scarer and about the health of rivers. It does seem that part of the exploration and
storytelling you’re seeking to do is about alerting people to the increasingly damaged
and at-risk aquatic world. So, in that connection, it’s interesting that ‘bára’ is about the
cyclical, daily repeating rhythm of the tide, whereas I know that other pieces you’ve done
direct attention to ecological dynamics that are changing and may be irreversible. I’m
thinking of course of climate change. Can you tell me about a piece that treats that?
JW: A little while ago, I was working on a piece called ‘Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone’,
dealing with the spring bloom of phytoplankton and zooplankton near what Norwegian
politicians like to call the ‘Ice Edge’. There is nowadays a debate about oil drilling in the
Barents Sea, near this so-called Ice Edge. Since the edge is moving north, many politicians
want to permit oil companies to search and drill for oil further north. But to call it an
‘edge’ is quite a mistake – it is, rather, a seasonal zone of ice, and it constitutes a very fragile
ecosystem, one that may be at great risk. If some species disappear in this ecology there will
not necessarily be another to take over their job. Such areas need to be protected against
human activities. Last year, I joined a research ship called the R/V Helmer Hansen to learn
more about the plankton in the area, under, near to, and in the sea ice (see Winderen 2016).
Twenty researchers from different parts of the world joined, looking into the whole water
column, from the sea ice to the benthos. It was very interesting. I interviewed everyone and
we were able to get off the boat two times (but, again, it was hard to get it quiet enough!
There is a lot of stuff happening on the boat and many people need to get their work done. I
dream of a research ship primarily concerned with sound under water! One day, I hope … ).
Sometime earlier, I went to the North Pole with the Mamont Foundation to familiarize
myself with what the sea ice felt like and sounds like (see Winderen 2015). Again it was
impossible to get away from human created sounds. I tried to walk away from the camp
as far as I felt was safe, but the sound from the generators reached me there through the
ice and the water. Also, on the geographical North Pole point that day, happy English
skiers were celebrating that they had made it to the North Pole and were screaming and
shouting. I would have needed to be skiing for days on my own or with another quiet
person to record the ambience without humans. I realize that we have colonized the whole
planet with our sounds, and I’m not sure if it is possible anymore to find somewhere
without human created sounds.
SH: It’s interesting and maybe even ironic that these quotidian sounds of people are so
disruptive, since part of what your work seeks to do is call attention to some of the larger
human-caused damage to the sea! I almost wonder whether doing a recording or piece
one day that emphasizes constant human interruption might be an interesting thing to
do! It could make a kind of complement to the work you’ve done to make audible some of
the creatures that live in the sea. Maybe you can tell me about one of those pieces?
JW: In work with the commission Classified, for the Borealis festival in Bergen,
I wanted to put focus on how human created sounds, like military sonar, seismic
testing with air guns, shipping traffic, detonation of bombs, are interrupting and
are destructive to the creatures living in the ocean. In the final piece, which was
performed on a multichannel setup in the marine institute storage warehouse, in
addition to the recorded human-made sounds I used in the piece I created a low-
frequency sound on the SUBs, which shook the building. This felt very physical to the
audience, especially since I dropped it in quickly, so one could feel a sudden release
of low-frequency sound pressure. When I did the rehearsal for this performance,
the warehouse’s neighbours complained. It was interesting, thinking that the sound
pressure I generated was far less than what we put into underwater environments,
seriously hurting the creatures living there. If I had used the same sound level above
water, there would be uproar, and it would have been dangerous for our bodies […].
It can be good to make comparison to what we do above water, then you start to
understand the brutal way the oceans are treated by humans.
Another installation I worked on parallel was the piece ‘Transmission’, for the V-A-C
foundation in Moscow. Here, I was invited by the curator for the show ‘Geometry of Now’,
Mark Fell, to use a large industrial space that I wanted to just ‘activate’ with the sound of
crustaceans, fish, and whales. It was a former plant for making gas into electricity, bought
by a private company, now making it into a huge art gallery and project place.
SH: That’s really interesting, again, this movement of underwater sound into these air-y
places of human audition. What do you hope people do when they listen to such work
of yours?
JW: When people ask me about listening, I try to explain a more active perception with
all of us connected to the environment. In other words, taking the focus away from
the ears towards listening. It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that it is about
concentration and paying attention; I also find myself not really able to concentrate
without closing my eyes these days. The whole of the body takes part in the listening
process. For example, it is impossible to listen if you are too cold, too warm, restless,
stressed, hungry, and so on. The core of my interest is the connectedness to our
environment, no matter where we are. I try to avoid the distinction between us and
them, between other species and humans.
References
Graham, J., N. C. Wegner, L. A. Miller, C. J. Jew, N. C. Lai, R. M. Berquist, L. R. Frank, and
J. A. Long (2014). ‘Spiracular Air Breathing in Polypterid Fishes and its Implications for
Aerial Respiration in Stem Tetrapods’. Nature Communications 5: 3022.
Helmreich, S. (2009). ‘Submarine Sound’. The Wire 302: 30–31.
Helmreich, S. (2012). ‘Underwater Music: Tuning Composition to the Sounds of Science’. In
Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, 151–175.
Touch (n.d.). ‘Touch.’ Available online: https://touch33.net/ (accessed 5 July 2020).
Winderen, Jana (n.d.). ‘Bandcamp’. Available online: https://janawinderen.bandcamp.com

Winderen, Jana (2015). ‘Field Trip to the North Pole, Mamont Foundation’. Available
online: https://www.janawinderen.com/field-trips/field-trip-to-the-north-pole-mamont-
foundation-18-23-april-2015 (accessed 5 July 2020).
Winderen, Jana (2016). ‘Iskanten, Field Trip to the Marginal Ice Zone in the Barents Sea for
the Spring Bloom of Plankton’. Available online: https://www.janawinderen.com/field-trips/
iskanten-field-trip-to-the-marginal-ice-zone-in-the-barents-sea-for-the-spring-bloom-of-
plankton-17-29-may-2016 (accessed 5 July 2020).
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30
Melt Me into the Ocean:
Sounds from Submarine Spaces
Yolande Harris
The Möbius strip of expanding awareness moves out from one’s own body to immediate
place, to other phenomena, on to remote environments and back to the self in Harris’s rich
body of thought and art. These are powerful works, in concept and realization. The sense of
interdependence which they evoke and encourage is vital to our transformation into good
stewards of our environmental neighborhoods.
—Annea Lockwood (2015)
Shifts in time and space, and undulations in daily perception, are active elements within
the work of artist Yolande Harris, and brought forward through a deep curiosity for the
world. A gap or fissure seems to appear, to break in – between seeing and believing, between
material fact and poetical imagining, and between the near and the far, along with the
ineffable and animate threads that may also connect and therefore disrupt such dichotomies.
The gap, and the threads that traverse and link, and which invite us to enter their subsequent
web of associations and slippages, disorienting layers and close-ups, and from which new
perspectives are generated.
— Brandon LaBelle (2015)
Sonic consciousness
How can our conscious listening affect the world around us? How can learning to listen to
underwater sounds transform us, and transform our relationship to the environment? My
process of making art celebrates the coexistence of multiple ways of knowing, and feeds
off moments of heightened awareness that arise in everyday experience. I explore my own
personal experiences listening to underwater sounds, and emphasize not only the sounds
themselves but also the context in which I find them. I am curious about the many ways we
listen – technologically, intellectually, culturally, physiologically, psychologically, spiritually,
and socially – and the different motivations listeners have. While science is revealing an
image of the submarine environment that is endlessly complex, I am also interested in
many ways of knowing the ocean, particularly how it exists in human imagination and
culture, the arts and psychology. Part of my research is learning to embrace and incorporate
forms of knowing that happen beyond my rational intellect, like those generated and stored
in my body, and my intuition, allowing my mind to recognize and integrate these forms
of knowledge. My creative process combines many hours of close listening, the rigorous
analysis of those sounds, and freely following intuitive threads of ideas in the moment
of making. For someone experiencing my work, I aim to provoke a sense of wonder in
my audience, asking their imagination to actively make sense of the experience. My work
activates the senses, drawing us back to the body as the central vehicle with which we
interface with the world around us. There is a moment when the individual opens to receive
these sounds into their system, in a way that is beyond information. When imagination,
investigation, and the senses are combined, an expanded form of presence can arise. When
something is given presence, it can no longer be ignored. I am particularly interested in
how sound and listening can help facilitate this presence in the context of the ocean.
Over the past ten years my research has focused on sound in the submarine environment,
with numerous works focusing on the dislocation between visually seeing surface and
sonically experiencing depth.1 Sound activates relationships between humans, animals,
and our shared environments; and it is these relationships my work strives to reactivate and
renew. To this end, I situate sound within a broader sensory context (walk, video, braids,
bubbles) recognizing the interdependence of the body’s own systems with the environment
it is in. My performances, installations, workshops, walks, lectures, and writings combine
deep listening, field recordings, live performance, and sound technology with images,
particularly video, to explore remote places of the environment and the mind. My goal is to
develop what I call ‘sonic consciousness’, a deepening of awareness through an attentiveness
to sound, and ‘techno-intuition’, combining technological and intuitive ways of knowing
and being in the world. My influences include: bioacoustic marine science; psychology of
memory and trauma; sound healing practices; Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening; human-
animal relationships; acoustic ecology, deep ecology; and ecofeminism.
A range of underwater listening

experiences
I lower a hydrophone, an underwater microphone, through the surface of the water. I pull
it up and let it down again, listening to the change in sound as my extended ear crosses
between air and water.
I tune in to live streams from hydrophones from deep ocean observatories around the
world.2 Most of the time there is the ocean hiss of white noise, faint or loud hums from
distant boat engines, and the occasional voice of a whale or dolphin.
I am in the lab of a university oceanographer, listening to the first sound recordings
of a sea-glider collecting data in the Pacific Ocean.3 We hear constant machine sound
Sounds from Submarine Spaces 471
from the glider, occasional bubbles and faint whale call. Later I ask her which species were
brought into harbour by the whaling fleets of Dundee in Scotland. My ears open up to a
soundscape full of bowhead whales, bearded seals, beluga whales, and narwhals, sounding
in the creaking and squeaking of the Arctic ice caps.4
In a local natural history museum on the coast of the Monterey Bay in California, I
set up a hydrophone for visitors to listen in the touch pool.5 I watch as they move the
hydrophone around, carefully exploring the acoustic spaces where the anemones live,
mostly sonic shadows created by rocks that hide the ongoing reverberation of the pump.
I go whale watching and we come close to humpback whales feeding in the Monterey
Bay. The engine is shut off, people on the boat gradually grow calm, the chattering stops,
and as a whale dives deep showing its fluke, I hear a collective gasp and sigh from the crowd.
I listen to an interview with a ‘dolphin ambassador’ and participate in her guided
meditation of dolphin sounds. I sense a change in the energy of the room.
I am watching the spectrogram of recorded sounds that I have been given by a scientist
working with a hydrophone deep in the Monterey Bay and I see the shapes of sounds well
outside my hearing range.6 I listen in detail over and over, zoom into specific features,
sometimes I recognize sounds. I shift sample rate, change speed, filter, remove ocean
hiss, replace ocean hiss, equalize so I only hear certain bandwidths, check how sounds
correspond to each other. I am getting to know the material and sonic space from many
angles. Gradually the deeper ocean, while still out of my reach in so many fundamental
ways, comes closer, or rather, I come closer to it. I begin to melt into it.
Listening to marine mammal voices in

Dundee Harbour, Scotland
In Whale […] visitors are invited to walk, letting the sounds of whales envelop them in
their watery, deep murmuring. These sounds are at once distant from our earthly territory,
our terrestrial senses, while they in turn immerse us within their sudden proximity: the
immensity of the sounds – the great depth and dimension of their sonority – are brought
right up against our skin, delivering all this depth and resonance into our listening.
—Brandon LaBelle (2015)
In 2017 I was commissioned to make a project in Scotland focusing on Dundee’s history

as a whaling port.7 The resulting piece, Whale (Dundee), is a 30-minute soundwalk using
custom-made headphones with an audio player, situated along the historic harbour walls
of the city and on the historic ship, RRS Discovery. Dundee has an interwoven history of
whaling and jute production, whale oil was used in the production of jute, and jute ropes
rigged the whaling ships. Although the whaling industry is over, jute production continues
today in Dundee. Using a traditional Celtic braiding technique – a sixteen-strand hollow
braid that enables a solid core to be wrapped in rope – I wove Dundee jute around the
headphones for the soundwalk. The rough feel of jute in one’s hands, along with the braided
pattern in two colours, provided a material-physical reference to Dundee’s whaling history

that participants experience when they touch the headphones. The ongoing entwining of
the cultural lives of these species – human and cetacean – fascinates me.8 The braided
headphones are a way of acknowledging the complexity of these cultural references in both
the cetacean and human communities.
In response to my inquiry about the species of whales hunted by Scottish whaling ships,
University of Washington oceanographer Kate Stafford sent me sound recordings that she had
made under the Arctic ice in the vicinity of Fram Strait and Davis Strait, whaling areas close to
Greenland. In addition to hunting bowhead whales, bearded seals, and beluga whales, Stafford
suggested that Scottish whalers also hunted narwhals. Her recordings of the animals in their
Arctic habitat are extraordinary to listen to. Bearded seals make long downward wavering
whistles of pure tones that fall endlessly at differing speeds, some fast, some slow, some starting
at a very high pitch, others at a low pitch, with no apparent ‘breath’ to break the sound. The
sounds are rich with reverberation and appear to go on into an indefinite background. The
bowhead whale has a squeezing multiphonic vocal sound, in repeating phrases alternating
high and low, that have a compressing and decompressing effect on my body when I listen
to them. The Arctic ice is irregularly creating a background of squeaks, creaks, and loud bass
cracks that fill the sound field. These recordings induce in me an uncanny sense of connection
with the direct physicality of another body making sound. I feel as though I could reproduce
these sounds and as I try, I realize that they require me to have internal pressure inside my
body, more like bodily resonations than our open-mouthed projections.
When I work with these sounds I go through a period of deep immersion in them,
through repeated listening often for hours at a stretch. The high quality of the recordings
enables me to work with them to reveal qualities I might not otherwise hear, by changing
the speed and shifting the frequency into my hearing range. I also work with the
visualization of the sounds in spectrograms both to help me listen, and to edit, at times
zooming in on certain frequencies to get more clarity in my mind as to what this sonic
environment consists of. After this immersion, my editing process consists largely of
selecting portions of the recordings. I listen for clarity of the voices, as well as a richness of
voices and background contextual sounds. I am not listening for one perfect voice, but for
passages that clearly reveal the array of sounds happening simultaneously, and the sonic
context within which they occur. I do not remix the sounds into a composition. Rather, I
try to present the sound environment in a way that is minimally edited while maintaining
the listener’s interest. When listening through the headphones on the historic walls of
Dundee Harbour, to these oceanic voices – bowhead and beluga whales, bearded seals and
narwhals – we can imagine them speaking directly into our ears from Arctic waters. They
become the agents, the guides, the voices of knowledge beyond our immediate experience.
Whale (Dundee) creates a resonance with the past and our changing relationships to the
ocean and the animals that inhabit it, while preserving a sense of wonder and inspiring a
greater sense of empathy.
People who participated in this walk were invited to share their reactions in a guest
book. Many of the comments point to the sound experience in combination with the site
as revelatory or transformative.
A moment to reflect on this history in the landscape.

Beautiful and meditative, left a lot of space for thoughts to wander and [be] still.
Really thought provoking.
Was aware of smells and feet walking. Was very emotional, quite upsetting toward the middle
and then calmed down at the end. Otherworldly and floaty.
Who would think all those sounds came from the sea!
Haunting sounds, feels like heaven, Thank you.
Sublime, altered perception of the waterfront.
Haunting. Made you reflect about our relationship with animals and think about the future
and our role in preserving their environments.
Beautiful sounds of the ocean! Sometimes I felt like I was on another planet! Closed off from
my surroundings and transported into the deep and wild oceans.
I’ve joined the whales. Send a note to my family…
Want to buy the headphones.
Sound, body, and oceanic states of mind

These are not unusual reactions to my work. Words such as meditative, aware, haunting,
heaven, sublime, altered perception, another planet, transported are commonly used to
describe a state of mind that is activated through the listening experiences I create. In
my desire to build on the knowledge I gain through such exchanges with participants
of my work, I look for answers in complementary forms of experience, bodily systems
of knowledge that are a step removed from theory, a step closer to directly being in the
world. Again, the questions arise: How can our conscious listening affect the world around
us? How can learning to listen to underwater sounds transform us, and transform our
relationship to the environment?
Composer Pauline Oliveros challenges us with her mantra ‘listen to everything, all the
time and remind yourself when you are not listening’ (Oliveros 2000: 38). Listening to
other beings, other phenomena, other machines, strengthens relationships between us and
our environment. It demands our attentiveness to other beings, and calls into question
distinctions between human and nonhuman, sentient and insentient. Sound asks for and
requires us to pay attention, to enter into a relationship with it. Oliveros notes that sonic
attention is focused and diffuse at the same time, and so it has the effect of situating us
within a field of relationships, a field of varying qualities. This practice helps shift our state
of awareness from one consumed with doing, to one attuned to being. I use the term ‘sonic
consciousness’ to describe such a heightened awareness of sounds around us and of the
materiality of sound (Harris 2011).
With Oliveros as inspiration, I explore different sonic experiences and ways of listening,
particularly in relation to immersion and oceanic states of mind. In her Deep Listening
practice, Oliveros draws inspiration and techniques from her lifelong study of meditation
and her work can be considered as a form of sound healing. During one of Oliveros’s deep
listening retreats, I was first introduced to the Taoist practice of Tai Chi and the healing art
of Qigong. I found these practices to be deeply complementary to my sound art practice

and I have continued to study them. ‘Chi’, which is roughly translated as ‘life energy’, moves
through the body and extends beyond the surface of our skin, which, although a physical
threshold, is not the limit of the body’s energy. I notice parallels between such a practice
of energy flow through the body and the way sound behaves in space, moving through
boundaries such as walls. This is a much more sonic than visual way of experiencing one’s
body, offering an awareness of oneself that is not bounded by the surface of the skin.
This more expanded ‘sonic’ notion of the body informs my understanding of echolocation
by animals underwater. Cetaceans use echolocation to make sense of their environment.
There are anecdotes of sperm whales and dolphins ‘scanning’ the bodies of human divers
where the sound conveys information, not only of their outside shapes, as would a visual
scanning, but of the interior of the body as the sound reflects differently depending on
density (Hoare 2016). This ability gives them a conscious awareness of the interior as
well as the exterior of other bodies. We visualize and see their physical body shape, but
this is most likely not their experience of themselves or others. Such a sonic awareness
of bodies de-emphasizes the apparent impermeability of surface, and reduces a lot of the
power of human visually centred discourse limited to external surface appearances.9 And
in addition, much as sound can travel through walls behind which we cannot see, the
visual surface of the skin or ocean need not limit us in our relationship and understanding.
As a result of visual dominance and suppressed sonic perception, we tend to ‘see’ only the
surface of the body and skin. A sonic sense would ‘hear’ or create mental maps or images
that are not limited by surface.
So how does sound affect the body and one’s sense of relating to the world around us?
Can listening be considered a form of healing as Oliveros’s work suggests? Sound healing
therapy takes many different forms, but all relate to a notion of how sonic vibrations affect
the energetic patterns of the body. In sound immersions or sound baths, the participant is
a passive receiver (unlike Oliveros’s active listening) of dense layers of continuous sound,
created live, usually with bowls, gongs, bells, chimes, voices, and sometimes electronic
sounds. These sound baths aim to immerse one in an ‘ocean of sound’; the vibrations of
the sound field directly affecting the vibrations within ones fluid body, and thus shifting
blockages and patterns in ways that allow the energy to flow more healthfully. This
experience is not so much a question of listening, as of allowing the physicality of the sound
to work on one’s body. Such sound-healing events have become enormously popular. I have
been in a large space with nearly a hundred people calmly lying on the ground while the
sound healers create waves and washes of sounds and vibrations. Afterwards my body and
mind became acutely sensitized and aware of my environment. I noticed the clear light and
shadow of moonlight far more intensely than usual, the pace of footsteps behind me, my
own impact on the ground, moving in a heightened mental state induced by sound.
Moving beyond the surface, whether the skin of the body, the surface of the ocean,
or the conscious mind, depends on the experience of energy exchange. In Jungian
psychology, the vastness of the subconscious is comparable to a submerged iceberg, where
the iceberg tip visible above water level is comparable to the conscious mind. Clarissa
Pinkola Estés, a Jungian psychoanalyst and traditional storyteller, links the imaginative
journey into the underwater world, with a dive into the subconscious. She interprets the
Scottish mythological beings of the Selkies, seals that can become human and return to
being seals, as an example of this ancient psychological pull. She refers to the notion of a
‘medial woman’ outlined by Antonia Wolff (1956), a psychoanalyst who worked closely
with Jung, as one ‘who stands between the worlds of consensual reality and the mystical
unconscious and mediates between them’ (Estés 1992: 288). In her interpretation, ‘the
seal-woman, soul-self, passes thoughts, ideas, feelings, and impulses up from the water
to the medial self, which in turn lifts those things out onto land and consciousness in the
outer world. The structure also works conversely’ (289). In my own work I draw parallels
between making conscious the unconscious through dream work (inspired in part by
Oliveros’s deep listening collaborator Ione, the Dream-Keeper), and making audible the
inaudible using technological means, drawing the sounds up from underwater into our
waking consciousness. Such a manifestation of the subconscious in a conscious or material
form, is like listening to the remote deep ocean on land. Listening to this material when
one’s imagination is engaged and free flowing is an enriching experience. As Oliveros
writes, ‘Listening involves a reciprocity of energy flow, and exchange of energy, sympathetic
vibration: tuning into the web of mutually supportive interconnected thoughts, feelings,
dreams, and vital forces comprising our lives’ (Oliveros 2000: 45).
Melt Me Into The Ocean: Santa Cruz and the

Monterey Bay
What pulls us to the ocean? And when we arrive at its edge, what do we experience? Melt
Me Into The Ocean (2018) imagines a deeper dive at the point where land and sea meet,
bringing sounds up from under the surface, filling our air space with liquid motion from
beneath the ocean. And while we look out at the surface of the ocean, feet on the land, ears
underwater, how does our sense of place expand to integrate the submarine world into the
presence of our imagination?
In Santa Cruz I live on the edge of a vast marine sanctuary, a submarine canyon deeper
than the Grand Canyon, filled with life, resident and migrating through. When I look out I
try to visualize in my mind the sheer depth of that canyon, the amount of space filled with
ocean, and the proximity of vastness to this small city. I remember the first time I reached the
edge of a desert canyon overlook in Utah, my stomach caved in as if punched hard and I burst
into tears. I couldn’t process that sudden vastness of scale dropping away beneath me. Now
I imagine the darkness of the three-dimensional space underwater, and the sounds that flow
through it, five times faster than sound moves in air and reaching greater distances, sounds
above and below my hearing range. I imagine my body orienting itself in this cold, liquid,
pressurized, sonic world. And then I feel my feet on the ground, in this place, looking out.
I listen through my body, I learn through my body, and sound helps to open up a
sensitivity and vocabulary for integrating my bodily sensations with a sense of place and
a sense of identity. Memory is stored in the body, sound acts on the body. Energy flows
through and out of the body, and many times gets blocked in it. Healing is associated with
allowing the energy to flow again.
Leaning over the edge of the wharf I am listening to a hydrophone I have lowered like
the people fishing around me lower their lines. I can see it shining in a thick shoal of
glistening anchovies hugging the wharf posts that are coated in muscles, barnacles, kelp
and giant star fish, red, orange, and pink. I hear these creatures clicking and snapping and
I can hear sea lions barking underwater. Somehow I am surprised that they can make these
sounds underwater as I have seen them on the jetty throw their heads back and open their
mouths showing big pink tongues and yellow teeth. I find myself thinking of their bodies
in relation to mine, and whether I could make sounds underwater in the same way, without
breathing or drowning. And then a sea lion comes darting through the anchovies chasing
a larger fish, and all is flow and energy exchange.
What do I mean by the ocean as energy exchange? I link it to the flow of sound, the
flow of energy in and through the body, the flow of energy within the liquid ocean, and
the flow of energy from ocean to climate systems worldwide. If I think of the ocean
not as filled with objects, but as a flow of energy exchanges, I come closer to it and
enable it to move over me on land. Its influence in a coastal zone is always present,
particularly in the air, in moisture, in smell, in sound. The coastal redwood forests
thrive on the foggy moisture from the ocean system. Everything is softer, skin more
supple, temperature steady. The coastal band absorbs the energy of the ocean by its
proximity. The ocean has influence well beyond its surface, much as the energy of a
human body has influence well beyond the surface of its skin. It makes me remember
that our visual sense identifies surfaces as solid boundaries, as beginning and ends of
objects, as identities and influence bound and contained by surface. In contrast our
sonic sense hears beyond surfaces, it recognizes what is beneath and outside of the skin
and ocean and beyond the walls of a room. Our sonic sense recognizes energy exchange
and flow; it recognizes the ocean in ways that eludes our visual sense. Such a state of
sonic consciousness brought about by listening to underwater sound, brings us closer
to that awareness of being rather than doing.
Melt Me into the Ocean explores these ideas. It has included an evening installation
in the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History (SCMNH), and a day-long festival,10
which included a soundwalk along the harbour jetty to Walton Lighthouse, and a sunset
performance at Ocean View Park, which overlooks where the San Lorenzo river joins the
Pacific. Siting the works in these public places, without an entrance fee, I invite a deeper
awareness of the presence of the ocean environment through sound. These works use
sound from the MBARI hydrophone, a high-resolution underwater microphone, placed
on a ridge 300 metres down in the Monterey Canyon, and linked by high-speed cable
to the shore.11 Unlike most recorded whale or dolphin sounds that are publicly available,
which are carefully edited to highlight just cetacean sounds, listening directly to the ocean
environment is a more complex experience. The sounds emerge from the distance, blend
with each other, echo off canyon walls, and are submerged in a loud ambient ocean hiss
created by waves or rain on the surface. The distinct ‘songs’ of humpback whales repeat in
long patterns, multiple overlapping echolocation clicks of perhaps dolphins, and even the
lowest bass of the blue whale, which rumbles at the very edge of our hearing range, are all
contextualized in the ambient sonic space of these recordings.
For the SCMNH installation I combined these sounds with video I recorded of
humpback whales in the same location, projected in an atrium above our heads, inviting
visitors to dive beneath the sea and hear the sound world of these and other animals via
headphones. This technological extension of our ears asks us to learn to listen to a place
we cannot directly experience. What are these sounds and how do they interact with each
other? What do they teach us about this environment and how can this help transform
our relationship to the ocean and its inhabitants? When I recorded the video of humpback
whales in the Monterey Bay I was fascinated by the rhythmic punctuation of breathing,
particularly the ‘fluke dives’ where the whale dives deep to feed for some minutes before
returning to the surface. So the video remains on the surface, in intensified colours, leaving
our imagination to dive with the whales and listen to the depths of their sonic environment.
The soundwalk to the lighthouse used the same headphones as Whale (Dundee) but
with a soundscape that I created from my own hydrophone recordings combined with the
MBARI recordings of the Monterey Bay. Walking out to the lighthouse along the harbour
jetty the listener becomes increasingly submerged in the deep ocean sounds. The evening
sunset performance at the park combined these sounds with my videos of a dreaming sea
lion, ocean waves, and humpback whales, projected onto boulders in the park. At first the
videos were very faint. As the light diminished the images came into focus and the sounds
blended with the ambient sounds of the location. The audience that gathered was quiet
and absorbed in being with this moment of changing transition from day to night, the
emergence of the city lights, the distant roller-coaster, and the planets and stars overhead.
The experience attuned us to being in the present moment, and in the presence of the
nearby ocean through its sounds.
Listening to Whales: The Exploratorium,

San Francisco Bay
The final presentation in this series took place at the Exploratorium, a science exploration
museum located on a historic pier of the Embarcadero in San Francisco. The installation
was situated in the upper-level Observatory space and exterior deck, surrounded by the
water of the bay and with views of the city. I filled the spaces with sounds from the earlier
works, including the Monterey Bay and the Arctic. During the evening, as the day turned
to night, with city, boat, and bridge lights appearing through the fog, large-scale video
projections of the ocean became visible across all the surfaces of the spaces. Within these
activated spaces, visitors could put on the braided jute headphones and listen to another
version of the underwater sounds in a more intimate way. The many visitors expressed
surprise and delight at finding themselves immersed in underwater sounds of marine
mammals, while simultaneously standing outside overlooking the environment of San
Francisco. Many stayed for long periods, others returned multiple times. This interweaving
of direct bodily subjective experience with the remote submarine spaces through sound
brings me back to Annea Lockwood’s comment, ‘The Möbius strip of expanding awareness
moves out from one’s own body to immediate place, to other phenomena, on to remote
environments and back to the self ’ (Lockwood 2015).
Sound as the harbinger of a renewed

relatedness
I began by considering the need for creating a space for the presence of the ocean within our
land-bound lives. While many mechanisms are in place, from entertainment and tourism,
to science, to spirituality, it is through sound – sonic consciousness – that a profound sense
of presence can be experienced. I create the possibility for people to be in their bodies, in
a way that enables them to extend their experience of the submarine spaces through their
imagination, provoked by sound. An understanding of body-knowledge, imagination,
and relatedness to environments needs to be embraced and practiced for the kind of deep
empathy to emerge towards an uninhabitable environment such as the deep ocean. Sound
is the harbinger of such a renewed relatedness. The technological advances that enable
us to hear underwater with our feet on the earth, demand that we re-embody our sonic
sense and our sonic intelligence towards the goal of a more conscious awareness of the
remote, inaccessible environments of this planet. It is my hope, as an artist creating these
opportunities for receiving ocean presence, that what leads out from the sonic imagination
contributes to healing and re-balancing human relationships to our environments.
Notes
1. In addition to the works described here, to access Sun Run Sun (2007), Pink Noise (2009),
Fishing for Sound (2010), Swim (2011), Listening to the Distance (2014), Eagle (2015), and
Bonneville Blue Whale (2015), see Harris n.d. See also Harris 2012, 2018.
2. For examples, see Lido n.d.; and Orcasound n.d.
3. Lab visit with Kate Stafford, Principle Oceanographer in the Applied Physics Department,
University of Washington, Seattle, 2014.
4. Email correspondence with Kate Stafford, 2017.
5. Installed during the special event ‘Sensation: An Evening of Sensory Science Exploration’
at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, 10 February 2018.
6. Thanks to John Ryan, Senior Research Specialist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute (MBARI), see MBARI 2017.
7. Commissioned by Sarah Cook, North East of North Digital Arts (NEoN) for the Ignite
Festival, Dundee.
8. That cetaceans are cultural animals is extensively reviewed in Hal Whitehead and Luke
Rendell’s The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Cultural evolution in this context
refers to knowledge and behaviours that are passed on and learnt within a group,
allowing significantly more rapid adaptation than biological evolution. Humpback
whales, for example, learn new songs each season, while orcas develop pod-specific
hunting behaviours.
9. ‘Seeing with sound would not be equivalent to seeing with light: the topology of inside
and outside would be different […]. Bodies without opacity: an oxymoron for us, but
perhaps mundane for dolphins’ (Peters 2015: 68–69).
10. Commissioned and curated by Santa Cruz experimental music platform Indexical (2018).
11. Made available to me for this project by lead researcher John Ryan, MBARI.
References
Estés, Clarissa Pinkola (1992). Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths And Stories of yhe
Wild Woman Archetype. New York: Ballantine Books.
Harris, Yolande (n.d.). Available online: http://www.yolandeharris.net (accessed 5 July 2020).
Harris, Yolande (2011). ‘Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness’. PhD
dissertation, Leiden University.
Harris, Yolande (2012). ‘Understanding Underwater: the Art and Science of Interpreting
Whale Sounds’. Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture 2. Available online: http://www.
interferencejournal.org/understanding-underwater/ (accessed 16 July 2020).
Harris, Yolande (2018). ‘Listening to the Ocean in the Desert.’ Leonardo Journal 51 (2): 193–194.
Hoare, Philip (2016). ‘Of the Less Erroneous Picture of Whales: The Whale in Myth, in
Industry, and in Futurity’. Lecture at Rhode Island School of Design, 14 January.
Indexical (2018). ‘Melt Me Into the Ocean’. Available online: https://www.indexical.org/
events/2018-08-11-melt-me-into-the-ocean (accessed 5 July 2020).
LaBelle, Brandon (2015). ‘Yolande Harris: Aesthetics of Intensity’. In Yolande Harris: Listening
to the Distance, 47–51. Woodbury Art Museum.
Lido (n.d.). ‘Listening to the Deep Ocean Environment’. Available online: www.
listentothedeep.com (accessed 5 July 2020).
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63–65. Woodbury Art Museum.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) (2017). ‘Ocean Soundscape’. Available
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hydrophone/ (accessed 5 July 2020).
Oliveros, Pauline (2000). ‘Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (to Practise Practice)’.
Music Works (Spring): 38.
Orcasound (n.d.). ‘Listen for Whales’. Available online: www.orcasound.net (accessed 5 July 2020).
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Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Whitehead, Hal and Luke Rendell (2014). The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
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31
Attentive Listening in Lo-Fi
Soundscapes: Some Notes on
the Development of Sound Art
Methodologies in Vietnam
Stefan Östersjö and Nguyễn Thanh Thủy
This chapter is dedicated to the memory of the composer Vũ Nhật Tân (1970–2020).
Introduction
In this chapter we will outline the development of the sound art practices of leading
composers and sound artists in Vietnam. The recent history of Vietnamese experimental
music and the development of artistic methods for making sound art was largely set in
Hà Nội. Our discussion builds on our own artistic experience from collaborative projects,
involving all of the artists discussed here, but we also carried out interviews with each of
these musicians and analysed some of their central works.
While the development of sound art practices around the world may largely be connected
to the possibilities afforded by audio technology of capturing and monitoring environmental
sound through microphones and recording devices, this seems less true for the early history
of sound art in Vietnam. Rather, several leading practitioners refer to transformative
experiences of listening to the soundscapes of the city of Hà Nội and of the countryside in
ways reminiscent of the nineteenth-century vogue in England for what has been termed
‘close listening’ (Picker 2003). This practice predated the invention of audio technologies
by several decades and created a novel ‘recognition of ambient sound as ubiquitous and
inescapable and its endowment with new material and figurative meanings’ (Picker 2003: 6).
For these Victorian listeners, this entailed a questioning of the listening attitude prompted
by Western art music, and proposed an engagement with sounds in natural landscapes as
well as with the noise of in the times of industrialization. The composer and sound artist Vũ
Nhật Tân describes a similar listening experience when weaving together the sounds of his
piano playing at home with the environmental soundscape, which, typical of a country like
Vietnam, was also ever present indoors: ‘I would hear the kids playing outside, and I would
be inside playing my piano. I listened to them but I continued to play my piano. I just liked
that combination’ (Cunico 2015). Attentive listening became his method for turning an
everyday experience into an artistic practice, which eventually would be further shaped into
compositions and performances. Hence, this childhood experience from the 1980s became
the impetus for a compositional practice which engaged with the noisy soundscapes of Hà
Nội in various ways. In later years, an example could be a solo piano and electronics project
premiered during the Hanoi New Music Festival in 2013. Here, Vũ recreated this childhood
listening situation in a piano performance interacting with field recordings from Hà Nội’s
massive drilling noise as a recurring feature.
The composer and sound artist Lương Huệ Trinh describes similar experiences some
twenty years later than Vũ. She refers to her youth, spent in the countryside in the Bắc
Ninh region north of Hà Nội, as being ‘very slow and close to nature’ (Lương, personal
communication, 2018). When she was thirteen she moved to the busy and noisy environment
of Hà Nội to study jazz piano at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music. She describes how the
experience of these contrasting soundscapes deeply affected her compositional practice:
For me, each sound has its own content, message, context, and space. These soundscapes
are extremely diverse. For instance, the sound of crowing roosters in early morning, cries
of street vendors, sounds of the wind, of fires or rain on various materials, noises on streets,
street music or insects in the fields, streams or rivers, and so on. These are enormous and
rich sources for me to exploit.
(Lương 2018)
Sound art methodologies in Vietnam have emerged out of such engagement with the
soundscapes of the country through attentive listening, which has generated an awareness
of their shifting qualities as a result of rapid processes of economic and social change since
the 1980s. Here, the concept of a ‘hi-fi soundscape’, a central building block in acoustic
ecology as introduced by R. Murray Schafer in the 1960s can be a useful figure of thought.
Regarded from a Vietnamese perspective, it is perhaps best defined through its counterpart,
the lo-fi soundscape of its modern cities. The quiet and the notion of clarity of signal – that
is, with less overlap between foreground and background – are typical of pristine sites in a
natural environment (Schafer 1977).1
In the 1980s, Hà Nội was a city of less than half a million inhabitants (Smith and
Scarpaci 2000). With the shift towards a restricted market economy through the reforms
referred to as Đổi Mới (renovation) in 1986, a process of rapid urbanization and industrial
growth started. Today, Hà Nội is nearing a population of eight million, a development
which also has resulted in an explosion of noise pollution, in particular from the increasing
use of motorbikes (Phan et al. 2010). Besides the traffic noise, Vietnamese soundscapes,
both on the countryside as well as in small towns and large cities, are characterized by
the omnipresence of speakers in public places, transmitting governmental information
and propaganda, interwoven with music broadcasted from local radio stations (Thế 2016).
First created as a communication system during the war against the United States, these
radio broadcasts have remained a constant in Vietnamese daily soundscape, contributing
Attentive Listening in Lo-Fi Soundscapes 483
substantially its lo-fi quality (Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016). Arguably, these speakers also
constituted the first audio technology to impact Vietnamese society, while record players
remained rare. Hence, sound art methodologies in Vietnam developed less through
interaction with technology and more from an engagement with the soundscapes through
attentive listening. However, we will also discuss below how audio technologies eventually
changed and diversified these methods, starting only in the early twenty-first century.
A short history of electronic music and

sound art
Sound art has a short history in Vietnam. The country was largely isolated from external
influence up to Đổi Mới. But even after 1986, the flow of information from the outside
world increased only gradually. One of the first artists to engage with electronic music
was the DJ, improviser, and composer Trí Minh. He describes his initial encounter with
electronic music as follows:
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, many Vietnamese guest workers returned home
[…] bringing along LPs released on the state Melodiya label. That is how I first got to hear
electronic music and the disco group Zodiac’s first album Disco Alliance. I was so amazed
with how the songs had no lyrics, since I had been taught that only classical Western music
is instrumental. I found the sounds so engaging I had to listen thousands of times […]. This
very first introduction to electronic music was just instrumental Euro disco.
(Trí, personal communication, 2018)
During the 1990s a number of artists in diaspora visited the country for longer periods,
bringing some of the first international impulses towards new directions in music and other
arts. In 1994, the choreographer Ea Sola invited Nguyễn Xuân Sơn, aka SonX, a traditionally
trained Vietnamese percussionist and composer, to perform in a piece titled Drought and
Rain. With her extensive knowledge of experimental Western music and her roots in
performance art, she not only opened up a window to American experimental music and
European avantgarde but also to a choreographic and musical mode of expression which
encapsulates the sense of loss and the activation of memories, drawn from an engagement
with the sounds of traditional life and nature in Vietnam. As their collaboration continued
through a series of internationally successful productions, SonX developed a compositional
practice which gradually also incorporated electronic media. He describes how he likes to
use everyday sounds from ordinary life, because they are natural and follow no rules
or regulations. In society, and in particular in a country like Vietnam, there are a lot of
constraints. The unintentional sonorities of ordinary life seem to refuse all of these
constraints, denying the rules, existing by necessity, and therein I find their beauty.
(Nguyễn, X., personal communication, 2018)
Here, SonX adds another layer to the discussion above: attentive listening to everyday
sounds can become a method for articulating a politically informed critique through sound
art. In the 1990s, the musical community in Hà Nội was conservative and had no interest
in experimental work. Therefore, SonX turned to a group of visual artists whose interests
also stretched to sound and performance.2 However, the visual arts scene was also stale: the
artist Nguyễn Mạnh Đức describes it as ‘the choking experience of oneself being unable
to transcend the stereotyped and one-dimensional direction of the field’ (Nguyễn, M.,
personal communication, 2018). With the aim of ‘creating a space where concepts and ways
of doing art could be challenged’, Nguyễn Mạnh Đức and his colleague Trần Lương founded
the Nhà Sàn Studio which became the first non-profit experimental art space in Vietnam.
The studio was housed in Nguyễn’s family home, a Mường ethnic minority house on stilts
which was moved from the mountains to a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Hà Nội.
If guest workers returning from the dissolving Soviet Union were the first carriers of
influences from abroad, a more substantial impact was brought to Hà Nội from the composers
Vũ Nhật Tân and Trần Thị Kim Ngọc, through their studies abroad, initially in Cologne,
funded by DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarships. Trần Thị Kim
Ngọc studied composition with Johannes Frisch and improvisation with Paolo Alvarez, while
developing a particular music theatre practice during her years in Europe. Vũ Nhật Tân went
to Cologne in 2000 to study composition with Clarence Barlow and Johannes Frisch. This
constituted his first introduction to experimental electronic music and computer music, and
he describes how his encounter with the Atari ‘changed me so much and opened to me a new
vision of new music and sounds that I can create and compose and perform by the computer
and electronic instruments’ (Vũ, personal communication, 2018). He returned briefly to Hà
Nội in 2002, but continued his education in the United States, where he studied with Chinary
Ung. During his stay in the United States he developed a sound art practice that included the
use of field recordings, thus transforming his original impetus towards the creation of sound
art through attentive listening by introducing audio technology and computing.3
In 2009, Hà Nội saw the launch of two festivals that would host much of the further
development in experimental music and sound art: the annual Hanoi Sound Stuff Festival,
initiated and curated by Trí Minh, and the Hanoi New Music Meeting, which eventually
lay the ground for the Hanoi New Music Festival, organized by Đom Đóm, an independent
centre for experimental music and art, headed by Trần Thị Kim Ngọc, who is also the
curator of the festival. Two years later, the Nhà Sàn Studio was forced to close down
its public activities as a response to a performance which was interpreted as critical of
governmental policies towards China. In 2013, the Nhà Sàn Collective was created, which
since then has been moving between different spaces in Hà Nội.4
Soundwalks, field recording, documentary

and ecological sound art
In 2003, the British Council funded a sound art project initiated by the British artist Robin
Rimbaud, aka Scanner, involving Nguyễn Văn Cường, Trí Minh, Vũ Nhật Tân, and Nguyễn
Mạnh Hùng. Titled Street Cries Symphony, this became the first substantial sound art work
to be created from field recordings in the country. The following year, Kim Ngọc created the
music for Venus in Hanoi, a large-scale dance performance featuring field recordings from
the streets of Hà Nội. As mentioned above, field recording also became a central practice for
Vũ Nhật Tân upon his return from the United States. Just as in the aforementioned pieces,
he developed a particular focus on the multifaceted noises of Hà Nội. In an interview he
describes how every time he goes out, ‘I look around, and if I hear something interesting, I
will follow it and I will go record it’ (Cunico 2015).5 The artistic results of this practice have
been channelled into a series of projects called Hanoise, also involving the sound artist and
composer Nguyễn Nhung, aka Sound Awakener. On the initiative of Trí Minh and with
support from the Goethe Institute, the German sound artist Herbert Henke joined Vũ Nhật
Tân and Trí Minh for a three-month project called Hanoi Soundscapes, presented during
the very first edition of the Hanoi Sound Stuff Festival in 2009 (Henke et al. 2013).
In 2014, Lương Huệ Trinh was invited to participate in Echoes, a geolocative sound
art project curated by Josh Kopecek, using software developed by Mathias Rossignol with
which GPS coordinates can locate each user, enabling a soundwalk design in which the
user can decide which route to take through the city. The project was divided into two
parts, set in Hà Nội and Copenhagen, and was designed as a collaboration between artists
from the two countries. It was proposed that Lương should collaborate with the Danish
artist Hans Sydow. She describes the project as follows:
My idea was to create an experience of a site, which brought the present and a distant or
more recent past together through sound. This also entailed an interaction between sound
distributed over headphones that participants had to wear during the audio tour and the
sounds in the streets. The collaboration with Sydow developed through an exchange of
field recordings and other audio, and through this exchange we created soundwalks for the
Danish and Vietnamese sites combining our materials.
(Lương 2018)
Lương made field recordings to capture the sound of contemporary Hà Nội, but she also
collected recordings from the past such as ‘the voice of a person who conveys policies of
the state, propaganda songs that praise the Party and Hồ Chí Minh played back through
speakers on every street corner, the sound of a tram, and cries of street vendors’ (Lương
2018). In this way ‘the participants could experience a dialogue, a connection between past
and present, between stereo sound heard through headphones and the intrusion of the
urban soundscape of Hà Nội’ (Lương 2018).
While all of the above projects engage with urban soundscapes, also the sounds of life in
the countryside have continued to fascinate composers. In 2013, the director of the Mường
Cultural Space Museum commissioned a piece from Nguyễn Xuân Sơn. Nguyễn describes
how, when he went to the museum to start working on the piece, he
found that the soundscape where the museum is situated was amazing. It was there all the
time but people were just unconscious about it. That was why I came up with the idea of
using only environmental sound, recorded around the museum, and brought inside for it to
be heard. My reward was not that people would remember my composition, but that they
became aware of a beautiful soundscape that they had forgotten to listen to.
(Nguyễn, X. 2018)
The piece, titled Hòa Bình, constitutes one of the few expressions of a classic soundscape
composition practice in Vietnam in the spirit of Murray Schafer, and aims to highlight
the increasingly rarefied hi-fi qualities of this particular sonic environment. SonX
clearly situates his practice closer to the pole of documentation than to composition, a
positioning which also actualizes the issue of representation in soundscape recording.
Marinos Koutsomichalis observes that ‘what a soundscape conveys cannot find its way
into some electroacoustic representation of it, and even if, hypothetically, there were no
technical constraints, the recording medium would fail to preserve the original semantics
and subliminal significances of someone’s encounter with an acoustic environment’
(Koutsomichalis 2018). Hòa Bình constitutes an invitation to the listener to also return
to the site of origin, outside the museum, with a novel awareness. However, despite this
implicit invitation to a different mode of listening to the surrounding landscape, the aim of
the field recording was to create a representation of place through an indoor installation.
A contrasting approach was developed within the ecological sound art project Quê/
Homelands, which engaged the two authors of this chapter and the British composer and
sound artist Matthew Sansom. It was premiered at the Manzi gallery in Hà Nội during the
Hanoi New Music Festival in 2013. Rather than a representation through field recording – as
is a characteristic of Schafer’s World Soundscape Project, the Landscape Quartet, of which
Sansom and Östersjö are members – it develops methods for a more participatory approach
to sound art. This entails the creation of interactive systems, such as the aeolian guitar,
developed by Östersjö. A guitar is stringed with fishing line around trees on a site. When
the strings are brought to tension by the performer, the wind will excite harmonics on
the extended strings. The assemblage of guitar-strings-tree-performer-wind becomes an
interactive system, which allows for a different engagement with the affordances of the site.
Quê/Homelands was set part partly on one of the mountains surrounding the little
village of Ngang Nội and partly in the rice paddies around the village. One of the central
characteristics of both sites was the constant presence of noises from the surrounding
villages. On the mountain, an aeolian lute6 constituted the interactive element at the site,
while in the rice field a đàn tranh (a Vietnamese zither) was hung upside down to be played
by Nguyễn Thanh Thủy in interaction with rice and wind. While the interactive design
involved only the participating artists, performative approaches can propose ways in which
an audience can be further drawn into the sonic event.7
A project in which we explored methods for a more immediate interaction with an
audience through the creation of performative ethnographies, drawn from documentary
work, was carried out by our group The Six Tones.8 This project, titled Arrival Cities:
Hanoi, is a piece of experimental music theatre which weaves documentary and sound
art as individual narratives in a collaborative and performative format. The project started
out in 2014, when the Swedish director Jörgen Dahlqvist, The Six Tones, and composer
Kent Olofsson started making field recordings and doing interviews in Hà Nội and on
the countryside. By engaging with stories of migration from the countryside to Hà Nội,
the project captures the experience of several generations of rural–urban migrant workers
in Hà Nội – such as the emblematic street vendors, who will normally have their homes
and families hours away from the city – and also of the radically shifting soundscape of
a developing country.9 Ironically, while the cries of street vendors are advertised by the
tourist industry, the same migrant workers are hunted by the police for carrying out their
illegal trade. Interviews, traffic noise, propaganda through the speakers, and many other
sources, contributed to the final staged production. Hence, sound art practice is here
brought into a performative context, in between music theatre, documentary film, and
electroacoustic music. Through the performative situation of the staged event the role of
listening has taken on a political direction, as a form of engagement with the Other, and by
engaging with the absolute Other (Derrida 2000) as represented by the migrant.10
The Vietnamese-American film-maker and theorist Trịnh T. Minh-hà’s latest film
Forgetting Vietnam, premiered during Cinema du Reel in Paris in Spring 2016, constitutes
an example of a similar weaving together of sound art, field recording, and documentary.
The making of the film, which started with Trịnh crossing the country by train and bike
in 1995, chronologically encapsulates the entire history of sound art in the country and
constitutes one of the first attempts at capturing the political and social change in Vietnam
through its shifting soundscapes. The material for the film was recorded in several periods,
with the final field recordings being carried out in the Spring of 2015. Given the historical
outline above, the audio recordings made for the film in 1995 – for instance of the train ride
from Hà Nội to Sài Gòn – may constitute the very first artistic approach to field recording
in the country. The music in the film – developed in collaboration with The Six Tones –
engages with the soundscapes of Vietnam in a number of different ways. The following
section is a conversation between the two authors and Trịnh T. Minh-hà, with the aim of
unpacking the methodical considerations which formed the basis of these early sound art
practices.
Forgetting Vietnam: A conversation about

sound art and memory
Stefan Östersjö [SÖ]: How would you describe your engagement with the sounds of cities
in the process of making Forgetting Vietnam?
Trịnh T. Minh-hà [TTM]: Vietnam is very much an agricultural country with at least 80
per cent of its people living in rural areas. So although the three main cities, Hà Nội,
Huế, and Sài Gòn (or Hồ Chí Minh City) serve as one of the referential threads in
Forgetting Vietnam, marking the film’s trajectories across the three main regions, rivers,
and linguistic variations, its soundscapes alter drastically between urban and rural, and
from one location to another.
For me, and perhaps for most musicians attentive to the sound environment,
working with soundscapes, whether in the city or on the countryside, merely requires
an active reception of what is perceived as ‘noises’, and an ear unconstrained by
musical training. So for example, what loses pertinence are the very hierarchies set
up between music and ‘ambient sound’, or between silence and sound. In the context
of film and video, this would also mean a predisposition for a free play between
synchronized, off-sync, and non-sync sound, as well as between musical composition,

improvisation, and indeterminacy. Such a path of the ‘musically unbound’ actually
requires a precise, demanding work of multiplicity.11
Cities have their own sonic imprints. One recognizes their soundscapes the way
one remembers faces. Sometimes this ability comes with attentive listening, but at
other times it catches one by surprise as it surreptitiously arises with memory. To give
just one example, the frequency with which people resort to honking while driving,
the way they beep, blow, blare, hoot, and whistle is quite distinct from city to city. It
is a language of its own. Hà Nội traffic can be crazy and loud, especially in the old
quarter. In their density and frequency as well as in their tone, dynamics, and speed,
horns and bells of cars, scooters, mopeds, cyclos, and bikes play a unique role in
defining the aural identities of cities like Hà Nội, Huế, and Sài Gòn.
In Forgetting Vietnam, you can also hear the differences of the clamour of the streets
in terms of times and temporalities: the same city caught on camera in Hi8 in 1995
and then in HD in 2012 shows dramatic changes, not only visually, in the content of
the images, and technologically, via the analogue and the digital, but also aurally, via
differing sound fabrics that include fragments of popular songs dear to radio media
during certain periods of Vietnam’s history. Viewers are quick in identifying an era
or a period through images, but they are much less attuned to how the sonic and the
musical also designate time; and more specifically, how besides being a powerful
sensorial experience, a film soundtrack is a multi-voice, multi-texture, and multi-text
just as complex, significantly informative, and interpretive as the visual and optical.
In the city, whether one stays in a place or walks through a neighbourhood, if
one remains all ears to the environmental soundscape, one would be struck by the
overwhelming wealth of sounds in coexistence and co-formation. Short fragments
of popular songs played on the radio mingle with animal, human, and mechanical
noises of all sorts. Arising in the city’s sonic fabric are the diversely textured street
vendors’ calls, children’s laughter, dogs’ yapping, and people’s vocal interactions
against a host of local labour sounds. These do not really clash with one another; they
resonate as a multiplicity. In Forgetting Vietnam, there is, for example, a multilevel
conversation unfolding both between the older and more recent soundscapes of the
same city, and between the differing urban–rural, human–nonhuman, high-tech–
low-tech, liquid–solid, and water–land soundscapes.
SÖ: It strikes me as one of the central characteristics of Forgetting Vietnam how it is
as much a cinema for the ears as it is a documentary film. One component in the
work of The Six Tones on collecting materials for the film was driven by the thematic
threads related to water and land in Vietnamese history and mythology. We carried
out fieldwork in the Bắc Ninh region to record Quan Họ songs relating to these
themes. This is a tradition which is very much alive on the countryside north of Hà
Nội, and when work is over for the day, people may gather in a master singer’s house
to join in. The songs heard in the film were all recorded in the house of Nguyễn
Thị Bướm, a female master in her eighties, sometimes singing solo, and sometimes
together with her daughter and granddaughter. In a small village like Ngang Nội,
Quan Họ singing still characterizes the soundscape in the evening, merging with the
sound of cicadas, domestic animals, and occasional motorbikes.
TTM: Yes, I was happy to have Nguyễn Thị Bướm’s Quan Họ in the film; it was a real
gift of yours, and especially of Thanh Thủy and her aunt. Besides being a recognized
cultural heritage, carrying with it the quality of the communal characteristic of a
village’s soundscape, the inclusion of Quan Họ is also personally dear to me. As per
my mother’s and grandmother’s stories, this folk music and its historical ‘antiphonal’
nature used to be such a lively event – a call-and-response mode of singing exchanged
between a pair of female and male singers during the rice planting season, which
remains amazing, both in its improvisations and in its playful love-and-seduction
undertones.
Each city, each neighbourhood has its own multi-sonic assemblage. By giving ear
to it, I usually use music – mainly the music produced by your collective, The Six
Tones – so as to prolong and highlight the sounds of everyday life and, further, to
take them into the realm of an ‘elsewhere within here’. For example, in the sequence
of boats shown at the beginning of the film, it is the various motor sounds of the
boats in motion, the rhythmic creaking of the boats anchored (or of metal moving
with the lapping of water) and later, the cadenced rowing (wood against water) that
motivates accordingly the choice of the musical sections put to use. What is heard
as banal and familiar in an everyday soundscape thus subtly changes before the
spectator realizes it and catches on in the process. Rendered fluid and mobile, the
relation between composed music and the sounds of daily life is worked on, both
so as to ground the viewers’ relation to the subject on screen and to unsettle that
relation, by drawing attention to hearing and to the dimension of the sonic and the
musical in film experience.
In mainstream films, all is geared towards achieving the ‘realism effect’. Music
primarily performs a secondary role of underscoring and enhancing the images, and
filling in what they lack, while sounds are reduced to Foleys or to the reproduction
of everyday sound effects. Thus, to generate a change in conventional listening and
to bring the spectator’s awareness to the aural realm, what is often made to enact a
structural role in my films is acousmatic sound and acousmatic listening (off-screen
sounds or those sounds one hears without seeing the source cause). The ear is not
made to serve the eye, and rather than providing the images with the realism they
lack when shown in silence, the role of the soundtrack is to create a multisensorial,
multifunctional space in which many relations between the seen (and unseen) and
the heard (and unheard) are possible.
SÖ: There are some other emblematic sonic elements, one being the train, recorded
in a journey from Hà Nội to Sài Gòn. How would you describe your work with the
train recording? We also recall the signal processing we employed to transform these
recordings when the scenario shifts in the film.
TTM: The train is a trans*12 character in my work. It was already featured in two previous
films of mine. In The Fourth Dimension (2001), it constitutes one of the two main
characters, the other being the drum; these are the two rhythms that characterize
the way Japanese culture negotiates between the ancient and the modern. In Night
Passage (2004), a film inspired by Kenji Miyazawa’s novel Milky Way Railroad, the
train takes on a protagonist role in the life-and-death journey of two young women.
In Forgetting Vietnam, the train again plays an important role. It is linked to the
way the film unfolds as a conversation between land and water – the two elements
underlying the formation of the term ‘country’ (đất nước) in Vietnamese. Here, the
encounter happens between the ancient as related to the solid earth, and the new
as related to the flow of liquid – the two forces that regulate life and can be traced
back to every beginning and ending, more particularly to the geological formation
of Vietnam’s Mekong and Red River deltas. As first explored in my installation Old
Land New Waters, this non-binary Two generates a third space: that of memory and
forgetfulness in the realms of history, culture, and family.
The sound and rhythm of a train anchors one to the earth, while the sound and
rhythm of the boat invites one to let go and float. In 1995, we mainly circulated by
bicycle, moped, and pedicab, and took the train to travel from North to South via Huế.
When I returned in 2012 we mostly travelled by car and bus, and flew from Hà Nội to
Sài Gòn. But the boat was used extensively in both travels. A large part of Vietnamese
culture is river born and Vietnam is, in its core, a water body. The necessary equilibrium
between water and land therefore plays a fundamental role in the country’s economics
and politics. It was then important to include in the film the means of transportation
that determine the ways one sees or hears the country. This was done by featuring the
sound of the old train I took in 1995, which was clanging away along window views of
the scorched landscape and of the extensive wet rice fields.
It is in this context of sound, rhythm, memory, and forgetfulness that we can
further discuss the link between the recorded and the transformed that you raise in
your question. One of the most exciting processes for me in this film was to work
with The Six Tones’ music. There is a happy encounter or something like a kin spirit
between the way I work in sound-and-image montage and the way your collective
combines the arrière and avant-garde – namely the experimental, electronic, and
concrete in music with the ancient and traditional.
I remember when I first heard you, Stefan, and Henrik Frisk in a performance at
the New Music Center in Berkeley. I was struck and very excited by the processes of
‘metamorphoses’ in your music, and this also came back to memory when I decided
that the sound of the train should go beyond its recorded state. In working with the
interconnected, non-binary between memory and forgetfulness, I first introduced the
recorded sound of the old train so as to invite the audience to listen more intensely to
the train sound in its amplified stabilizing cadences, and then in its transformation –
how it ‘liquefies’ and ‘etherealizes’ with yours and Henrik’s intervention – and further,
to forget so as to remember more intensely how, ultimately, every sound image on
screen is actually an image of memory. To remain creative and to keep the field of
possibilities open, one listens to the becomings of reality’s recorded sounds and
soundscapes. And for this, The Six Tones’ music plays a primary role.
SÖ: The director Jörgen Dahlqvist and composer Kent Olofsson have also collaborated
extensively with The Six Tones. In a recent paper, they analyse the artistic strategies
they have developed within experimental music theatre as a vertical dramaturgy –
by reference to Ruth Finnegan’s claim that writing is multimodal in ways similar to
performance – and they advocate a multilayered conception of music theatre, in which
layers of music, text, scenography, and acting are sometimes independent but also
aligned, both horizontally and vertically, within the dramaturgy of the composition
(Dahlqvist and Olofsson 2017). It seems to me that Forgetting Vietnam develops a
similarly contrapuntal relation between its elements.
TTM: It is very relevant to introduce this dramaturgy of composition in relation to the
multiplicities at work in film. Such a notion of vertical and horizontal dramaturgy
can also apply in terms of substance and surface or what I often call the within, the
between (inter) and the across (trans*) in arts and politics.
What is most questionable is the widespread, reductive tendency in mainstream
productions to fold the space of the verbal over that of the visual or the musical, and
hence to reduce these to the functions of illustrating, explaining, and duplicating.
Rather than being one of subordination and domination, the relation between the
verbal, the musical, and the visual could remain, at the core, one of multiplicity.
Viewers have asked me why in Forgetting Vietnam there is no voice-over as in my
other films. But the ‘voice’ of the film is here already so richly manifested through a
tapestry that weaves together Vietnamese classical music (the đàn tranh as performed
by Nguyễn Thanh Thủy), popular songs, recited poetry, folk music, avant-garde
composition, and everyday sound art, that I prefer to leave the verbal commentary
to the eye, together with the selected translations of the singing and the local people’s
comments and interactions. Since Forgetting Vietnam takes the viewer through
the three regions of Vietnam with a focus on the rich activities on the Red River in
the North, the Perfume River in the centre, and the Mekong River in the South, the
differently accented voices of the people on and off-screen – bus and taxi drivers and
riders, street vendors, boat passengers, performers of traditional, popular and folk
music, for example – are not only used for cultural and political reasons, but are also
indicative for each of the regions through which the viewer is led. Film as music for
the eye and editing as composing are bound to be at once visual, textual, and musical.
Discussion
The sound art practices of pioneering composers such as SonX and Vũ Nhật Tân have
their origins in methods centring around the transformative nature of attentive listening.
When sound art emerged in Vietnam, the access to audio technology was limited, as was
the interaction with artists in other parts of the world. Sound art in Vietnam has a strong
connection to the changing soundscapes of the country, and is reflected in changing modes
of listening among composers and other artists.
The relation between the political and economic reforms and the development of
sound art practices in Vietnam are linked in paradoxical ways. Đổi Mới unleashed a wave
of urbanization and growth which has transformed the soundscapes in ways that have
prompted many artists to respond through new ways of listening and making sound art.
The governmental radio transmission in public places contributed in a similarly double
manner, by constituting an early introduction to audio technologies through their mere
presence and at the same time by becoming an iconic reference to noise pollution. But
technologically driven methods for sound art emerged only in the beginning of the twenty-
first century, introduced through composers who studied abroad.13
Most of the projects discussed in this chapter address the role of memory in one’s
engagement with sound and place through the use of field recording, often, as made clear
by Trịnh in the interview above, using methods that explore the relation between the
recorded and the transformed. Similarly, through the juxtaposition of past and present
in Lương’s soundwalk, or in Vũ’s re-enactment of his childhood experience of listening
to city sounds through the piano, a stronger awareness of sonic memories and of the
political signification of sound in society can be achieved. An engagement with everyday
soundscapes through field recording can thus hold a political dimension as is also expressed
by SonX, who observes how unintentional sonorities of ordinary life seem to refuse the
constraints that characterize daily life in a country like Vietnam (Nguyễn, X. 2018).
In our own practice, the development of participative methods through ecological
sound art, and the creation of a more clearly articulated political dimension through
the performative ethnographies which constitute the basis for Arrival Cities: Hanoi,
suggest a development in sound art practices in Vietnam that can contribute to a further
engagement with the sonic environment, and create new encounters between sound artists
and audiences. Further, we see – in the conversation with Trịnh and with reference to
the method development of Dahlqvist and Olofsson (2017) – the possibility of developing
compositional methods for sound art that combine dramaturgy and musical composition,
as a means for structuring what Trịnh refers to as the ‘work of multiplicity’. Methodologies
for sound art in Vietnam have developed in a particular sonic and political landscape, but
the variety of methods and formats for output, as well as the focus on listening experiences,
suggest that some of these findings may have a bearing on the development of the field
more widely.
Notes
1. Paradoxically, such hi-fi soundscapes, today indeed rarefied in the country, may perhaps
have been experienced even in Hà Nội when Vũ Nhật Tân was a child. He describes how,
in ‘the quiet Hà Nội, you could hear the birds chirping and there were bicycles on the
streets’. His work builds on the experience of the shift from the sounds of Hà Nội from
before the arrival of cars to its contemporary soundscape, which he characterizes as ‘one
of the noisiest cities in the world’ (Cunico 2015).
2. Central figures were the painter Nguyễn Văn Cường; Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng, a visual artist
who also developed a practice of experimental music performance with electric guitar
and analogue pedals; Quách Đông Phương, working with voice, distortion pedals, and
home-made drum kits; and Đào Anh Khánh, who developed a central practice as a
performance artist. This group of artists was joined by Trí Minh and Vũ Nhật Tân in the
early 2000s and created many sound art events at the Nhà Sàn Studio.
3. Vũ Nhật Tân hereby became the first composer to introduce technologically driven
methods for sound art composition in Vietnam.
4. The history of sound art in Vietnam is short, but it has an important function within
alternative cultures in the country. All artists discussed here are active in independent
fields outside of institutions for music, art, and higher education. During the 1990s
and up to 2013, the support from European organizations was substantial and created
opportunities for experimental artistic work and for increasing exchanges with the
outside world. However, this support has been in decline, which for instance can
be seen in the radical cuts of funding for the independent centre Đom Đóm, which
had substantial European funding during its first two years, which is now all gone.
Unfortunately, the Vietnamese authorities do not provide any support, and music
institutions do not teach or engage in experimental arts. Hence, while sound art in
Vietnam is constantly developing, it exists in a fragile situation, in which initiatives of
small independent organizations and individuals sustain the entire field.
5. This citation brings the early sound art methodology of Akio Suzuki to mind, who
developed a practice in the 1960s which he called ‘throwing (nagake) and following
(tadori)’, one of the first examples of a participatory form of sound art. Just as Akio
Suzuki’s practice could also be termed ‘close listening’, Vũ’s field recording practice is a
consistent development from his early listening experiments.
6. The choice of instrument was a three-stringed lute, the đàn đáy, which is exclusively
used in a form of Vietnamese chamber music called Ca Trù. The affordances of a three-
stringed instrument are different to that of the six-stringed aeolian guitar, since it is
possible to obtain proper lute strings at any length. The lute produces less complex
harmonic clusters, but is beautifully distinct when the low extended strings are played as
well as with melodic figurations with the harmonics.
7. For a further discussion of this project, and some audio and video examples, see Östersjö
and Nguyễn 2016.
8. The Six Tones are Nguyễn Thanh Thủy (who plays đàn tranh) and Ngô Trà My (who plays
đàn bầu) from Vietnam, and the Swedish guitarist Stefan Östersjö. Since 2006, The Six
Tones have been working on the amalgamation of art music from Vietnam and Europe,
but the group also functions as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration. Over the
past ten years, The Six Tones have initiated many collaborations with playwrights, film-
makers, and choreographers, and created a series of sound and video installations.
9. For a further discussion of this project see Östersjö and Nguyễn 2016; 2019, 2020.
10. Peggy Phelan refers to Levinas, and the notion of ethics as essentially expressed in the
face-to-face relation to the other in her discussion of The House with the Ocean View, a
piece of performance art by Marina Abramović. Through this piece, Phelan observes how
‘live performance might illuminate the mutual and repeated attempt to grasp, if not fully
apprehend, consciousness as simultaneously intensely personal and immensely vast and
impersonal’ (Phelan 2004: 574).
11. James Gifford’s discussion of Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet strikes a very
similar note to Trịnh’s reference to multiplicity here. Gifford points to how the first
book, Monsieur, mirrors the structure of the entire cycle, by being ‘divided into five
independent sections where authorship of the book is brought into question. It is this
constant remembering of the authorship – or constructed nature of fiction – which most
strongly brings the reader’s mind to the epistemological crisis, and refutes the concept
of the work revealing a single absolute truth. Monsieur is a work of multiplicity’ (Gifford
1999: 7). Gifford further suggests that Durrell’s project aims to replace ‘our sense of an
absolute truth derived from our sensory experiences with a realization of the necessarily
multiplicitous and unrealizable nature of absolute truths’ (4), in a manner very similar
to Trịnh’s claim that there is no such thing as documentary: ‘On the one hand, truth
is produced, induced, and extended according to the regime in power. On the other,
truth lies in between all regimes of truth. To question the image of a historicist account
of documentary as a continuous unfolding does not necessarily mean championing
discontinuity; and to resist meaning does not necessarily lead to its mere denial. Truth,
even when “caught on the run,” does not yield itself either in names or in filmic frames;
and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at either what is said or what is
shown. Truth and meaning: the two are likely to be equated with one another. Yet, what is
put forth as truth is often nothing more than a meaning. And what persists between the
meaning of something and its truth is the interval, a break without which meaning would
be fixed and truth congealed’ (Trịnh 1990: 76).
12. Jack Halberstam proposes that the use of the asterisk ‘modifies the meaning of transitivity
by refusing to situate a transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific
shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds of the
certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any knowing in advance what the meaning of this
or that gender form may be, and perhaps most importantly, it makes trans* people the
authors of their own categorizations’ (Halberstam 2018: 4)
13. Such influence is still strong also in the younger generation. For instance, Lương Huệ
Trinh has just finished her master’s studies with Georg Hajdu in Hamburg, studies that
have brought her sound art practice into an exploration of interactive media.
References
Cunico, K. (2015). ‘Vũ Nhật Tân: The Noisiest City’s Noisiest Musician’. Contented,
27 October. Available online: https://contented.cc/2015/10/vu-nhat-tan-the-noisiest-citys-
noisiest-musician/ (accessed 15 November 2018).
Dahlqvist, J. and Olofsson, K. (2017). ‘Shared Spaces: Artistic Methods for Collaborative
Works’. Studies in Musical Theater 11 (2): 119–129.
Derrida, J. (2000). Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Forgetting Vietnam (2016). [Film] Dir. Trịnh T. M.-H. USA: Moongift Films.
Fuchs, T. (2012). ‘The Phenomenology of Body Memory’. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa,
and C. Müller (eds), Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement, 9–22. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Gifford, J. (1999). ‘Reading Orientalism and the Crisis of Epistemology in the Novels of
Lawrence Durrell’. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature & Culture: A WWWeb Journal 1 (2): 1.
Halberstam, J. (2018). Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Oakland,
CA: University of California.
Henke, R., Trí Minh, and Vũ Nhật Tân (2013). [CD] Hanoi Soundscape. Hanoi: Goethe
Institute.
Koutsomichalis, M. (2018). ‘On Soundscapes, Phonography, and Environmental Sound
Art’. Journal of Sonic Studies 4. Available online: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/
view/268080/268081/0/0 (accessed 9 May 2019).
Nguyễn, T. and S. Östersjö (2020). ‘Performative ethnographies of Migration and Intercultural
Collaboration in Arrival Cities: Hanoi’. Journal of Embodied Research 3 (1), 1 (25:10).
http://doi.org/10.16995/jer.19.
Night Passage (2004). [Film]. Dir. J-P. Bourdier, and Trinh T. M.-H. USA: Moongift Films.
Östersjö, S. and T. Nguyễn (2016). ‘The Sounds of Hanoi and the After-image of the
Homeland’. Journal of Sonic Studies 12. Available online: https://www.researchcatalogue.
net/view/246523/246546/23/0 (accessed 20 May 2019).
Östersjö, S. and T. Nguyễn (2019). ‘Arrival Cities: Hanoi’. In C. Laws, W. Brooks, D. Gorton,
T-T. Nguyễn, S. Östersjö, and J. Wells (eds), Voices, Bodies, Practices, 235–294. Orpheus
Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Phan, H. Y. T., Y. Takashi, S. Tetsumi, and N. Tsuyoshi (2010). ‘Characteristics of Road Traffic
Noise In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’. Applied Acoustics 71 (5): 479–485. https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2009.11.008.
Phelan, P. (2004). ‘Marina Abramovic: Witnessing Shadows’. Theater Journal 56 (4): 569–577.
Picker, J. M. (2003). Victorian Soundscapes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rochester: Destiny Books.
Smith, D. and J. L. Scarpaci (2000). ‘Urbanization in Transitional Societies: An
Overview of Vietnam and Hanoi’. Urban Geography 21 (8): 745–757. https://doi.
org/10.2747/0272-3638.21.8.745.
Thế, K. (2016). ‘Loa phường được phát thanh những nội dung nào?’. Dân Trí, 9 December.
Available online: https://dantri.com.vn/xa-hoi/loa-phuong-duoc-phat-thanh-nhung-noi-
dung-nao-20161209162829359.htm (accessed 15 October 2018).
Trịnh, M.-H. (1990). ‘Documentary Is/Not a Name’. October 52 (Spring): 76–98.
Trịnh, M.-H. (2011). Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary
Event. New York: Routledge.
496
Part III
Geographies, Politics, Histories
498
32
Introduction to Part III:
Listening as Method
Marcel Cobussen
Introduction
Roughly speaking, investigating, collecting, and evaluating a diverse range of sonic
methodologies that this Handbook contains takes two paths. On the one hand, the
attention for sound, sound studies, and/or methods which are based on listening can form,
inform, and transform certain (academic) disciplines and discourses. The invention of
the stethoscope and echography have contributed to the development of medical diagnoses
and treatments (see Eggermont, in this volume); soundwalks and field recordings serve, for
example, anthropological, ethnographic, and biological research (see Biserna; Guillebaud;
Battesti; and Halfwerk, among others, in this volume), influence the theoretical as well
as practical orientation of architects (see Arteaga, in this volume), and contribute to the
mapping of noise pollution in urban spaces (see Brown, and Fiebig and Schulte-Fortkamp,
in this volume); sonification makes it possible to aurally access information stored in (big)
data (see Vickers, in this volume); the (systematic) exploration and deployment of sound
archives may shed a new light on specific historical periods and events (see Hoffmann, in
this volume); etc. In short, in these examples sound has become a methodological tool
through which new information and knowledge can be gathered, organized, disclosed,
and/or presented – information and knowledge at the service of or benefitting these
specific disciplines.
On the other hand, already established (academic) disciplines affect sound studies
and discourses around sound, for example when the methods of the former are put to
use in research strategies of the latter. The use of questionnaires, participant observation,
action research, and working with case studies are tried-and-tested sociological and
anthropological methods that can be applied in sound studies as well (see, for example,
Waldock; and Bild, Huijsman, and Zentschnig, in this volume); experimentation, well
known and often used in scientific research, has also become an established method
in sound art projects (see also Van der Heide; and Teboul, in this volume) and sonic
ethnography (see Thibaud, in this volume); prototyping has entered the domain and
discipline of sound design (see Misdariis and Hug, in this volume); feminist theories and
philosophical discourses affect the way sound studies develops (see Thompson; Di Bona;
and Waltham-Smith, among others, in this volume); etc.
In both options – attention to sounds and sonic information influencing other (academic)
disciplines as well as attention for how methods coming from various research fields enter
sound studies – two basic forces seem to be operative: the first one is listening, the second
one discourse. It will not come as a surprise that all methods and methodologies1 described
in this Handbook in one way or another deal with the issue of listening.2 Rather than
focusing on the intrinsic qualities of sounds themselves, sonic methodologies emphasize
the role of perception.3 Either directly (as in, for example, soundwalks and field recording)
or indirectly (as in using questionnaires or by applying philosophical concepts), listening –
in all its variety: its modes of attention, its intentionalities, its negotiations between activity
and passivity, its balancing between determinacy and indeterminacy, its oscillations or
tensions between the sonorous and the audible (Bonnet 2016) or between the perceiving
senses and the perceived meaning (Nancy 2007: 2), etc. – as a method seems to be the
glue that connects all chapters. However, the same holds for the second force, discourse.
In this context, discourse should not be restricted to language and speech that create
constructs of cohesive and interconnected concepts within which the world receives
meaning and through which reality is formed. Besides and beyond this, discourse should
also be regarded as material events and concrete practices connected to all manner of
historically contingent procedures that exert power in and on a society and its citizens,
thereby producing, organizing, and normalizing specific knowledges and meanings while
disqualifying and excluding the ones that might destabilize or challenge the power of the
dominant discourse. In short, I understand discourse here as an external force – although
it remains to be seen how external it is – acting on sound, soundscapes, sound art, and
sound studies.
What interests me here, and this is based on and informed by all of the chapters collected
in this Handbook, is how listening and discourse can be related to one another: how the
one is affected and inflected by the other. In other words, I do not consider ‘regimes of
listening’4 as a priori subordinate to discourse: modes of listening act on and co-create
discourse as much as discourse influences listening attitudes and the knowledge and
experiences stemming from these listening attitudes. While discourse (the grammatical,
the structural, the semantic, the signifying) confers legitimacy, authority, and direction
on what we hear and how we listen, the sens(e) of sounds is never secured, as the way we
affect and are affected by them also exceeds the cognitive structures of signification that
discourse claims and aims to name and contain (Finn 2009). The one forms the other,
but, simultaneously, both are un-formed, de-formed, trans-formed in and through their
connectivity.
Below, two art works will be presented as starting points, as case studies, as more or
less arbitrary markers to investigate and, simultaneously, to re- and de-territorialize the
relationship between discourse and listening, the one being a movie, Das Leben der Anderen
(The Lives of Others) (2006), the other a novel, FOON (Phon) (2018).
Introduction to Part III 501
Das Leben der Anderen: Part I

As can be read throughout this Handbook, many professions require an acute ear –
from the auscultation of patients by doctors to the designing of utensils and household
appliances, and from conducting ethnographic research in megalopolises to tracing the
various roles of sonic communication by animals. And spying! Das Leben der Anderen,
a German movie from 2006 by the film director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck,
mostly takes place during the heyday of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the former
East Germany, during the 1960s and 1970s. The protagonist, Gerd Wiesler, is a dedicated
citizen of this socialist republic and a captain within the infamous security service Stasi. As
such he is charged with controlling fellow citizens. The plot starts when Wiesler receives
the order to eavesdrop on the internationally recognized and initially pro-communist
playwright Georg Dreyman and his girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland, as their loyalty to the
communist principles is questioned by the Minister of Culture, a cynical man who intends
to enter into a sexual affair with Sieland. Dreyman’s apartment is stuffed with electronic
listening devices, and Wiesler finds himself installed in the attic of the apartment block
with headphones and a tape recorder; the relevant parts of what has been recorded must be
typed up and forwarded to his superiors.
Ear-witness testimonies must become a crucial form of proof: sound leaks into the
attic, affording an acoustic impression of what happens elsewhere. And this auditory
information should thus provide evidence as to whether Dreyman and Sieland are guilty or
innocent.5 Recorded materials should not only tell the truth; they will tell the truth, if only
the truth that pleases the East German authorities. In other words, what is made audible is
not only constituted by the phenomenon that produces it but also by the ears to which it is
addressed (cf. Bonnet 2016: 42). In the end, it is the act of listening that makes the sounds
speak, that will give sounds their meaning. With the French philosopher François Bonnet,
one could state that ‘listening does not depend upon an audibilizing of sound – it produces
this audibilization’ (Bonnet 2016: 136). Hence, listening is not neutral and passive; it is a
method that organizes, composes, modulates, and selects. Aural perception determines
what can and cannot be heard, what should and should not be heard, what is desired
and what is dreaded to be heard (for example manufactured as evidence that forces the
defendant to plead guilty). In that sense listening is never neutral: it is never just connected
to sounds, to the sonorous or the audible, but always already determined by a pretext,
a context, a frame within which it takes place. Listening is teleological; it serves a goal.
Bonnet summarizes this under the denominator ‘discourse’. When listening is subjected to
discourse, it is by definition subjected to ‘mechanisms of control and regulation’ (198). It is
discourse that determines an aim for listening, a reason, thus making it instrumental, for
example for heuristic verification; listening is disciplined, incorporated in (a belief in) the
existence of an order. This is what spying does, this is what Wiesler does, this is what he is
told to do by his superiors: to listen, to listen in to find the truth, better yet, a truth, a truth
that corresponds to the dominant discourse of the East German leaders.
However, another aspect catches the eye – literally. Wiesler’s chiefs only get visual
information: they never listen themselves; they read! Their method to obtain evidence
is not to lend an ear but to rely on reports; they read the notes Wiesler has made on
the basis of what he has heard. The ‘real truth’ is written down. Their attitude seems
to confirm what James Clifford already claimed back in 1986, namely, that Western
culture is grounded in acts of inscription, reading, and interpretation, acts within the
domain of vision and visibility (Clifford 1986: 25). Is cribbing in the end more reliable
than eavesdropping, reading more trustworthy than listening, visual information a
better proof than audible accounts?6 Can listening only be regarded as a useful method
when it is sustained and, ultimately, even replaced by the written word? And is listening
always subordinated to and encapsulated in discourses which make it teleological? These
questions are being raised by this movie but are also pertinent in the novel FOON to
which I now turn.
FOON: Part I
In comparison to Das Leben der Anderen, FOON 7 (2018) starts from the opposite position.
FOON is a book by the Dutch author Marente de Moor, and for over three hundred pages
readers find themselves in the psyche of Nadja, an ex-student and the current spouse of
Lev, an old professor who suffers from dementia. They live in primitive circumstances
in a deserted and remote village in the forests of western Russia, near to their former,
now disestablished, research centre and shelter for orphan bears. Years ago they fled from
the (academic) world of technology and efficiency and the over-organized (Soviet) society
with its obligations, regulations, and standardizations. However, what is real and what is
a product of Nadja’s imagination, the latter partly influenced by her alcohol consumption,
remains vague and uncertain throughout the book. Nadja wallows in a world of shadowy
stories; vague conversations; inner monologues and desires; talkative animals; ogres,
ghosts, and witches; incomplete memories; and half hallucinations; only once in a while
the outside, regular, and real world, seems to seep through, for example in the form of the
delivery of unpaid bills and the visit of a few policemen as well as a Dutch woman who
mixes ethnographic research with New Age sentiments.
Within this context, oscillating between reality and fantasy, between sensory impressions,
memories, and imagination, it becomes clear that, for some time, both unstable Nadja and
senile Lev suffer from hearing odd sounds – ‘the Big Sounds’ they call them.
‘Have you heard anything tonight?’ he asks.
‘The usual alarming sounds.’
‘No, I mean those from heaven.’
‘Ah, those.’
‘The Big Sounds.’
‘Yes, yes.’
(De Moor 2018: 11)8
This is how the Big Sounds are first introduced, as coming from heaven. Nothing to
worry about, so it seems, but it does leave the reader with an uneasy feeling. Invisibility
and evanescence easily lead to insecurity, hesitancy, and uncanniness. And just as Nadja and
Lev cannot predict when the sounds will (re)appear, where they come from exactly, and
what they signify, the reader is also left without any further information or explanation. In
fact, they have to wait until page seventy-three before a first, small corner of the veil is lifted
and the sounds are described in more detail.
It never sounded that loud. The first tone, sluggish and colossal, trails from east to west
through the sky. As if God is moving furniture. Then a silence that, I already know, will
not last long. Something builds to swell into a roar. One register lower this time, a rusty
yowl runs above our heads. The ears don’t hurt, because it is not directed to something in
particular. It is simply everywhere. When it is over, we won’t be able to copy it, not with our
voices and not whistling; we will not even be able to describe it.
(De Moor 2018: 73)
The description only magnifies this sonic mystery, even though listening to sounds becomes
more secure and secured when the source can be detected, named, categorized, and localized.
Here, the sounds at first seem to come from above, but De Moor immediately undermines
this conclusion by claiming that they do not come from one particular direction: they
move from ‘east to west’ and are ‘simply everywhere’. The brief silence doesn’t offer comfort
either: at any moment its deceptive peace can be shattered. And even a mere description
or sonic imitation of the sounds seems impossible: words and the human voice fall silent,
unable to translate these uncommon sonic signs into common language. However, this
uncontrollable network of imminent danger combined with the impossibility to put it into
words didn’t frighten Lev and Nadja initially:
When we heard it for the first time, we leapt up, happily. We thought that someone was
playing on an alphorn, or something alike. Finally a bit of life to the world! However, we
rectified ourselves immediately, as this sound was too huge for human ears. It was not meant
for us. It should be a side effect of something mysterious.
(De Moor 2018: 75)
‘There is often that sense of there being more to what I am hearing,’ Brandon LaBelle
writes in Sonic Agency (2018: 60), and this also seems to apply to Lev and Nadja. Behind
or beyond what they can hear, something inhuman, something unthinkable must hide
itself. But perhaps the reverse is also true: what they hear exceeds their imagination and
transgresses the available discourses that name and frame the sonorous and put it into the
domain of the audible; no discourse can get a grip on the sounds that haunt this couple.9
However, at times, Nadja doesn’t seem to care: ‘The eerie in the world was never enigmatic.
For thousands of years, man lived in a wealth of mysteries, which you could disregard
undissolved. Sometimes they took the shape of a wonder. Long live the enigma!’ (De Moor
2018: 105)
It is here, in these phrases and in Nadja’s simple and acquiescent meditation, that the
fundamental difference between the role of listening in Das Leben der Anderen and FOON
becomes most prominent. Both share the same point of departure, namely that listening
gives access to a world otherwise hidden or veiled; in both cases listening is, one could say,
the method through which world and man encounter each other, determine one another,
create each other’s identities, and give each other significance. But what separates the two
is equally clear: In Das Leben der Anderen listening is a monitoring tool, an instrument
to control and to be controlled, a means to subjugate and repress, a method to hold on
to the dominant discourse, ideology, and politics. Conversely, in FOON listening can be
considered as a tool to come into contact with the enigmatic, the unknown, the uncanny.
Perceiving the Big Sounds makes one drift away from control and mastery: one can
only absorb the sonic atmosphere as it unfolds. Listening becomes disengaged from the
teleological as imposed on it by discourse. Nadja and Lev’s are ears of refusal, hallucinating
or ecstatic ears. Their experience is one of putting the ear out of place, of a coming to
be of a sens(e) that never arrives as such, as if the audible truth is anyhow accessible to
argumentation, exegesis, and analysis, instead of an irreducible and untranslatable excess
or effect of the panphonic power and volatility of the sonorous itself (Finn 2009).
Das Leben der Anderen: Part II

While eavesdropping, while overhearing, the listener is in control. He decides when
to listen, what to listen for, how to assess what he hears, and what to do with the
information gathered. In All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage Peter Szendy speaks about
this position as a providing panacoustic power, explicitly relating it to Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon prison in which a guard can see into each prisoner’s cell at any moment
without being seen by the one who is being watched. However, Szendy also expresses a
concrete reservation with regard to this sonic equivalent: compared to the prison guard,
the position of the eavesdropper is not as sovereign (Szendy 2017: 48). First, he is destined
to lose himself in what Szendy describes as ‘the infinite finitude of the detail’ (74). Second,
he is confronted with an excess: sounds always carry with them more information than
would lead to a single, correct interpretation. And third, he is restricted to
a mere gathering whose horizon and general plan escapes [him]. [His ears] abandon their
task of watchful surveillance at the threshold of a totality whose aim is not given to them,
although it alone would be capable of transfiguring the collected details by retrospectively
illuminating them with meaning.
(Szendy 2017: 109)
This undermining of the sovereignty of the eavesdropper is exactly what happens in Das
Leben der Anderen. At a certain moment, Wiesler’s assistant, who sometimes replaces him
in the attic, picks up on a conversation between Dreyman and Sieland but completely
misinterprets its meaning. Sieland’s confession that she is being blackmailed by the Minister
of Culture in exchange for sex is regarded by him as a first incentive for a new theatre play.
The auditory surveillance of those whom one wishes to master fails. Wiesler’s superiors
receive unsuitable and inferior information; that is, the eavesdropping does not lead to the
desired and anticipated result, namely to have proof that Dreyman commits subversive
actions. The perceptual will to extract something tangible and verified goes awry. Wiesler’s
role as a messenger, an intermediary, as the one who simply has to transmit something
that someone before him has spoken appears to be quite complicated. At first, his own
‘voice’ seemed completely absent in the work he has to do. But now it becomes clear that
his listening is not just doomed to be a mere instrument of a dominant and disciplining
discourse. Through listening, sounds can be de- and re-territorialized, interpreted in
various ways, and thus be projected into another discourse in which they take on other
values, in which they tell other stories: ‘a ruinous reassemblage of the system of signs’,
according to Bonnet (2016: 276). Listening (in) – as a method to gather information, to
acquire knowledge, to find the truth – is not reliable but inevitably destined to fail. And
perhaps this is not even an exception, but the very condition of listening (in). Failure is
an essential risk of these kinds of operations. The possibility of a negativity is a structural
possibility. Listening (in) opens the way for misunderstandings, misinterpretations, the
possibility of hearing something with another intention, to hear something else or in a
different way than how it was said or intended. Listening (in) as a tool to execute power
and to establish and maintain a certain order can simultaneously undermine this power
and subvert this order.10
FOON: Part II
I left my reflection on FOON by stating that an explanation of the occurrence of the Big
Sounds failed to appear and that Nadja was celebrating the mysterious. However, the
search for an explanation is already well under way, seeping through Lev and Nadja’s
ostensibly laborious or even laconic observations. Framing it as an alphorn or as God
moving furniture are already (futile) utterances made in the attempt to get a grip on the
ungraspable; after all, they are (still) scientists, trained to dissect the world or to extract
the secrets of nature.11 Hence, former colleagues are consulted. One claims that these are
sounds coming from the sun; another speaks of radio waves propagating from the ocean;
a third one says that NASA has been testing a new, secret device (De Moor 2018: 291).
Even Lev, though suffering from dementia, immediately tries to find a clarification when
confronted with the unfathomable. His conclusion: they are ultrasonic. However, once he
realizes that this cannot be a real, solid, and decisive explanation, he falls prey to existential
fear and tries to physically and mentally escape from this sonic horror haunting him.
Other clarifications are sought. Scientific theories – from increasing geodynamic
activity and quickly moving magnetic fields to gliding tectonic plates – prevail, but more
esoteric and religious hypotheses are also considered: the biblical End of Days, Time itself,
which doesn’t want to proceed in silence anymore, the background noise of Life (De Moor
2018: 290). Or, is it indeed ‘only’ a product of the imagination? Not everyone hears the
Big Sounds; perceiving them seems only possible for those whose mind’s eye is open in
a specific way, for example the mentally confused or disabled. The desperate quest to
solve this mystery, the uncomfortable feeling of not being in control, the inability to fully
accept the incomprehensible – these reactions show how both the protagonists in FOON
as well as its readers are longing for that which Wiesler and his assistant had to abandon:
an overriding discourse that gives direction, sense, and meaning to their listening
experiences.
Listening between discourse and

dissonance
It is time to recapitulate, time to tie up the loose ends. Why have I chosen to, briefly and
incompletely, describe and reflect on this German movie and Dutch novel in an introduction
meant to present Part III of this Handbook on sonic methodologies? Why did I present these
two stories that seem to take inverse journeys – the one progressing from the imperative to
control to the reality of excess and precarity and the other proceeding from an encounter
with the unknown to a desperate (but futile) search for clarity? The answer might be that I
wished to make clear once again that the one (discourse and control) cannot exist without
the other (excess and unknown), that the one is always already (latently) present within the
other, that the one can never completely exclude and rule out the other, as that which needs
to be excluded and ruled out, that which needs to remain on the outside, is thereby already
incorporated in the inside.
Roland Barthes’s seminal text ‘Listening’ from 1976 illustrates this very well. He
distinguishes between three basic forms of listening. The first one, called indexical
listening, is closely related to hearing as a physiological phenomenon, directed towards the
appropriation of a (sonic) space, that is, to the act of paying attention to whatever might
disturb this space and defending oneself against surprises. Perhaps this is the initial listening
mode of Nadja and Lev when they are confronted with the Big Sounds. But it certainly
also applies to Wiesler, as his listening attitude implies getting used to the ‘normal’ sounds
in Dreyman’s apartment and to be all ears when something extraordinary is detected.
The second mode, called hermeneutical listening, could also be connected to Wiesler’s
eavesdropping activities, as it relates to an attitude of decoding that which is obscure, of
enciphering and deciphering reality. However, as Barthes continues by writing that ‘by
her noises, Nature shudders with meaning’, and ‘to listen is […] to try to find out what is
happening’ (Barthes 1985: 250), this second mode of listening is also applicable to the story
of the Russian couple. The third mode is called psychoanalytic listening and is an unbiased
listening, attentive but not predetermined: ‘The originality of psychoanalytic listening is to
be found in that oscillating movement which links neutrality and commitment, suspension
of orientation and theory […] an attention open to the interspace of body and discourse
and which contracts neither at the impression of the voice nor at the expression of the
discourse’ (254–255). This third listening mode, Barthes continues, involves a risk: ‘It
cannot be constructed under the shelter of a theoretical apparatus’ as it grants access ‘to all
forms of polysemy, of overdetermination, of super-imposition’ leading to a ‘disintegration
of the Law’ because ‘no law is in a position to constrain our listening’ (256–260).
Both Wiesler and the Russian couple as well as the audience of Das Leben der Anderen
and the reader of FOON experience, first of all, that none of these listening modes supplants
the others (as Barthes also makes clear in his essay): listening takes place between the
indexical, the hermeneutical, and the psychoanalytical; it takes place between the sensible
and the intelligible; it takes place between the acoustical and the grammatical – between,
that is, going from one to the other and back again, with the one always already being
affected, infected, and inflected by the other. Second, listening is always inadequate as well
as excessive. Szendy stresses this inadequacy and calls it ‘a dissonant listening’, a phase
‘where overhearing encounters its limit’, where ‘it ends up announcing the deconstruction
or the disenchantment of […] a complete inspection’. What remains, then, is listening’s
‘unresolved duplicity, its fission that is not absorbed in a fusion’ (Szendy 2017: 116).
Whereas Szendy thus underlines listening’s dearth, the philosopher Geraldine Finn puts
more emphasis on the excess, on experiencing the effects of a non-discursive sonority,
that is, on a surplus value generated by sounds that cannot be assimilated by discourse.12
Next to systems of signification that can be mastered and explained by analysis, an in(de)
terminable play with the materials of sound and sense is always already operative, to make
them sound and make sense otherwise (Finn 2005).
This in-between state of listening, this listening in the service of discourse while
simultaneously undermining it, this listening which disciplines, is disciplined, while at the
same time subverting and undermining, of course influences the way in which it can be
presented and defended as a method. If the precarity and indeterminacy inherent in any
regime of listening can ever be considered as productive for a sonic methodology, this
methodology should emerge from flexibility and adaptation rather than from mechanistic
predispositions and fixed procedures. And precarity and indeterminacy will only be
tolerated when methods can evolve in real time, in particular situations, in concrete
contexts. What is interesting about this Part III is that all authors take as their points of
departure concrete case studies to describe, analyse, and reflect on the methods being used
and the role sounds play. So, although the sonic methodologies as such might be described
in general terms (soundwalk, experimentation, action research, etc.), they receive very
specific meanings and various implementations within the case studies described in each
contribution. Thus, the methods and methodologies are emptied of the generic and given
a particularity and singularity, a difference in each repetition.
What thus stands out are the various ways in which the relation between listening and
discourse, the relation between sounds and information or knowledge, the relation between
the audible and the sonorous are played out in this section. In other words – and this
could also be concluded from the above reflections on Das Leben der Anderen and FOON –
listening cannot be confined to a pure function of knowledge production, as it necessarily
oscillates between perceiving sonorous vibrations without any signification and attributing
semantic content to the audible. Moreover, listening implies a being-in-relation: there is a
strong and reciprocal relation between that which sounds and the one who listens, if only
because they share time and place. As such, sonic methods and methodologies can be
simply described as strategies for engagement and exploration, at their best facilitating a
rigorous and responsible perception in an in-between space.
Notes
1. For the difference between method and methodology, see my Introduction to Part II.
2. Here I will not assume a fundamental difference between listening and hearing.
Although slightly criticized in Darla Crispin’s essay (see Part II), I basically follow Anahid
Kassabian’s deconstruction of that opposition. As she writes: ‘By listening, I mean a range
of engagements between and across human bodies and music technologies, whether
those technologies be voices, instruments, sound systems, or iPods and other listening
devices. This wipes out, immediately, the routine distinction between listening and
hearing that one often finds, in which the presumption is that hearing is physiological
and listening is conscious and attentive. I insist, instead, that all listening is importantly
physiological, and that many kinds of listening take place over a wide range of degrees or
kinds of consciousness and attention’ (Kassabian 2013: xxi-xxii). Listening is not always
and only an intentional act, but also happens on a subliminal level: un- or subconsciously,
sounds enter our body – that is, our body is listening, too. It can in fact be considered as a
gigantic membrane.
3. See also the description of a soundscape in the international soundscape standard, the
ISO 12913–1, as ‘an acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood
by a person or people in context’ (my emphasis). Several authors in this Handbook refer
to this standard and its definition of a soundscape.
4. I have introduced this term in another essay: see Cobussen 2020.
5. Whereas Das Leben der Anderen is ‘just’ fiction, albeit based on prevalent East German
practices, a more recent story may remind us of the role ear-witnesses can play in reality.
On 14 February 2013, a famous South African runner, Oscar Pistorius – also known
as Blade Runner as his two legs have been amputated so that he has to run on two
artificial legs – was arrested on suspicion of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
He was found guilty on the basis of the testimonies of ear witnesses who heard the
two quarrelling, followed by several pistol shots. Steenkamp died of three bullets, and
Pistorius has been sent to prison.
6. This reminds me of the incredulity of the disciple Thomas who refused to believe what
the other apostles told him, namely that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to them:
‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of
the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.’ When Jesus appears once
again, Thomas believes, but Jesus answers: ‘Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast
believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed’ (Jn 20.24–29).
7. ‘Foon’ translated into English as phon, is a unit for the perceived loudness of pure tones.
Human sensitivity to sound is variable across the frequency spectrum. For example, the
ear is less sensitive to low and very low frequencies and most sensitive to middle and
mid-high frequencies. The phon takes the perceived loudness of a 1 kilohertz tone as a
reference. For a tone with another frequency the physical intensity is adjusted to result in
the same perceived intensity and thereby the same phon value (see also Wikipedia 2020).
8. All translations of FOON are mine.
9. Bonnet makes a clear distinction between the sonorous and the audible. Whereas the
sonorous refers to the sounds per se, to sound as an emergent and primordial force,
the audible – that what ‘gives itself to be heard’ (Bonnet 2016: 8) – is always already
permeated by meaning and signification. Lev and Nadja seem to experience the Big
Sounds in a space between the sonorous and the audible.
10. It would be possible to understand Darla Crispin’s remark, in this volume, that sound
studies has a contribution to make to the debate around ethics in this context.
11. The human yearning for explanation, logic, consistency, and control also became
apparent during the solving of some mysterious sounds heard at the US Embassy in
Cuba in 2018 and 2019. Employees suffered from headaches and became sick and
lightheaded due to sounds, they believed, that had no clear source. Suspicions developed
that the Cuban secret service was responsible, using a sonic weapon to cause these
inconveniences. Many months later this suspicion turned out to be false: these strange
sounds were actually produced by the mating of an indigenous bug.
12. The German philosopher Gernot Böhme also makes the connection between a sonic
experience and excess. ‘Hearing is being-outside-oneself ’, he writes, as one can be ‘carried
away by sweet melodies, knocked over by thunderclaps, threatened by droning noises,
or wounded by a piercing tone’. And this being-outside-oneself while listening has more
fundamental consequences. It is not simply so that the listening subject meets sounds while
being outside; it becomes ‘shaped, moved, modelled, nicked, cut, lifted, squeezed, widened,
and constricted by those sounds’ (Böhme 2017: 133). Hence, the subject does not precede
its listening experience but only comes into being through and in the act of listening.
References
Barthes, Roland (1985). ‘Listening’. In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music,
Art, and Representation, 245–260. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Böhme, Gernot (2017). Atmospheric Architectures. The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. Trans. Tina
Engels-Schwarzpaul. London: Bloomsbury.
Bonnet, François J. (2016). The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago. Trans. Robin
Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media.
Clifford, James (1986). ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’. In James Clifford and George Marcus
(eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 1–26. Berkeley, CA:
Cobussen, Marcel (2020). ‘Regimes of Listening … or … One Day in the Life of a Music
Philosopher’. In Nanette Nielsen, Jerold Levinson, and Tim McAuley (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Finn, Geraldine (2005). ‘The Truth in Music: The Sound of Différance’. Muzikološki Zbornik
– Musicological Annual 41 (2): 117–146. Available online: https://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/
MuzikoloskiZbornik/article/download/5600/5339 (accessed 6 July 2020).
Finn, Geraldine (2009). ‘Giving Place – Making Space – For Truth – In Music’. Available
online: https://www.twu.ca/verge-conference/conference-archive/verge-conference-2009/
conference-presenters/bios-abstracts-geraldine-finn (accessed 6 July 2020).
Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian (2006). Das Leben der Anderen. Available online: https://
www.bing.com/videos/search?q=film+das+leben+der+anderen&qpvt=film+das+leben+
der+anderen&view=detail&mid=0421FEC96CC1B9740F840421FEC96CC1B97
40F84&&FORM=VRDGAR (accessed 6 July 2020).
Kassabian, Anahid (2013). Ubiquitous Listening. Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity.
LaBelle, Brandon (2018). Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London:
Goldsmiths Press.
Moor, Marente de (2018). FOON. Amsterdam: Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij B.V.
Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007). Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Szendy, Peter (2017). All Ears. The Aesthetics of Espionage. Trans. Roland Végsö. New York:
Wikipedia (2020). ‘Phon’, last updated 30 June 2020. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Phon (accessed 6 July 2020).
33
Auditory Diagramming:
A Research/Design Practice
Alex Arteaga
This chapter presents a detailed and extensive account on an aural research and design1
practice termed ‘auditory diagramming’.2 This practice has been conceived in the last few
years and continues to be developed at the Auditory Architecture Research Unit and in the
framework of different projects, seminars, and workshops.3
This chapter is split into three parts, realized respectively through three different practices
of writing. In the first part, produced through a practice close to academic writing, I describe
the conceptual context in which auditory diagramming is defined. On this basis, I outline
the practice conceptually and specify its function. In the second part, generated by a kind
of instructions-for-use writing practice, I explain how to perform auditory diagramming
step by step. The third part is brought about through a writing style I have been developing
in my latest projects, which I denominate ‘exploratory essay writing’.4 I consider this to
be aesthetic research practices in the medium of written language without any a priori
formal and style-related limitations. It is a practice of slow observation that mobilizes the
inherent epistemic agency of the semantic, syntactic, and morphological aspects of written
language in order to disclose the object of inquiry, in this case two different but intimately
intertwined moments in the process of diagramming: making the diagram and reading the
diagram. I explore these moments initially hypothesizing that the first is enabled by an
aesthetic procedural manner – what I call aesthetic action5 – and the second by a poetic one.
In a closing postscript I briefly explain, performing a practice related to academic writing,
how the practice of auditory diagramming establishes a continuum between researching
and creating an agent for the transformation of an environment: an architectural design.
Conceptual framework and outline

of the practice
Auditory diagramming is a practice conceived of and developed in the framework of
auditory architecture, a new approach to the relationships between aurality and environment.
In this section I briefly outline the basic traits of this approach together with the conceptual
framework in which it has been initiated and continues to be realized.
The concept and practices of auditory architecture mark a double and fundamental turn
with regard to the lines of research initiated by Murray Schaefer and further developed
by, among others, Barry Truax. The first discontinuity between the traditions of acoustic
ecology and auditory architecture is the substitution of sound as focus of inquiry with
aurality as medium of research. In these traditional frameworks sounds are the focus of
awareness. In these contexts, processes of inquiry aim at figuring out how the sounds are
present in a certain environment and how they relate to each other. In short, it is about
sounds. In contrast, the research developed in the framework of auditory architecture is
not focused on sounds but on practices conceived and performed in the aural medium.
Specific practices of hearing and listening actualize the potentialities provided by this
medium within the limits and according to the constraints that it establishes. Aurality is
understood here as a set of conditions of possibility for the performance of practices of
hearing and listening.6 As such the aural is not the focus of research,7 but the medium
in which the research takes place, that is, the field of potential agencies that enables
and constrains the processes of research. The second aspect of the fundamental turn
inaugurated by auditory architecture defines its object of research. Elaborating on the idea
that the focus of attention in the context of acoustic ecology is sound, I posit that the
object of research in these traditions is a part, component or feature of the environment:
its acoustics. In simple terms: it is, mainly and firstly, about how an environment – or
maybe a landscape – sounds. On the contrary, in the framework of auditory architecture,
the object of research is the whole environment or, indeed, the environment as a whole
– as a significant, enveloping, all-over presence, as the immediately surrounding world.8
Auditory architecture, therefore, is environmental research performed in the aural
medium, actualized through specific practices of hearing and listening.
The concept of environment that underpins the development of auditory architecture
and that, in turn, auditory architectural research further develops, has been outlined
in the phenomenology-based enactive approach to cognition.9 The basic idea is that an
environment emerges out of the interaction between living beings – biologically realized
autonomous units – and non-living beings – heteronomous entities. The dynamic unfolding
of the structural coupling between a specific spatio-temporal configuration of the members
of these two classes sets the enabling conditions for an environment to come into being,
namely as the environment for,10 the living being. Furthermore, the environment and the
living being to whom it appears are in a relation of mutual conditioning; or, expressed in
enactivist terms, they co-emerge.
To summarize, the idea is that out of the inherent and inalienable interaction between
living beings and their physicochemical surroundings, selves and environments co-emerge.
Specifying this concept for the case of an auditory architectural researcher who investigates
the environment through diagramming, it means, first, that both researcher and
environment as such – that is, as the very specific researcher and environment they become
through their interactions – are in a relational process of co-constitution. Secondly, that the
practice of diagramming and the immediate result of it – the diagram – are interventions
Auditory Diagramming 513
in and therefore constitute new constraints of their common process of coming into being
in mutual conditioning, that is, of co-emergence. None of the participant entities in this
process exist in isolation or are ultimately completed: they all – researcher, researched, and
means of research – are in a shared process of emergence. Therefore, the research situation,
as well as all its components are understood here as radically dynamic, relational, and
transformative.
The fact that the environment is present for a living being does not necessarily mean that
it represents its environment. Instead, the living being enacts it. According to the enactive
approach, the environment, although it appears in this way, is not given to the living being.
It is not simply out there to be caught. It does not exist in itself, independently of the
actions of the self to whom it appears, waiting to be grasped. Accordingly, perception is not
understood here as the process of taking in an ‘outer reality’ in order to represent it in the
brain or in the mind. Instead, perception is conceived as a network of bodily acts, or to be
more precise, of interactions that co-constitute what appears as real.
Adopting an enactivist position – instead of the realism-representationalism adopted by
the traditions of acoustic ecology – has fundamental consequences for auditory architecture.
These consequences become primarily manifest in the presentation of a new term as an
alternative to soundscape – Klangumwelt – and in the conception and development of
new research practices like auditory diagramming. The German term Klangumwelt11 can
be translated as ‘sound environment’ or, literally, as the surrounding (um-) aural (Klang)
world (Welt). This word is a dense expression of the concepts succinctly presented so
far: it refers to a surrounding, all-over and significant presence, a life-world, experienced
primarily in the aural medium, that is, mainly conditioned in its process of emergence
in and through the practices of hearing and listening. A Klangumwelt, therefore, is not
a given configuration of sounds occurring in a given topology; it is not a soundscape.
This clear definitional difference implies that, whereas a soundscape can be recognized
or apprehended – the performance of the concept of perception as representation of a
reality existing in itself – a Klangumwelt can be co-constituted through perception and
other intentional acts – understood, thus, as an embodied and situated process of active
participation in a system of co-emergence. The fundamental difference between both
concepts also means that whereas a soundscape can be recorded and reproduced – a
technological implementation of the realist-representationalist concept of reality and
perception – a Klangumwelt cannot. Instead, the dynamic structure of a Klangumwelt
can be understood through the performance of certain research practices not based on
representation but on mediation, that is, on the generation and activation of a medium –
like an auditory diagram – that allows the disclosure of the researched environment.
Although auditory architecture participates in the conceptual framework of the
phenomenologically-based enactive approach to cognition, it is not the result of ‘applying
a theory in the practice’. Auditory architecture is not the implementation of a cognitive
theory.12 On the contrary, auditory architecture can be regarded as a further development
of the enactivist way of thinking in the aural medium. Auditory architecture is, therefore,
aural, phenomenological, and enactivist environmental research. As such, auditory
architecture is architectural research. Auditory architecture participates in and further
develops a specific concept of architecture. Auditory architecture is a contribution to the

concept and the practices of architecture as intervention in the emergence of environments
through construction and related practices.13 Architecture is not conceived here as the design
of big-scale objects, generically dissociated from any concrete surroundings; and, clearly,
auditory architecture does not aim at designing how these objects should sound: auditory
architecture is not acoustic design. Through the definition of new practices, auditory
architectural research aims rather to conceive of constructive interventions14 that expand
the possibilities of mutual relationships between subjects and their environments. This
should result in possibilities for those subjects exposed to ‘the agency of these interventions’
to understand themselves and their life-worlds differently, that is, of co-emerging for one
another as significant and intimately intertwined phenomena in alternative, unforeseen
ways. Hence, architecture is conceived here, as a medium that enables the emergence of
radically alternative phenomenal selves and environments.
In order to serve this purpose, the practices developed in the framework of auditory
architecture are, fundamentally, aesthetic practices. They organize and systematize actions
performed in a specific variety of relationships between the one who carries them out
and the environment with which one interacts. I call this mode of interacting aesthetic
conduct and characterize it fundamentally as being based on a spontaneous – meaning not
controlled by will – performance of basic relational skills: perception and emotionality.15
This kind of conduct produces a redistribution of the agencies at work that enable the
inception of a field of shared agencies. In this framework, the practitioner does not control,
define, and lead the situation but participates in a non-hierarchical network of agencies
in which all components that make the emergence of the environment possible take
part actively. Auditory architecture, therefore, is aesthetic research16 and as such aims at
contributing to define and develop an aesthetic architecture, a network of aesthetic practices
that facilitate the realization of constructive and/or construction-related interventions
into the co-emergence of environments and selves, aiming at expanding their respective
actualizations.17
As a practice – that is, as a systematized set of actions – auditory diagramming tends
to specific environments, understanding the environment as a topological restraint of a
18
phenomenological notion of world: ‘not [as] an object whose law of constitution I have
in my possession [but as] the natural milieu and the field of all my thoughts and all my
explicit perceptions’ (Merleau-Ponty 2012: lxxiv). The subject matter of this practice,
therefore, is not an object but one of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of
objects. The non-objectual status of this practice’s subject matter fundamentally constrains
the definition of its function. As the topic of this practice is not an object, its function
cannot be to represent it, to depict it, or to ‘grasp’ it in any way, since only objects can
be represented, depicted, or grasped. An auditory diagram is not a representation of an
intended environment. Instead, it is a medium outside of the regime of representation
that allows the practitioner to participate in the emergence of an environment in a specific
way or, rather, with a particular goal: to understand its dynamic and relational structure.
Furthermore, the singular objects that configure the diagram are neither representations
of things, facts, or states of affairs: they are formulations of phenomena constituted by
diagramming. These singularities, as constitutive components of the diagram, are the

means to an end: to identify the dynamics that relate them to one another. Whereas the
performing auditory diagramming is an investigative intervention in the emergence of a
specific environment, the diagram – the artefact – becomes a medium for the realization of
the practice that produced it and, more fundamentally, a medium for the achievement of
the aimed goal: to understand the environment as environment.
Diagramming aurally: The performance of

the practice
This section delivers a detailed description of the realization of an auditory diagram
preceded by some considerations about its subjective and spatio-temporal structure and
the required technology required to realize it.
In order to diagram aurally, a device endowed with a touch screen, such as a tablet,
is required. Although a large part of the process could be done using other support, the
most fundamental part of the process, that is, the moment of the practice that defines
it as diagramming, requires a technology that enables a fluent, unmediated, and precise
modification, at least of the size and position of the written words. So far, there is no specific
app for diagramming aurally. Therefore, any app that allows one to realize the operations
described in the following lines can be used for this purpose.
Auditory diagramming is originally conceived to be performed by individual
practitioners, obviously without excluding the possibility of sharing results in a group,
of combining individual realizations of diagrams, and working in a team. Diagramming
collectively is possible but in order to overcome the difficulties derived from the individual
character of perception, imagination, and association, the identification of new strategies
would be required. This is one of the necessary further developments of this practice.
Before the practice begins a preliminary exploration of the surroundings of inquiry is
recommended in order to initially define a spatio-temporal structure for the performance.
In relation to time, it is useful to identify intervals in which the environment presents itself
in a ‘normal’ way. To use the criterium of ‘normality’ in a phase previous to the beginning
of the research is, to a certain extent, contradictory: it is not possible to know what the
‘standard state’ is of an environment that we do not yet know. Nevertheless, since we are
acquainted with different types of architectural environments, it is possible to intuitively
differentiate between standard and exceptional, ordinary and extraordinary states. I
recommend diagramming in those moments that we intuitively recognize to be standard,
although an initial identification can be changed. However, a random selection of time
frames is also an option.
These considerations manifest an inherent problematic aspect of this kind of research,
derived from the temporal contingency of environments: they are constantly changing.
My position in this regard is based on the idea that every phenomenon, although being
a temporal entity, tends to stabilization.19 Independently of the kind of intentional act

performed – perception, imagination, association, etc. – the degree of variation of the
resulting intentional objects decreases progressively until it acquires a steady presence.
This can simply be proved by the possibility of being able to recognize them. On this basis,
I recommend a repeated performance of the practice until the researched environment
becomes stable. The same kind of reflection can be done in relation to space, since an
environment is also contingent in this regard. In principle it would not be mistaken to assert
that an environment presents itself differently in each spot or trajectory or, more radically
expressed, that each spot or trajectory enables the emergence of a specific environment.
Nevertheless, based on experience, it is reasonable to affirm that stabilization – maybe it
would be better to talk about continuity – also takes place regarding space, that is, that we
have a sense of being in the same environment across and along a certain extension of a
field. On this basis, I recommend initially defining, again in an intuitive way, a structure
of spots and/or trajectories in and through the surroundings to be inquired according to
vague criteria of interest and difference which can be articulated through the following
questions: what do I consider to be interesting spots and/or trajectories? In which spots/
trajectories do I recognize differences inside the homogeneity that makes a ‘unity’ of the
environment possible?
The practice of auditory diagramming is based on a fundamental phenomenological
distinction between intentional acts and objects – in Edmund Husserl’s terminology,
noema and noesis (see Moran and Cohen 2012: 222–224). The act of perceiving differs from
the perceptions that appear by virtue of this act. On the other hand, there is an obvious
correlation or mutual conditioning between the act of perceiving and the phenomena that
appear by and through perception. The practices of hearing and listening that underpin
auditory diagramming are conceived of as attending to this distinction and correlation
and, furthermore, to the differentiation between intentional acts. Although other practices
can be identified and included in this framework, auditory diagramming is currently
realized on the basis of four aural practices: qualitative, imaginative, and associative
hearing, and analytical listening.20 My distinction between hearing and listening can be
adequately described on the basis of the differentiation made by Jean-Luc Nancy, that
is, understanding hearing as the non-tense, ‘natural’ performance of our aural skills and
listening as its tense, focused mode (see Nancy 2007). Accordingly, hearing is understood
as having a wide focus or, rather, as having no focus: we don’t hear to something, we just
hear – a set of acts that appears as events, as ‘something that simply happens’ – implicitly
reducing the meaning of action as to deliberate action, that is, as action lead by will towards
a goal. By hearing we do not direct our attention to aural phenomena: they simply appear,
without us tending to them or trying to avoid them.21 Hearing, we could say, happens while
we are doing something else or when we are focused on something else other than sound.
This double condition of hearing – the aural connection with the environment as
well as the possibility of performing other actions – allows the definition of qualitative,
imaginative, and associative hearing. During qualitative hearing, the practitioner establishes
a non-tense aural relation with the environment while testing from time to time that this
relation is still there, that is, that the aural presence of the environment continues to be
the prime modality of appearance, and on top of that, trying to identify the qualitative
aspects that emerge. On the background of hearing, the practitioner addresses the question
‘how is it here?’ Qualifications such as ‘boring’, ‘interesting’, ‘disturbing’, or ‘subtle’ might
appear. But also these terms might give rise to the commonly asked question: ‘Is it about
the environment or about myself?’, ‘Are these qualities of the environment or are they
subjective emotions and feelings?’ My position in this regard is to provisionally suspend
the distinction underlying this question – the distinction between ‘my environment’ and
‘myself ’ – in favour of the first, that is, to posit that all these qualitative presences are
emerging qualities that belong to the environment’s emergence. Although this position
is questionable from different perspectives, it allows the practitioner to register a large
number of significant phenomena. This registration takes place by writing down the words
with which, or better as which, these qualities appear on the touch screen.
Imaginative hearing and associative hearing have the same structure as qualitative hearing.
In all three cases, hearing is the background activity on which another, focused action is
performed. In the case of imaginative hearing, the activity obviously is to imagine. While
hearing, the practitioner asks questions like ‘What could happen here and now?’, ‘Who
or what could appear?’, and ‘Who or what couldn’t?’ I have not yet identified an adequate
question to trigger or support the intentional act of associating. I understand association as
the spontaneous, unexpected, and even surprising emergence of a phenomenon different
from the one which is currently perceived but strongly connected to it. To associate is
neither to remember nor to establish a logical connection between a perceptual and a non-
perceptual phenomenon.
Although the order in which these three practices of hearing are performed is not
necessarily fixed, a good way to begin is simply by identifying sounds without making
an effort, without focusing – that is, hearing and not listening – and simply allowing the
aural manifestation of the environment to become present. From there on, qualitative
perception, imagination, and association can be activated interchangeably. In all three
cases, the emerging phenomena should be written down on the touch screen, exactly in
the way they linguistically appear, that is, as words or word clusters22 without any kind of
judgement or correction, and without attending to their distribution on the screen’s surface.
The result is a formless group of words that can be expanded by the results of analytical
listening. I consider the three described practices of hearing to be nuclear for auditory
diagramming and, therefore, analytical listening to be a complementary practice. This
aural practice is based on establishing a tensed aural relationship with the environment,
focusing the attention first on the identification of single aural phenomena – single sounds
and their own features – second, on the discrimination of general features of sounds
(respectively in close, mid, and far range), and third, on the characteristics of all present
sounds as a unit. The phenomena that can be constituted by setting each of these different
foci are listed in Annex 1. Whereas the results of the three practices of hearing can be
decisive in understanding the inner dynamic structure of the inquired environment, and
therefore in having a sense of ‘how it is as a whole’ and ‘how it could or even should be’,23
the phenomena made explicit through analytical listening can contribute to identifying
concrete interventions for transforming some of its aspects.
Nevertheless, none of this would be possible if the phenomena notated on the touch screen
are not modified and organized through diagramming. The practice of diagramming begins,
sensu stricto, after this first phase of notating and consists of a process of in-formation –
of form-giving – of phenomena that allow the environment to emerge in their respective
specificities through their constitution of that environment in this very specific environment.
Although the whole group of phenomena is going to be informed, the attention should be
oriented, firstly, towards each of them and, secondly, to the relationships between a small
number of them. Facing each singular phenomenon, the question refers to their degree of
presence. If the presence of a phenomenon is big, the practitioner should increase the size
of the word that expresses it; if the degree of presence is small, the size should be decreased.
Addressing now the relationship between phenomena, the question is one of the degree of
connection – what I express in German with the word Sinnzusammenhang, which can be
translated as ‘context’ but attending to its composition as ‘a sense of hanging together’. If
two phenomena are connected, they should be displaced close to one another; the weaker
their interconnection, the further the distance between them. Two criteria are fundamental
in order to realize these operations. First, the relationship between the practitioner and the
environment should be perceptual: the environment has to be perceived – I would rather
say sensed – and not inquired through logical operations. The degrees of presence of the
phenomena and the connection between one another should be immediately apparent and
need not be asserted through deduction or induction. These features of the phenomena
and their interrelationships should appear, enabled by the intimate perceptual connection
between practitioner and environment. Second, adequacy, coherence, or correspondence
are the criteria to be employed in order to realize these operations. The diagram does not
represent the environment but constitutes a relational medium between practitioner and
environment. Accordingly, the words on the screen do not represent phenomena, nor
do their size or their relative position to one another represent their degrees of presence
and connection. Instead, these graphic resources – size and distance on a plane – allow
the practitioner to articulate in a coherent way states of affairs perceived as present in the
environment. The size of each word should not be the ‘correct’ one but the adequate – or,
as I formulate in German, the stimmige.24 Accordingly, the size of a word and the distance
to another word should be varied, until they reach the adequate magnitude which can only
be fixed through perceptual interaction with the environment. A third relevant feature
of environmental phenomena, their respective degrees of significance, has not yet been
addressed in the development of the practice. Despite its degree of presence, a phenomenon
can appear in different ways for the whole environment. The procedure for implementing
this parameter graphically is in a phase of consideration and trial. The level of transparency
of a word seems to be a potential solution.
These operations, the notation of new phenomena or the erasure of some of the
notated ones, should be carried on until the whole diagram appears as coherent with the
environment, that is, until the diagram and the environment stimmen, are ‘tuned’. As I
wrote regarding the spatio-temporal structure of the realization of the practice, the number
of changes introduced in the diagram will progressively decrease until it achieves a rather
stable state. This might be the end of the productive phase of the practice, the moment
that is inquired as being aesthetic in the following section. However, it is not the end of the
practice: the diagram must be ‘read’25: the, possibly, poetic moment. Although producing
and reading are intertwined moments along the process of diagramming, once the artefact
is stabilized, reading becomes the pre-eminent action.
Auditory diagramming as an aesthetic/

poetic practice: An exploration
Two moments. Two actions or, better, two ways of acting. Two ways of behaving – of
facing the diagram, of realizing, and of relating to the process of diagramming and to the
diagram – to the artefact. Two ways of understanding it, of performing it, of signifying it,
of activating it – its potentialities, its agencies as a medium and as a practice.
Two practices? Definitely not. Two qualitatively differentiated performances of the same
practice. The performance of a practice as aesthetic practice and as poetic practice. Two
significations of the very same practice – of sense-making, of conditioning the emergence
of sense, of trying to understand the emergence of sense in one of its specifications and in
a particular case: its manifestation as an environment.
Two modes of practising – they are modes of the same practice, intimately related to one
another. In different ways. Time-wise: following each other, alternating, excluding each
other as simultaneous acts. Relating to each other in time as a sequence: first one, then the
other, then, maybe, the first one again. Or, on a larger timescale, as a simple series: first
one, the aesthetic mode – making the diagram – and then the poetic mode – ‘reading’
the diagram or, being more precise according to the specificity of a diagram which is to
participate in the linguistic and iconic logic, reading/perceiving-as-an-image the diagram.
Or, in a more complex relation, while maintaining the sequence, performing one of
the modes as pre-eminent, and shifting – shortly, from time to time – to the other as a
subsidiary mode. Establishing, therefore, an occasional, provisory, and reversible hierarchy
between them. A hierarchy that shows the functional relationship between them or, better,
their mutually complementary functions in relation to the function of diagramming and
the diagram. A hierarchy that shows the necessity of performing this practice, combining
these two modes in order to fulfil the function of diagramming and the diagram: to
understand an environment in its emergence.
On auditory diagramming as an aesthetic practice

To begin with: aesthetics here as aesthesis – as a specific way of understanding through a
certain use of the senses or, better, through a certain way of mobilizing our sensorimotor
skills – our sensorimotor self. More fundamentally: aesthetics as a way of relating to our
surroundings, as a way of interacting with others – with other entities, with other units that
we experience, however they appear, as other: as differentiated from ourselves.
Aesthetics as a mode of participating in the process of sense-making – as a mode

of co-conditioning the emergence of sense – through a specific form of con-duct: of
leading-(ourselves)-with-others.
Aesthetics as a mode of being, actively – unavoidably actively – in touch – in intimate,
fluid, porous touch. As a way of conditioning the touch. As a way of enabling a certain
kind of touch. As a way of disposing, activating, and bringing the enabling conditions into
relation for the emergence of a certain dynamic quality of touch: relying on the performance
of our sensorimotor skills and of our emotionality – of our capacities of being moved, of
acting without the constrains of our will but rather conditioned by other agents, by the
performance of other agencies, of the agencies of others.
Aesthetics, in this case, as acting in a field of agencies shared by the one who is
diagramming and the other units that enable the emergence of the environment to be
investigated, to be understood – as participating in the process of emergence of the
environment with which the diagram will be produced, through acting with other actors,
through performing one’s own agency as a constitutive and therefore inseparable part of a
network of intimately shared agencies. Aesthetic conduct instantiated here as a practice, an
aesthetic practice, which systematizes specifically a mode of acting enabled by dynamically
disposing one’s own basic and not target-oriented skills of communication, of doing
together, of allowing the environment to emerge together, and simultaneously, observing
its emergence through diagramming: producing an artefact that mediates simultaneously
the emergence of the environment and the observation of this process of emergence – the
observation of the environment as emergent.
Diagramming as an aesthetic practice: as a way of intervening in an ongoing process
without disturbing the process in which the practitioner intervenes but rather becoming
part of it – participating through adapting to its dynamics, to the enabling dynamic
conditions for a network of significant enveloping qualities to appear as an environment.
I am somewhere. I might know a name, the convention that designates the spot on
which I am, but not where I am, not the world becoming present and significant – present
as significance – to me being, now, here, where I am. And being here, now, I begin to vary
the way I act. I vary the way I relate to my surroundings – the way I interact. I suspend the
way of acting that allows me to arrive here, to reach the spot I am at now. I stop judging
what I perceive as right or wrong in relation to the goal I am seeking: to arrive here. I
stop moving in relation to these judgements. Or, if I knew the way, if I have been here
already, I stop acting according to my habits, to the embodied processes of signifying
my surroundings as ‘the right way’. With my movements I stop reaffirming the value
that each element of my surroundings acquires in relation to a target – this spot – and a
goal – to arrive here. I suspend the significance of this spot as a target. I empty this spot
of significance as the condition of possibility for this spot to become a network of agents.
I – my will-based self – retreat.
In this sense, I also empty myself or, maybe better, I reconnect with the constitutive
emptiness of myself, with its selflessness, in order to allow other-selves to act, in order to
allow a distribution of agency, in order to conduct (myself) aesthetically. In order to allow
the performance of a network of agencies to enable an environment to emerge here and
now: a network of qualitative significances, of dis-tended qualities, of qualitative presences

not arising out of the tension established by the definition of a target, by acting in order to
achieve a pre-established goal but obeying a complex process of observation: of keeping-
safe what appears before the one who observes.
I begin to diagram. I begin even before I grasp any tool, specifying my conduct again.
Maintaining my aesthetic relation with my surroundings, acting without abandoning this
mode of action – this disposition, this conduct – I set a focus or, more precisely, a double
focus. First, I prioritize those actions that allow me to establish an aural relationship with
my surroundings – those actions that enable the emergence of phenomena that appear
as aural, as heard rather than listened. A disposition in a disposition – a specific set of
actions, by acting aesthetically. I continue to not impose my agency over the agencies of
my surroundings. I simply reorganize the way my organism – my body – acts in this field
of shared agencies. ‘Simply’ because it is enough to activate the agency of the concept
‘hearing’ – to ‘think’ of hearing – in order to set a focus of my awareness on what appears
as heard. It suffices to think ‘and now I hear’ in order to do it, in order to make it possible
for this to ‘happen’.
And in the frame of this specification of my aesthetic conduct, I set a second focus;
or, better, once I have established hearing as my main activity, I displace the focus of my
awareness to the qualities that emerge, enabled and constrained by this very specific set of
conditions: the agencies of my surroundings, the agencies of my-self – maybe rather of my
body, of the organic substrate of my-self – acting aesthetically and privileging the aural –
the agency of my-self-hearing.
Now I take a device endowed with a touch screen, I activate the app that will allow me to
diagram. As I activate this technology, I allow its agency to participate in this field in order
to co-constitute a visual medium and begin to actualize its potentialities through a specific
practice: auditory diagramming.
Acting in an aural specification of my aesthetic conduct, focusing my awareness on the
identification of qualities emerging out of the field of shared agencies I am participating
in, I begin to write down the names with which these qualities appear: new components
of the environment, new presences, new agencies intervening, expanding the sphere of
agency – new actors conditioning the emergence of the environment and allowing me,
simultaneously, incipiently, to understand it – its emergence, it-as-emergence.
My aesthetic conduct allows the words appearing on the screen that I hold in my hands
to unfold – immediately, from the moment they appear – their own agency. They do not
appear to me as the result of me writing them. I do not deny that I am writing them, this
might be clear but it is not significant now. They appear as presences modifying, potentially,
what is happening here and now, conditioning my next actions, my next move in this
common sphere, in the process that we, as actors, share.
My aesthetic conduct does not confer agency to these words but allows their potential
agency to be actualized (agency, as any other feature, is not a constitutive trait of an entity:
it comes to be by virtue of relationships, by virtue of the activating force of touch, of a
specification of an in-betweenness).
I continue acting aesthetically – my sensorimotor and emotional I continues interacting

spontaneously with its surroundings – and I continue hearing – privileging those actions
that enable auditory phenomena to be constituted.
On this basis, I temporarily activate my will in order to introduce a variation in my
connection with the environment – in order to modify the way I am constraining its
emergence, in order to introduce a new dynamic condition. Without altering my basic
aesthetic conduct, without ceasing to hear, I act supplementary in such a way that
enables imaginations to appear, phenomena whose material correlates are not part of
the surroundings I am interacting with and therefore are not possible to be constituted
through perception.
Correspondingly, I shift my awareness in order to identify these new kinds of phenomena
and I write them down. I generate, by writing, new phenomena with a strong and intimate
relation of identity with the phenomena constituted through imagination: I write the
names with which or, better, as which they appear.
And I repeat the same procedure but now substituting imagination with association –
the way of acting that enables former experiences to be spontaneously re-enacted by the
present experience.
A cloud of words in front of me now – between me and my environment. An incipient
relational medium. A bunch of dots relating to a continuous whole, I could say.
No form yet, only an accumulation of potentially form-giving elements.
New surroundings in my surroundings – a new field of agency in a field of agencies. A
set of potentially transformative potential forces.
A prospective correlate, a correspondent, a counterpart – a possible ‘Entsprechung’, a
‘stimmige Entsprechung’: a latent coherent analogon of the emerging environment.
An in-between to be inhabited. A bipolar, asymmetrical focus of awareness: one part
relating to the other, intending the other – the diagram to the environment.
The mobilization of the agencies of the intended environment is now needed again in
order to organize the cloud of words in a way that fulfils its function, that accomplishes
its correspondence. The mobilization of the agencies of the environment is now needed
again in order for the diagram to become a cognitive medium, the field of conditions of
possibility for understanding the structure of the environment – in order to transform the
cloud of names into a diagram, in order to begin to diagram with the cloud of words.
My aesthetic conduct now, again, provides the conditions for these agencies to operate
– the empty but receptive space for these agencies to unfold.
Orienting now the unfolding of my sensorimotor and emotional skills – in intimate
touch with the environment to be disclosed – towards identifying affinities between the
qualities, imaginations, and associations, I displace some words on the touch screen. I
bring those together which appear as ‘belonging together’ and I take those apart which,
although participating to the same environment, establish different polarities.
And now, attending to the level of presence of each phenomenon present on the
environment – and expressed on and through the touchscreen – I modify the size of the
words.
I do that without knowing or, better, not-knowing how – without being able to generate
an explicatory artefact, of formulating a reason or a set of criteria to differentiate or justify
a differentiation – but instead sensing a common sense, a commonality on the level of

sense – a literal ‘Sinnzusammenhang’ – rather than of meaning.
I do that – I can only do that – by acting aesthetically: moving by being moved, acting
in intimate touch and, fundamentally, by virtue of other agencies.
Form appears, incipiently.
What I have in front of me now, is no longer an amorphous cloud of signs but, latently, a
significant constellation of presences surrounding me, enveloping me, allowing my world-
around – my immediate world, my environment here and now – not only to emerge but,
principally, to be understood, to be not only present but intelligible.
The beginning of a poetic moment or, better, the beginning of the primacy of the
poetic – since poetics has been at work already, ‘on the other side’, ‘in the shadows’ of each
aesthetic move.
On auditory diagramming as poetic practice

To begin with: poetics here as poiesis, as open-ended procedures of radical cogeneration: of
bringing about a new phenomenon, a thoroughly new state of affairs, out of its very roots
(the body or bodies involved in its arising and to which the poetically enabled presence will
appear; the practices, or at least the actions of these bodies; the agency of the media in or,
better, with which these practices are performed; the other agents involved, the interacting
agencies of others).
Poetics as a fulfilment of an always ongoing process of sense-making – of emergence
of sense. In the case of the diagram, fundamentally, as a way of ‘reading’ it, of establishing
two sets of relationships intimately intertwined with one another: between the phenomena
collected on the touch screen, and between them and the environment with which they
have been constituted.
Putting a finger on a word – an operatively effective although physically simulated touch
– and displacing it – slightly, carefully, maybe even hesitantly – navigating the uncertainty
of not-knowing – of not having the possibility of relying on the illusory certainty of clearly
defined criteria or, at least, on an explanation but, instead, letting the move be guided by
the coexistence of agencies – of my aesthetically disposed body, of the surroundings in
touch with it – subsumed now in the agency of the emergent coherence between the co-
emergent diagram and environment.
Creating coherent clusters: small, ‘regional’ wholes in the environment as a whole – as
the whole. Actualizing the power of conditioning the emergence of sense with which each
word is potentially endowed through the negotiation of its coherence – of the possibilities
of holding together with other words.
‘Seeing’, I could say, expanding the reductive gesture of affirming that a diagram can be
‘read’, ‘sensing’ maybe better, how the potentiality of new agencies comes to be through the
alteration of the in-betweenness that simultaneously joins and separates the words – the
in-betweenness that regulates the poetic power of each written word, of each phenomenon,
of their poetic agencies: their capacity of enabling the emergence of sense, specified in this
case as environment, as an environment, to appear as ineligible in a disturbing way, in a
way able to simultaneously transform the environment and the one to whom it appears – to
transform, simultaneously, unexpectedly, in a flash, the environment and my/its-self.
Putting now two fingers on a word – a variety of virtual physical touch, preparing the
gesture, the media-specific gesture of modifying the size of a digital object. Altering the
actualization of one word’s agency in relation to [by change] English? sizes and by virtue of
the level of presence of the phenomenon it contributes to make present.
In both cases, sensing the emerging sense – the alterations of the senseful all-over
presence I am trying to understand. Conducting the actions according to the presences of
the modified words, according to the way these modifications intervene in the emergent
whole – in the environment or, better, in my incipient understanding of the environment, in
the environment as my understanding of it. Or, taking now an analytical way of explaining
it, participating simultaneously in two processes of mutually conditioning emergence: the
environment and my understanding (of it).
Sensing, noticing, letting what is happening configure my understanding, or more
radically, letting it become my understanding: my positioning towards the thing or the
event of understanding.
Poetic understanding is the act of letting myself be repositioned towards the object – of
letting the object of understanding acquire a new presence, a new, fuller, broader, more
dense significance for the one who is engaged in the act of understanding.
Two simultaneous, mutually conditioning moves coming to be out of poetic actions:
navigations of a field of shared agencies enabling the emergence of new, transformative,
open trajectories of sense.
Postscript: Notes on the relationship

between research and design through
auditory diagramming
An attentive reader of the book Klangumwelt Ernst-Reuter-Platz commented to me that
he understood the description of the practice or auditory diagramming – described in
the first chapter – as well as the design proposed by the Auditory Architecture Research
Unit for the transformation of this Berlin square – exposed in the last chapter – but he
did not understand or could not retrace how the practice of auditory diagramming leads
to the design, that is, how the design is realized through this practice. This reader could
not see the continuity between the research practice and the realization of an auditory
architectural design. I do not think that he missed the point: by researching and designing
through auditory diagramming there is no continuity between research and design, that
is, no linear development linking what is usually considered to be two different phases of
one process.
Auditory diagramming establishes another relationship between the operations
habitually categorized as either pertaining to research or to design. In this case the relation
between these two terms does not obey the standard sequential link: the process of research
delivers results and they are used as a basis for the realization of a design – design follows
research and, therefore, we can talk about ‘research-based design’.
The performance of auditory diagramming, on the contrary, allows us not only to
understand the environment in its current state but in other possible ones. Probably
due to the intertwinement between perceptual, imaginative, associative, and analytic
procedures, the inquired environment appears in its actuality and in its potentiality. A
sense of how the inquired environment emerges under the present conditions and how
it could appear in a varied field of contingency arise simultaneously. Research – the
systematic process of understanding – and design – the process of defining conditions
for transformation – coexist as interlaced procedures through the practice of auditory
diagramming by virtue of the intimate connection between the agency of the practitioner
and the agency of the environment to be transformed.
Notes
1. Instead of ‘research and design’ I prefer the formulation ‘research/design’ in order
to express the particular relationship between these procedures enabled by auditory
diagramming. For a brief explanation, see the last section of this paper.
2. For the first description of this practice, see Arteaga et al. 2016b: 12–55.
3. The two main research projects in which auditory diagramming has been developed are
‘Auditory Long-term Observation Schlieren’ and ‘Klangumwelt Ernst-Reuter-Platz.’ For a
description of these projects, see Architecture of Embodiment n.d. Most of the seminar
and workshops related to this practice took place in the MA Sound Studies and Sonic
Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (n.d.).
4. My first ‘exploratory essay’ was written in the framework of the research project ‘transient
senses’ and has been included in the book with the same title (Arteaga 2016b). For more
recent exploratory essays, see Arteaga and Langsdorf 2018; and Arteaga, forthcoming.
5. For a first description of this concept, see Arteaga 2017.
6. For the interpretation of aurality as medium I am referring to the so-called
transcendental definition of media developed, among others, by Dieter Mersch. See, for
example, Mersch 2004.
7. In this framework, aurality becomes the object of research when a necessary reflection on
one’s own methodology takes place.
8. The term ‘world’ is understood here as outlined in the phenomenological tradition
especially by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For a comparative description of this concept in
phenomenological context, see Jacobs 2018.
9. For a first definition of the enactive approach to cognition, see Varela et al. 1991. For
further developments, see, for example, Thompson 2007; and Gallagher 2017.
10. See Varela et al. 1991.
11. This term was coined in the first phase of research of the Auditory Architecture Research
Unit realized in Berlin and in the German language. This research platform is hosted
by the Berlin University of the Arts and associated with the MA Sound Studies and
Sonic Arts.
12. I think that the generally unreflectively accepted operation of ‘applying a theory in the
praxis’ does not express adequately the relationship between these two concepts. First,
because I consider ‘theory’ to be a field of practices performed mostly in the medium
of written language and, accordingly, ‘theories’ to be artefacts generated through these
practices; second, because ‘application’ is not a possible operation between practices and/
or the artefacts they generate. Instead, the practices included in both fields – the so-called
‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ – and the artefacts they produced influence one another when they
coexist in hybrid processes, for example, of research.
13. With the formulation ‘related practices’ I mean here all kinds of possible practices
performed within the horizon of architectural construction, that is, connected to the final
possibility – it does not matter how remote or imaginary – of a material realization of
architectural-constructive processes.
14. ‘Constructive interventions’ are those realized through construction and ‘construction-
related practices’.
15. See end note 5.
16. With the term ‘aesthetic research’ I specify the concept of ‘artistic research’ on the one
hand through the concept of the aesthetic I have briefly outlined here, and on the other
hand situating this kind of research beyond the normativity of art as social system. For a
different approach to the differentiation between both terms, see Vilà, forthcoming.
17. I coined the term ‘aesthetic architecture’ in the framework of my research project
‘Architecture of Embodiment’ (n.d.).
18. I use the formulation ‘to tend to’ referring to the phenomenological concept of
‘intentionality’.
19. This term relates to Husserl’s concept of ‘sedimentation’ (see Moran and Cohen 2012:
288–291).
20. In order to avoid misunderstandings on the use of the term ‘practice’ for both auditory
diagramming and qualitative, imaginative, and associative hearing, as well as analytical
listening, and thus affirming that auditory diagramming is based on practices, it would
be possible to consider auditory diagramming as a method, understood as the systematic
connection between practices, considering consequently the procedures of graphic
articulation of the emerging phenomena and practices.
21. Speaking phenomenologically in a strict sense, the actions of hearing are also endowed
with intentionality: they tend or relate to something, they are about something. But this is
a specific form of intentionality that can be identified or at least related to the Husserlian
concept of operative intentionality.
22. Sometimes the expression of a phenomenon does not manifest itself with the required
precision or adequacy as only one word or a word cluster is necessary in order to
formulate it.
23. For some comments on the relationship between these two manifestations of an
environment, see the postscript.
24. The term Stimmung means, among others, ‘tuning’, that is, the adequate relation of
frequencies between two sounds.
25. A diagram, even if it is configured by words, participates in two different epistemic
modes: the ‘own’ of language and the ‘own’ of image. That is why the term ‘reading’ is only
valid in order to designate the interaction with a diagram in sensu lato.
References
Architecture of Embodiment (n.d.). ‘Framework’. Available online: www.architecture-
embodiment.org (accessed 6 July 2020).
Arteaga, A. (2016a). ‘Steps towards an Architecture of Embodiment: Thinking the
Environment Aurally’. In A. Arteaga, G. Green, and B. Hassenstein (eds), Klangumwelt
Ernst-Reuter-Platz: A Project of the Auditory Architecture Research Unit, 12–55. Berlin:
Errant Bodies.
Arteaga, A. (2020). ‘Aesthetic practices of very slow observation as phenomenological
practices: steps to an ecology of cognitive practices’. RUUKKU, (14). https://www.
researchcatalogue.net/view/740194/862241
Arteaga, A. (2016b). Transient Senses. Barcelona: RM.
Arteaga, A. (2017). ‘Estètica corporitzada i situada; Un enfocament enactiu a una noció
cognitiva d’estètica’. Artnodes, (20). http://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i20.3155.
Arteaga, A. (ed.) (forthcoming). Architectures of Embodiment: Disclosing Fields of Intelligibility.
Zurich: Diaphanes.
Arteaga, A. and H. Langsdorf (eds) (2018). Thinking Conditioning through Practice. Ghent: Art
Paper Editions.
Berlin University of the Arts (n.d.). ‘Sound Studies and Sonic Arts (Master of Arts)’. Available
online: www.udk-berlin.de/en/courses/sound-studies-and-sonic-arts-master-of-arts
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Jacobs, H. (2018). ‘Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty on the World of Experience’. In
D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, 650–675. Oxford:
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mersch, D. (2004). ‘Medialität und Undarstellbarkeit. Einleitung in eine “negative”
Medientheorie’. In S. Krämer (ed.), Performativität und Medialität, 75–96. Munich: Fink.
Moran, D. and J. Cohen (2012). The Husserl Dictionary. London: Continuum.
Nancy, J-L. (2007). Listening. New York: Fordham University Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind.
Varela, F. (1991). ‘Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves’. In A. I. Tauber (ed.), Organism
and the Origins of Self, 79–107. Dordrecht: Springer.
Varela, F., E. Thompson, and E. Rosch (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vilà, G. (forthcoming). ‘Aesthetics and Aesthetic Research’. In A. Arteaga (ed.), Architectures of
Embodiment: Disclosing Fields of Intelligibility. Zurich: Diaphanes.
Annex 1
Analytical listening: Foci of attention and correlated phenomena
Focus 1: Single sounds and their own features
- Name
- Parametric properties:
- Loudness
- Time structure: steady or variable, if variable: periodic (patterns) or non-periodic
- Level: range and average
- Pitch
- Sound’s pitch
- Range and average
- Internal distribution of pitch (spectrum)
- Range and average
- Spatial structure: static (indicate position) or in movement (indicate lines or fields of
presence)
Focus 2: General features of sounds (respectively in close, mid-, and far range)
- Differentiability between single sounds
- Identifiability of single sounds
- Identifiability of the acoustic source of single sounds
- Locatability of single sounds
- Diversity
- Diversity of time structures
- Diversity of spatial structures
presence)
Focus 3: Features of all sounds as a unit
- Parametric properties:
- Loudness
- Level: range and average
- Pitch
- Range and average
- Time density
presence)
- Wideness
- Spatial density
- Reverberation/Echo
34
Close Listening: Approaches
to Research on Colonial
Sound Archives
Anette Hoffmann
Colonial knowledge production has left an archival echo. Between the hissing and crackling
of old shellac records and wax cylinders, voices can be heard that speak, announce, musick,
whisper, chant, narrate, sing, and criticize. These recordings were produced by linguists,
musicologists, anthropologists, folklorists, or laypeople, sometimes a century ago, often
in asymmetric situations of knowledge production. Today, most of these recordings are
trapped in archives where they have been received and configured as specimens. Speakers,
who were seen as ‘native informants’, are often irreversibly absented from the archival
catalogues. Textual contents of recorded speech and song rarely surface in the catalogues of
the archives. The collaborative nature of knowledge production is perpetually concealed, and
archives often keep quiet about the colonial, violent context of their making. This figuring
of acoustic collections as archival objects is durable; it has both shaped the recordings
and indelibly watermarked their form and content (Hamilton et al. 2002; Quijano 2007;
Stoler 2009). Yet sound recordings are specific archival documents. They allow interested
listeners to revisit acoustic traces that resonate with the very moment of their making.
While the recorded voice is mediated, what may be heard in a recording often differs from
what can be read in the transcription, or from what appears in the catalogue of the archive.
A striking example of this chasm between what is catalogued and what is audible
appears in the collection of the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch, which was recorded
in the Kalahari in 1908 as part of an attempt to document ‘Bushman languages’. Pöch’s
recordings were published by the Phonogrammarchiv Wien in 2003 (Schüller 2003). The
booklet that comes with the CDs describes recording no. 20 on CD 1 as ‘Speech’, spoken by
Bushmen, recorded in 1908, in a place Pöch called Kxau, in the vicinity of Ghanzi, British
Betchuana Land (now Botswana; Schüller 2003: 36). On this recording, almost drowned
out by crackle and hiss, one can hear the faint voice of a man speaking German with a thick
Austrian accent, first in English, then in Afrikaans:
We bring some wood for fire and then we go to the pit to drink some water, you know...?
|Kxara, waar is die |Kxara?…[|Kxara, where is |Kxara? ]
|Kxara, môre vroeg jy moet mich wakker maak [|Kxara, tomorrow morning you must wake
me up]
Als... uitkomt, ik moet wakker zijn [When … comes, I must be awake]
Is julle bang? [Are you afraid?]
Denkt die |Kxara ik wil die |Kxara fressen? [Does|Kxara think I want to eat him?]1
Filos! Filos, you come!
Filos, did you look after the horse?
...The bush…very far
You look at it that it niet hardloop [so it doesn’t run]
The recording sounds staged, some spoken words are inaudible; it is hard to assess why
Pöch even speaks on this recording. As is very often the case, the documentation is sketchy:
Pöch’s notebooks of the days in July and August 1908 when the recordings were produced
are missing. The printed Protokoll that is supposed to provide information about the
acoustic documentation of so-called ‘Bushman languages’ doesn’t specify the content of
this particular recording, nor did Pöch deliver a transcription. Here, as with other acoustic
collections, it is the usual archival practice to retain the historical categorization, which still
states: ‘Bushmen speaking Bushman speech.’ How and when did the anthropologist become
a Bushman? Did the label of ‘Bushman speech’ induce spontaneous agnosia in listeners in
a European archive?
This example may seem bizarre, yet colonial knowledge production frequently sounds
different from how it reads. Research on the history of particular sound collections often
reveals that these recordings were but one part of a larger collection that was amassed
during a particular project of ‘collecting’ and study. I write ‘collecting’ in inverted commas
here, because voice recordings or musical recordings are often referred to in this way but
were, in fact, never collected. They were produced for archiving. Once the recordings
are listened to, and re-connected to other results of projects of knowledge production,
they appear as inscribed with information that speaks beyond their status as examples of
languages, folklore, and music.2
The recording cited above becomes unheimlich only in connection with Pöch’s aims
for his journey. It is part of his enormous collection, which has been dispersed to at least
five institutions in Vienna. The collection includes hundreds of photographs, ethnographic
objects, life casts, cinematographic film, and a massive quantity of human remains that
Pöch robbed from graves in southern Africa (Rassool and Legassick 2000). With this in
mind, the faint echo of the question ‘Is julle bang?’ (are you afraid?) posed to his assistant
|Kxara, who may have witnessed some of those practices, resounds differently. These and
other recordings allow researchers to revisit the politics of producing acoustic collections,
methods of archiving, cataloguing, and practices of dissemination for an understanding of
the sonic objects’ archival biographies and the ways in which they speak or sound in the
present.3
Close Listening 531
Phonography and the politics of archiving

sound
Once one turns to listening, acoustic collections resound with technological achievements
entangled with the idea that cultural expressions need to be salvaged. Researchers who (said
they) worried about the disappearance of languages, types of music, and oral repertoires
readily exploited opportunities they found in the subjugation of colonized populations
which allowed them to produce specimens and acquire artefacts. This means that the very
politics of colonization, which endangered the survival of groups of people and led to
epistemicides, also made the production of acoustic recordings possible logistically.
The technical precondition for sound recording was the introduction of phonography in
the late nineteenth century, which made acoustic conservation and the archiving of hitherto
ephemeral sound possible for the first time (Brady 1999; Stangl 2000; Sterne 2003). In
Europe and in the United States, phonography was picked up promptly as a means to record
and archive specimens for linguistic studies, as material for comparative musicology, and
in connection to projects of salvage ethnography. The introduction of phonography also
allowed researchers to arrest the flow of music, thus enabling them to dissect and atomize
acoustic musical elements (not merely the written scores) for analysis. Erich Moritz von
Hornbostel, one of the founding figures of German musicology, described this process of
analytic listening in anatomic terms, which speaks to the proximity of analytic listening
to dissection, as Eric Ames (2003) has remarked (Von Hornbostel and Abraham 1904).
Phonography thus played a crucial role in the development of a dissecting, analytic style
of listening in the West, which came to be vital for the impulse to archive sound, and to
establish regimes of listening in the production of knowledge on music and languages. This
historical shift in audible regimes, as one landmark among others, speaks of the plasticity
of practices of listening, which corresponds with research interests but also with a larger
politics of salvaging cultural artefacts and expressions (Sterne 2003; Ochoa Gautier 2014;
Stoever 2016).
The historical sound collections that result from these projects of recording speak of
phonography’s claims to technical objectivity, of epistemic practices, of the politics of
collecting, and of the establishment of disciplines such as musicology and linguistics.
Together with their written documentation (if available), these collections resound with
the asymmetrical power relations at play in and beyond historical situations of recording.
The possibilities of conserving sound on collectible objects, together with the aim of
establishing acoustic collections for research, induced the founding of several phonogram
archives in Europe, the earliest if which were in Vienna (1899), Berlin (1900), and St
Petersburg (1902) (see Lange 2018). Yet historical collections are also held in libraries,
museums, and universities, mainly in Europe and the United States. The Berlin
Phonogramm-Archiv is an example of the implications that imperial politics coupled
with violent epistemic practices have for the constitution of an enormous collection of
acoustic recordings (Simon 2000). Among many other sound carriers, this archive holds
more than 15,000 wax cylinder recordings, which were produced between 1893 and 1954.
About a third of these early recordings were created in African countries; another quarter
originated in Asia (Ziegler 2006: 29).
In the early years of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, its directors regularly visited the
sites and performers of Völkerschauen (ethnic shows) in the region to produce musical
recordings. Susanne Ziegler’s catalogue of the wax cylinder recordings of the Phonogramm-
Archiv in Berlin (2006) lists around thirty collections that were produced with performers
in zoos and at fairs.4 The majority of the archive’s wax cylinder collection was recorded by
researchers, missionaries, and travellers, who were equipped with portable phonographs
and cylinders, and were commissioned to deliver the desired recordings to the archive
upon return.
Especially in colonized countries, the favoured locations and institutions for recording
music and languages included prisons, police stations, and pass offices – where researchers
could easily coerce colonized people into being recorded, examined, photographed, and
sometimes cast in plaster (Luschan 1906; Pöch 1910; Hoffmann 2009). Incarceration
of thousands of foreign men in Germany during the First World War was also seen as
an occasion for recording. The result was an enormous collection of recordings of
languages and music, which was produced by the Königlisch Preußische Phonographische
Kommission (Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission) with prisoners of war in German
camps, between 1915 and 1918 (Lange 2013; Hoffmann 2018a). Phonographic recording,
in contrast to the acquisition of ethnographic objects, did not take songs and stories away
from speakers and singers. Nonetheless, projects of acoustic recording were informed by
an overall coloniality5 of attitude, which informed and justified violent epistemic practices
and routines of racist anthropology (see Berner, Hoffmann, and Lange 2011; Hoffmann and
Mnyaka 2015). These practices have watermarked the recordings and their documentation,
affecting both their form and content indelibly, and cannot be unlinked from them.
The context of production continues to affect the accessibility of recordings as well as the
availability of knowledge on their existence. The geographical distribution of recordings,
which were often produced in colonized countries and then archived in European and US
institutions, mirrors the intended routes of knowledge production. In the present, politics
of access vary immensely: whereas several US institutions are granting free access to their
collections, European phonogram archives, albeit engaging in processes of retribution, are
reluctant to share their collections online.
Digitization and the persistence of colonial

categories
Especially for fragile wax cylinders – which do not allow for frequent playing due to physical
degradation and thus cannot be listened to directly, let alone taken out of the archive for
research – digitization has a significant impact. Digitization has literally mobilized sound
Close Listening 533
recordings: as digital files, recordings can leave the protected and often sequestered
environment of the archive to be sent or taken abroad. This mobilization facilitates
collaborative research, which is a precondition for any analysis of these transcultural
archival objects in the present.
Yet digitization does not automatically remove the barriers that prevent access:
online sound archive portals, when they exist, are often not easily searchable (SPK
Digital 2020b). Many catalogues are only available in the languages of the collectors
and the recordings themselves cannot, or can only partially, be accessed or listened
to online (Humboldt University in Berlin 2020). Nor does digitization automatically
undo racializing categories, correct the misspelling of the speakers’ names, or replace
derogatory names that were given to ethnic groups. In other words, digitization does not
alter the archival order of things or undo epistemic violence. The persistence of historical
categories that arrange recordings either according to ethnic groups or according to
names of collectors, also complicate the search for semantic and performative contents,
or for particular genres of speech and song.
An example is the collection of Hans Lichtenecker, produced mainly in a police station
in German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1931. The digital catalogue of the Stiftung
Preußischer Kuturbesitz has retained much of the information that appeared in the printed
catalogue of 2006. The collection still appears as ‘Lichtenecker Südafrika’, probably because
at the time of the recording the country was under South African mandate. Lichtenecker’s
original specification ‘Hottentot’ as a language and ethnic group of the recordings in
Khoekhoegowap does not appear in Ziegler’s catalogue of 2006. This led to the omission of
a third of the recorded languages of the collection in this publication. In the digital version
some of these recordings are specified as ‘Nama’, yet the names of the speakers do not
appear, and the spelling of places as well as the categorization of recordings is consistent
with Lichtenecker’s erroneous list (see SPK Digital 2020a).
Altogether, the possibility to access recordings as meaningful, performative utterances,
or the attempt to relate such recordings to each other in and across collections – for
instance in identifying people speaking of the situation of knowledge production or of
specific historical events – continues to be complicated. In this way, archival practices add
to the sequestration of sound recordings within the silos of their disciplines (Hamilton and
Leibhammer 2016). Especially in the case of recordings of linguists, musicologists, and
perhaps somewhat less so, anthropologists of the early twentieth century, a change in the
‘terms of engagement’ would need to take place so as to direct the attention of scholars from
outside of these disciplines towards sound archives and their contents.6 A recategorization
could be the first step of a move towards understanding historical sound collections that
stem from projects of colonial knowledge production as inscribed with the histories of
colonial epistemologies, and as potentially carrying significant textual and performative
content. The first methodological step I suggest for the study of these historical sound
archives is thus a ‘refiguring’ (Hamilton et al. 2002), which subsumes these recordings to
the colonial archive at large. This change in the terms of engagement may alter the way
materials in these archives are listened to.
Sound recordings and the colonial archive

So far, the colonial archive is quiet. Subsuming sound collections within the colonial
archive at large is a strategic move in at least two senses: it may facilitate the recuperation
of pertinent, as yet barely known acoustic documents, which adds the specificity
of recorded spoken or sung texts as well as music to the debate around what traces of
colonial histories can be found in the colonial archive. Secondly, listening to historical
voice recordings and music as semantically and performatively meaningful utterances may
allow for a better understanding of the speaking positions of subaltern subjects located
in a situation of colonial knowledge production. In some cases, acoustic collections may
present alternatives to forms of representation in writing or visual depiction, in which the
racialized Other surfaces in specific ways (Hoffmann 2014). The strategic move to explore
acoustic archives may recuperate commentary and critique in recorded speech acts, songs,
stories, and accounts that were recorded and archived, yet not noted as meaningful speech,
text, nor as speaking beyond the circumscribed sphere of the disciplines for which they
were recorded.
I tentatively define the colonial archive at large as an imbrication of the discursive sense
of ‘archive’, which determines what can be said, what is of interest, and what becomes
knowledge (Foucault 1981) together with ‘archives’, as specific collections and institutions.
The colonial archive, in this sense, is based on the paradigms and epistemic constellations
that were operative in exploring, describing, and inventorying subjugated territories,
resources, and people. It is predicated on, shaped by, and thus intrinsically connected
to imperial power relations and agendas (Stoler 2016). Both the archive as a discursive
formation and archives as deposits of sources, collections of documents, and materialized
knowledge, which have been created within and for the colonial project, actively direct the
work of researchers who study colonial history. As the ‘source’ for crafting historiographies,
the colonial archive has seen rigorous critique in recent decades. Who speaks, and who
does not; what is included or excluded; violent forms of representation; the archive’s
productive power to create and organize semantic content; protocols of collecting, storing,
or circulation: all these are topics of debate. Most importantly, the critique of the colonial
archive has moved the debate from the archive as repository of evidence, to the archive
as practice (Stoler 2009). Analysing the colonial archive’s bias shows that the enunciative
positions of colonized people are difficult to retrieve in written documents of the colonial
administration or from historical ethnographies (Spivak 1999; Prakash 2000).
Turns towards photographic archives have shown that different media may have
documented aspects of colonial history that differ from those found in the texts of
administrators, missionaries, and explorers (Edwards 2000). Still, some histories rarely
surface, they seem to be caught in the shadows of imperial imagination. Sound archives
are yet to be included in the theoretical debate on archive.
In recent years, the interest in sound archives has been growing. Yet so far, projects of
recording have been analysed mostly on the basis of their written documentation, and not
much systematic research has been conducted that engages with the acoustic collections
Close Listening 535
as specific sources in their own right (Ames 2003; Scheer 2010). A change in the terms of
engagement requires more than a theoretical re-conceptualization. To sound out acoustic
collections, methods of listening to recordings are needed, which analyse acoustic files
beyond their archival status as specimens. One such method is related to what Rodney
Harrison (2013) has called the ‘reassembling’ of museums as sites of epistemic practices
and histories of amassing objects.
Regarding sound collections, reassembling entails a systematic reconnection of
recordings with available documentation, which may, for instance in the case of notebooks
and diaries, be kept elsewhere. Other objects – for instance travelogues, photographs, and
film – that were produced during the same study or on the same journey can be instructive
for the analysis of the acoustic files. In many cases these connected objects are distributed
to various archives and institutions according to the logic of disciplines, or the politics of
archiving.
In the case of the traces of |Kxara (no surname mentioned) who appears as a speaker on
recordings from the Kalahari, this means that his photographs are found in three different
collections in Vienna, his phonographic recordings are archived in the Phonogrammarchiv
in Vienna, and appear in the publication of 2003, plus a cinematographic film that shows
him is held at the Filmarchiv Austria. Close listening in combination with reassembling
pertinent documents and archival objects can significantly reframe sound recordings, and
may add to the understanding of textual content (Hoffmann 2009, 2011).
What I tentatively call ‘close listening’7 describes the attempt to know by ear, that is, to
grasp as much as possible of the audible features of a recording. This includes attention to
recorded features which do not appear on the label, for instance, the sound of the pitch pipe
(which indicates the speed at which the recording should rotate); the noise of a rotating
cylinder or scratched record (which can deliver clues on how often the record has been
played); the recordist’s announcement (the ‘acoustic tag’); the languages, performative, and
musical genres documented on the recording; the features of the voice of the speaker and
singer, together with accent, pauses, and background noises. Apart from exposing that
what can be heard on a recording may or may not be described or noted in the file’s label
or written documentation, this exercise in listening makes audible that archived sound
files often speak beyond the object status attributed to them by the recordists and in the
archival documentation. Sharp contrasts between the audible and what was registered
in the written documentation often announce the logic of archiving, for instance in the
frequent omission of what I call the ‘acoustic tag’ from the written description of sound
files. By acoustic tag I mean the recordist’s spoken announcement of what is to follow
on the recording. From about 1900 this announcement was requested in manuals for
ethnographic collecting, which included an instruction on ‘collecting with the phonograph’
(Luschan 1896; Ankermann 1914). The voiced tag was added to the recording to secure
the identifiability – especially of recordings in non-European languages – in the case of the
loss of written labels and documentation. In this recorded announcement one hears the
voice of the recordist, his accent, and tone. Local and historical idioms are audible, but also
attitudes, for instance in the case of a German recordist who yelled ‘Achtung!’ and ‘Achtung
Aufnahme’ in a commanding tone into the funnel three times, before the person who was
to be recorded started to speak (Hoffmann 2018b, 2019). A recording labelled, for instance,
as ‘narrative told by XY’ may, in fact, comprise a composition of the sounds of a noisy
technology, an announcement made by a recordist, the narrative of XY, and background
noises of the audience or a train passing by. Listening to everything audible makes clear
that most recordings are composite sound objects that can be heard in different ways.
Close listening also alerts one to the positionality of listening and the status of sound
in a given environment or situation. Modes of hearing and listening are culturally and
historically informed. They precipitate in languages and philosophies, and have histories
and impacts in the present (Baumann 1997; Chernoff 1997). This also means that however
‘closely’ one listens, one cannot escape one’s own position as a listener, which may lead to
insensitivity, or heightened sensitivity, to certain aspects of the audible.
Sound archives keep what has been recorded for specific purposes and interests. Yet
attentive listening may perceive that the rationale of the researchers did not entirely
control what entered the archive. The excess of voice vis-à-vis the spoken or sung words
– in pronunciation, tone, and the ability to communicate non-verbally, often slipped past
censors, or evaded the registration of the archiving process. Thus the performativity,
meaning, and messages of recorded sounds, words, songs, stories, or even example
sentences are not always contained within the rules and practices of recording.
Marked by the archival politics that have produced them in the first instance, recordings
may present a neuralgic nexus in archiving, because they constitute an interface of
different cultural practices of conservation that become articulated – in the double sense
of expressing and joining – by means of recording. What have been archived as examples of
music and languages, often hold elements of repertoires, which can be fragments of record-
keeping such as oral poetry or songs and narratives that are part of a body of historiology.8
This means that the expressiveness of recorded voices and sounds must be listened to with
cognizance of the politics of their production as recordings, yet the rules and practices of
creations may not completely grasp nor direct the performativity, generic properties, and
meanings of spoken, sung, or played recordings, both in respect of their utterance and
reception. The complexity of oral genres, or the inability to understand languages, means
that contents of various repertoires may have entered sound archives unidentified. What
was said was often not understood by those who recorded, contents were outside of the
field of interest in which the archivists operated, or the double meaning or performative
sense of songs escaped the radar of regulation and censorship.
An example from a POW camp

Archived voice recordings often appear incomprehensible. Reassembling and close listening
may help identify genres, and registers of speech or retrieve additional archival material
that adds to the meaning of recordings. A change of the terms of engagement can create the
space for the recorded voice to lay out a track in the network of archives, as the following
example shows. The voice recordings produced with the imprisoned Senegalese soldier
Close Listening 537
Abdulaye Niang, who was recorded in November 1917 in the POW camp Wünsdorf by the
Königlich Preußische Phonographische Kommission is an example for a possible analysis
of an acoustic trace by means of close listening and re-assembling. Eight wax cylinder
recordings were produced with Abdulaye Niang as specimens of the Wolof language. None
of the recordings was translated until 2013. The first person who listened to the spoken and
sung words and was able to understand and interpret them was Serigne Matar Niang (who
happens to have the same family name). He translated Abdulaye Niang’s recordings in Cape
Town in 2013. On two of the recordings, Niang urgently requests not to be deported to
Romania, where many African and Indian prisoners were sent in 1917. The official reason
given for their deportation to Romanian camps was concern about the health of prisoners
from the south, whose mortality rates were alarming. Niang’s request seems to respond to
this reasoning on the recording listed with the file number 1114/2 at the Berlin Lautarchiv:
I am truly worried as where we are right now is freezing and very uncomfortable. We were
on parade this morning and the lieutenant summoned the prisoners and searched our
belongings with the intention of finding money. A guy called Alexandre had 16 francs in his
suitcase is that understood?
Right now, the cold is terrible, and as we are headed for [Romania], we are uncertain
what we will find there. We prefer to remain where we are right now. Irrespective of our
next destination, at least we are familiar with our surroundings and we are coping with the
climate.
May this war end, so that we can return to our parents, resume our duties and treasure
them. This place is freezing; we don’t know this kind of weather, we are also not used to it.
(emphasis in the original)
Abdulaye Niang used the recording situation to petition against deportation. Yet this does
not surface in the personal files that were filled in meticulously for each of the several
hundred prisoners who were recorded by the Kommission. The file provides Niang’s name,
indicates his place of birth, his profession, religious denomination, age, and education. His
repeated, urgent request is listed under the rubric Art der Aufnahme (kind of recording) as
‘Erzählung’ (narrative).
The content of this recorded speech act is not all that is missing. Abdulaye Niang
expressed his request in a specific way, using a particular register of speech in Wolof, one
that has been described as connected to the class of griots (Irvine 1990). This particular
register of speech can also be employed to express a request among speakers of a different
class. In this case it becomes a performative ‘bow’ that seeks to present a plea in a pleasant
and socially acceptable form. In the acoustic recording, this resounds distinctively,
because this register of speech entails particular prosodic features, a characteristic tempo,
expressivity, and vocabulary.
With regard to the specificity of historical sound recordings, this example demonstrates
what can be gained by close listening, that is, listening not only for the purposes of
translation and understanding semantic content, but with an ear for rhetoric form and
genres of speech. The drama of this historical moment in a prison camp unfolds in sound.
In the recording situation the prisoner’s urgent request fell on deaf ears, because the
recordists were focused on recording examples of Wolof, a language which they did not
understand but wanted to ‘collect’ as a specimen. Communication was suspended in the
moment of recording, at least from the side of the recordists. The prisoner apparently was
not aware of this.
Apart from its outstanding expressiveness and historical significance, Abdulaye Niang’s
recorded voice also became the connective tissue in a network of archives in Berlin,
Vienna, and Frankfurt. Niang’s archival echo, the acoustic trace of his presence in the
POW camp Wünsdorf, prompted my search for traces of his presence in Germany and
Romania, which I found in the anthropometric photographs in the publication of a racial
study conducted by Rudolf Pöch and Joseph Weninger (1927), and in the archive of the
Institute of Anthropology of the University of Vienna. With these photographs, Serigne
Matar Niang and I were able to identify him on a group photograph that was taken in
Romania, and is now kept at the Frobenius Institute in Frankfurt. Re-assembling, in this
case, told us that he was indeed deported to the Romanian camp Turnu Magurele.
Not all recorded traces are as dramatic as this example. Others recordings transmit
fragmented echoes of witty responses to the projects of knowledge production. ‘Doesn’t the
book tell the Whities?’ a speaker who was recorded in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in
1908, by the Austrian missionary Franz Mayr, asked.9 The recording resounds with mocking
critique. Abelungwana translates roughly as ‘Whities’: the etymology of the term relates to
dirty white foam on the sea. Apart from clearly disrespecting the missionary, the question
mocks hierarchies of credibility and refers to the limits of written knowledge. The reference
to incwadi – the book – speaks of competing spheres of knowledge production within
different genres, media, and societal groups. The question of ‘what counts as knowledge?’
that the speaker, whose name is archived as ‘Pakati’, so confidently brings up is crucial for
the interpretation of the recordings and for their production (Schüller 2007).
The speaker’s question also shows that what was of little importance at the time of
recording may achieve retrospective significance today (Trouillot 1995: 58). As recorded
echoes, commentary, requests, pleas and critique have survived as acoustically documented,
performative texts in many archives. There is much to sound out.
Notes
1. This is an idiomatic phrase in German, which makes fun of somebody’s fear.
2. For the concept of re-assembling museum collections, see Harris 2013.
3. Most of these recordings are spoken or sung in Naro, a language spoken by about 20,000
people in Namibia and Botswana. For more translations and interpretations around this
collection, see Hoffmann 2020.
4. Examples are ‘Archiv Siam’ (1900); ‘Archiv Samoa’ (1910); ‘Archiv Sudan’ (1909); ‘Archiv
Somalia’ (1910); ‘Archiv Tunesia’ (1904); ‘Archiv India’ (1902) (see Ziegler 2006).
5. On the concept of coloniality, see Quijano 2007; and Garbe 2013; on coloniality and
sound archives, see Hoffmann 2018b.
Close Listening 539
6. The archaeologist Nick Shepherd speaks of ‘terms of engagement’ in his study of the
practices of archaeology in South Africa, in which the contribution of black South
Africans has systematically been elided from publications (Shepherd 2015).
7. The notion of ‘close listening’ as a method to engage with historical recordings first came
up in conversations with Britta Lange, when we taught a seminar on sound archives at
the Humboldt University together in 2012. It was developed further in workshops on
‘knowing by ear’, which I organized at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative
at the University of Cape Town in 2013 and 2014.
8. With historiology I mean orally transmitted interpretations of history.
9. In the transcription in Zulu that Mayr provides this reads as: ‘Incwadi ayibatsheli
abelungwana?’ Abelungwana is a diminutive form of the term abelungu for white people
(singular: umlungu).
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542
35
Sonic Feminisms: Doing Gender in
Neoliberal Times
Marie Thompson
In this chapter I address the growing body of European and American activist projects
seeking to encourage, advocate for, and celebrate women’s participation in sonic and
musical cultures. Through various methods, strategies, and approaches, these projects
have sought to reveal and reconfigure the gendered make-up of industries, practices, and
genres. While some explicitly identify themselves as feminist, others have intentionally or
strategically avoided the term, choosing instead to signal their ambitions via feminized
terminology and aesthetics. Nonetheless, many recent projects centring sound, music, and
gender can be understood in relation to certain strands of feminist thought and action, and
contextualized in relation to broader discussions of feminisms in the plural.
A central point of debate within recent feminist thought has been the relationship
between the ideological and socio-economic formations of neoliberalism and the correlative
transformations of gender relations. As a form of ‘political rationality’, neoliberalism ‘casts
the political and social spheres both as appropriately dominated by market concerns
and as themselves organized by market rationality’ (Brown 2006: 694). Individuals are
approached as self-sustaining and competing economic units in a system that legitimizes
and advocates for ‘the equal right to inequality’ (695). Meanwhile, a wide range of cultural
phenomena – including self-help literature, mainstream television, popular fiction, food
journalism, and music – share and thus work to reproduce the basic presuppositions of
neoliberal thought via the celebration and dissemination of competition, individuality,
and meritocracy as norms (Gilbert 2013). These social, economic, and political shifts
associated with neoliberalism have also had significant implications for the formation and
function of gender. Pertinent for feminists are the assertions of some neoliberal thinkers
that the apparent alleviation of discrimination is conducive to the expansion of economic
norms and values: for the benefit of the market, some manifestations of neoliberalism
have adopted a socially progressive outlook in terms of gender, race, and sexuality.
Consequently, the priorities of anti-discrimination and equal opportunities feminisms,
and some of neoliberalism’s advocates have converged (Watkins 2018). Neoliberalism’s
apparent pursuit of egalitarian goals, however, is limited by its grounding in fundamentally
unequal economic relations. If neoliberal society values competition between individuals,
then this requires that there are winners and losers; and women have frequently been
amongst neoliberalism’s ‘losers’ (Endnotes 2013). Apparent advances in gender equality
have also gone ‘hand-in-hand with soaring socio-economic inequality across most of the
world’ (Watkins 2018: 7, emphasis in the original). Thus, women’s relative gains in terms
of access to education, political representation, and changing social attitudes from the
perspective of society and culture have been accompanied by growing economic pressures
that shape and are shaped by gender relations.
Where certain formations of neoliberalism appear to encourage the overcoming of
previous inequalities via an emphasis on individual empowerment, diversity, and inclusivity,
neoliberal rhetoric and values have often resonated with particular manifestations of
feminism – namely in its liberal, anti-discriminatory, or post-feminist configurations.
Indeed, the explosion of interest in ‘sonic feminisms’ – used here to primarily refer to
activist projects that seek to address the gendered make-up of sound and music production
and consumption and their surrounding discourses – might be considered symptomatic
of feminism’s resurgent ‘popularity’. Feminist scholars such as Clare Hemmings and
Sarah Banet-Weiser have noted the emergence of a media-friendly ‘popular feminism’,
which places emphasis on empowerment, visibility, and success. Popular feminism is
not straightforwardly neoliberal inasmuch as it remains indebted to liberal feminism’s
critiques of gendered exclusions from public and corporate spheres. Like liberal feminism,
popular feminism is often a call to bring more women to the table because they are women
(Banet-Weiser 2018: 13). Nonetheless, popular feminism is also shaped by ‘decades of
neoliberal commodity activism, in which companies have taken up women’s issues […]
within neoliberal brand culture, specific feminist expressions and politics are brandable,
commensurate with market logic’ (13), and often reproduces neoliberalism’s emphasis on
entrepreneurialism, individualism, and meritocratic market values. Consequently, popular
feminism remains consistent with neoliberal political rationality in pursuing parity within
inequality (Watkins 2018).
It is against this social and economic backdrop that contemporary projects aimed at
addressing the inequalities of sound and music cultures take place. As a result, there are
numerous points from which the intersection of neoliberal gender relations, popular
feminism, and sonic feminisms might be traced; for example, the pedagogic investments
in ‘the girl’ as a means of securing auditory futures; the figuration of inclusion and diversity
as ‘good for the market’; the reiteration of entrepreneurialism, empowerment, and self-
development as strategies for achieving ‘success’ within the sound and music industries;
or the conflation of women’s ‘success’ with gender equality or challenges to sexism within
contemporary music cultures. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I focus on two
interrelated methodological components of what might be described as a ‘popular’ sonic
feminism: quantification and amplification. Although it is important to recognize that
these components are not common to sonic feminisms in general – not all sonic feminisms
are ‘popular’ – they nonetheless can be traced within and across a range of sonic feminist
projects.
To discuss quantification and amplification in terms of sonic feminist methods
requires an expanded definition of the latter and its constitutive terms. Quantification and
Sonic Feminisms 545
amplification are ‘sonic’ inasmuch as they are used to reveal and reconfigure listening habits
and formations of sound production. Yet, as will become evident, the seen and the heard
are often folded in on one another; and numerical data and audibility are often conflated.
Consequently, ‘the sonic’ in this context becomes difficult to hold apart from other processes
of mediation. Quantification and amplification are ‘feminist’ inasmuch as they are used
to intervene in and transform gendered hierarchies within the fields of sound and music
production and consumption, and can be situated in relation to the methods, practices,
and limitations of broader feminist formations – in this instance, popular feminism. Of
course, quantification and amplification are by no means exclusively ‘feminist’, inasmuch
as ‘there is no research method that is consistently or specifically feminist’ (Ramazanoğlu
and Holland 2002: 15). Indeed, as will become evident, the extent to which quantification
and amplification operate in alignment with feminist interests is questionable. Finally,
quantification and amplification are discussed in proximity to ‘method’ inasmuch as they
name particular, systemic approaches that produce knowledge about a field (quantification)
and the consequent strategies for changing that field (amplification). They also carry with
them methodological assumptions about how change is evidenced (i.e. through increased
audibility/visibility and numerical balance). However, to understand sonic feminist
deployments of quantification and amplification in terms of method requires the notion
of methodology to be extended beyond its usual academic connotations as pertaining to
scholarly research: many sonic feminist projects have existed on the margins of – if not
outside – academia. Nonetheless, insofar as these projects have sought to generate and
mediate knowledge about gender’s relationship to sonic cultures, they can be understood
as undertaking methodological work. Significant for this chapter, quantification and
amplification also produce and reproduce particular conceptions of gender and gender
inequality, inasmuch as they are necessarily approached as measurable. By situating
quantification and amplification in relation to feminist critiques of popular feminism
(Banet-Weiser 2018; Hemmings 2018), I interrogate the ways in which gender and gender
inequality are configured in some contemporary sonic feminisms as oppositional (i.e. male/
female), singular (i.e. non-intersectional), and generalizable (i.e. held in common across
geopolitical, cultural, and economic differences). In doing so, I also aim to demonstrate the
ways in which feminist critique can function as method, as well as being about method.
This chapter utilizes critique as method insofar as it is a means of asking questions about
relationships between gender, sonic cultures, social life, and knowledge production. It does
so by offering a feminist critique of some ‘popular’ sonic feminist methods, arguing for
the need to remain attentive to the conceptions of gender that these methods – and sonic
methods more generally – reflect, reproduce, and naturalize.
Identifying sonic feminisms

In 2016, the Still Waiting Discussion Group – a student-led collective concerned with
the lack of diversity of London College of Communication’s BA Sound Arts and Design
curriculum – launched the Tumblr ‘S-A-D boyz’. The blog offers a playful critique of the
course’s reading list, which is described as ‘full of pale, male and stales’. Featuring a series of
labelled author images that expand as the user scrolls through, S-A-D boyz visualizes the
curriculum’s gendered and racialized construction: the user is visually bombarded with the
faces of mainly white and mainly male writers and sound artists. S-A-D boyz is indebted
to internet humour and its visual aesthetics: a number of the subjects appear in awkward
or funny poses (economist Jacques Attali looking unimpressed, Soviet film-maker Sergei
Eisenstein posing with a giant phallic cactus), while the Instagram artist Audrey Wollen’s
protest-meme flashes up towards the end of the list. Crossed out images of bare trees,
the desert, a book of John Cage’s music, and the corner of a room are accompanied by
all-caps text: ‘BEWARE MALE ARTISTS MAKING ARTWORK ABOUT EMPTINESS:
NOTHING DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU: GIRLS OWN THE VOID: BACK OFF
FUCKERS!!!!!’
Although addressing different contexts, the use of internet humour and aesthetics to
highlight the gendered make-up of sonic cultures connects S-A-D boyz to another Tumblr
site, ‘Very Male Line-ups’. Active during 2015 – a year prior to S-A-D boyz – the blog targets
male-dominated dance music events, ‘highlighting all or mostly male club/gig/festival line-
ups and helping bromoters do better’. The blog features male-dominated events line-ups,
accompanied by a ‘thumbs up’ image of Rihanna and a congratulatory tagline.
S-A-D boyz and Very Male Line-ups are manifestations of the contemporary expansion
of activity around the gendered formations of sound and music cultures. In recent years,
there have been numerous discussion panels, festivals, exhibitions, symposia, publications,
websites, music compilations, and workshops that have sought to draw attention to
women’s roles within the histories of music and sound art; to interrogate the barriers that
have and continue to prevent their inclusion; and to encourage and celebrate women’s
creative activities. While there is a rich lineage of feminist scholarship and practice that has
sought to address these issues (for example, Oliveros 1970; McClary 1991; Rodgers 2010),
the surge of interest in the intersections of gender and sonic practice suggest that they are
being considered with a reinvigorated sense of urgency.
Many of these recent projects have centred on women’s participation in the music
industry and related professional fields. In alignment with liberal feminist values, industry-
oriented projects often focus upon ‘empowering’ individuals in their pursuit of equality
and institutional reform. By facilitating their professionalization, these projects aim to
enable women and girls to enter into the music and audio industries, thus resulting in
a diversification of its workforce. PRS Foundation’s Keychange initiative, for example,
which ‘empowers women to transform the future of music and encourages festivals to
achieve a 50:50 gender balance by 2022’ aims to ‘accelerate change and create a better,
more inclusive music industry for present and future generations’ (PRS Foundation 2018).1
The US non-profit organization SoundGirls, meanwhile, aims ‘to inspire and empower the
next generation of women in audio’, providing ‘supportive community for women in audio
and music production’ and ‘the tools, knowledge and support to further their careers’
(soundgirls.org 2018). Founded in 2013 by live sound engineers Karrie Keyes and Michelle
Sabolchick Pettiano, the organization provides a range of resources for prospective and
Sonic Feminisms 547
current women workers, as well as for those wanting to support women in the audio
industries. These include guidelines for writing about women in sound, feature profiles
on women audio workers, and advice for freelancers on tackling sexual harassment in the
workplace.
In contrast to industry-oriented initiatives, some sonic feminisms centre on building a
space of one’s own – be it discussion-based, educational, or performance-based – that has
different rules, structures, and values to dominant musical cultures. Such projects typically
involve a ‘do-it-ourselves’ ethos, drawing inspiration from the feminist art-making and
activism of Riot Grrrl. The Ladyz in Noyz project, for instance, has sought to emphasize
non-hierarchy, cooperation, and resource sharing (by, for instance, lending equipment to
one another). Similarly, the long-standing feminist media project Pink Noises is described
as seeking to encourage critical consciousness through exploratory uses of sound and
audio technologies. Like Ladyz in Noyz, it centres community-building and peer support,
specifically through an online platform, and aims to make information on sound and
music production more accessible.
Historical and archival projects have also been undertaken as a means of rethinking
patrilineal histories of sonic practice (Rodgers 2010). The Her Noise archive, for example,
is a physical and virtual resource of collected materials investigating music and sound
histories in relation to gender. Initially forming part of the Her Noise exhibition in South
London Gallery and curated by Lina Džuverović, Anne Hilde Neset, Irene Revell, and
Emma Hedditch, the archive now exists within the University of Arts, London Archives,
and Special Collections at the London College of Communication. However, although
archival work has been a feminist strategy of building cultural and political alliances across
different generations, curator Anne Hilde Neset notes that ‘Her Noise wasn’t a result of
focused feminist strategy, it “just happened” in the end, it sprang out of the hundreds of
interviews and conversations we had conducted over four years and a lifetime’s obsession’
(Neset 2007). Lina Džuverović has also reflected on the project’s complex relationship with
feminism. Although she notes the feminist resonances of the project’s curatorial method,
Džuverović suggests that the project was originally thought of as ‘postfeminist, believing
that by curating an exhibition of sound-based work by women, yet not articulating it as
a feminist project, we were going beyond feminism, going one step farther, thus avoiding
the alienation from the visual arts establishment that an outwardly feminist project, at
that moment, would have brought about’ (Džuverović 2016: 90). For Džuverović, the
simultaneous ‘identifying yet not identifying’ with feminism and the ambiguity of Her
Noise’s politics was a product of the moment in which it emerged: ‘At the height of the
backlash against second wave feminism’ (90). Consequently, the feminist voice of the
project was silenced: ‘We, the Her Noise curators, had been brought up not just on a diet of
feminist music, literature, and art but also with a profound belief in equality and in finding
ways to live feminism. Yet in a post–Spice Girls world of the early 2000s, somehow the term
did not roll off our tongues easily’ (91, emphasis in the original).
In her remarks, Džuverović highlights the relationship between sonic feminisms and
their social milieu: feminism is both implicated in the Her Noise project and its methods
but disavowed due to the affective and semantic resonances of the term at the time.
Angela McRobbie, from whom Džuverović draws, identifies how in the social and cultural
landscape of the early 2000s
elements of feminism have been taken into account, and have been absolutely incorporated
into political and institutional life. Drawing on a vocabulary that includes words like
‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’, these elements are then converted into an individualistic
discourse as they are deployed in this new guise, particularly in media and popular culture,
but also by agencies of the state, as a kind of substitute for feminism.
(McRobbie 2009: 1)
The emergence of ‘popular feminism’ since the early 2000s, however, means that
feminism’s resonances have changed since the initial formation of the Her Noise project.
Clare Hemmings notes how the term feminism has shed its negative connotations within
popular discourse, often becoming a ‘universally desirable’ signifier of the post-colonial
modern. Hemmings considers the conditions under which this mainstreaming of feminism
has taken place, suggesting that ‘feminism can only be framed as desirable when it is
untethered from its association with both masculinity and intersectionality, and sutured
instead to femininity and singular understandings of women’s oppression’ (Hemmings
2018: 964). This ‘popular’ and ‘universal’ feminism maintains and reifies heteronormative
oppositions between men and women, ‘all the while appearing to challenge the limits
such binarism represents’ (973). The gender binary upon which popular feminism relies
helps to naturalize the socio-economic relations that are ‘enduring condition of gendered
discourse. The desire to include women as full and equal participants in the public sphere
(or to present them as already such participants) is necessarily contradicted by the creation
of conditions that prevent them from being able to participate’ (973, emphasis in the
original). It is these enduring conditions that popular feminism – with its emphasis on
empowerment, visibility, and ‘success’ – struggles to address. Banet-Weiser offers a similar
thesis to Hemmings, arguing that
popular feminism exists along a continuum, where spectacular, media-friendly expressions
such as celebrity feminism and corporate feminism achieve more visibility; and expressions
that critique patriarchal structures and systems of racism and violence are more obscured.
As a result, ‘seeing and hearing safely affirmative feminism […] often eclipses a feminist
critique of structure, as well as obscures the labor involved in producing oneself according
to the parameters of popular feminism.
(Banet-Weiser 2018: 4)
In light of McRobbie’s, Hemmings’s and Banet-Weiser’s analyses, it becomes pertinent

to consider the ways in which sonic feminisms and their methods bear the traces of
feminism’s institutionalization, popularization, and universalization; and the extent to
which they participate in the reproduction and reification of singular and oppositional
notions of gender.
I now turn to consider the relationship between sonic feminisms, popular feminism,
and neoliberal political rationality with reference to two complementary methodological
aspects of what might be recognized as ‘popular’ sonic feminisms: quantification and
amplification. Where quantification refers to a method of understanding, producing
Sonic Feminisms 549
knowledge about, and representing the gendered make-up of sonic fields, amplification
is understood as a means of creating change. However, the former is typically implicated
in the latter and vice versa. Amplification as a strategy usually rests upon methods of
quantification; and methods of quantification often provide the rationale for strategies of
amplification. I contest that both quantification and amplification are shaped by popular
feminism in particular and neoliberal rationality in general, and as a consequence, rest
upon and reproduce understandings of gender as singular, oppositional, and generalizable.
Quantifying inequality: The metrification

of gender
In March 2018 the music streaming platform Spotify, in collaboration with vodka brand
Smirnoff, launched Smirnoff Equalizer – a marketing campaign and web-based user
platform that sought to address the marginalization of women artists. Launched just
before International Women’s Day, the campaign was a response to streaming data that
revealed that the top ten tracks on Spotify for 2017 were all by men. The platform was
part of Smirnoff Equalizing Music, ‘a 3-year global initiative to double female and female-
identifying headliners and inspire the next generation of DJs’ (Smirnoff Equalizing Music
2018). Through linking their Spotify account to the Equalizer, which reveals the ratio of
men to women artists in their previous streaming data, users are able to discover how
‘equal’ or ‘unequal’ their listening habits are. The platform also offered the opportunity to
create a more ‘balanced’ personalized playlist: by adjusting a slider that offered different
percentages of music by men and women, users could ‘discover more amazing music’.
Marked ‘M’ on one side and ‘W’ on the other, the slider allowed users to select options
between 50/50 women to male artists to 90/10 women to male artists. Promoted in
partnership with Chicago DJ Honey Dijon, the platform was available through the summer
of 2018 and could be accessed by those of legal drinking age in the United States, Great
Britain, Ireland, Australia, Mexico, and Argentina.
Spotify’s Smirnoff Equalizer platform produces gender as a metric: it is something that
can be counted and represented as percentages and ratios. By extension, inequality itself is
quantifiable: the pursuit of gender equality becomes an issue of fixing the numbers. In this
regard, the Equalizer platform and its methods of understanding gendered listening habits
are consistent with Spotify’s data-driven approach to music-streaming and advertising,
and, more broadly, a neoliberal political rationality that awards the market and its logics
ontological and epistemological primacy. As David Beer notes, ‘competition and markets
require metrics, measurement is needed for the differentiations required by competition’
(Beer 2016: 13). Thus, although ‘metrics are themselves nothing new […] there is little
doubt that these systems of measurement have escalated and intensified over recent years,
especially with the rise of new data assemblages and their integration into the very fabric
of our lives’ (4). In other words, neoliberalism is an ideological context in which these
methods of knowing become normative. These methods, likewise, play a key role in the
reproduction of neoliberalism as a coherent political rationality. Spotify and Smirnoff ’s

quantification and ‘metrification’ of gender inequality, then can be situated in relation to
neoliberalism’s marketization of social relations.
While the Equalizer platform is framed as a means of enabling users to discover the
unacknowledged gender bias of their listening habits, the quantification of inequality
and the metrification of gender obscures as much as it reveals. As Sally Engle Merry
argues, ‘counting things requires making them comparable, which means they are
inevitably stripped of their context, history, and meaning. Numerical knowledge is
essential, yet if it is not closely connected to more qualitative forms of knowledge, it
leads to oversimplification, homogenization and the neglect of the surrounding social
structure’ (Merry 2016: 1). Although cited in the Equalizer’s advertising materials,
there is no real explanation offered for why the top ten tracks of Spotify in 2017 were
produced by men. It is perhaps unsurprising that this question is not really addressed
in the advertising campaign; however, it becomes particularly pertinent in light of
Maria Eriksson and Anna Johansson’s (2017) research into the gendering of Spotify’s
algorithmic structures, which suggests that Spotify’s recommendation system over-
represents male artists. Furthermore, in keeping with Hemmings’s aforementioned
critique of popular feminism, the Equalizer and its methods of quantification produce
gender as singular and oppositional. With regard to the former, gender is isolated
from other co-constitutive social divisions, relations, and identities, such as race, class,
disability, and sexuality. With regard to the latter, the Equalizer posits gender as binary –
artists are either male or female, and visually and numerically represented as such via
the slider. In a smaller font next to the slider, the platform notifies users that it has
‘included artists who identify as non-binary if they match your listening habits’. How
these non-binary artists are categorized in relation to Spotify’s binary gender metrics
remains unclear.2
It might be tempting to dismiss the Spotify/Smirnoff campaign as a crude capitalization
on sonic feminist efforts and their struggle for gender parity in musical cultures. Indeed,
Spotify has been critiqued for its symbolic adoption of social justice causes, all the while
sustaining the inequalities it aims to contest (Pelly 2018). Yet a range of sonic feminist
projects share Spotify and Smirnoff ’s methodological treatment of gender and gender
inequality as quantifiable, with the use of numerical infographics and data a common
strategy for making visible the gendered make-up of sound and music cultures and
industries. The international network female:pressure, for instance, has carried out a
series of biennial FACTS surveys that have sought to calculate the gendered make-up
of electronic music, resulting in a number of infographic representations of women’s
participation in label rosters and club and festival line-ups. In a 2013 press release the
network states:
The members of the female:pressure network operate within a seemingly progressive
electronic music scene and its subcultures. However, we find that women are notoriously
under-represented in the realms of contemporary music production and performance. The
female:pressure group would therefore like to invite you to take a look at the facts and make
the mechanisms of this specific market more transparent … Female:pressure believes there
Sonic Feminisms 551
is no justification for more male-dominated music events. We need – and paying audiences
deserve – invigorating and entertaining diversity!
(female:pressure 2013, emphasis in the original)
The framing of the female:pressure FACTS surveys varies. Similar to the Equalizer
platform, the 2013 survey makes use of a slider infographic, noting the percentage of
male, female, and mixed artists on labels and festivals respectively, as well as providing an
alternative visual representation of the gendered make-up of labels and festivals according
to country. By comparison, the 2017 FACTS survey offers more detail in terms of methods,
results, and discussion, as well as an acknowledgement of possible future directions and
notable limitations. With the expansion of the festivals and countries surveyed in 2017,
female:pressure suggest that ‘we may see the extent to which inequity is a systemic issue.
Structural sexism perpetuates inequality by creating barriers and disincentives for women,
which limits women’s success in the arts to genres and media aligned with the status quo’
(female:pressure 2017).
There are significant differences between the quantification of gender inequality in the
context of Spotify and female:pressure that should prevent a straightforward conflation
of their methodological approaches. While the former is primarily associated with
the marketing of Smirnoff (as well as the accrual of data), the latter is associated with
and pursued by a grassroots network of women artists, DJs, and producers; and it is
undertaken without any funding. And although market logics are evoked in the framing
of female:pressure’s work (‘paying audiences deserve invigorating and entertaining
diversity!’), there is also an attempt to recognize some of the underlying causal factors
inasmuch as ‘structural sexism’ is referenced as both cause and context of numerical
discrepancies between male and female artists. However, in approaching gender as a
metric to be calculated, female:pressure also risks producing similar obfuscations through
their attempts to uncover the gendering of electronic music. In female:pressure’s surveys,
gender is once again produced as singular and oppositional: artists are categorized as
either male, female, or ‘mixed’, with the network acknowledging that non-binary artists
are currently not easily represented within this framework. Likewise, despite some of the
breakdowns offered in terms of geography, in counting artists in relation to binary and
generalized notions of gender, other cultural, economic, social, and aesthetic differences
are flattened. In doing so, the female:pressure report reproduces popular feminism’s
treatment of gender as a universal and central category of analysis. Gender and gender
inequality, rendered calculable, countable, and generalizable, become unmoored from
their specific and constitutive socio-economic contexts.
‘Make Yourself Heard’: Amplification and

the economy of visibility
For both Spotify and female:pressure, the purpose of quantifying inequality is to improve
the representation of women artists: by uncovering gendered disparities in playlists,
line-ups, and rosters through methods of quantification, listeners, promoters, sponsors

label owners, and producers are encouraged to ‘discover more amazing music by women’
or ‘give more opportunities to women’. Likewise, ‘boosting’ women artists serves to address
quantified inequality by ‘fixing the numbers’. Amplification, then, can be understood as
the intended outcome of quantification and a means of changing the gendered make-up of
sound and music cultures.
Although the deployment of amplification as an auditory metaphor might suggest
improving audibility, some sonic feminisms focus on improving visibility within sound
and music cultures: in this context, equality, diversity, and inclusivity need to be seen.
The US organization SoundGirls, for example, has partnered with Spotify to host the
EQL Directory – a searchable database of women and gender non-conforming people in
audio and music production. As with many sonic feminist initiatives, the terminology,
ambitions, and framing of the project reproduces the neoliberal rhetoric of economic
success, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurialism: the directory enables users to
‘showcase their work, market their skills and reach out to each other for collaboration and
networking’, and acts as ‘a testament to female audio professionals’ resilience’ (EQL 2019).
Putting a celebratory ‘spotlight’ on the work of women and gender non-conforming audio
practitioners is understood to challenge barriers to access and, as a result, serve to diversify
the field:
By amplifying the careers of these women and people, we’ll soon see equal access to
encouragement, equipment and opportunities within the industry, as well as equal recognition
of these incredible professionals’ work […] through celebrating audio professionals who
are women, trans, and non-binary we believe the EQL Directory has the power to create a
positive feedback loop – when more diverse people are seen running a recording session or
commanding the mixing console, people of all genders will feel empowered to enter these
fields.
(EQL 2019)
In keeping with the corporate feminist dictum that ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, the
EQL Directory and its ambitions are predicated on the understanding that the heightened
visibility of women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming practitioners will inspire
future practitioners to strive for success, thus reconfiguring the make-up of the audio
industries. By becoming more visible through strategies of amplification, these practitioners
create a more diverse image of the audio industries. ‘Seeing’ diversity, meanwhile, is
associated with more equitable working conditions.
As the EQL Directory exemplifies, sonic feminist strategies that are centred on making
marginalized practitioners more visible typically cohere with the logics of a ‘economy of
visibility’ (Banet-Weiner 2018). As Banet-Weiser argues, the economy of visibility is central
to the form and functioning of popular feminism within a broader ‘attention economy’.
The logics of an economy of visibility are clearly manifest in the media landscapes that
popular feminisms and sonic feminisms occupy, ‘a technological and economic context
devoted to the accumulation of views, clicks, “likes” etcetera’ (Banet-Weiser 2018: 2). By
contrast to a politics of visibility, which makes visible gender (or race, class, sexuality, or
Sonic Feminisms 553
disability) as a marginalized political category for the purposes of social change (e.g. to
demand rights, to change media representation practices, or to transform the ways in
which identities matter and are valued), when economized, ‘visibility becomes the end
rather than a means to an end’ (23, emphasis in the original). Such is the case with the
EQL Directory: the aim is to make gendered practitioners more visible so as to ‘empower’
others. Furthermore, an economy of visibility transforms political categories such as
gender and race ‘so that the visibility of these categories is what matters, rather than
the structural ground on and through which they are constructed’ (23). Yet in a context
where visibility is often predicated on circuits driven by market values of accumulation,
competition, and consumption, increasing visibility does not mean that identity categories
such as gender, race, and sexuality will be unfettered from sexism, racism, or homophobia.
Thus, once again, then, an economy of visibility prioritizes surface over structure: where
the politics of visibility places the spotlight on marginalized identities to highlight their
disenfranchisement, within an economy of visibility ‘the spotlight on their bodies, their
visibility, the number of views, is in fact its politics’ (29, emphasis in the original).
Amplification means that some signals are boosted while others are rendered background
noise. Spotlights illuminate some things while leaving others in darkness. While the EQL
Directory amplifies the (self-selecting) ‘winners’ (the EQL Directory invites professionals
working in the audio industries to submit a profile), it leaves in the dark the structural issues
and industry norms that serve to differentiate ‘winners’ from ‘losers’ – these include, for
example, precarious working conditions, intern cultures, and irregular wages, the effects of
which are exacerbated by neoliberal diminishments of welfare and social provisions. Thus,
in keeping with an economy of visibility’s attention to surface over structure, amplification
directs attention to discrete signals over the complex infrastructures.
Not all strategies of amplification, however, straightforwardly conform to the normative
logics of popular feminism’s economy of visibility. In this regard, the S-A-D Boyz and Very
Male Line-ups – mentioned at the beginning of this chapter – can be understood as offering
an alternative method of visual amplification with rather different consequences. Like many
manifestations of popular feminism, these projects deploy digital platforms and social media.
However, instead of celebrating diversity or amplifying the work of gendered practitioners,
S-A-D Boyz and Very Male Line-ups use these platforms as means of amplifying the
gendered and racial homogeneity of educational curricula and dance music culture. In doing
so, they draw attention to – and ridicule – the current gendered formations of their targeted
fields. Consequently, they can be understood as operating as a negative critique in at least
two senses. Firstly, these sonic feminist Tumblrs might be framed as negative with reference
to their affective mobilizations, which are notably different from projects that centre on
empowerment and celebration. In their use of sarcasm and humour, S-A-D Boyz and Very
Male Line-ups might be understood as attempts to generate embarrassment and shame on
the part of course convenors and bromoters. In doing so, they depart from the palatable
positivity of popular feminism and its confident ‘can do’ attitude. Secondly, these projects
are negative inasmuch as they draw attention to ‘what is’ – that is, the current formations of
educational curricula and dance music culture respectively – and in doing so, they open a
space to consider who and what is missing and why. In placing the spotlight on the centring
of white, cis men, it is not assumed by these projects that what is therefore absent is ‘women’
in the singular.3 Consequently, they can be understood to maintain a distance from popular
feminism’s oppositional conception of gender.
Conclusion: Popular sonic feminisms and

the need for feminist critique
Although there are now many different sonic feminisms acting within and upon different
fields, a significant proportion of these align with the principles and values of popular
feminism. Symptomatic of neoliberal reconfigurations of social divisions, relations, and
identities, popular feminism marks a combination of liberal feminism’s emphasis on the
inclusion of women in the public and corporate sphere with neoliberalism’s emphasis on
individualism, empowerment, and entrepreneurialism. In this chapter I have offered an
assessment of quantification and amplification as methodological components of popular
sonic feminisms. In using quantification and amplification to reveal and address gender
inequality, these projects can be understood to reproduce gender in alignment with
popular feminism: gender is produced as singular, general, and oppositional, while gender
inequality is unmoored from its underlying socio-economic conditions. Consequently,
they can serve to conceal as well as reveal the gendered dynamics of auditory cultures.
In her essay on gender inequality in electronic music, Annie Goh argues that the task of
feminism is not only to struggle on the terrain of representation, ‘but also to understand
and critique the very categories and structures of power in which gender discourses operate’
(Goh 2014: 57). Indeed, feminist critique might be understood to have an important role
to play in discussions of sonic method and sonic culture more broadly. Critique, here,
might be understood in at least two senses: both as method and of method. With regard
to the former: the discussion of S-A-D Boyz and Very Male Line-ups demonstrates how
critique works to produce knowledge about gender’s production and circulation within
different sonic cultures. This chapter, likewise, might be understood to employ critique-
as-method, that is, as a means of asking questions about relationships between gender,
sonic cultures, the structures of social life, and the production of knowledge. Yet it is also a
feminist critique of particular methodological approaches and their limits as feminist tools.
Sara Ahmed notes that critique has sometimes been admonished as a ‘bad feminist’ habit –
a reactive, uncreative, and unproductive response; however ‘what critique does depends on
where – and where not – critique is directed […]. In fact, much of what needs critiquing still
seems to go unnoticed in our academic worlds’ (Ahmed 2014, emphasis in the original).
At a time where the political progressiveness of both feminism and the sonic is often taken
for granted,4 critique remains a necessary resource for feminist sound studies. In addition
to developing more affirmative strategies, feminist interventions into sound and music
cultures must remain attentive to the ways in which different methodological approaches
reflect, reproduce, and naturalize categories and structures of gender.
Sonic Feminisms 555
Notes
1. PRS is one of the main funders of new music in the UK.
2. This coincides with Spotify’s treatment of user’s data: registration requires users to
identify in relation to a binary category of gender. While Spotify has sought to make
some changes to include options for non-binary users, it would appear that Spotify’s
algorithm still assigns them to a male/female category (Eriksson and Johansson 2017).
3. It is notable that when the Tumblr account was mentioned in a Guardian article ‘Does
Club Culture Have a Problem With Bigotry?’ (Beaumont-Thomas 2015) the Very Male
Line-ups twitter account responded saying that, while it was good to see the club culture’s
gendered dynamics being discussed in major outlets, they rejected the piece’s ranking of
bigotries ‘placing sexism as worse/more prevalent than racism/homophobia. It’s reductive
and unhelpful because a) it’s not a competition b) these things don’t occur in isolation
from one another and can’t be solved in isolation from one another. You could add
classism, transphobia, ableism and more to that list’ (@malelineups, 9 June 2015).
4. For examples of how the sonic is positioned in relation to emancipatory, progressive
or resistive politics see Brandon LaBelle’s Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of
Resistance (2018).
References
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feministkilljoys.com/2014/05/26/feminist-critique/ (accessed 1 March 2019).
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Beaumont-Thomas, Ben (2015). ‘Does Club Culture Have a Problem with Bigotry?’. The
Guardian, 9 June. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/09/
does-club-culture-have-a-problem-with-bigotry (accessed 1 March 2019).
Beer, David (2016). Metric Power. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Born, Georgina and Kyle Devine (2015). ‘Music, Technology, Gender and Class: Digitization,
Educational and Social Change in Britain’. Twentieth-Century Music 12 (2): 135–172.
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democratization’. Political Theory 34 (6): 690–714.
Džuverović, Lina (2016). ‘Twice Erased: The Silencing of Feminisms in Her Noise’. Women and
Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 20: 88–95.
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Misfortunes. Available online: https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3 (accessed 1 March 2019).
EQL (2019). ‘About: A Woman’s Place is in Music’. Available online: https://makeiteql.com/
Eriksson, Maria and Anna Johansson (2017). ‘Tracking Gendered Streams’. Culture Unbound:
Journal of Current Cultural Research 9(2): 163–183.
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2019).
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Modern’. Gender, Place and Culture 25 (7): 963–977.
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Goldsmiths Press.
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36
Sound as City Maker: Developing
a Participatory-Collaborative
Process to Work with Sound as an
Urban Resource; the Case of
Mr. Visserplein (Amsterdam,
the Netherlands)
Edda Bild, Michiel Huijsman,
and Renate Zentschnig
Introduction
There is increasing awareness and understanding of how city sounds are connected to
urban identity and dynamics. After decades of focusing on the negative effects of noise
on human health, various calls for increasing sound awareness have been made to move
beyond the sound-as-noise approach. The calls acknowledge and make use of the potential
of soundscapes as urban ‘resources’ for city planning and design (Böhme 2000; Brown
2011; Maag 2013). The adoption of a new ISO standard demonstrates this apparent growing
interest in approaching sound as more than noise,1 as do various projects worldwide that
engage in diverse forms of urban soundscape design (for example, Axelsson, Nilsson, and
Berglund 2010; Lacy 2016). However, we contend that sound awareness remains low both
among city users – namely, the people who use and engage with the spaces in a city – as
well as among city makers – specifically, the ensemble of actors that intervene and make
decisions about the city, ultimately influencing the way it sounds (Aletta and Jiao 2018;
Steele 2018). This also holds true in a Dutch context where soundscape ideas have not
yet been formally integrated in urban design or policy practices, and participatory and/
or collaborative, user-centred projects in relation to sound – in which the contextual
knowledge of users about their soundscapes goes beyond noise complaints – have
practically been non-existent (Derksen and Van den Bosch 2018). We propose that by
increasing awareness on why the auditory dimension of the urban experience matters, we
can encourage multisensory perspectives on urban living; the project presented in this
chapter is a starting point in that direction, briefly introduced in Textbox 36.1.
Textbox 36.1. ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ project description.
‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ was a collaborative project between the University

of Amsterdam and Soundtrackcity that began in late 2016 and developed out of the
perceived need for concrete examples to demonstrate the benefits of designing
cities with sound in mind to both Dutch city users and city makers, with the long-
term goal of encouraging the integration of sound in city making. By focusing
on the on-site auditory experience of users of a busy square in the center of
Amsterdam, the project aimed to show how local sound artists, researchers, and
practitioners could collaborate and act as moderators to help ‘processing’ site-
specific experiential knowledge of local experts. It did so by engaging with a wide
array of tools and methods to promote sound awareness and address auditory
concerns in a local public space.
Here we will describe and reflect on our proposed participatory-collaborative approach

(we distinguish between ‘participation’ and ‘collaboration’ to better illustrate the process
of the project). We then outline the design of the project and its methods, synthesize its
results, and reflect on the insights. We will first situate the project in the urban, scientific,
professional, and artistic contexts that have inspired our approach. Next, we map our
three-part iterative process of knowledge elicitation; interaction and exchange; and
engagement and dissemination, and summarize the results of the model used to structure
our findings. We will offer an overview of the participants’ descriptions of their auditory
experiences, their verbal exchanges, and their suggested proposals for the Mr. Visserplein
square transformation, visualized and auralized with the help of an architect and a sound
artist. We conclude with reflections on the collaboration and participation process (and
its outputs) and our sound awareness efforts, with an eye on integrating them in current
policies, community practices, as well as in planning and design initiatives.
Background
The approach for encouraging sound awareness discussed here includes the participation
of city users as local experts, whose explicit and tacit knowledge on the auditory dimension
of their everyday uses of spaces should be discussed clearly and integrated in various
steps of the city-making process, and the collaboration between researchers, artists, and
Sound as City Maker 559
practitioners; these actors work on an equal footing and use their discipline-based tools
and methods to engage in iterative processes of elicitation of users’ auditory knowledge
that can be further integrated in strategies to encourage sound awareness among all those
involved in the city-making process. Artists are considered essential: trailblazers who have
a history of engaging with the sonic aspects of urban spaces in unique and creative ways
that enact new forms of urban listening.2 This approach considers city users as an active
source of experiential knowledge, rather than as ‘naïve participants’ who are passively
subjected to noise, which tends to be the norm in current sound-related policies.
To contextualize our approach, we briefly show the increasingly common trend of both
collaborative and participatory perspectives in decision-making processes that could be
applied to integrate a sensory dimension to the aforementioned processes. Collaborative
planning was envisioned as a socially interactive and inclusionary process bringing
together a more diverse array of actors in order to contribute to policies and plans that
would significantly affect their everyday lives (Healey 1992, 1997, 2003; Innes and Booher
1999; Margerum 2002). Within the broad array of interpretations of what was referred to
as the ‘collaborative turn’ in planning initiatives, participatory planning emerged as a key
paradigm emphasizing the importance of integrating the knowledge of the community in
city-making processes (Forester 1999; Fischer 2000; Innes and Booher 2004).
The idea of participatory approaches might sound commonsensical in today’s
‘participation society’ (Troonrede 2013; Tonkens 2014), and evidence on why and
how integrating this knowledge matters has been extensively documented in academic
literature. The focus lies specifically with so-called ‘local’ knowledge as the relational
knowledge of everyday users of spaces, who have their own ways of engaging with,
describing, and evaluating spaces and environments (Wilson 2008; Chilisa 2011; de Sousa
Santos 2015). This approach can serve to add the experiential dimension to current ways
of tapping into various forms of context-embedded knowledge, for example explicit and
tacit knowledge (Nonaka et al. 1994). While explicit or codified knowledge is standardized
and often articulated formally in, for example, text or maps, tacit knowledge is more
personal, informal, embedded in experience and know-how, and situated in a specific
context (Nonaka et al. 1994). This tacit knowledge is particularly relevant in relation
to the ineffable sensory experience of (sonic) spaces, as members of many linguistic
communities – including English and Dutch – lack a commonly agreed upon vocabulary
to unambiguously articulate their (auditory) experiences (Corbin 1986; Dubois 2000;
Dubois et al. 2014). To date, there have been efforts to valorize this city or space user-
centred knowledge in initiatives attempting to capture some of the theorized benefits of
the soundscape design strategy (Axelsson 2011; Brown 2012; Bild et al. 2016b). Various
ways of using sound to improve the quality of urban public spaces for their users have
been proposed, experimenting with integrating different experts and disciplines in the
process, engaging with local decision makers, and involving the city users as participants to
different extents (Axelsson 2011; Bild et al. 2016a; Maag and Bosshard 2016; Cerwén et al.
2017; Steele et al. 2017; Xiao et al. 2018; Lavia et al. 2018). However, these projects remain
scattered and highly dependent on local dynamics and the willingness of local actors to
support such initiatives. The challenge that remains is the transfer of collected knowledge
(tacit or integrated tacit and explicit) from academia to practice, in a manner that can be
‘translated’ to specific action items, for example for design practices.
In the Netherlands, city makers focus overwhelmingly on noise and increasingly on
what is supposed to be the antonym of noise, namely, quietness (Bijsterveld 2008; Booi
and Van den Berg 2012; Licitra et al. 2014). While the political discourse and policies are
centred on city users and their well-being, the methods used rely on acoustic measurements,
embedded in noise abatement and management strategies; there is limited participation
of city users, who are only consulted (usually ‘after-the-fact’) to provide input on noise
complaints or the occasional completion of public health-related questionnaires.
With this in mind, capturing the resources of the auditory dimension of public
spaces requires a more situated approach. The ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ project
aimed to show how a transdisciplinary approach could encourage both collaboration
and participation, and generate knowledge that could increase sound awareness among
city users and makers. The integration of different disciplines was tested to address the
aforementioned difficulty in eliciting the various types of knowledge of city users. While
researchers usually encourage verbal or written articulations, artists and other professionals
(e.g. architects or designers) can prompt expressions that are also non-verbal, for example
visual or aural, to stimulate exchanges rooted in multisensory on-site experiences.
In bringing together the individual auditory experiences of various local and
professional experts, and encouraging exchanges and discussions, we provided a more
holistic understanding of the urban auditory experiences and a pragmatic overview of
users’ needs and expectations in their spaces, thus also offering a starting point for public
space transformations. To further demonstrate the relevance of this approach to urban
designers, for example, part of the process was focused on suggestions for minimally
invasive, cost-effective sound-based solutions that we contend could improve the quality
of the square for its users.
Method
Peter Brook wrote that, in theatre, the empty stage evokes another world by the stories
of the dramatic figures (Brook 1968), arguing that the stage changes with every dramatic
performance and every world evoked by it. Through the stories and dialogues of
characters that are part of a performance, the space itself changes and transforms. We have
appropriated this notion in ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’: the square was but a busy,
yet ‘empty’ space/stage that gained meaning through the stories and experiences of those
using it in their everyday lives. We documented how people who are familiar with and use
the square describe their on-site experience according to three topics: their perception of
the space, its perceived patterns of use, and its sounds. We used this space-use-sound model
to structure our data collection, processing, and analysis. We put particular emphasis on
the extent to which the square responds to the users’ auditory and behavioural needs and
expectations, and how it could be redesigned to do so better.
The research process itself was not linear, but rather iterative, and had three key parts
which partially overlapped: (1) knowledge elicitation, steps associated with the auditory
and verbal data collection, processing, and analysis; (2) interaction and exchange, steps
associated with encouraging social interaction and exchanges between participants on
their on-site experience; and (3) engagement and dissemination, steps associated with
strategies of encouraging sound awareness (see Figure 36.1). The process remained open,
as additions could be brought to any core part, and it was also flexible, as there was overlap
between the parts; for example, the discussions in workshops fall under ‘interaction and
exchange’ but are at the same time activities that elicit knowledge. The methods employed
to process and analyse the data collected, ranging from the transcription of recordings
to thematic coding of the resulting written text, were also cross-cutting through the
three elements. They allowed us to make the elicited knowledge explicit and ‘visible’, to
facilitate social interaction, and to further integrate this knowledge in engagement and
dissemination strategies.
In the next sections we will discuss each part in detail and provide details on the
collaboration process as well as the site and participant selection processes. The first part
of the data collection method as well as a detailed overview of the findings of that part
have been detailed elsewhere, summarized here with the permission of the authors of that
report (Van Kamp et al. 2018).
Figure 36.1 Visualization of the process of ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ with its three
core parts. In the overlapping areas, examples of specific activities.
Collaboration
The project was initiated through discussions and shared concerns at an event organized
in September 2016 by one of the authors, at the University of Amsterdam (Bild et al.
2017).3 The focus was on shared grievances on what, we, the authors of this chapter,
considered to be insufficient collaborative and participatory approaches in sound-related
practice in the Netherlands (particularly Amsterdam). Therefore, one essential goal of
the Soundtrackcity–University of Amsterdam collaboration (see Textbox 36.1) was to
integrate the work and expertise of sound artists and design professionals, and to support
the participation of city users as local experts. We acknowledged the advantages and
limitations of the methods and tools we used in our everyday professional activities, so
we aimed to develop and test a process that brought together complementary, domain-
specific methods to support participants in articulating their experiences (and thus their
tacit auditory knowledge). The core team of ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ included one
visual artist and one theatre maker/director (members and initiators of Soundtrackcity4),
one urban sociologist (from the University of Amsterdam), one sound artist/composer
(Van den Broek 2020), and one architect (Blits n.d.). We had the support of other
external collaborators (including one researcher/urban planner, a graphic designer, and a
multimedia interaction designer).
Site selection
Mr. Visserplein is a square in the historic centre of Amsterdam, a place of contention and
political debate (Figures 36.2 and 36.3), having undergone radical transformations in the
last half century (Batjes 2008). It was the site for a number of unrealized plans made in
recent history (Ten Dam 2009; Meershoek 2017). Being surrounded by traffic arteries from
all sides (resembling a roundabout), the square faces environmental issues – including
air pollution, noise complaints, and heat island effects – but also social concerns such as
crowdedness in the city and tourism–resident tensions.
The specific urban form and seemingly hybrid function of Mr. Visserplein as an urban
space, situated at the intersection of traffic arteries, of different urban communities, and
of distinct urban neighbourhoods with different functions make it an appropriate case
study to research the relationship between form, use of space, and perception of sound.
Table 36.1 characterizes Mr. Visserplein in terms of space, use, and sound based on the
observations of the project team.
Participant selection
We exclusively selected Dutch native speakers, to allow participants to communicate about
and reflect on their auditory experience in a language they are comfortable in. Participant
selection was completed according to the following criteria:
Figure 36.2 Historical photograph of Mr. Visserplein, 1983. View from the Moses and
Aaron Church. Photograph by Jan van Boerkhoven. Source: The Amsterdam Municipal
Archives.
Figure 36.3 Mr. Visserplein, aerial photograph, February 2016. © Thomas Schlijper.
● Relationship with the square: resident of the neighbourhood or worker in the area
● Age distribution: different ages, ranging from children to the elderly
● Personal background: different professional and educational backgrounds.
We also invited one participant with a severe visual impairment; one participant
used to be homeless, having spent nights on the square itself. We did not aim to collect
Table 36.1 Characterization of Mr. Visserplein in Terms of Space, Use, and Sound.
Space Use Sound

• Historical importance • Simultaneous mobility • Reflections from buildings
● Buildings of cultural and flows:
• Limited variety of sound sources
historical significance ● Motorized traffic
(including scooters) • Dominant sound: mobility related
● Destination space
● Bicycle traffic ● Traffic: motorized vehicles
• Large open space and bicycles
● Pedestrians
● Divided in half by a tram
line • Soundmarks:
• Shared space
● Static: audible crosswalk
• Transition space • Diverse group of users signals
● Nearby residents ● Dynamic: tram bells and
• Amenities encouraging
lingering activities ● Students tram crossing over metallic
structure
• Surrounded by motorized ● Employees
and bicycle traffic on all • Strong temporal patterns
● Visitors/tourists
sides ● Strong temporal auditory
● Passers-by ‘rhythms’
• Limited accessibility
● TunFun users ● High measured sound
• Underground level: TunFun – pressure levels both
children’s playground
● Homeless people
during the day and night
(Government of the
Netherlands n.d.)
a representative sample of square users but, rather, to have a maximally diverse group
of participants, in order to find the distinct as well as shared aspects of their auditory
experiences on site. We identified and developed connections with various local actors,
both public and private, and accessed the existing local communities in the area to find a
balanced distribution of participants who both live and work in the area. Twenty volunteers
were willing to engage in the participatory process.
The project process

The process is the result of the intermingling of the three aforementioned core parts:
knowledge elicitation; interaction and exchange; and engagement and dissemination.
Knowledge elicitation
The knowledge elicitation part consisted of the collection, processing, and analysis of on-
site individual data (individual commented soundwalks with short-follow up interviews)
and data from workshop discussions. We collected three different types of data: verbal,
audio, and visual (i.e. photographic).
The on-site data were collected over a one-month period in the early summer of 2017,
both on sunny and rainy days, during different times of the day and week. The average
duration of a data-collection session (soundwalks and interviews) was 1.5 hours. The
conversations took place exclusively in Dutch.
For the self-guided commented soundwalk participants were met either at their home
or their workplace. They had chosen the route beforehand and acted as guides through
their ‘territory’, where we, as knowledge elicitors, were mere guests (Figure 36.4). The
participants were encouraged to describe what they heard and what they thought of the
square, to share personal memories, and to reflect on their experiences, both at the time
of the soundwalk as well as from memory. One project member walked alongside one
participant, reminding them to focus on sound in various moments, as well as suggesting
stopping at random points on the trajectory to focus on listening. While on the square, the
participants were asked to stop, close their eyes and listen for a few minutes; afterwards they
were asked to describe what they heard. The participants’ commentaries were recorded,
and a second project member, walking a few metres behind the participant, recorded the
environmental sounds.
Immediately after the walk, participants were invited to conduct a short semi-structured
interview, usually in a quieter space (a café or the participants’ home). The interview was
recorded and had four distinct parts: reflection on sound (and the auditory experience
of the square), general evaluation of the square, own patterns of use of the square, and
suggestions to improve the square (with a limited budget). Participants were asked to use
one word or one phrase to describe the square, based on their current impression and
previous experience.
Figure 36.4 Self-guided soundwalk: trajectory (left) and walk (right). Source:
authors.
Figure 36.5 Space-use-sound model.
The recorded interviews and discussions were transcribed and the soundwalk
trajectories were digitized. The audio data was processed, edited, and curated for further
artistic, educational, and promotional use, with the participants’ permission. We completed
a thematic coding of the resulting written data, using the space-use-sound model visualized
in Figure 36.5.
Interaction and exchange

To facilitate social interaction and exchange, we organized two workshops for the
participants to come together and discuss their shared experience of the square. Workshop
1 focused on the participants characterizing the square as it was at the time, as well as what
was needed in terms of space, use, and sound; Workshop 2 focused on the participants
debating the proposals put forward by the architect and the sound artist to transform the
square.
All participants were invited to take part in Workshop 1 in September 2017; seven of
them joined the workshop, in which they discussed the characterization of Mr. Visserplein
from three points of view: space/physical environment (the tangible elements of the space,
infrastructure, buildings, materials, urban furniture), use, and sound, using keyword
mapping. The discussion focused on what the participants thought the space was like now
(i.e. the current state at the time of the soundwalks/workshop) and what they needed in
Mr. Visserplein.
Based on a preliminary thematic coding of the transcribed data from individual
soundwalks and interviews, we put together a list of one hundred keywords and phrases
– direct quotations from the interviews. The participants were split into two groups;
each group was given two sets of the same keywords, additional blank cards where
they could write new keywords as well as modifiers (‘too little’, ‘too much’, etc.), and six
sheets of paper where they could stick their keywords. The sheets indicated the topics
that the participants were asked to characterize: space-now, space-needed; sound-now,
sound-needed; use-now, use-needed. The participants were then invited to share their
outcomes in an informal setting, where they focused on commonalities and differences
in their keyword maps. The discussions were audio-recorded and photographed, with the
participants’ consent (Figure 36.6).
Based on the insights collected from the transcribed soundwalks and the discussions
in this first workshop, the project architect and sound artist developed visualizations
and auralizations of the participants’ recommendations for redesigning the space (see
below); the architect also developed his own proposal to redesign the space (building
a suspended park on top of the square). In the end, four final proposals for physically
redesigning the square were discussed (Figure 36.7): building a park on top, adding a
green noise barrier with elevated cycling space, removing the two metallic roof-like
structures in the middle of the square to expose the children’s playground, and adding
a fountain/water element. One additional proposal focused on adding a larger variety
of activities on the square. The activity and water-centred proposals were auralized by
the sound artist.
During the second workshop, four participants (three of which already participated
in Workshop 1) discussed the two sound-centred and the four physical design-centred
proposals in a moderated, round-table setting, with the entire project team present. These
discussions were also audio-recorded and photographed (Figure 36.8).
Engagement and dissemination

The individual and shared knowledge of the participants was processed, disseminated, and
used to encourage further engagement and sound awareness, using various strategies such
as augmented soundwalks, exhibitions, and transdisciplinary events.
The augmented soundwalk allowed attendees to an event to listen, using headphones,
to recordings of representative snippets of what the participants shared on their auditory
experience while walking through Mr. Visserplein. The attendees were handed maps of
Mr. Visserplein with various designated stops where they could listen to stories of the
participants in the self-guided soundwalks and go-along interviews, recorded in that
particular spot on the square (Figure 36.9).
The project exhibition offered a visual overview of the aim, process, inputs, and outputs
of the ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ project (Figure 36.10). Two iPods preloaded with
Figure 36.6 Workshop 1 on characterizing the space, use, and sound of Mr. Visserplein.
Source: authors.
Figure 36.7 Square redesign proposals. Top left design (1) by Louwrens Duhen; other
designs by Erik Blits.
the two auralizations of the water and user-centred proposals that can be listened to using
headphones, were also part of the exhibition.5
The ‘Geluid als stadmaker’ (‘Sound as a City Maker’) event took place in November
2017 (Figure 36.11). It consisted of a guided augmented soundwalk on the square (see
above), followed by presentations from various professional and local experts, and group
discussions. It acted as a platform for engagement and dissemination on topics of urban
sound and strategies for integrating auditory aspects in designing and managing urban
spaces, with a focus on Dutch cities (particularly Amsterdam).
Figure 36.8 Workshop 2 on visualizations and auralizations of square redesign
proposals.
Figure 36.9 ‘Geluid als stadmaker’ event attendees on the augmented soundwalk.
Figure 36.10 Project exhibition: banners.
Findings
In this section we summarize the output of the knowledge-building process, first reporting
on the insights that were collected on how the participants evaluated the space itself, its
perceived use as well as its sounds, based on our space-use-sound model (Mr. Visserplein
– ‘now’). Next, we report on the participants’ recommendations on redesigning the square
with sound and use in mind (Mr. Visserplein – ‘needed’).
Figure 36.11 ‘Geluid als stadmaker’ – event brochure.
First, we analysed the participants’ description and evaluation of the square and how
it fit their environment and their expectations. For a number of participants, it was not
a ‘real square’, one adding that it was not a ‘user’s square’ (gebruikersplein) and it did not
encourage ‘square-appropriate’ activities. The square was not described as a destination
but, rather, as a point of transition, despite its amenities that were supposed to encourage
lingering activities. However, for some participants, the square was a somewhat typical
and expected part of the city, stating that the square was ‘lively’, particularly due to the
many people passing it on bike or foot. The design of the square was mostly described as
a ‘collage’ and ‘incoherent’, with one participant describing Mr. Visserplein as a leftover
space (restruimte). For others, it was perceived as disappointing, considering the historical
context in which the square is situated; some emphasized that the square lacked identity
and ‘a heart’ in comparison with its surroundings, and that it was overall a ‘missed chance’.
Nonetheless, there were participants that enjoyed the square, ‘as a space’ (als ruimte), but
felt distracted by the sound and sight of traffic.
Second, we focused on how and when the participants used the space, their satisfaction
with it as well as how they thought others used it. The square was defined by many in
relation to what it is not, which the participants connected to what types of activities it
is not appropriate for. The square was perceived as being left unused, with the exception
of the odd tourist out. Some participants entertained the idea of sitting and listening in
the square (particularly on sunny days); however, the traffic was considered a distracting
element that made the square unsuitable for sitting or recreation, but rather used as a
transition/passage space, where people go through rather than stay. This idea of passage is
related to the different types of mobility encountered in the space, emphasizing the nature
of the square as a place dominated by continuous flows of people, both as part of motorized
or bicycle traffic and as pedestrians (‘pedestrian highway’ – voetgangerssnelweg). For their
own use of the square, participants stated that it was driven more by necessity than desire,
as it is the only way to reach several other destinations they visit on a regular basis. The
dominance of traffic was perceived to have repercussions on the participants’ feelings of
safety, as well as health-related effects, ranging from the air quality to the feeling of being
overwhelmed/claustrophobic to downright getting a headache if one remained on the
square for too long.
Third, we analysed the participants’ impressions of the auditory environment and
specific sounds and how that affected their experience. Unsurprisingly, the sounds that the
participants referred to can be grouped according to types of mobility: motorized traffic-
related, public transportation-related (tram), bike-traffic related, and pedestrian-related.
However, participants did not heavily rely on words such as ‘annoying’ or ‘nuisance’
(storend or overlast), rather attempting to describe the ‘layers’ of sound. When asked to
close their eyes and listen, respondents detailed their auditory experience through a larger
diversity of sounds, compared to when participants only passed through the space. Some
participants referred to the rhythm of the square (observable both in minute-long and
daily cycles), with one participant likening it to a flow: ‘Traffic light, tram, footsteps, heels,
tram, scooter, child, bike, and now the traffic starts all over, engine […] a wave’ (‘stoplicht,
tram, voetstappen, hakken, tram, scooter, kind, fiets, en nu begint het verkeer weer, motor
[…] een golf ’).
The recommendations for square redesigns were the result of both individual interviews
and exchanges during the two workshops. We grouped the recommendations according to
the physical and sound-related design they imply and labelled them according to what part
of the space-use-sound model they addressed.
1 Large-scale redesigns of the square: a park on top of the square and a green noise
barrier with elevated cycling space (space-, use-, and sound-related redesign)
2 Small/minimal physical changes to the square to enhance or minimize existing/
audible sounds: removing the metallic structure in the square to expose the children’s
playground (space- and sound-related redesign)
3 Adding sounds by adding physical elements to the square: a waterfall or fountain
(space- and sound-related redesign)
4 Adding sounds through added functions: introducing a food cart (use- and sound-
related redesign)
The recommendations suggested by the participants go along the lines of the findings
and work in literature on the principles of soundscape design, particularly in relation to
the minimization of unwanted sounds (e.g. traffic through masking), enhancing wanted
sounds (e.g. the sounds of other users), and introducing new sounds (e.g. the sounds of
children and, to a smaller extent, the sounds of water) (see Axelsson 2011; Coelho et al.
2016). The sounds of others were considered to make the experience of the space friendlier,
while still allowing users to ‘feel like being in the city’. This justified the importance of
adding ‘reasons’ for users transitioning the space to stay or regard the space as a destination
as well. Some participants referred to these sound additions or enhancements as ‘counter-
sound’ (tegengeluid), and the small redesigns were suggested to lead to a more liveable
and dynamic auditory experience on the square: ‘It becomes a place where more happens,
more diversity, more life’ (‘Het wordt een plek waar meer gebeurt, meer diversiteit, meer
leven’). One key finding was that participants did not seek to silence the space but rather
to enhance its liveliness. As the participants stated that green spaces are not far from the
square, and other quiet spaces are within reach, their idea was not to turn Mr. Visserplein
into a quiet space. One participant argued that ‘a city must remain a city’ (‘een stad moet
een stad blijven’) and square soundmarks such as the sound of the pedestrian crossing or
the trams remind users that they are in a city, so they should be evaluated as pleasant and
positive. The participants thus shared a pragmatic view to allow for a diversity of uses, with
the changes suggested out of ‘respect for the city’.
Discussion
The process behind the ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’ project was a participatory-
collaborative one; it was developed to both encourage the participation of city users beyond
consultation as well as to make full use of the approaches, tools, and methods of the different
experts collaborating in the project. The project team thus operated with the shared goal
of eliciting the participants’ tacit knowledge on their on-site auditory experience, as well as
supporting and moderating discussions and exchanges between them in order to make that
knowledge explicit and shareable. While the methods used were not necessarily innovative
(at least not in the context of the disciplines in which they were initially developed), the
process of integrating them as part of this transdisciplinary project was insightful. It was
particularly the overt interest expressed by city users in both the auditory dimension of
their experiences as well as in being actively involved in city-making processes in general
that encouraged us to develop a number of propositions or action items that city makers
intervening in urban spaces can integrate in their practices and considerations:
1 Being in the space: Designers, planners, and other city makers should start by going
into the space themselves rather than relying on plans and models of the space. The
actual on-site experience can elicit their own knowledge – not just as professional
experts but also as everyday users – to better gauge the potential consequences of
policies, plans, or designs.
2 Sharing the experience of the space: Participation of city users is essential in city-
making processes and city makers should visit the spaces with users. By visiting
spaces together city makers and city users can reach a common (experiential) ground
for discussion and talks. Having an equal and shared experience can allow also for
mutual learning, and the knowledge elicited by being there can be more useful than
off-site conversations about the space.
3 Encouraging an active experience of the space: Being in the space and experiencing
it in an active manner, similar to everyday practices (e.g. walking) allows for
embeddedness and the appropriation of a space through use and play (e.g. through
soundwalking exercises).
4 Listening together: In the move towards embracing a multisensorial experience of
spaces, it is essential to teach city users and city makers how to listen, and how to
engage with spaces aurally. Being aware of sound can encourage a more meaningful
relationship with a space and add or make explicit a previously tacit layer to an
experience. This can, for example, represent the basis for previously ignored/not
thought-of transformations or encourage a re-evaluation of certain dimensions of
one’s experience; if sound has just been ‘negative’ until that point – as noise or a
source of annoyance – the experience of sound can become different by learning
how to listen.
Particularly in relation to the auditory experience, insight collected in this project allowed
us to articulate three lessons in relation to the added value of engaging in listening processes
and increasing sound awareness:
- Listening together is a mutual learning process, as there are as many ways of

listening as there are people. This implies not only listening with other city users but
also collaborating with artists or other practitioners who may have different ways
of listening and whose methods and insights can elicit new forms of knowledge
feeding into the city-making process.
- Listening together can encourage the creation of a local community.
- Listening and talking about sound can also elicit valuable linguistic insights on how
everyday users of spaces talk about sound. This can help improve current common
research instruments (such as surveys) or policy language.
Following these propositions and, more broadly, using methodologies such as the one
described in this chapter, aiming to collect in-depth qualitative data, are labour-intensive
but necessary to ensure that policies and interventions directed at improving the urban
quality of life address the needs and expectations of users, mirroring their everyday
discourses and experiences, and eliciting both their tacit and explicit knowledge. City
makers must stay informed about the ways in which city users talk and experience
sound in rapidly changing urban environments, for example their sources of complaint,
annoyance, or enjoyment. This is particularly true in a political context that emphasizes
the importance of public engagement and citizen participation with local- and country-
level policies. Insight collected using such methods can also help update existing surveys
in terms of content and language.
Both the outputs and the process described in this chapter can support a shift towards
more multisensorial approaches to city-making. On the one hand, by using the dissemination
and engagement tools described above, one can demonstrate to urban dwellers in different
neighbourhoods what types of projects or knowledge could be collected or used in their
own spaces to inspire more sound awareness and sound-driven change. On the other hand,
by sharing a flexible process scheme with city makers, they can add, change, or use parts of
it to collect necessary knowledge to transform cities with sound in mind. By doing so, they
can avoid situations in which they need to ‘fix’ implemented plans rather than anticipate
auditory issues or concerns.
To conclude, the participatory-collaborative process of ‘Crowdsourcing Mr. Visserplein’
is proposed to complement traditional methods and approaches used both in research and
in professional practice or policy. This chapter advocates for engagement in processes of
active consultation of local experts in both policy- and space-design initiatives as more
than sources of complaints. The intention is to move towards more collaborative processes,
in the sense that the insights of local experts should be integrated and used in multiple
stages of the process, as part of an interactive process of co-production of knowledge.
Notes
1. See Fiebig; and Schulte-Fortkamp, in this volume.
2. See, for example, the work of Maryanne Amacher (1967), Max Neuhaus (1988), Akio
Suzuki (2014), and Peter Cusack (2017).
3. The event focused on ensuring a platform for discussion and collaboration between
scientists and practitioners on topics of public space research, design practice, and urban
data gathering, with specific attention on sound.
4. Soundtrackcity is an artist initiative specialized in organizing soundwalks in order to

make people more aware of their sonic ambiances (see Soundtrackcity n.d.).
5. For information, see Architectuur Centrum Amsterdam n.d.
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37
Dropping Down Low:
Online Soundmaps, Critique,
Genealogies, Alternatives
Angus Carlyle
Key
Located between the compound noun ‘soundmap’ and its detached corollary ‘sound map’
is a stable definitional ground for the diagrammatic representation of acoustic place. It
may be, however, that this territory is more narrowly circumscribed than necessary, is
isolated from a wider genealogy, and contains some partially buried commitments which
further compromise soundmapping’s methodological potential. This chapter proceeds
from a verification of my own bona fides in relation to this sonic practice, draws out that
wider genealogy, then unearths those commitments – which are understood to involve
the alignment with a specific technological apparatus and the adoption of a particular
perspectival frame. I conclude by proposing three alternative approaches that are freighted
with the means to deliver, in their diversity, formations of knowledge of the heard world that
are transposed from the conventions of the cartographic to the experimental possibilities
Samuel Thulin has recently designated the ‘cartophonic’:
‘Cartophony’ operates as a near-synonym of ‘sound mapping’ with the subtle difference
that whereas ‘sound mapping’ suggests a qualified mapping and already carries associations
with particular practices often involving a mimetic approach to [their] representation […]
‘cartophony’ is used as an attempt to speak to how practices of sound and mapping may feed
into one another in a broad array of ways.
(Thulin 2018: 193)
Orientation
My practice-orientated research seeks to establish sensory resonances between environments
and their inhabitations. The sites in which my recording and listening strategies have
found themselves include a suburban strip measuring 500 metres by 200 metres, the public
galleries and backstage operations of a municipal museum, an organic small holding

enmeshed in the concrete and steel infrastructures of a busy airport, a wind farm on a
plateau, a series of footpaths in a national park, and a stretch of local woodland close to my
home. I understand all these to be forms of soundmapping yet appreciate that they would
to be excluded from definitions; nonetheless, at least two of my past projects more closely
resemble the normative soundmap.
The first of these, 51° 32 ‘ 6.954” N / 0° 00 ‘ 47.0808” W, was a contribution to the
Sound Proof exhibition at E:vent Gallery, London, in 2008. This emerged from a three-
month period of field work devoted to a 100 metre by 100 metre zone of the Lower Lea
Valley, an area previously comprising light industrial units, transport networks, residential
architecture from a variety of historical epochs, a canalized waterway, and liminal
greenspaces but which was undergoing a process of demolition and construction for the
London Olympics. 51° 32 ‘ 6.954” N / 0° 00 ‘ 47.0808” W represented a ‘mapping of intangible
qualities, in the space where social and ecological, past and future intersect’ (Biagioli 2018:
98) and comprised an hour-long audio composition of layered but otherwise unprocessed
field recordings, a booklet of field notes and photographs, and an A0 scale map (that was
reprised in A1 format for the exhibition catalogue). One of the curators of the exhibition
recently addressed the work:
Carlyle’s contribution to a sense of social and spatial orientation is asserted through finely
noted observation of activity and ephemera encountered during his visits to the site. These
seemingly inconsequential events and objects are plotted diagrammatically on his map as
key markers of the site, giving prominence to the vernacular components of this site in
transition. His approach echoes the notion that whoever maps the space gives that landscape
and location its territorial characteristics.
(Biagioli 2018: 102)
The second project which bears closer structural analogy to how soundmaps are
conventionally conceived, developed from field work of similar duration but differentiated
by a more diffuse location in the rural environment of the Picentini mountains, in the
hinterlands behind Naples and Salerno. Commissioned by the Fondazione Aurelio Petroni,
an organization based in the small town of San Cipriano Picentino, it formed part of a
multimodal account of the region entitled Viso Come Territorio / The Face as Territory.
One of my contributions involved placing field recordings on an online map, deploying
a platform devised by Peter Cusack for his Favourite Sounds project. The web-based
mechanism enabled the Viso Come Territorio map to be gradually populated over the spring
of 2012, to be accessed remotely (and retrospectively, since the soundmap remains online),
and to function as the basis for an installation during the exhibition. Salomé Voegelin who
engaged with this soundmap online and in her book Sonic Possible Worlds described the
encounter:
This geography is not that of San Cipriano Picentino and not of my living room either but
that of their possibilities generated in my recentred listening, exploring the material that
sounds there and bringing it back into the actuality of my present listening that is every
thicker and pluralized for it. These sonic narratives do not share in the generality of the
Online Soundmaps, Critique, Genealogies, Alternatives 583
visual map, nor in the image we might have of an area […] I am not following the map but
mapping my own while listening.
(Voegelin 2014: 34)
This prior involvement in the creation of soundmaps has combined with experiences as a
user that date from relatively early in the gestation of what we recognize as their typical
form and my 2007 edited book Autumn Leaves: Sound and Environment in Artistic Practice,
included documentation of several such soundmapping projects. Reflections on the
creation and consumption of soundmaps have informed a previous conference paper on
this theme, which sketched some initial problematizations of soundmapping as a sonic
research methodology (Carlyle 2014), problematizations that are now deepened, are
contrasted with alternative approaches, and are situated within a genealogical frame.
Scale
A conventional interpretation of a soundmap is announced in the very first line of the
relevant Wikipedia entry as ‘digital geographical maps that put emphasis on the sonic
representation of a specific location’. By embarking on a speculative genealogy, I hope to
demonstrate that what currently tends to pass for a soundmap – on Wikipedia and elsewhere
– need not be as narrowly defined and that there are historical resources for mapping
sound that prefigure something of the alternative approaches which this chapter finishes
with, approaches which might be considered under the rubric of Thulin’s ‘cartophonic’.
Perhaps most recently presented in this lineage would be the noise map which, in its
paradigmatic form, constitutes what cartographers call a choropleth, a thematic map where
colour gradations reflect distributions of density, in this case measured (or simulated)
acoustic intensity. In Europe, noise maps tend to be associated with the Environmental
Noise Directive (END) (Council of the European Union 2002) and in a case study-based
article offering the methodological innovation of triangulating noise maps with ‘sound
maps and soundscape maps’, acousticians Francesco Aletta and Jiang King indicate that
‘noise mapping is certainly one of the most relevant operational tools that the END relies
on, providing visual representations of the yearly average noise levels in a selected area […]
useful to assess easily the population’s noise exposure and consequently to spot areas where
noise action plans are required’ (Aletta and Kang 2015: 1). Though we can enthusiastically
acknowledge the imperative ‘to listen beyond an exclusive focus on the quantitative
regulation enshrined in noise pollution policies’ (Di Croce 2016: n.p.), it might be, as we
shall hear, that the choroplethic approach can be adapted to amplify other aspects of the
sounded environment without succumbing to the conventions of the soundmap.1
Predating the choroplethic noise map and equally implicated in the substitution of
visual for acoustic information was the audiospectrograph, the development of which is
critically reconstructed by Joeri Bruyninckx as a complex process in which the impetus
towards mechanical inscription (of bird song) involved a renegotiation of the competing
legitimacies of sensorial and scientific knowledge and propelled ‘recorded sound further
into even flatter and more controllable, comparable units of sound […] deal[ing] with
the dimension of time in a more felicitous way […] deal[ing] with the problem of noise,
by erasing it visually’ (Bruyninckx 2012: 145). Bruyninckx cautiously concludes that the
audiospectrograph and such successor technologies as the spectrograph and the sonogram
are taken to ‘illustrate a scientific culture in which places of science are demarcated by
sterility and silence and underscore the need to understand how this scheme is enforced by
and reinforces wider cultural expressions of modern sound control’ (147).
Valerio Signorelli has uncovered other such antecedents, dating, for example, ‘the earliest
documented examples of soundmap […] in the research conducted, in the 20s, by the
Finnish geographer Johannes Gabriel Granö […] [who] developed a specific methodology
to describe landscape features through direct multisensory observations of the proximate
environment and a series of hatched maps’ (Signorelli 2017: 155). It is possible to uncover
two persuasive prior claimants to the title of earliest soundmap, each as imbricated within
a scientific culture as the noise maps and the audiospectrographs, albeit a Victorian
paradigm rather than Bruyninckx’s Modernism. In 1888, the Royal Society of Great Britain
reported on the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, devoting extensive analysis to associated
acoustic phenomena, of which two dimensions attract attention. First of these dimensions
are the series of topographic maps plotting the global movement of the pressure waves that
persisted for nearly 100 hours after the eruption, the data for which were recorded as traces
detected by the network of meteorological barographs. Second is the report’s tabulated
accumulation of ear witness accounts from mariners, colonial administrators, weather
scientists, and others which arguably constitutes another cartography, of which evidence
from the Rodrigues Islands’ Chief of Police – 4,777 kilometres from Krakatoa – is edifying:
‘stormy […] heavy rain and squalls, […] wind […] blowing with a force of 7 to 10, Beaufort
Scale […]. Reports like the distant roars of heavy guns’. The table of textual witnessing in
the Royal Society report functions to map the perceived movements of sound across what
was estimated to have been ‘a 13th of the surface of the earth’ (Furneaux 1964: 18), bringing
detailed coloration to the more orthodox representations in the global plotting of pressure
gradients on the projected continents and oceans.
The textual component intimates other pedigrees for a critical conceptualization of the
soundmap as method. Ear witnessing reports, such as that derived from the Rodrigues
Islands’ Chief of Police, James Wallis, are perhaps less infrequent as mapping of acoustic
phenomena within Victorian scientific culture than might have been anticipated. Archival
analyses conducted by one of my doctoral students, Jennifer Allan, suggest the other
conceivable candidate for earliest soundmap – some fifty years before Signorelli’s Granö –
in John Tyndall’s Report on Fog Signals (Tyndall 1874). Alongside a bird’s eye projection –
a projection I will later call ‘aerial’ after Voegelin and R. Murray Schafer – that depicts
the radial acoustic propagation from the fog signal and the ‘sound shadow’ in a bay
neighbouring the coastal test site of South Foreland in Kent, there are circular graphics
to demonstrate perceived loudness of a trumpet as it is directed to different points of the
compass, where the intensity is given both in numbers and linguistically as ‘weak, faint,
good, very good’. In parallel to the Royal Society’s report on Krakatoa, diagrams and maps
are supplemented with a textual attention to the sonorous that can be comprehended as
another mapping of the transmission vectors of sound, Tyndall’s language rehearsing the
words of Wallis and others in the tables of aural testimonies:
The heavy rain at length reached us […] the sound, instead of being deadened, rose perceptibly
in power. Hail now added to the rain, and the shower reached a tropical violence. The deck
was thickly covered with hailstones which here and there floated upon the rainwater […]. In
the midst of a furious squall both the horn and the syren were distinctly heard; and as the
shower lightened, thus lessening the local noises, the sounds so rose in power that we heard
them at a distance of 7 ½ miles.
(Tyndall 1874: 22)
Although sensually attentive and allusive, the respective reports of Tyndall and Wallis,
each bending their listening practices to the geophonic, remain within the parameters of
gridded, choate writing. Other textual cartographies of sound have shown less obedience
to the grid, and more proximity to that digital writing addressed by N. Katherine Hayles in
which text ‘becomes a process […] “eventilized”, made more an event and less a discrete,
self-contained object with clear boundaries in space and time’ (Hayles quoted in Carpenter
2017: 105). Two contrasting para-literary illustrations, separated by a neat century, that
might also be accounted for as sonic mappings can be located in an example drawn from
F. T. Marinetti’s ‘parole i libertà’ (words-in-freedom) and in Christian Marclay’s video work
Surround Sounds (2015). Marinetti’s poem ‘Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto’
(1915) is described by curator JoAnne Paradise as ‘unusual in that it borrows the basic
form of a military map’ to evoke what she dubs the ‘surround sound’ of the battle, depicting
the physicality of landscape and troop dispositions and the sonority of combatants, their
screams, machine gun reports, and artillery blasts rendered through an ‘eventilized’,
dynamized combination of typography and paint strokes (Finkelaug 2006). Marclay’s
own Surround Sounds resembles an animated version of Marinetti’s poem, deploying a
graphic depiction of comic book sound effects to infer, in the gallery’s own interpretation
text, ‘the acoustic properties of each word. “Boom”, for example, is no longer static on
the page, but bursts into life in a sequence of colorful explosions, while “Whooosh!” and
“Zoooom!” travel at high speed around the walls. The work fuses the aural with the visual,
and immerses the viewer in a silent musical composition’ (White Cube 2018).
I am arguing that Marclay’s and Marinetti’s onomatopoeic ‘eventilizations’ constitute
soundmaps and belong to a genealogy that can be obscured by the current conventional
definitions. Room within the terminological scope of the soundmap can also be made for
the more recognizable antecedents in choroplethic noise maps and audiospectrographs just
as accommodation can be found for the diagrams of acoustic propagation encapsulated in
Tyndall’s fog horn tests or the Royal Society’s plotting of the auditory aftermath of Krakatoa.
The ‘ear witness’ textual testimonies that were also embraced by Tyndall and the Royal
Society plant other roots from which new practices can grow. Indeed, in advance of the
relatively recent access to digital and network technologies, the historical incarnations of
soundmaps most closely approximated these two examples emerging from that (Victorian)
scientific culture. Signorelli draws justifiable additional attention to the presence of a variety
of soundmaps within the 1970s research of the World Soundscape Project (WSP) such as
their ‘isobel map of Stanley Park in Vancouver […]; the Sound Profile Map of the Holy
Rosary Bells of Vancouver; the yearly graph of natural soundscape in British Columbia
coastline; a pictorial representation that shows the sound sources converted in textual
notation; the acoustic horizon of Bissingen in Germany, and Lesconil in France’ (Signorelli
2017: 156). If Signorelli’s illustrative examples correspond to Thulin’s maps-of-sound – a
category in which he incorporates the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s ‘Tranquil
Area’ maps from the 1960s – other projects by researchers associated with the WSP would
be classified in Thulin’s taxonomy as sound-as-map. The sound-as-map is constituted as a
‘sonic cartography […] based on the richness of spatial and locational information that
can be attained through listening, and approaches visual representation as secondary or, in
some cases, unnecessary to the mapping of sound spaces’ (Thulin 2018: 196).
Frame
With Thulin, I want to open up the genealogy of the soundmap to usher in instantiations
of sound-as-map and I want to welcome both methods which can be configured in relation
to the lineage of noise maps, audiospectrographs, and textual testimonies and methods
which find forms external to those pedigrees. Yet the definition deployed by Wikipedia and
others effectively bars entry to cartographies which do not bend to ‘digital geographical
maps that put emphasis on the sonic representation of a specific location’. In Jacqueline
Waldock’s early analysis of the form, she identifies ‘a new interactive, publicly engaging
medium […] a social media application […] the interactive soundmap’ (Waldock 2011),
which is echoed by Milena Droumeva in her later articulation of the soundmap as ‘publicly
engaging digital artefacts’ (Droumeva 2017: 337). This commitment of the soundmap to a
specific technological apparatus and the association between soundmaps and web-based
distribution is, with perhaps inevitable circularity, one cemented by subsequent online
discourse. In 2010, Merle Patchett posted ‘Mapping Sound and Sounding Maps’ to the
blog Experimental Geography in Practice, introducing a field in which only two of the
eight illustrative examples of ‘sonic maps’ are delivered offline (one of these being the work
of the WSP); in 2015, Cities and Memory – ‘which, though resembling traditional online
soundmapping portals […] defines itself as a global artwork, a participatory, yet curated
portal for real and imagined soundscapes’ (Droumeva 2017: 345) – published its ‘Top 10
Sound Maps’, all of which are internet platforms, as are the fourteen ‘other sound maps well
worth investigating’.
Cities and Memory cast their selection in an economy of personal taste, that same
inspiration that has energized enthusiasm over more than two decades for the sound-
triggering symbols that populate what must count as the hundreds of online soundmaps.
Such preferences for what inspires are compelling and it is to be conceded that the
potential benefits of online soundmaps include: inserting the tactics of crowdsourcing
within sound arts practices; exploring auditory locality’s relations to the live and the
recorded (see Soundcamp 2020; and Locus Sonus 2020); investigating the ways in which
the cartographic might be harnessed to diagrammatize what is perceived as negative and as

positive in environmental sound (see Hush City n.d.; and Metcalfe 2013); coordinating acts
of sensory conservation that approach the motivations of salvage ethnography (Samuels et
al. 2010: 338); and discovering a mechanism in the internet-based map which makes the
production and distribution of self-initiated, thematically coherent site-orientated sound
projects as accessible as it does their consumption.2
These benefits aside, it is this mechanism of accessibility itself that is one of dimensions
of online soundmaps that troubles their easy adoption as a sonic methodology. Whether
it is Google Maps or any of the rival geographic information systems that are used as the
base layer on which the online soundmap is created, each complex blend of cartographic
material is derived from remote sensing systems and aerial photography from within an
institutional environment favouring ‘free trade, an open market and privately funded
research and development […]. It requires a well-funded military–industrial complex that
develops defense technology’ (Lee 2010: 910). Whatever creative adaptations are made
to these base-layers, ‘it is important to recognize that they do so within a production
environment where their emancipatory potential is always constrained by institutional
forces that govern the production, storage, and provision of geo-spatial data’ (Jetahni and
Leorke 2013: 488).
In parallel to this question of ‘the master’s tools’, attention needs also to be devoted
to the mechanisms of access since the availability and cost of the high-speed internet
necessary to upload material to an online sound map is far from equal. Jason Farman’s
2010 article, for example, distinguished digital signal transmission costs in Japan as 6 cents
per 100 kilobytes per second – a price that amounted to 0.002 of the average monthly
salary – from the cost for the same data transfer rates in Kenya at twice the average monthly
salary. More recent research substantiates the concern that ‘internet exclusion coincides
with other forms of marginalization […]. In the case of Africa, global digital inequalities
have reinforced existing racial as well as economic chasms, shutting out a huge proportion
of the continent from access to the internet. Although some 14% of the world’s population
resides in Africa, only 3% of the world’s internet users live on the continent’ (Robinson et
al. 2015: 574).
The specific technological apparatus through which the conventional soundmap is
delivered is the first of the two problematic investments I referred to earlier: the differential
economics of access, the broader milieu of militarized and capitalized spatiality, and the
imbrication within a logic of data collection where ‘location-based services are being
recognized as participative ways to normalize surveillance: a process through which
leakages of personal information are seen as “normal” or “natural” in everyday life’ (Diogo
2018).
This investment undercuts the ‘seemingly neutral medium of the sound map’ (Droumeva
2017: 339), as does the second problematic investment, which relates to a particular
perspectival frame. The base maps are never faithful analogues of geomorphology nor
indexical renditions of the built environment: they are the multitude of ‘little white lies’
that Mark Monmonier identifies as the basis of every map. These distortions are what
‘suppresses truth to help the user see what needs to be seen’ (Monmonier 1996: 25); without
such deliberate down-scaling of information, a map would be rendered useless. This point
is implied in Schafer’s thoughts on what he calls ‘soundscape notation’, thoughts which
inadvertently recall Jorge Luis Borges’s anti-cartographic fable On Exactitude in Science:
While everyone has had some experience reading maps […] few can read the sophisticated
charts used by phoneticians, acousticians or musicians. To give a totally convincing image
of a soundscape would involve extraordinary skill and patience: thousands of recordings
would have to be made; tens of thousands of measurements would have to be taken; and a
new means of description would have to be devised.
(Schafer 1994: 99)
In an extension of this argument, Schafer asserts that ‘the microphone gives the close-up
but nothing corresponding to aerial photography’ (Schafer 1994: 99), a position that is
echoed by Voegelin: ‘Sound suggests a geography from within the depth of the place, rather
than projecting an aerial view’ (Voegelin 2010: 144). And yet, the ‘aerial’ of Schafer and
Voegelin is precisely the perspectival frame which is projected by the conventional online
soundmap. The aerial perspective which suspends the soundmap user at an abstracted
height particularly chafes as a distortion because it is insensitive to the condition often
ascribed to sound as that which engulfs the listener – like the ‘surround’ relationship
attributed earlier to Marinetti and to Marclay. Moreover, the top-down aerial view,
reiterates the militarized projection that is a function of the online technological apparatus,
since it belongs to ‘the cartographic imagination inherited from the military and political
spatialities of the modern state’ (Weizman 2002). Finally, although the aerial representation
depends upon the vertical for its elevation above the visualized ground, it paradoxically
occludes the vertical axis itself (Carlyle 2000, 2014). The nodes on a conventional soundmap
are positioned on a flat plane where altitude can have no place, a diagrammatization
that is particularly problematic methodologically at a historical juncture when political
geographers are seeking to invest the vertical as a significant territorial dimension, when
‘such a perspective neglects the three-dimensional politics of the worlds above, below and
around borders’ (Graham 2016: 3).
In addition to its symbolic evacuation of the vertical, reiteration of the militarized
projection and dislocation from the ‘surround’ of sound, the aerial dimension of the
soundmap risks disembodying its users through a process that parallels the sensory
hierarchization evoked by Michel De Certeau in his famous meditation on the view
from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center: ‘one’s body is no longer clasped by
the streets […]. Nor possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many
differences. The city’s agitation is momentarily arrested by vision’ (De Certeau 1984: 92).
The ‘rumbles’ are not entirely silenced, of course, since their amplification is the very
functional imperative of the soundmap, yet there is an objectivized distance. Whether
the map user moves the mouse and activates a virtual button from a rendered height or
observes from afar a flattened, static visualization, both might be processes not entirely
divorced from Bruyninckx’s ‘sterility’, hailing the user at Donna Haraway’s ‘vantage point
of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject’ culpable of ‘seeing everything
from nowhere’ (Haraway 1988: 586 and 581).
The spatial demarcations involved in conventional soundmaps reach further still,

the aerial perspective obscuring those complexities of urban soundscapes that relate to
what Matthew Gandy has called ‘the spatial porosity of atmospheres and the uncertain
distinctions between what constitutes “inside” and “outside”’ (Gandy 2017: 356). It is not
simply that the construction of soundmaps’ interfaces tends to isolate individual sources,
and hence ignore the overlapping complexities, since some platforms, such as Cusack’s
Favourite Sounds, do allow multiple nodes to play simultaneously in a simulation of
porosity. Rather, what is at issue is the prioritization of externalities, another consequence
of relying on graphic base layers engaged from above and a problem that Waldock’s research
has been important in addressing:
Within the short history of soundmaps, there has developed a cycle of otherness that obtains
its clarity in the absence of the domestic. Within the sound maps there appears to be a trend
to capture the public rather than the private moments of life […] there are only a handful of
recordings within the home.
(Waldock 2011)
Just as Waldock’s analyses have drawn our attention to soundmaps’ capacities to silence
auditory activities occurring under the roofs and behind the walls rendered on-screen
and online – and how that suppression is a gendered one – Isobel Anderson has explored
how only if the boundaries of the ‘online gridded soundmap platform’ are traversed can
we access ‘the peripheries of lived experience’ and reveal ‘the invisible “in-between-space”
of personal relationships to sound, but also the unseen spaces of urban architectures’
(Anderson 2016).
Projections
The final stage of this chapter is inspired by Anderson’s projects that ‘map sound in
unconventional and creative ways’ (Anderson 2016) and by Droumeva’s suggestion of
an ‘alternative grammar’ (Droumeva 2017: 346). It is informed by the wider genealogy
of soundmapping and it has been alerted to the jeopardies of a specific technological
apparatus and of the particular perspectival frame that is the aerial.
Textual/graphic soundmaps3
In the parameters developed by Jacob Smith in Eco-Sonic Media, soundmaps which involve
the inscription of written or graphic information have the potential to eschew complicity
in a ‘material culture that has caused so much environmental damage’ (Smith 2015: 4);
subject to the sustainability credentials of the paper and inks, these might instantiate
Smith’s ‘no-wattage sound technologies’ (6, 168). Such cartophonies can be threaded back
to the genealogies of the textual components in Tyndall and in the Royal Society report and
of the ‘eventilized’ words on Marinetti’s page; equally, they are stitched into the histories
of ornithological transcription that propelled the development of the audiospectrographs
analysed by Bruyninckx and ultimately form part of the wider, complex, and antediluvian
fabric of sound notation, as Schafer’s reference to ‘soundscape notation’ underscores.
Although, in some of its manifestations, paradigmatic of Wikipedia’s ‘digital
geographical maps that put emphasis on the sonic representation of a specific location’,
Cusack’s long-running Favourite Sounds vehicle has also evolved in recent years to
generate word clouds, in which solicited public preferences of acoustic place are rendered
according to their statistical prominence in the sampled population. These word clouds –
part of what Nicola Di Croce calls a ‘sensitive attempt to represent personal feelings and
build through them a collection of sensations which reflect everyday practices’ (Di Croce
2016) – provide a contemporary example of the alternative approach to soundmapping
which emphasizes the textual and the graphic. Introduced in the context of a community-
engaging or pedagogic arts practice, this approach might avoid some of the intimidations
of digital creativity and can construct a bridge for non-specialists to travel into the world
of sound representation. A perspectival frame remains active, with elements of the aerial
tending to persist in the more spontaneous initial efforts, but through guided iterations,
the conventions of the top-down can be as challenged as any reflex elimination of porosity
or ‘in-between-spaces’.4
Cusack’s word clouds correlate with the visual grammars we have come to associate
with map-making; however, it may be that textual creativity can be entirely unhinged from
the graphic, even from the ‘eventilized’, yet still retain a purchase on Thulin’s cartophonic.
Candidates can be identified within recognizable sound arts practices – Steve Peter’s Here-ings:
A Sonic Geohistory (2012) comes to mind, drawing as it does from a calendar year of listening
devoted to a site in New Mexico and delivering sensed experience in spare, diaristic prose;
so too, Voegelin’s Sound Words, a mobile microsite that shuttles between personally authored
and curated collaborations and has been hosted by various international festivals. Forms
of locational writing that express an attentiveness to the sonorous yet fall outside genre
delineations, such as those resonant passages of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain5 that to
my ear fashion for the Cairngorms a porous, ground-truthed soundmap that no screen with
uploaded nodes could hope to match for nuance, might equally well qualify.
Desterilized soundmaps
For Bruyninckx, the audiospectrograph sought to flatten and control sound, it ‘dealt with
the problem of noise, by erasing it visually’ (Bruyninckx 2012: 145). In common with the
choroplethic noise map – the audiospectrograph is as attached to a specific, and loaded,
technological apparatus as it is to a particular perspectival frame. There have been instances,
however, of efforts to disentangle the spectrogram and the noise map from their silencing
and sterile ‘scientific culture’, and to exploit their respective latent cartophonic possibilities
(as opposed to their already materialized cartographic ones).
Bernie Krause’s first encounter with spectrograms in the early 1980s is narrated in
language dislocated from orthodox scientific culture – he evokes Turner’s late seascapes
and dares ‘to think of the spectrograms as contemporary graphic musical scores’ (Krause
2013: 87). Subsequent engagements with spectrograms enabled him to map the waxing
and waning of biophonic and anthrophonic presences in particular places, both terrestrial
and marine, that have been returned to over successive decades, and to represent these
dynamics in the characteristic diagrammatic form. The spectrograms compliment the
recordings from which they derive, sometimes coexisting spatially, as in the 2016 installation
in the basement of the Cartier Foundation, Paris, which the exhibition designers explained
within a representational schema of mapping, repeating the rhetoric of the ‘surround’ we
have heard before: ‘A cohesive, immersive experience that three-dimensionalises Krause’s
recordings and suggests scenes from the natural world […]. The spectrograms form an
abstract landscape, an interpretation of the various global locations and times of day that
Krause made the original recordings in a way that envelops the audience and encourages
them to linger in the space’ (United Visual Artists 2018).
The Spanish artist Edu Commelles decoupled the spectrogram further from its host
scientific culture in Spectre/A Secret Music (2018) and, particularly, in Espectrograma:
Mislata (2016) where a month of ‘sound mapping the entire city’ was concretized in two
curved murals, each 2.6 metres high, one stretching out beneath low-rise tower blocks
for 25 metres, the other spanning a neighbouring 20 metres. Although there is an audio
dimension to the Espectrograma project, it is the soundless spectrogram structure,
ironically given Bruyninckx’s critique of silencing, which reverberates, since this, in the
artist’s own interpretation, ‘aims to trigger imagination of the viewer to wonder which
graphic correspond to each sound and to imagine those sounds […] sometimes, the
imagined sound is the most powerful and compelling’ (Commelles 2016).
Spectrograms or noise choropleths that are ‘détourned’ as singular soundmaps to address
Droumeva’s ‘alternative grammar’, are not entirely released from scientific culture (just
as the grammar remains a grammar, however alternative). Rather, there are contiguities
with what Eyal Weizman has to say of the forensic: ‘[We] use the term “forensics”, but
we seek, in fact, to reverse the forensic gaze and to investigate the same state agencies
[…] that usually monopolise it’ (Weizman 2017: 9). A work by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a
colleague of Weizman, exemplifies the reversals that are possible here, reversals that can
have the character of a counter-mapping, an expression that Nancy Lee Peluso introduced
and which is highly instructive in the scope of the conventions of perspectival frame and
specific apparatus: ‘Counter-mapping can be used for alternative boundary-making […]
for expressing social relationships in space rather than depicting abstract space itself ’
(Peluso 1995: 387).
Earshot (2016) is a multidimensional installation, its impetus derived from acoustic
analysis previously commissioned from Hamdan by a charity who had sought to establish
whether the Israel Defense Force had discharged rubber bullets or live rounds in an incident
which left two unarmed teenagers shot dead in the occupied West Bank. An element of
the research involved creating spectrograms of gunshots recorded on the day the youths
died and these featured as evidence in newspapers and at a US Congress hearing; the
same visualizations later deployed in gallery spaces in different configurations and draw,
precisely, a soundmap of the lethal chaos of social relationships in space rather than a more
abstracted, sterile cartography.
Compositional soundmaps
Few material constraints impede the construction of the low-wattage textual and graphic
soundmaps, and this is one of their advantages in a workshop setting; the many resources
which Steph Ceraso identifies in her inter-chapter in Sounding Composition facilitate
the more environmentally impactful form of the online soundmap, and she has shown
that they can be developed as part of curriculum projects. Although soundmaps, both
online and offline, permit this relatively accessible assembly by use of relatively available
software, some practitioners have distinguished themselves through the duration of their
commitment: Cusack’s twenty years of his Favourite Sounds project, Krause’s many decades
devoted to the spectrogram. Annea Lockwood’s Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982)
took a year and demanded recordings from fifteen locations along a 563-kilometre course;
the fieldwork for her A Sound Map of the Danube (2008) generated some 80 hours of
recordings.
Although Lockwood distinguishes her approach by insisting ‘my intention is different
from compositional work’ (Lane 2013: 31), I see her work as emblematic of a kind of
soundmapping that is usefully defined as compositional. Like Lockwood’s work, projects
such as Fernando Godoy’s Atacama: 22° 54 ‘24 ‘S, 68° 12’ 25’ W” (2017) and Cathy Lane’s
The Hebrides Suite (2015) depend on sustained investments of time; deliver as multimodal
combinations of images, texts, and sound; and foreground an adjudicatory, authorial
listening that is active at the site, in the edit suite, and later governs the gallery installation or
other form of dissemination. As Lockwood has it, the initial ‘site has to be really satisfying
to listen to and make my ears prick up’ and subsequent choices of recordings amount to
‘selecting sites that are really engaging and vivid to me – really alive’ (Lane 2013: 33–34).
This is not to say that Lockwood, Lane, or Godoy resist inscribing the testimonies of
others within their sonic mapping. We hear vocalized witnessing in Lockwood and Lane.
Witnessing contributes to Godoy’s sound world too, not through audible speech itself but
through the invocation of ‘Atacama [as] a space of evocation, of memory, of overwhelming
loss experienced by the mothers and women who have spent years searching for the
remains of their loved ones […] buried there during the extermination carried out by the
Chilean dictatorship’ (Pisano 2018). It functions as another of Peluso’s counter-mappings,
triggering ‘a critical process that questions epistemological maps of knowledge by offering
a possible renegotiation of the meanings of language itself ’ (Pisano 2018).
The compositional maps by Lockwood, Lane, and Godoy each offer their own answers to
James Clifford’s question ‘but what of the ethnographic ear?’ (Clifford 1986: 12). Rather than
the aerial, their exploratory altitude drops down to ground level and sometimes lower still,
as in the below-surface hydrophone recordings of Lockwood and the contact microphone
recordings of Godoy and his Austrian collaborator Peter Kutin. These projects – that fall
within the sound-as-map in Thulin’s taxonomy – can have recourse to actual maps, such
as those which appear in some of Lockwood’s Sound Map installations and in Godoy’s
abstracted diagram that allows the audience to plug headphones into specific nodes on
the gallery wall labelled with longitude and latitude in his contribution to the 2017 Otros
Sonidos, Otros Paisajes exhibition at MACRO, Rome, curated by Pisano and Antonio
Arévalo. However, in keeping with what Thulin says of this category, they approach ‘visual
representation as secondary or, in some cases, unnecessary to the mapping of sound spaces’
(Thulin 2018: 196).
The compositional sound-as-map artists I have chosen to exemplify this third category
of alternative approaches all use field recording, editing, and various dissemination formats
and, taken together, these institute their own technological apparatus. This may attract
different issues from those I associated earlier with the online soundmaps’ own apparatus,
yet, to measure their methodological robustness, a similar critical auditing is indispensable
in parallel dimensions of economics of access (and Smith’s ‘wattage’), implied spatiality and
questions of data collection (such as the privacy and property rights of those inhabitants of
place who we hear vocalized).
Other projects, though still accountable as an individual artist’s responsibility,
demonstrate a relaxation of compositional control, and accommodate collaborative
methods that endow participants with technical skills and equipment to enable a certain
autonomy to map their own localities, perhaps engaging more directly with issues of access
and data collection in the technological apparatus. Waldock’s work in Liverpool’s Welsh
Streets repositions the researcher so that the domestic spaces are foregrounded and, for
their inhabitants, ‘instead of listening in on them, this methodology makes it much more
possible to listen to and with them’ (Waldock 2016: 67). A similar recalibration is discernible
in Hong Kai Wang’s Music While We Work (2011), where retired sugar factory labourers
become recordists, soundtracking the multiscreen and multichannel installation, ‘allowing
them to work on their own, identifying and recording the sounds of their former work
environment – their aural universe. Wang believes that whoever holds the microphone and
what he or she records, delineates, from various viewpoints, the right to speak, the right to
interpret and the power relationships between sound-maker and recipient’ (Chang 2011).
Compass
One of the significant advantages of the online soundmap relates to its capacity to deliver a
collective listening for its audience from the collective, recorded, and uploaded listenings of
its curated contributors. Cities and Memory’s recent project Sounding Nature incorporated
the work of 250 artists who supplied some 500 recordings from 55 countries; Udo Noll’s
Radio Aporee has evolved into a platform for 1,665 contributors and to hear the totality
of its collective cartography would demand 115 days and 23 hours. The peculiarities of
how Cities and Memory or Radio Aporee or any of the other online collective soundmaps
adapt the geographical information system’s base layer to invite the rich, crowdsourced,
material constitute a technological apparatus and a perspectival frame. These stipulate
an invoked territory, in terms of the militarized, capitalized, surveilled infrastructure
on which they depend, an infrastructure that has not surmounted the issue of digital
inequality nor escapes Smith’s critique of environmental damage, and stipulate an impelled
listening position, in terms of the aerial that disembodies as it plugs porosity and stresses
externalities. Some online soundmaps have invested energies in engineering a distinctive
interface, though there is often standardization within a project in terms of how acoustic
content is presented, despite wide disparities in that content and between many separate
projects there is a palpable presentational homogeneity, partly because their creators
gravitate to similar software.
Less homogenous is the genealogy of the soundmap, a family history in which scientific
culture’s noise maps and audiospectrograms form one branch, textual ear witnessing
another, diverse diagrammatic innovations a third, and the various alternative approaches
a fourth. The three alternative approaches I provided could each have been deepened to
draw in more exemplars, just as they could have been broadened to incorporate other
cartophonic categories: the transmission works of Dawn Scarfe or Jiyeon Kim suggest the
possibility of a live soundmap, the reverberation of interior or external spaces in projects by
artists as different as Viv Corringham and Davide Tidoni imply a performative soundmap,
and a potential classification of storied soundmaps arises out of the separate creative
research endeavours of Isobel Anderson and Ultra-Red.
It is not that the alternative approaches have somehow evaded technological
apparatuses and perspectival frames: they are still soundmaps after all, each with an invoked
territory and an impelled listening position. Rather, the alternative approaches agitate the
apparatuses and frames to critical motion, hazard counter-mappings, lower themselves
from the aerial, admit the porous, and slip from the cartographic into the cartophonic.
Notes
1. Not fully cartophonic but nonetheless intriguing is the Chatty Map collaboration between
Yahoo Labs, Bell Labs, and the universities of Turin and Sheffield where choroplethic
maps are generated from tags on social media data to characterize acoustic perceptions
organized across axes of chaos, calm, monotony, and vibrancy and to characterize sonic
diversity (see Aiello et al. 2016).
2. Perhaps the emblematic soundmap project, in its breadth and depth, its balance of
complexity and coherence, is Ian Rawes’s London Sound Survey (2008–2020).
3. I am borrowing this forward slash from the work of Alison Barnes: ‘The forward slash [in
geo/graphic] is used to reconfigure the context of the word representation in discussion
of creative outputs that endeavor to go beyond a one-to-one “mapping” of place. The use
of re/presentation in relation to both the research and practice of this type emphasizes
both “re” and “presentation” and again creates a productive interplay that enables one to
move beyond the idea of the mimetic with regard to an image of place’ (Barnes 2018: 4).
4. An insightful and inspiring account of the adaptation of soundmaps within classroom

settings – and the compromises which emerge – can be found in Ceraso (2018).
5. The passages in chapter 4 of Shepherd’s book are particularly resonant (Shepherd [1977]
2011: 22–29).
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598
38
Listening as Methodological Tool:
Sounding Soundwalking Methods
John L. Drever
Soundwalking as an emergent practice

Amongst the interplay of competing commands and demands for our attention in daily
life, multitasking attentive listening to the here-and-now with the bipedal locomotion
mode of ambulation – along with an inordinate amount of other incessantly shuffling
and intermingling of tasks – is considered by many as routine. Relentlessly endeavouring
to attend to the sounds around you, whilst dwelling in and passing through everyday
environments for an extended duration of time, by actively curtailing other customary
cognitive tasks or behaviours, on the other hand, is an atypical activity. Prefiguring the
developments of sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and the ‘sonic turn’ (Drobnick 2004:
10), such a pursuit, under the overarching term, soundwalking, has been employed over
the past forty years as a designated and dependable, even vital sonic method.
Approaching soundwalking as an emergent rather than a transplantable fixed practice
with an ossified methodology, this chapter will feed off historical precedence and draw from
the author’s direct experience as a soundwalk facilitator in multiple situations, catering for
participants with disciplinarily specialisms including acoustic engineering, architecture,
ornithology, city planning, accessibility, social science, and arts practice, and extending out
to school children and the general public at large – all stakeholders and individuals with
diverse general and specific needs, concerns, and understandings. Attentive concentration
on listening is an engrossing experience where one can become absorbed in the flow1 of
the enveloping soundscape. As it is beholden on the soundwalk leader to guide and to plan
ahead to the safe and sound completion of the walk, whilst poised to attend to any pressing
pragmatic issues that may transpire midst-walk, the actual emphasis on their listening
tends not to be prioritized. But this in turn permits the participants to dedicate their entire
attention to the task in hand. So, reversing roles, the author will also reflect on his various
soundwalking experiences as participant – experience which encompasses dogmatic
and more idiosyncratic approaches, in formal and performative, intimate and extrovert
configurations. The chapter will critically reflect and evaluate on this multitudinous data
set that endeavours to incorporate and verbalize sensuous experience and behaviour, whilst
surfacing the practical, logistical, and ethical vagaries. It will unashamedly concentrate on
soundwalks that do not incorporate audio playback via headphones or aspects of telepresent
or augmented reality (beyond participants’ regular use of audio prosthetics) such as audio
walks by, for example, Janet Cardiff, Christina Kubisch, and Duncan Speakman; it is
contended that soundwalking with the ‘naked ear’ is an already highly sophisticated and
infinitely practicable and malleable methodology suitable for multiple research, training,
and artistic needs.
Evolution
The dominant traits of soundwalking appear to coalesce in the 1960s around the Fluxus
movement (where foregrounding, framing, and enacting forms of gait were a recurring
theme) and the experimental music scene in part influenced by but departing from
exemplars posed by John Cage, typified in 4ʹ33˝ (1952): in particular, the open air activities
of Philip Corner, Max Neuhaus, and Ben Patterson, who in their own ways radically
inverted concert hall conventions and aesthetics with the world outside. This attitude is
most clearly exemplified by Neuhaus’s rubber stamping the imperative ‘LISTEN’ (1966)
on to the hands of a small group of participants, and leading them down West 14th Street,
Manhattan, and in subsequent trips to out-of-the-way sites such as power stations.2
It was with R. Murray Schafer and the prodigious exploits of the handful of Vancouver-
based researchers that constituted the aspiringly named World Soundscape Project (WSP)
in the 1970s, that the soundwalk is pinned down and codified as a method: this is most
clearly expressed and promulgated in a special issue of Aural History focused on ‘Sound
Heritage’ (1974), in Schafer’s instructive paper ‘Listening’ (1974) and from a more personal
and motivational perspective, Hildegard Westerkamp’s (an enduring practitioner and
passionate advocate of soundwalking) paper ‘Soundwalking’ (2007). Echoing the pervasive
uptake of walking in its many manifestations as core practice across-the-board (see Evans
2012; Smith 2014; Qualmann and Hind 2015), in the past decade soundwalking activities
have mushroomed. In 2013 it was adopted in English primary schools as a recommended
activity for Key Stage 1 (i.e. pupils aged five to seven) of the National Curriculum in England
(Department of Education 2013), and in August 2018 it was enshrined as a scientific
method for acoustic engineering in Part 2 of the ISO series on Acoustics – Soundscapes
that is concerned with Data collection and reporting requirements (ISO/TS 12913–2: 2018).
Soundwalking
The conjoining of ‘sound’ and ‘walk’ to produce the compound noun, ‘soundwalk’,
presents an immediately graspable and yet imaginative concept – I have tended to opt
Sounding Soundwalking Methods 601
for the continuous tense form, ‘soundwalking’, indicating that it is an action that is in
progress associated to time, space, and place, albeit on occasion vicarious or virtual. In
the opening line of ‘Soundwalking’, Westerkamp articulates the soundwalk quite simply
as ‘any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment’ (Westerkamp 2007:
49). For Westerkamp, and for the interdiscipline of acoustic ecology in general, this is no
passive pursuit however, the practice demands practise, and in turn redoubles ‘attentive
listening’ towards ‘aural awareness on a wider scale’ (52). From a preliminary survey of
the rhetoric surrounding soundwalking you can find ‘attentive’ treated synonymously for
other affirmative adjectives, each bringing its own inflection, on describing the kind of
listening soundwalking may engender: ‘critical’, ‘engaged’, ‘active’, ‘relational’, ‘meaningful’,
‘interactive’, ‘connective’, ‘deep’, ‘sensitive’, ‘purposeful’. What characterizes the soundwalk
as a sonic method, however, is its alignment with the meta-concept of soundscape,
again both a concept nurtured by the WSP and recently stamped by ISO, defined as an
‘an acoustic environment as perceived or experienced and/or understood by a person
or people, in context’ (ISO 12913–1: 2014). Thus, the raison d’être of the soundwalk is
in the interrelationship and intra-relationship (Barad 2007) between participant(s) and
the prevailing acoustic environment that they encounter and experience. But, as we will
examine, what actually constitutes a soundwalk and the motivation for soundwalking is a
moot point.
Five Village Soundscape

The WSP made extensive use of soundwalking methodology in their Five Village Soundscape
project that ran between February and June 1975, where they ‘undertook to study the
soundscape of northern Europe’ (Schafer 1977a: 1). Fully aware of resource and time limits,
they strategically decided to focus on a comparative soundscape study of five European
villages, allowing a week to ten days of concentrated study in each location. On arriving
in a new village, recuperating from their long journey in a rented Volkswagen bus, they
would expeditiously get to work, the first activity being a walk: to provide them with ‘an
immediate initial sensory experience […] which each village evoked’ (11). This outsider’s
ear, even naïve listening is akin to Elias Canetti’s resistance to prior knowledge espoused
in his travelogue, The Voices of Marrakesh: ‘I wanted sounds to affect me as much as lay in
their power, unmitigated by deficient and artificial knowledge on my part’ (Canetti 2003:
23). It could also be considered an enactment of an auditory take on the consumption of
place parallel to John Urry’s notion of the tourist’s gaze: ‘Places are chosen to be gazed upon
because there is an anticipation, especially through day-dreaming and fantasy, of intense
pleasure, either on a different scale or involving different senses from those customarily
encountered’ (Urry 1995: 132).
Moving on from their initial ‘touristic’ impressions, they analysed the ‘acoustic rhythms
and densities’ (Schafer 1977a: 21) in a more systematic, quasi-statistical, and consistent
fashion: along with traffic counts, 24-hour-long sound recordings and sounds preferences
tests, they used their own hearing as a diagnostic tool. They were tasked with creating
‘sound catalogues of all acoustic events heard by listeners in all areas of the village during
half hour periods at five times between 7.00 am and 7.00 pm. To compile this the village
was divided into sections and project field workers moved continuously through the streets
listing to every sound heard’ (21).
Deliberately focusing on man-made sounds, the team assigned what they heard into
prearranged categories such as motor traffic, human traffic (e.g. footsteps, bikes), voices,
indoor or outdoor human activity, domestic animals, and electro-acoustic (Schafer 1977a:
27–28). In the year 2000, the villages (with the addition of Nauvo in Finland) and the
research methodologies were revisited in the Acoustic Environments in Change project,
led by Helmi Järviluoma. Twenty-five years on the researchers found this specific task
limiting, ‘distracted from concentrating on the environment itself ’ (Vikman 2009: 63).
Departing from a mechanistic process they found themselves inclined to acknowledge
their auditory perception in situ: ‘we distinguished between distances and directions of
the sound sources, or the order in which a cluster of sounds were heard, so that chains of
perceptions of each listener walker could be constructed later’ (Järviluoma et al. 2009: 63).
Soundwalk/listening walk
Where Westerkamp regards soundwalking as an all-encompassing term that may include
a wide variety of approaches which foreground listening, Schafer calls for a differentiation
between a listening walk and a soundwalk, where ‘a listening walk is simply a walk with
a concentration on listening’ (Schafer 1974: 17). The soundwalk, on the other hand, may
be an elaborately devised affair, where specific modes of listening to the environment may
be prompted by maps or scores and/or a greater level of performativity through sonic
interventions or choreography by the participant or interlocutors, such as engineering ‘a
dialogue with a slat fence by dragging a stick across it’ (17) – the kind of nascent sonic
playfulness and openness displayed by children on entering a highly reverberant space.
I participated in such an active approach at the inaugural symposium for the
International Ambiance Network hosted by CRESSON (Centre for Research on Sound
Space and the Urban Environment) in Grenoble in 2009. Merging their expertise in dance,
choreography, ethnology, and architecture, the Collectif Rendez-Vous led simultaneous
soundwalks through the streets to prompt the delegates to identify, through in situ active
listening and performative interventions, sonic effects. The ‘sonic effect’ is a pragmatic
listening tool developed in CRESSON, presented as a repertoire of effects, geared towards
apprehending the soundscape of the build environment ‘that allows us to integrate the
domains of perception and action, observation and conception, and analysis and creation’
(Augoyard and Torgue 2005: 11). Echoing Situationist tropes, questioning the perception
of the human scale in the design of the city and the way it influences our habitual
deportment in an embodied manner, with a frisson of social disruption, the delegates
were prompted to play spatial games and explore rhythmic variation of their steps, and
unconventional deportment, including the creation of collective ‘sculptures de corps’
(Dugave and Regnault 2009).
The European Sound Diary

Not restricted to the villages, soundwalking in the Schaferian sense, was practised
throughout the WSP’s European tour. As they stopped off in cities to undertake preparatory
research on the villages, they creatively adapted methods of soundwalking to the contexts
they found themselves in. These activities are assiduously documented in the European
Sound Diary (1977). As well as individual members’ accounts of what they heard, the
publication also includes detailed instructions and sound maps on carrying out place-
specific soundwalks as ‘useful educational experiences for everyone’ (Schafer 1977b: 1).
The Paris Soundwalk acts as a stimulus to imagining the soundscapes represented or
alluded to in selected paintings of the Louvre: ‘Study the images, and let the genius of their
execution speed your imagination to provide the appropriate soundtrack’ (Schafer 1977b:
86). It also keeps the participant connected to the physical surroundings, drawing attention
to the actual aural architecture of the gallery: ‘Note marble stairway floorsounds on way up
to 3rd floor – especially the clicking and ensuring reverberation’ (91).
The Vienne Soundwalk: Evening in the Old Town, invites the participant to intervene
in the soundscape; for example, on Backerstrasse and Dr. Innaz Seipel-Platz, the walker
is asked to ‘go to the telephone booth. Stomp on the wooden floor […] whistle yourself
through the arch’ (Schafer 1977b: 84).
The London Soundwalk, which leads from Euston Square to Queen Mary’s Gardens in
Regents Park, introduces the notion of thresholds of comfort and discomfort:
● ‘THRESHOLD OF COMFORT: find the transition point where the roadway sound
gives way to the sounds of the park’ (Schafer 1977b: 93).
● ‘THRESHOLD OF DISOMFORT: the transition point where the sounds of the park
are once more buried by the sound of city traffic’ (94).
Whilst conscientious listening is encouraged throughout, soundwalking does not

necessarily demand continuous ambulation. Once in the gardens the soundwalker is
invited to: ‘Sit on the bench nearby until someone crosses between you and the fountain.
How do they affect the sound?’ (93). The exercise goes on to highlight a highly subjective
contextual factor for the soundwalker: ‘Note the difference between the two threshold
locations. Depending on how much the park has cleaned your ears, the second threshold
will be farther from the outer streets’ (94). An audiologist would refer to this kind of
aural respite as recovering from auditory fatigue or temporary threshold shift (TTS),
however the wording chimes with one of Schafer’s central concepts, Ear Cleaning (Schafer
[1967] 1976: 49–92), originally designed as a series of experimental workshops for music
students to metaphorically open their ears: ‘To induce students to notice sounds they have
never listened to before, […] the sounds of their own environment and the sounds they
themselves inject into their environment’ (49). Schafer, later expanding this concept from
music education to the acoustic designer, regarded soundwalking as a principle exercise
of ear cleaning, ‘at the root of the acoustic design program’ (Schafer 1994: 213). He also
promoted ear cleaning for the whole society, starting with schools, which, as already noted,
has now been picked up in England’s National Curriculum.
Soundwalking methodology guide

The following is a fleshing out of the methodology of the much-trodden rudimental,
orthopraxic soundwalk as prompted in Schafer’s No. 13 Listening Walk of his 100 Exercises
in Listening and Sound-Making (Schafer 1992: 31) and The Soundscape: Our Sonic
Environment and the Tuning of the World (Schafer 1994: 212–213). It provides a useful
blueprint which one may elaborate from, deviate from, ignore, or work against. It is not
quite, as suggested, ‘simply a walk with a concentration on listening’ (212) as to allow such
‘concentration’ requires the observance of series of strictures and structures.
1 Route
A route is prepared in advance, considering the specific needs and mobility of the
participants. It is important not to be too prescriptive, allowing for some variation on
the day; this requires research and ideally a recce of the potential routes. The scheduling
of the walk is of course crucial, considering the rhythms of the day, week, season,
tides, etc. You may aim to be in a specific location at a specific time to hear prominent
soundmarks such as a church clock ringing out its Westminster Chimes on the hour. I
often seek out aspects of urban soundscapes that have been consciously designed from a
sonic perspective, such as water features and contrasting acoustic architectures. You may
attempt to circumnavigate specific continuous or intermittent sounds radiating from
fixed points, exploring the change in spectrum and directionality as heard from different
sounding locations. Such activity should not be exclusively predicated on assumed
auraltypical (Drever 2017) hearing of the participants – creative alternative methods are
encouraged.
2 Leader
The walk will require a leader, which is a position of relative authority and trust. Taking
inspiration from the 100 Soundscapes of Japan by the Environment Agency of Japan (1997),
and the TESE project on the Isles of Harris and Lewis, Scotland (1999–2002), when I directed
a public soundscape study of Dartmoor, Sounding Dartmoor (Drever 2007), soundwalking
was a key method of engagement, but unlike the WSP, with the help of Dartmoor-based arts
organization, Aune Head Arts, the walks were all led by local inhabitants and stakeholders;
they were regarded as the experts of the Dartmoor soundscape.
Emulating Max Neuhaus, the sound artist Christine Sun Kim has been leading
soundwalks through the Lower East Side, a territory that she once inhabited. However,
having been deaf since birth, hearing as a prerequisite for soundwalking is problematized;
with the aid of graphic and text scores on an iPad, and imparting personal memories,
listening ‘is substituted, emphasizing layers of subjective, interpersonal, and technical
mediation involved in non-verbal communication’ (Kim 2016).
3 Appropriate footwear
Participants should come with appropriate clothing and footwear for walking in the specific
environment the walk is set, and that does not generate excessive sound whilst moving.
Perhaps after Isadora Duncan, barefoot soundwalking could be encouraged, providing
a direct vibratory contiguity between ground and skin. Some innovative soundwalkers
invite purposefully loud footwear or the acoustic embellishment of shoes: Davide Tidoni’s
Exaggerated Footsteps (2016), which consists of two metal plates, instructs: ‘Fix the plates
underneath your shoes and take a walk. When the plates touch the ground they activate the
acoustics and magnify your own presence in space.’
As a leader my attention is often drawn to the sonic emanations of the participant
immediately behind me – footsteps can provide an eloquent building acoustics reference
tool akin to a geologist’s rock hammer. During one walk, heralding his presence, the man
immediately behind me unremittingly tossed and caught his large bunch of keys with
impressive precision for the duration of the walk, the high-frequency content providing
unparalleled acoustic illumination or echolocation of the space, expertly articulating the
morphology of resonances and reverberations (the sound of which he apparently was
blissfully unaware).
4 Proxemics
The guide leads at the front like a quasi-mute pied piper, and the group (which should be
small in number, say twelve) follow on, one by one, leaving a wide enough gap between
the participant in front so their footsteps are out of earshot of other participants; they
should not crowd each other. I would also encourage the participants to spread out so as
not to draw attention to the group, or to limit the group from becoming an invasive or an
obtrusive presence.
5 Inter- and extra-communication

An idiosyncratic feature of soundwalking is the collective observance of silence; talking,
whistling, humming, etc. during the actual walk is discouraged, saving up thoughts and
insights for the debrief at the end. If participants want to catch those fleeting moments, they
could jot them down. It is important to acknowledge that this facet shifts soundwalking
into a ritualistic, performative mode, and can lead to some awkward moments as non-
participants attempt to engage in conversation with soundwalkers mid-walk. In addition
to the vow of silence, to help dedicate attention on the here and now, mobile devices are
required to be set to airplane/flight mode or simply turned off. For practical and safety
reasons the leader may talk (if necessary) and keep their mobile on. Schafer is also averse
to sound recordings or videos being made by the participants, as I witnessed in a walk in
Lisbon in 2005, as he regards it as a distraction for the focal task of listening.
6 Duration
A duration of 90 minutes including post-amble discussion time allows for a range of
topography to be covered and, importantly, time for the participants to really tune into
attentive listening of place. For the more elite soundwalker, longer durations are of course
an option, such as Tony Whitehead’s 12-hour overnight walk in Plymouth in 2010, to bear
aural witness to a sequence of a day.
7 Pace
I am a habitually a fast walker, but soundwalking should not be rushed: it is not about
journeying from A to B. The musical tempo designation, andante, referring to ‘a walking
pace’ is a useful measure. It was commonly used by composers such as Johann Sebastian
Bach and George Frideric Handel (Le Huray 1990: 36); there usage predates metronome
markings, with andante today spanning from 76 to 108 beats per minute. This slowed
down pace appears to help shift habitual listening practices and allows people to simply
take their time. If you walk through a shopping mall and travel on an escalator, move at the
speed that the escalator has set. You may of course be required to speed up on pedestrian
crossings, likewise due to congestion you may be forced to go even slower. Go with the
flow. Some artists have emphasized the slowness of the walk as a fundamental feature, for
example Phil Morton’s Sonic Gaze, which he refers to as ‘a static soundwalk’ (Morton 2019).
The urban designer Jan Gehl reflects on his preferred gait of locomotion speed for walking
and perceiving, albeit prioritizing sight:
Our sensory apparatus and systems for interpreting sensory impressions are adapted to
walking. When we walk at our usual speed of four to five km/h (2.5–3 mph), we have time
to see what is happening in front of us and where to place our feet on the path ahead […].
At speeds greater than walking or running, our chances of seeing and understanding what
we see are greatly diminished.
(Gehl 2010: 43)
8 Caesura
When we walk, we move through the soundscape, but we can pause in opportune locations
that give themselves to lingering (designed or otherwise), allowing the prevailing soundscape
to move around us. This can also be helpful for refocusing listening attentiveness.
9 Meteorology
(Within reason) don’t let inclement weather get in the way of appreciating the walk: a
sudden gust of wind can sonically bring to life otherwise silent foliage; falling rain drops on
surfaces, taking John Hull’s heed, ‘gives a sense of perspective and of actual relationships of
one part of the world and another […] I am presented with a totality, a world which speaks
to me’ (Hull 1997: 27).
10 Safety
Soundwalking is potentially hazardous, as you are inviting people to slowdown and
reorientate their senses in active everyday contexts. Therefore, prompt the participants to
take extra care when crossing roads, etc.
11 Preamble
Once the group has assembled, the leader will need to prepare the participants and set
the rules, along with imparting pragmatic information. What is said at this stage will
prime predominant attitudes to listening, and this will of course depend on the agenda
and motivation of the walk’s impetus. The mantra-like instruction for soundwalking is:
listen! – but this is vague, you may wish to explore concepts of listening, such as ‘listening
in readiness’ and ‘listening in search’ (Truax 2001: 21–24). Introduce specific themes you
may wish to draw attention to such as biophony or regeneration. Resist divulging the route,
but reassure the participants that there is no need to worry: ‘We will finish on time, at the
designated location.’
These are the questions I primed participants with, as an activity associated with the
24th International Congress on Sound and Vibration in Westminster:
● We will be exploring the salient characteristics of the Westminster soundscape; is it
congruent with your expectations?
● How are the sound sources modulated by this specific acoustic architecture?
● How much cognitive effort is required to listen attentively to the acoustic
environment – is it pedestrian friendly?
● How does the actual prevailing acoustic environment shape the pedestrian
experience of Westminster on a mid-week evening in July, and how does this
experience impinge on your perception of the soundscape?
12 Post-amble
Allow ample time for open discussion in a safe and secluded location where the prevailing
soundscape continues but voices are not masked. No contribution is invalid, insignificant,
or incorrect. Allow time and space for the quieter voices to be heard.
13 Questionnaire and verbalization

When the aim of the soundwalk is to collect, compare, and evaluate specific data on the
experience of the soundscape by the participant, different methods have been applied. The
use of questionnaires in situ is a simple process and doesn’t necessarily interrupt the flow
of experiencing the soundscape completely. However, questionnaires may miss valuable
nuance and contextual detail of that sensory experience. To capture more involved and
meaningful data, researchers at CRESSON3 developed a walking method, an elaboration
of Jean-Paul Thibaud’s ‘commented city walks’ (2013), where ‘a researcher [equipped

with directional microphone] accompanies the participant in order to guide them and
to encourage them to speak if necessary’ (Tixier 2002: 85). Building up a fuller picture of
the location and the responses thereof, they repeat the route at different times of the day,
weather, etc. The simple instruction is ‘to say what one hears and to comment on it’. To add
commentary to this information they are asked to ‘qualify them and explain the relations
they maintain with the city, the people or oneself ’ (86). Even for a soundscape studies expert
it is hard to reflect on and verbalize one’s experience of the soundscape as it unfolds around
you, so the role of the researcher is key here in opening up a dialogue between participant
and researcher. And the build-up of that relationship through sharing the walk is very much
part of the process: ‘The idea that walking with others – sharing their step, style and rhythm
– creates an affinity, empathy or sense of belonging with them’ (Pink 2015: 111).
The London Soundwalk: Re-enactment

Soundwalking promotes untrammelled listening in whatever location the participants may
find themselves traversing. However, there are incumbent ethical issues, as such an attitude
gives way to overhearing and verges on eavesdropping. On a Sunday morning in April 2009,
I lead a re-enactment of the WSP’s The London Soundwalk, thirty-four years on.4 We adhered
to the original route and instructions, with the addition of a circuit through the Euston Road
train stations which were undergoing major redevelopment. There was one major alteration
however on ethical grounds. The original walk also took place on a Sunday morning around
Easter time with the inclusion of experiencing ‘true calm’ (Schafer 1977a: 92) by attending
the morning meeting of the Society of Friends on Euston Road. Soundwalks have often
taken in ‘the inner ambience, reverberation and relative stillness’ (92) afforded by religious
spaces. On carrying out a recce of the route, I attended a regular Sunday worship which
primarily takes the form of collective silence which is regarded by the Quakers as a mode of
worship, a practice that parallels some attitudes to soundwalking (see below). I approached
an elder of the group after the service and described what I had in mind. I quickly realized
that bringing in our soundwalking group to listen to the Quakers’ listening was obtrusive
and unwelcome and verging on the unethical. Fundamentally, we would not be sharing
the same orientation for silence and listening as the rest of the congregation – a kind of
eavesdropping on the silence of others. As a compromise at the end of the walk we met in
the Friends Meeting House for a debrief, allowing us to dwell in the original starting point.
The joy of soundwalking

Notwithstanding the health benefits of daily walking, and its accompanying boost of
dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, it can be a highly pleasurable activity. In his A
Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros, develops the States of Well-Being that the walking
experience offers – ‘to different degrees, on different occasions’, as differentiated in antiquity

– pleasure, joy, happiness, and serenity (Gros 2014: 139–146). For Hildegard Westerkamp,
soundwalking affords the ‘practical purpose of orientation in the environment’ or can have
a ‘purely aesthetic purpose of creating a soundwalk’ (Westerkamp 2007: 52), but much
more than that, as shared or solitary daily practice, it is allied to the practice of meditation
and mindfulness as it has the capacity for personal enrichment. On reflecting on many
years of soundwalking practice – and resonating with Pauline Oliveros’s practice of Deep
Listening (2005) – she appraises ‘soundwalking or any related ways of listening. Doing such
a lifelong practice imbues a visceral, embodied knowledge of healing, calming, centering. It
is in the doing that this knowledge emerges and the benefits are particularly relevant in this
ever-increasing chaos and confusion of today’s world’ (acoustic-ecology@sfu.ca discussion
list, 31 May 2018).
The potential for collective walking and listening to induce calm is astonishing; at the
end of the walk there is often a reluctance across the group to break the silence back into
the customary verbal mode of exchange. I have led a soundwalk around Goldsmiths’
neighbourhoods in South London every year for the past decade, a route that takes in a
wide range of social and topographic contrast. At the debrief one year a student announced
that he had never felt so relaxed. Despite the frenzied and quantitatively loud and complex
urban environment that we had traversed, the walk had imbued him with an inner silence,
cocooning him from the physical acoustic environment. At the end of another walk on a
cold and wet November evening in Leeds, a participant extolled on the most amazing 3D
surround sound experience; the walk had rendered his listening experience of the physical
acoustic environment into a highly mediatized hyperreal mode, detached from the
everyday. Yet the urban soundscape is not rarefied or meticulously controlled like cinema
sound design: ultimately it is haphazard, generative, unwieldly, and inherently complex,
and most importantly, all sounds are indexical.
Walkability
I have observed some participants increasingly unable to block off the prevailing noise
of the environment as walks have progressed. In feedback following a soundwalk of
Plymouth city centre I led for the Geographies of Creativity and Knowledge research group
from Exeter University in January 2015, which included the participants’ intensification of
their sense of smell (interestingly not an uncommon response), performance maker and
director Paula Crutchlow explained:
I was OK for a while and I was hearing things and following the source of the sound. Then
it was the tuning in to listening to everything [that] made me feel anxious and overloaded.
Like I could hear everything simultaneously. Not only hearing things coming from all
directions, I felt like I needed to know where all the sounds were coming from and attach
them to the source of the sound. I started to make up stories in my head for all the sounds
and the snatches of conversation. In the end I felt like I was hearing everything all at once,
coming from all directions, and loudly – which was overwhelming. It was only when we sat
down to talk about it that I realised how challenging the experience had been.
(email to the author, 6 September 2018)
Deliberating on this kind of dissonant reaction to soundwalking with Westerkamp, I learnt

that she recommends participants take some time out following a walk, postponing the
plunge back into everyday life. To help foster a potentially nourishing relationship with
the acoustic environment, Westerkamp is careful in her choice of soundwalk locations and
routes: ‘It is best done in a place where we can hear ourselves and the more delicate sounds
around us’ (Westerkamp 2007: 52). Here there is pressing desire for a reorientation of urban
soundscape design towards the human-auditory-scale in contrast to the preponderance of
street design where the ‘needs of drivers and motor traffic [are] put first’ (Commission for
Architecture and the Built Environment [CABE] 2008: 2). For Westerkamp, a judgement
of human-scale can be simply the (in)ability to hear your voice or your footsteps due to
masking: ‘You cannot hear the sounds you yourself produce, you experience a soundscape
out of balance. Human proportions have no meaning here’ (Westerkamp 2007: 50).
Assessing the entirety of the human experience and behaviour within cities, with an
eye to prioritizing the pedestrian (and cyclist) in the urban environment, Gehl and his
team carried out comparative walking tours. Soundscapes tend not to feature too highly
in their observations and concerns, however he makes a similar qualitative evaluation
to Westerkamp’s. On comparing ‘pedestrian-friendly’ Venice with London, Tokyo, or
Bangkok, he pronounces: ‘It is possible to speak quietly and pleasantly with others. At
the same time you can hear footsteps, laughter, snatches of conversation, singing from
open windows and many other sounds of life in the city. Both the possibility to hold a
conversation and the sound of human activity are important qualities’ (Gehl 2010: 152).
Lamentably, the uncrowded Vienna soundscape throws the soundscape of most
urban agglomerations into sharp relief, which can be overwhelmingly hostile, alienating,
and ‘out of balance’. A briefing document by the Commission for Architecture and the
Built Environment (CABE) on Civilised Streets acknowledges that ‘most of our streets
are not civilised, enjoyable places to be. They are mainly noisy, polluted, hazardous and
unpleasant – with serious social and environmental problems the result’ (CABE 2008: 2).
What much of the public realm is lacking can be best defined as ‘walkability’. Articulated
by pioneering soundscape researcher Michael Southworth, whose experimental research
into accessibility and the senses included blindfolding participants – a method also carried
out by Ben Patterson in Tour (New York, 1963) – and traversing them through urban
environments on wheelchairs, walkability is ‘the extent to which the built environment
supports and encourages walking by providing for pedestrian comfort and safety,
connecting people with varied destinations within a reasonable amount of time and effort,
and offering visual [and aural] interest in journeys throughout the network’ (Southworth
2005: 248).
Soundwalking in those auditory nourishing places is helpful for learning lessons about
what constitutes good soundscape design, as well as for ameliorating walkability throughout
the city, we also need to venture into the more challenging urban spaces, to understand
what needs to be worked on, and to evaluate what extant features can be valorized and
maintained. But here we have another ethical quandary: is it ethical to promote sensitive
listening to a populous who unavoidably inhabit a potential stressful fight or flight inducing
(corticotropin-releasing hormone and adrenocorticotropic hormone) noisy environment.
Conclusion
As I have shown, soundwalking approaches lie on a spectrum between soundwalking
as a means to an ends and soundwalking for soundwalking’s sake. Its methodology
incorporates multiple practices of overlapping and divergent ideological, ontological,
and epistemological underpinnings, the aims and objectives of which are inconsistent. Its
form can be scrupulously prescribed and intentionally proscriptive, or aping the tradition
of the dérive (drift); it can be open, generative, and improvisational. Today’s versions of
soundwalking can be found in multiple disciplinary contexts with a polyphony of converging
and diverging, spoken and unspoken set of aims and motivations, and as such engender
themes of participation, social context, aesthetic listening, environmental sensitization,
interpretation, pedagogy, awareness raising, deep mapping, psychogeographic musings,
and more recently the professional field of acoustics (ISO 12913–1: 2014). Whatever
its orientation, soundwalking practices share the commonality of encouraging the
prioritization of auditory perception(s) over the other senses outside of a lab setting, which
might be understood as immersed in the everyday, the real world, in the field, or in situ.
Hence it is inescapably and unashamedly context sensitive with all that may encompass. But
it is not an activity that can be replaced. I would claim that if you have never participated
in a soundwalk you will not be able to comprehend the profound experiential effect that an
erstwhile prosaic activity can have.
Notes
1. ‘The state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’
(Csikszentmihalyi 2002: 4).
2. For a pre-history of soundwalking, see Drever 2009.
3. The salient research theme of everyday walking at CRESSON can be traced back to Jean-
François Augoyard’s formative study of the inhabitants of L’Arlequin, presented in Step by
Step (Augoyard 2007, originally published in 1979 as Pas à Pas).
4. In collaboration with city planner Max Dixon, the UK and Ireland Soundscape
Community, Noise Futures Network, and Sound Practice Research (Goldsmiths), and
joined by Hildegard Westerkamp.
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39
Sounding Wild Spaces: Inclusive
Map-Making through Multispecies
Listening across Scales
Alice Eldridge, Jonathan Carruthers-Jones,
and Roger Norum
The conservation of wilderness is critical to the future of our biosphere, on both ecological
and social levels. Scholars across disciplines have established the importance of wilderness
as a key site for endangered species (Soulé 2014), human recreation and well-being
(Milner-Gulland et al. 2014), as well as the wider network of ecological processes on which
all life depends (Chan et al. 2006). Recognition of the value of wilderness across cultural,
socio-economic, and ecological perspectives bolsters the conservation imperative, but
the respective associated land uses rarely align with all of these perspectives. Imagine, for
example, that you are the director of a national park. The park stretches from the edge of a
small village, where unemployment is high, up wooded slopes, which provide habitat for
the endangered wildcat, as well as a playground for local ramblers and ardent naturalists,
before stretching up to the jagged peaks that are an international mecca for climbers and
home to breeding pairs of golden eagles. The national government has just announced
green incentives for the development of wind turbines; local government recognizes
therein the potential to boost the economy and decrease unemployment in the local
community, mandating development within the park. Your job is to decide whether wind
farm construction is warranted and, if so, where to site the turbines. Current maps provide
geophysical information such as access roads and landscape topology which indicate the
optimum location in terms of power generation and distribution, but what about the
impact of the turbines on flora, fauna, the local community, and the tourism industry?
How would you visualize, analyse, and ‘map’ these other important perspectives, such as
value and meaning for inhabitants, which are not readily quantifiable?
This scenario plays out in many national parks across the world: resolution of the
conflicting needs of human stakeholders, and ecological and economic imperatives poses
a significant challenge globally (Redpath et al. 2013; Vuceticha et al. 2018). Wilderness
policy and planning, like all conservation decision making, must be evidence-based
(Sutherland et al. 2004; Adams and Sandbrook 2013; McIntosh et al. 2018). However, we
currently lack the means to build evidence in a way that takes into account the needs of
all abiotic processes and biotic beings living, working, playing, and otherwise becoming
(Haraway 2008) in wild spaces. It is a complex, wicked problem (Rittel and Webber 1973;
Elia and Margherita 2018), one which cannot be solved by researchers working within a
single discipline.
One key obstacle is that current methods for mapping the landscape and the populations
which inhabit them are incommensurable in scale and intrinsically prioritize one perspective
over another. Land management decisions are predominantly based on maps created
from satellite imagery which provide visual representations of broad vegetation cover and
macrostructures of the built environment, yet these maps are blind and deaf to the details
of the lives of the myriad critters (humans among them) which flourish in wild spaces. Site-
based ecological surveys capture detail of which flora and fauna dwell at particular sites and
times, but are intrinsically small scale and traditionally focus on nonhuman species. At the
same time, participatory, ethnographic methods are increasingly being explored to access
the knowledge, perception, and values of local human actors (Maginn 2007; Hollowell
2009). However, these are typically documented in such a way that any insights generated
end up divorced from the geo-ecological contexts in which actors are situated (Pink 2010;
Reed 2018). Each approach is de facto incomplete and spatially limited, and ipso facto fails
to provide a comprehensive representation of wilderness across the local and landscape
scales required. This limits their usefulness as a support tool in environmental decision
making and planning which requires standardized, spatial data with homogenous coverage
across their administrative remit.
A deeper epistemological issue is that we lack frameworks to synthesize the insights
generated from these different methods. Each is born of distinct disciplines, between which
there may be little interaction or communication, much less conceptual or methodological
integration. In order to create maps that integrate empirical, ecological, and geophysical
data at scale, with personal, particular existences, experiences, and knowledges of actors,
we need a conceptual framework which resonates across attendant disciplines.
In an ongoing project we are exploring the potential for diverse forms of listening as
a point of encounter between ethnographic and ecological perspectives, with the aim of
integrating both within the standard geophysical, cartographic format, in order to create
inclusive, multivocal wilderness maps. Our work builds upon contemporary research across
ecological sciences, anthropology, and political geography which highlights the importance
of the soundscape – understood broadly as all the sounds emanating from a given landscape
– as a significant component of both ecosystem function and human experience, as well as
a key factor in the politics of environmental justice and land management.
Walking and listening in the landscape

Existing approaches to wilderness mapping in Europe use imagery from satellite data to
designate areas on a continuum from least wild (e.g. the centre of a large urban conurbation)
Sounding Wild Spaces 617
to most wild (e.g. a remote corner of a mountainous region) (Carver et al. 2012; Müller,
Bøcher, and Svenning 2015). Under this standard model the degree of wildness is
designated by considering four key metrics, each inferred from satellite imagery: perceived
naturalness; absence of modern artefacts; rugged or challenging terrain; and remoteness
from roads and ferries. Similar multi-criterion approaches have been developed globally.1
This remote, multi-criterion approach is attractive because it can be operationalized at scale
using satellite data and geographical information systems (GIS) to create comprehensive
maps that support decision making in landscape management in areas such as renewable
energy development or protected area designation (McMorran and Carruthers-Jones
2015; Ma and Long 2019). However, in being constructed from information derived from
reflected light (satellite imagery), these methods are inherently insensitive to necessary
‘local’ details: the subjective, multisensory subtleties of the human wilderness experience
cannot be taken into account; similarly, whilst canopy cover may be documented through
remote satellite surveys, any wildlife beneath the canopy is less detectable. Humans and
other living beings are literally not on the map which informs the management of the lands
in which they thrive.
Understanding the value and meaning that wild spaces have for particular human
communities requires situated, ethnographic, and qualitative data. To this end, participatory
research methods have gained popularity in recent years in the social and environmental
sciences because they provide a means for incorporating the experiences, attitudes, and
even ecological knowledges of local community members through research co-design
(Calheiros, Seidl, and Ferreira 2000; Probst and Hagmann 2003). For example, participatory
map-making mobilizes and produces knowledge, while maintaining relevance and
legitimacy among actors in the field (Warner 2015). This not only complements high-level
data with more finely grained local knowledge but also potentially can empower residents
to envision improvements of spaces with which they have close, meaningful relations (Pain
2004).
Walking research offers an intuitive and compelling means of studying human
relationships to landscape and place (Certeau 1984; Pink 2007; Edensor 2010). When
walking methods integrate ethnographic interviews, the responses from participants have
been found to generate deeper place-based narratives than sedentary research practices,
particularly when considering narrative quality and spatial specificity of the study area
(Evans and Jones 2011). However, structured approaches to walking interview methods
have thus far focused primarily on urban spaces (Pierce and Lawhon 2015; Middleton
2018). Sound mapping in particular affords emplaced aural engagement (Westerkamp
1998; see also Carlyle, in this volume), and various forms of it are increasingly explored as a
means of inquiry into spatial, geopolitical, and cultural issues (Droumeva 2017). However,
most sound-mapping work has tended to focus on representation of and communication
about the sound environments themselves rather than the personal responses of individual
actors to the landscape (Droumeva 2017). A key challenge is thus to broaden the scope of
these emerging, situated methods in a structured way that enables comparison between
individuals and communities, and across different habitat types and landscape gradients.
A related methodological question is how to design conceptual frameworks for combining
rich qualitative data arising from these mobile methods and the quantitative data of remote
sensing which forms the bedrock of current wilderness mapping.
Learning to listen to biodiversity

Despite the well-documented strategic importance of wild spaces for biodiversity
conservation (World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF] 2008; Dudley 2009), biodiversity
metrics have yet to be widely incorporated into wilderness mapping (Brown and Williams
2016). This is principally because traditional in situ point count methods – whereby
experts walk transects so as to tally quantities of birds, bats, bees, barnacles, etc. – are time-
consuming, costly, and require an expertise often simply unavailable in many situations.
The result is that they are not operationalizable at the requisite landscape scale.
The need for cost-effective, scalable biodiversity monitoring tools is not unique
to wilderness mapping, but is an urgent imperative for conservation efforts globally.
The emerging field of ecoacoustics (Sueur and Farina 2015) proposes that listening to the
environment may provide a solution. Just as doctors and physicians have listened to the
health of our heart, lungs, and other bodily systems, ecologists are beginning to listen to
ecosystems as an indicator of their ecological status. The rationale behind this approach
can be understood in evolutionary terms. We are all familiar with the fact that sonic signals
are critical to the survival of many species on land and in water. If your voice is masked –
by other species, wind, rain, cars, planes, or motorboats – the chances of reproducing are
reduced. If all your conspecifics live in a similar acoustic environment, eventually your
species will die out. If, on the other hand, your voice carries well in the soundscape, you
have a higher chance of mating, you might produce offspring, and their voices are likely
to be rather like yours. For soniferous species, survival of the fittest subsumes singing the
right song.
This has implications at higher levels of ecological organization. In a healthy, stable
habitat (such as our idealized Wilderness Area), evolutionary theory predicts that
competitive co-evolutionary forces will sculpt complex choruses in which each voice
occupies a unique acoustic niche (Krause 1993). Much like the voices of a good orchestral
arrangement, or well-mixed dance track, each voice has a specific place in a complex but
coherent polyphony. In pristine areas, where there are hundreds or even thousands of
vocalizing species, it follows that competition for acoustic niches will compose a more
complex (but well-structured) soundscape, spreading the voices over a wider frequency
range. To return to our musical analogy, consider the range of sounds in a string quartet
(from cello to violin) compared to that of a symphony orchestra (from double bass to
piccolo).
An evolutionary perspective highlights four productive ideas. Firstly, that sound is a core
dimension in the evolutionary ecosphere, like food, water, and habitat. Secondly, beyond
basic survival, sound is a significant component in the Umwelt (Uexküll 1926) of many
species: within biosemiotics, a soundscape is investigated as a cognitive medium (Farina
and Pieretti 2014). Thirdly, therefore, soundscapes mediate2 the interactions between all
soniferous and sonically sensitive species dwelling at a given place and time: like a global
feedback delay buffer, soundscape is shaped by the past and shapes the future voices in
a given biome. Finally, it follows that a soundscape is a source of information about the
ecological status of an acoustic community. Just as the fossil record tells us something
about hard-bodied things of the past, a soundscape tells us something about the lives of
soniferous species in the present – so long as we can learn to listen in the right way.
The calls of soniferous species (biophonies) are not the only component of the
soundscape, they interact with sounds that emanate from, and are shaped by, the landscape:
wind, rain, or rivers (geophonies); and man-made sounds (anthrophonies), including
those of industrial activity (technophonies). Understanding the causes and consequences
of these soundscape components is the concern of soundscape ecology (Pijanowski 2011).
Like its sibling landscape ecology, this emerging discipline addresses the dynamics of
natural–human systems (Liu et al. 2007) and investigates the role of sound in mediating
interactions between climate, landscape, human and ‘natural’ processes. We now recognize
that sensitivity to sound extends to the plant kingdom (Gagliano, Mancuso, and Robert
2012), and recent studies reveal that sound-mediated relationships even traverse kingdoms,
promoting consideration of the soundscape as an interspecies media.3
The theory and methods of ecoacoustics have inspired a sea change in ecological
monitoring practices worldwide (Sueur and Farina 2015; WWF 2018). Empowered
by the decreasing cost of robust, programmable sound recorders, researchers and land
managers are establishing acoustic monitoring programmes at multiple spatio-temporal
scales to assess biodiversity and other facets of the ecological status across a range of
planetary ecosystems. Bioacousticians have long listened to the communication between
the individuals of particular species, and machine-learning algorithms are being developed
to automate identification of specific species calls (Stowell and Plumbley 2014; Turesson
et al. 2016). In contrast, ecoacousticians deploy algorithms – known as acoustic indices
– to assess the global composition of spatio-temporal patterns in a soundscape and,
by inference, the structure of the acoustic community. Some indices are predicated on
particular soundscape components being band-limited: the vocalizations of animals (birds,
bats, insects, fish) tend to be high frequency (2–8 kilohertz) and intermittent, whereas the
engines of transport and industrial machinery contain relatively low-frequency components
and tend to be of constant amplitude. Under one approach, the ‘health’ of a soundscape is
assessed in terms of the relative levels of biophonies and technophonies detected (Gage,
Napoletano, and Cooper 2001). Where the composition of the acoustic community itself
is of interest, the spectro-temporal arrangement of biophonic signals is assessed as a proxy
for species richness or abundance. Over sixty computational acoustic indices have been
proposed and evaluated to date (McKenna et al. 2017). These indices provide statistical
summaries of the distribution of sound energy in short audio recordings (typically 1–5
minutes). Even relatively simple indices have been shown to reflect spatial heterogeneity of
vegetation (Bormpoudakis, Sueur, and Pantis 2013), to correlate with observed changes in
habitat status (Kasten et al. 2012) or biocondition (Eyre et al. 2015), and to strongly predict
species richness across a wide range of terrestrial (Boelman et al. 2007; Eldridge et al. 2018)
and aquatic (Bertucci et al. 2016; Harris, Shears, and Radford 2016) habitats.
Acoustic monitoring is attractive to the ecologist because it is non-invasive and sensitive
to a wide range of species across media of the biosphere, including air, water, soil, and
vegetation. It is cost-effective, removes human bias, and is unaffected by factors such as light
level or vegetation density which hinder remote visual methods. Crucially, the technique
is considered scalable at no loss of resolution: acoustic survey is embraced as a means
to capture the intimate moment-to-moment dynamics of soniferous species interactions
whilst being replicable at large spatio-temporal scales. For the development of multivocal,
multidisciplinary wilderness mapping, the ecological conception of soundscape is attractive
in providing a cost-effective method for biodiversity monitoring. It also provides a valuable
conceptual nexus for understanding the interactions between anthropogenic, ecological,
atmospheric, technological, and geophysical processes – as well as a transdisciplinary
point of contact from which we might engender methodological interaction between
ethnographic, ecological, and geographic mapping methodologies.
Case study: The WILDSENS project in

Abisko National Park
In our ongoing project, WILDSENS: Sensing Wild Spaces: Integrated Participatory Mapping
for Understanding Community Relationships to Dynamic Mountain Landscapes, we
explore the potential for soundscape as a conceptual nexus for integrating methodologies
across disciplines in order to make more inclusive wilderness maps. As a team we draw
on a rich mix of disciplinary backgrounds relevant to thinking through the inevitable
interdisciplinary challenges of integrating human, ecological, and geophysical perspectives
on wild spaces: social anthropology, soundscape ecology, music, computer science, human
and political geography, and the environmental humanities. In previous work, we have
investigated the relationships between human perception and ecoacoustic metrics across
wildness gradients in Scottish and French mountain regions (Carruthers-Jones, Carver,
and McMorran, forthcoming; Carruthers-Jones et al. 2019), and have considered the
importance of both mobile methodologies (Salazar, Elliot, and Norum 2017) and how
mobility is mediated (Ramella and Norum, forthcoming) in interdisciplinary scholarship.
The primary aim of WILDSENS was to further develop participatory mapping methods
and explore ways to incorporate both qualitative ethnographic insights and quantitative
ecological data within a cartographic frame. We designed a small pilot project to test a suite
of ethnographic and ecological methods together in order to engage multivocally with the
local landscape, wildlife, and key local actors in Abisko National Park in order to sketch a
framework for inclusive wilderness mapping.
Abisko National Park lies at the edge of one of Europe’s largest remaining wilderness,
situated 250 kilometres inside the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. Abisko provides an
ideal study area as it encompasses a gradient of wilderness, from semi-urbanized areas to
wild mountainous landscapes otherwise untouched by human activity. We were hosted by
the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat as part of the EC-funded INTERACT network and
were based at the Abisko Research Station, an established centre for ecological, geological,
geomorphological, and meteorological research in Arctic and sub-Arctic environments.
Land use in this part of Sweden is extremely varied: in a single day’s walk you may
encounter indigenous agricultural and livestock farming, hunting and fishing, travel and
tourism, commercial forestry, conservation, and research. This makes the area an ideal
outdoor laboratory, offering representative examples of common environmental conflicts
found globally. The location also provided access to a wide range of local actors, including
the county government administrators, urban planners, tourist developers, tourists, and
Sámi reindeer herders. The research station holds a wealth of historical landscape data as
well as local ornithological expertise, which helped strengthen and supplement our own
skill sets.
Research activities were choreographed around a transect walk along a wildness gradient.
A transect provides a literal common path along which ethnographic and ecological surveys
can be carried out in situ. The transect also provides a shared methodological path, being
central to ecological, social science, and ethnographic methods, as well as arts practices
and leisure activities (Carruthers-Jones, Carver, and McMorran, forthcoming; Carruthers-
Jones et al. 2019). The Abisko transect was carefully designed through consultation with
local community members and the study of extant maps to create a walk along a gradient
of wildness. The path (see Figure 39.1) began at the Abisko tourist station on the road
out of Sweden to Norway, diverging from the well-trodden Kungsleden trail up into the
Kårsavagge valley and back along the lower slopes of Slåttatjåkka massif. This constituted
a walk of 4–5 hours, which began in a car park, with the peri-urban sights and sounds of
high-horsepower Nordic tourist vehicles, a bustling tourist shop, and a bar and restaurant,
before crossing the roaring Abiskojaure River, heading up through silver birch woodlands
and Salix scrubs, and into the windswept, bilberry-lined valleys at the heart of the national
park. Five sample points were selected along this circular route, which characterized the
range of habitats and landscapes traversed. At each point, acoustic and habitat surveys
and ethnographic interviews were carried out in English, Swedish, or Finnish according to
participant needs. A summary of data is presented in Table 39.1.
Participants were recruited using an iterative snowball method that began with local
gatekeepers. Through social media, posting paper flyers, local press, and word of mouth,
we identified and recruited a representative set of participants (see, for example, Reed et al.
2009; Colvin, Witt, and Lacey 2016). Over the course of our stay in June 2018, we took five
separate groups of between three and six people out along the research transect. Groups
included a team of officers from the regional land planning office, staff working at the area’s
tourist facilities, students on placement at the Research Station, and residents of Abisko
(population eighty-five). We received introductions to multiple communities from several
generous gatekeepers. Because the time of year of our field visit coincided with reindeer
calving season, however, many members of the local Sámi population were unfortunately
not available to participate in this methods development pilot study. We recognize both
the critical nature of their voices to this conversation, and the time needed to build trust
between researchers and indigenous community members prior to beginning such studies.
Figure 39.1 Research study site at Abisko National Park showing the walking transect
(black) and waypoints (numbered crosses) and the river (white) running into lake
Torneträsk. Esri, Garmin, USGS. © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Table 39.1 Data Types Associated With Each of the Surveys Carried Out in Abisko
National Park
Geophysical
• GIS data • Roads, built environment, topology, macro-vegetation
Ecological
• Habitat surveys • Habitat data – range and cover of species (in situ quantitative)
• Acoustic surveys • Acoustic recordings (audio) and acoustic indices (quantitative)
Ethnographic
• Interviews • Interviews and questionnaires (qualitative and quantitative)
• (meta) Ethnographic observations (video and audio recordings)
Acoustic surveys were carried out at each of the designated waypoints. Programmable
recording devices (Wildlife Acoustics SM2+) were attached to trees, and programmed to
take short recordings at regular intervals throughout the day and night. These recordings
were later analysed, giving numerical summaries of each file to provide an indication of
the activity of vocalizing species at each site. Habitat assessments were made at the same
points to complement the high-level GIS vegetation data with local detail: following a
standard rapid habitat assessment procedure, estimates of vegetation structure were made
and plants, mosses, and algae covering the ground identified within a 10-metre quadrant.
Structured interviews were carried out alongside these waypoints, also providing a
welcome moment to rest and reflect at specific moments throughout the walk. Interviews
were typically conducted in pairs in order to enable discussions to grow organically and
without too much prompting from the interviewer. They lasted between 15 and 20 minutes,
and focused on the proximate spaces around the participants. The questions we asked
sought to solicit responses which were informed by sensory stimuli (e.g. sonic, olfactory,
etc.) in the immediate environs, and how these related to participants’ experience of
‘wildness’ at that given transect point. We also encouraged participants to discuss whether
the immediate environment evoked any memories and/or affective responses regarding the
past or anticipated future of the local environment. While the interviews were primarily
qualitative, we also asked participants to offer an index (1–10) of how wild they perceived
their immediate physical environment to be.
Even in this small-scale pilot project, the individual conversations brought forth a
range of themes which both reflected (and contested) wider debates and assumptions
around management of wilderness areas. For example, wildness quality maps (Carver
et al. 2012) are constructed using ‘perceived naturalness’ as one component spatial layer,
under the assumption that wilderness is associated with ecological intactness (and, by
extension, higher biodiversity). Yet in listening exercises on the walk, ardent Arctic
hikers explicitly identified bird song as a telltale sign that they had not yet reached the
true wilds of the park, being still below the tree line. Similarly, the noise of helicopters
above the park held different meanings according to participants’ divergent interests and
experiences. For tourists, the sound of a passing helicopter signalled a reminder of their
proximity to the town and impinged on their ‘wilderness experience’. For those working
in the ski industry, however, the sound triggered various concern for a lost tourist (was
it a rescue helicopter?), excitement at the promise of a Heli-ski experience, or a reminder
that supplies were being transported during that month for the improvement of the
forest walks.
We walked this transect under shifting conditions that spanned drizzling rain, bright
sunshine, clouds of mosquitos, and the blustery winds of the Arctic summer. Walking
the route each day, we were each struck by the extent to which variations in weather
impacted our experience of the landscape. Walking away from the road into this great
wilderness, even for a couple of hours, the magnetism and power of the wild was always
strong, but of different character depending upon a multitude of other factors beyond
weather and landscape – suitability of clothing, group dynamics, quality of snacks, sites,
sounds, and smells specific to that particular visit. This reminded us how intrinsically
multisensory and situated human experience is. As Feld has famously noted, ‘place
is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place’ (Feld 1996: 90).
Ethnographic methods that aim to garner data about being in a space must necessarily
therefore also be situated and multisensory, which is to say that our methods were not
exclusively sonic (Ingold 2007).
Toward a framework for co-design of

comprehensive, multisensory maps
Our next step is to integrate these various data into a map which could be consulted for
landscape policy and decision making. Taking inspiration from schema developed in
urban community mapping (Warner 2015), we envision this developing as a composite
map that integrates five distinct layers of information (Figure 39.2).
The geophysical base-layer is constructed from objective, remotely sensed, and publicly
accessible satellite data that describes the macroscopic structures of the environment: the
topology, broad vegetation cover, roads, and other structures in the built environment.
Overlaid directly on this are local ecological details: the species data of the habitat
assessments and biodiversity proxies derived from the ecological acoustic surveys. In our
pilot project, single points were surveyed; larger spatial replicates would be needed to
account for spatial variation and to provide links between local detail and macroscopic
satellite data representations. The remaining three layers represent the ethnographic
insights: the third layer represents the immediate multisensory experiences of people in
the landscape, accessed through structured interviews carried out along the transect –
what they see and hear (or smell) in situ. For example, when asked about her sensory
perception at the first waypoint, one woman was particularly attentive to olfactory senses:
And also smell. It’s so […] well now it’s been raining so it’s a very rainy smell but it’s still a
very nature-y smell, you can’t feel any pollution or fumes. It’s very airy, it’s very clean.
Figure 39.2 Schematic of proposed conceptual framework detailing co-design of mixed

methods approach to inclusive wilderness mapping.
Another woman at Waypoint 2 commented:

The river we can still hear quite loudly, which I thought was cars earlier. We’ve just passed
that little trickle stream but I think that those sounds being so loud reminds you that it’s
really quiet here […] there’s no tractors, there’s no strimming, [weeding], there’s no drones,
there’s no people talking. We’re getting these occasional helicopters and things […] Maybe
the roar of the river covers any other traffic residue that we might have from the road.
While these layers reflect fairly straightforward, perceptible phenomena, layers four and
five are more complex, speaking not just to human perception but also to human feeling
and imagination. The fourth layer reflects participants’ affective responses to the landscape,
their current thoughts, feelings, and emotions in relation to their memories of it. Finally,
the fifth layer represents visions of the landscape for the future – hopes and fears for what
may or may not come. Any of these ethnographic layers may directly reference the first two
more perceptual layers – their sensory impressions of the landscape, absence or presence
of sounds of traffic, flora or fauna. As noted by Warner (2015), these final two types of data
are the most challenging to analyse and represent, as they are by far the most subjective and
most variable – and, indeed, the most mutable.
The various survey methods outlined here are just a few of the active components in
this methodology. The process of carrying out surveys itself provides an interface between
landscape, policymakers, and local actors, each data collection method also being an
opportunity for conversation and discovery. The act of taking part, of making space to
listen to and reflect upon the landscape in itself modifies the ways in which stakeholders
perceive and value wild spaces: human perspectives are as dynamic as the processes of
ecological succession through which wilderness is restored. The next step in our broader
project is to carry out a larger study in collaboration with land managers across Europe
in order to complete the co-design cycle whilst revisiting and revising the constituent
methodologies.
Soundscape as epistemological nexus

In this chapter, we have suggested that diverse forms of listening can offer a link between
distinct perspectives and diverse scales, providing an interface between in situ ecological
and ethnographic detail and landscape scale cartographies. In seeking to develop multivocal
representations, we have described multi-aural methods which include: inviting participants
to reflect on their relationship to landscape through listening; listening to stakeholder’s
responses to landscape and soundscape; and a technologically mediated listening in to
the same soundscapes in order to assess biodiversity. These activities are consolidated by
an evolving conception of soundscape which encompasses the sociocultural concerns of
sound studies and the socioecological framework of soundscape ecology. Ecoacoustics
serves to bridge scales in two important ways. Firstly theoretically, the foundational
evolutionary perspective draws irrevocably reciprocal links between the voices of
individuals and the overall global acoustic environment.4 Secondly, in methodological

terms, networks of acoustic sensors can be employed to listen in to the intimate inter- and
intra-species communications of soniferous organisms whilst operating across vast spatio-
temporal scales, arguably offering a technologically mediated response to Schafer’s dream
of listening up-close and at scale:
To give a totally convincing image of a soundscape would involve extraordinary skill and
patience: thousands of recordings would have to be made; tens of thousands of measurements
would have to be taken; and a new means of description would have to be devised.
(Schafer 1994: 99)
Furthermore, the development of machine listening methods and visualization tools

which are necessary to integrate and make sense of this big audio data (Phillips, Towsey,
and Roe 2018) themselves draw from cross-disciplinary efforts. Where sound mapping has
been critiqued for drawing upon ‘the cartographic imagination inherited from the military
and political spatialities of the modern state’ (Wilmott 2020: 346), the technological tools
employed to make sense of big data from ecoacoustic research draw upon the sensitivities,
insights, and skills of musicians, ecologists, indigenous land stewards, and computer
scientists to create a fresh approach to eavesdropping that is motivated by care and concern,
rather than surveillance and suspicion.
Through working across disciplines we are beginning to build a narrative that makes
space for all voices, but methodological details require further development. Working in
wild mountainous areas presents fresh challenges to this approach. Ecoacoustic methods
are predicated on the co-evolution of individuals in dense acoustic communities and are
known to operate best in terrestrial environments when the soundscape is dominated
by birdsong (Eldridge et al. 2018). In the mountainous wilds of our studies, animal
vocalizations are relatively sparse and vie with the howl of Arctic winds and roar of glacial
rivers. New, low-level computational methods are needed to isolate and assess the interplay
of sparse biophonies in the context of rich geophonies. Similarly, we need to develop new
approaches that speak to other forms of data and analyses: conducting and representing
insights from interviews, integrating participatory methods, and developing sound-
mapping strategies to ensure that the concerns and knowledges of diverse human actors
are brought onto the map and into consideration in the management of wilderness areas.
Through our interdisciplinary collaboration, we are developing a multispecies
conception of soundscape which begins to ameliorate disciplinary divides. Understanding
soundscape as that which mediates sonically responsive beings makes space for the rich
and productive treatments of sound across the humanities and sciences disciplinary divide:
sound as a distinct medium for knowing the world (Feld 1996); sound as ‘the medium of
our perception’ (lngold 2000: 265); sound as a productive and performative force (Augoyard
and Torgue 2008; LaBelle 2010); geographies of sonic affects (Scrimshaw 2013); and sound
as an ecological resource and significant semiotic component in the Umwelt of species both
across and beyond the animal kingdom.
This broader techno-/geo-/socio-/ecological conception of soundscape attunes with our
increasingly expanding understanding of listening – from being predominantly associated
with human, conscious aurality to encompassing ‘the responsiveness of bodies encountering

sound’ (Gallagher, Kanngieser, and Prior 2017: 620). In opening our ears and minds to
other spaces and other species, we can more easily move beyond anthropocentricism,
a mindset for which there is no place – intellectually, morally, or pragmatically – in the
current climate. Our concern with inclusive wilderness mapping is emblematic of a larger
imperative to take all species into account in imagining planetary futures, and managing
the resources of the biosphere. It is our hope that listening across species and scales, and
thinking across fields, might bring the critical perspectives of the humanities to the complex
processes of evidence-based policymaking and conservation. Only by integrating ways of
knowing across disciplines can we ensure that all species are represented on the map.
By figuring soundscapes as the locus of interaction between diverse actors, species,
and disciplines we are investigating relationships with and responses to wildness through
different forms of listening. Through this work we are developing a concept of soundscape
as an epistemological nexus that affords disciplinary bridge-building for tackling some
of the wicked problems we face, and for bringing both social and ecological matters of
concern (Latour 2008) into earshot and onto the map for future generations of all living
beings.
Acknowledgements
This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project INTERACT,
under grant agreement No. 730938, from the University of Sussex, Sussex Humanities Lab,
and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the
Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642935.
Notes
1. Relevant examples can be found in the Australian national wilderness inventory (Lesslie
and Maslen 1995), the wildness quality index for Europe (Carver et al. 2012), the human
footprint index at the global scale (Sanderson et al. 2002), the map of Denmark (Müller,
Bøcher, and Svenning 2015), and the Cairngorm National Park Wildness Quality map
(Carver et al. 2008).
2. Note that this evolutionary perspective aligns closely with an anthropological conception
of sound as ‘the medium of perception’ (lngold 2000: 265) but expands this to an
inclusive, interspecies media shared across species.
3. Numerous examples exist which illustrate the co-evolution of plant structure and
function and animal and insect vocalization. Consider the carnivorous pitcher plant
(Nepenthes hemsleyana) which has evolved what is essentially a parabolic reflector
in order to attract a mutualistic bat species (Kerivoula hardwickii) to roost within it
(Schöner, Simon, and Schöner 2016). A concave structure in the back wall of these
plants’ pitchers strongly reflects the ultrasonic calls of the bats. This structure is missing
in closely related Nepenthes species that do not interact with bats, suggesting that its
principle function is to guide bats towards insect snacks and a comfy bed for the night,
in return for high-quality nitrogen-rich manure. Recent studies further suggest that
flowers are sensitive to the buzz of pollinators and use this information to increase the
sugar content of their nectar as they fly past (Veits et al. 2019). The implication is that the
flowers’ shape is selected for ‘hearing’ ability and pollinators may evolve to make sounds
that flowers can hear.
4. Note that this ecoacoustic conception of soundscape can be understood as a multispecies
equivalent of the early usage of the term by Buckminster Fuller: ‘When […] man
invented words and music he altered the soundscape and the soundscape altered man.
The epigenetic evolution interacting progressively between humanity and his soundscape
has been profound’ (Fuller 1966: 52).
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org/883f/768308cac12556b912750590e9720c42b146.pdf (accessed 8 July 2020).
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Zone Books.
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Proceedings from ‘Stockholm Hey Listen!’ Conference on Acoustic Ecology, 53–63.
Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
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M. Grooten and R. E. A. Almond. Gland: WWF.
40
The Emergence of Voices in
an Indian Bus Stand:
An Ethnographic and
Acoustic Approach
Christine Guillebaud
The topic of sound is more relevant than ever in the contemporary world, and this is even
more the case in countries of the Global South. Worldwide rankings of the most noise-
polluted cities include the megalopolises of Mumbai, Cairo, and Tokyo. There as elsewhere,
decibel counts are measured scrupulously according to standards set by national and
international organizations.1 Sound pollution has now become one of central governments’
major concerns in the management of public spaces and infrastructure. If this conception
of ‘pollution’ is legitimate from the perspectives of public health and the improvement
of citizens’ quality of daily life, it also touches on a number of anthropological issues.
Ambient sound is produced and altered by a wide range of materials and surfaces, weather
conditions, and media upon which its propagation depends. However, by nature it is also
immaterial and part of everyday sensory experiences. This inherent complexity should be
taken into account by treating sound as a composite material, its perception necessarily
drawing from a vast spectrum of ways of paying attention, spanning simple inattention to
ordinary sounds all the way to specific forms of listening, such as listening to acoustically
prominent sounds that organize or prompt human activities. Indeed, at a local level, a
simple physical decibel level count taken near an intersection, hospital, or school says
nearly nothing of how residents and passers-by use and listen to the space. It says nothing
of how they perceive ambient sounds or how they appraise and appreciate the sensory
environment.
The notion of ‘pollution’ arbitrarily places thousands of daily commercial and ritual
activities on the same level of acoustic reality, although their sounding characteristics
are difficult to compare. Examples are not hard to find: festive uses of fireworks, various
calls to prayer, loudspeaker systems, all manner of sound distortion, local sales methods
(itinerant street vendors, bazaars, markets, etc.), dense transportation network signalling,
commonplace ways of initiating interaction with others, or even multiple ways of

conferring cultural identity on a place and its correlate, residents forming a community. The
undertaking is all the while guided by social and cultural contexts that give local meaning,
thus distinguishing it from collecting quantitative data to analyse ‘nuisance’ or ‘pollution’.
The ethnographic approach is primarily devoted to understanding the sensory modalities
of the production of sound environments, decrypting the range of local knowledge and the
imaginaries that they inspire in a given group or society.
My research2 consists of observing (and recording) fragments of daily life in different
public spaces (markets, temples, train/bus stations). By focusing on their sensory
dimensions, one of the goals of this research is to restore in situ listening and observation.
Different vocal and sound techniques are produced in these spaces to create effects that
are perceived by inhabitants, clients, and passers-by, generally to attract their attention
or even to shape ‘ambiances’3 that impose specific listening postures on these people. The
present chapter focuses on an Indian bus station, considering it as a relatively autonomous
milieu. By milieu, I mean a composite world made up of sounds produced, perceived, and
listened to either intentionally or coincidentally. This simple definition, centred on the
idea of experienced ‘sound worlds’ (Canzio 1992), is inscribed in a wider anthropological
undertaking. Indeed, I consider the bus station as a site for everyday public interactions
(Goffman [1959] 1973), which involve different procedures for sound perception as well as
singular ways to manage the crowd.
I have previously described the sonic organization of the Saktan Tampuran Bus Stand
located north of Thrissur, a city of the southern Indian state of Kerala (Guillebaud 2017).
This sound environment seems very dense due to a number of concomitant sources and a
rather high sound pressure level (decibels). Analysis of everyday interactions makes clear
that instead of thinking of this sound space as a single, coordinated whole, it should be
understood as consisting of multiple scales of listening mainly organized around the cries
of ticket vendors announcing bus departures.4 Criers’ voices are the product of specifically
acoustic work intended to draw the attention of passers-by by making their calls heard in
a dense sound environment.
This chapter combines ethnographic observation methods with acoustic analysis
(sonograms) to study sound in specific locations. Stations, which sociologist Antoine
Hennion (2012) has called ‘movements/places’, offer high human and sonic density. The
ethnography that follows will first present the triangle sound-perception-action, which
regulates daily flows. Acoustic analysis will then demonstrate the acoustic signatures of
prominent voices based on configuration types that have been observed in situ.
The bus station: A sound space and its

scales of listening
At the Saktan Tampuran bus station, a space of mobility and circulation, travellers find
themselves immediately thrust into a dense sound environment. The multiple events
occurring simultaneously give the impression of a vast sonic chaos. The observer is struck
Emergence of Voices in an Indian Bus Stand 635
by the number of (sound) events and the resulting sonic saturation, even more so because
the spatial configuration of the station seems, on the contrary, to be particularly well
defined. Following the stream of passengers, a central platform can be seen along which
several dozen buses are parked, awaiting their departure. These vehicles are not parked
randomly, as each has taken the space reserved for its destination. Among them is the
town of Guruvayur, a holy place with its celebrated Krishna temple; Guruvayurappan, a
highly sought-after destination, especially during the festival periods marking the Hindu
calendar; Shoranur, a town where many transfers are made to northern districts; and
Kuntakulam, an urban centre with a variety of traditional factories to which many workers
commute daily. In the station, there are also many established small businesses, teashops,
and grocery shops lined up in the middle of the platform. They mark the circulation space
of travellers moving in opposite directions, up and down the platform which functions as
an intermediary space reserved for passengers waiting to board.
The space concentrates sounds of traffic, motors, whistles, and the many cries of ticket
vendors. The first impression of this sound space is one of extreme discord between what
can be seen – the steady stream of passengers moving around the central platform – and
the numerous sound actions taking place. There is no coordinated and overarching logic of
this sound space, but rather different scales of listening that are mainly organized around
the criers.
The crier: The man who captures more than

he informs
Upon listening to the criers for the first time, one might think that their calls are
informative – in other words, that they are simply making announcements. If this were so,
their function would be similar to that of the vocal announcements – either pre-recorded or
‘live’ – broadcast via microphones and loudspeakers, as is the case in many bus and railway
stations around the world. But in this case, no other informational system is associated
with these voices, no visible signage or timetables, not even an information desk. There
are as many criers as there are destinations, and just as many buses ready to depart. This is
essential: the entirely acoustic character of the announcements and the numerous sound
sources imply that there are also many ways of perceiving and locating the ticket vendors’
voices.
From a semantic point of view, the criers’ voices always indicate the destination – the
name of a town. However, the striking feature of their calls is not what they explicitly state
but their sonic form. Rather than choosing semantic clarity, articulation, and intelligibility,
the criers deliberately shorten the names of towns and cities. The holy city of ‘Guruvayur’
becomes ‘Guruyur’, Kuntakulam is heard as ‘Kulam’, and the city of Thrissur becomes ‘Shur’.
The contraction of place names is combined with a prosodic principle of constant repetition
and a melodic and tonal coloration that amplifies the phenomenon of personalization. Due
to the simultaneous cries of the ticket vendors and the consequent extreme proliferation,
the meaning of words is somewhat blurred in favour of specific sound effects.
With this type of sound production, one might wonder whether the term ‘announcement’
is truly relevant, as each crier develops his own singular way to capture passengers’
attention. An announcement usually implies a certain element of schedule and time; it has
a provisional nature. In many countries, a single voice broadcasting loudly and uniformly
throughout the station is used to ensure the punctuality of departures. It relates information
expressed in a future tense – the train or bus ‘will leave’ at such and such a time from this
or that platform; it coordinates pre-scheduled actions to which travellers are invited to
comply. In an Indian bus station, on the contrary, time is conjugated in the present; time is
immediate. Vocalized information is transmitted when passengers are already on the move;
it is not used to invite passengers to move. Furthermore, the acoustic propagation of these
voices can only be heard in a limited area since they are not amplified, resulting in a dense
sound space where they do not monopolize the full attention of the passengers. With his
call, the crier simultaneously condenses three types of information. He indicates in situ the
destination (semantically identifiable), the bus’s location (by the fact that he is next to the
vehicle), and the imminent departure (by capturing the attention of the potential client).
Passengers’ modalities of perception

Now, from the regular passenger’s (listener’s) point of view, the general organization of the
bus station is well known. Each space in the station is dedicated to a particular destination,
and because this placement is rarely modified, travel habits become ingrained. The ticket
vendor’s action coincides with a very precise moment in the passenger’s attention: the
moment when passengers visually perceive the vendor (lateral vision) and acoustically
distinguish his projected voice from the rest – that is, just before they get on the bus. Informal
interviews conducted with vendors confirmed this observation. For the most part, the call
is nothing other than a way to make a ‘time announcement’, an expression the vendors
made in English to describe their work.5 Behind the station criers’ calls lie the principles
of attraction and recognition. In this context, passengers are literally immersed in multiple
sound spheres that impel them to listen in certain ways. The multiple projections of sound
act upon their perceptive sphere and almost simultaneously drive them towards their bus.
The very fact that the criers’ voices do not compete according to a monopolistic principle
makes it possible to understand the sound space as being organized in a fragmented system
that is anything but random, but governed by the logic of multiple attraction.
Managing the flow of the crowd

Another important element must be taken into account: there is no space reserved for
lining passengers up or putting them in order. The stops in the station are temporary
and the ways of entering buses are subject to few rules. The passengers board when they
present themselves at the bus and the departures happen when the vehicles are full. The
throngs on platforms are commonly thought to indicate an inescapable wait or delay for
the passengers, but in fact another logic is at work: the continuous flow of departures
and the competition between buses favours a degree of fluidity in the crowds. This sonic
and anti-monopolistic approach to managing crowds makes it less effective to study the
station through the figures traced by an organized movement of people. For example, if
waiting lines were imposed in such an acoustic economy, the sought-after fluidity would be
hampered. In an article on the culture of the queue in India, Ajay Gandhi summarizes the
line’s defining feature as follows: ‘It is a teleological and universal form; requires bodily self-
containment; demands synchronicity with others; and inculcates a detached, disciplinary
sense of place’ (Gandhi 2013: 5). Gandhi justly underlines the quasi-emblematic nature of
the line in contemporary Indian institutions, as a manner to ‘normalize’ crowds (and their
bodies).
The absence of waiting lines in the bus station strongly contrasts with the example
of the ‘massified queues’ imposed, for example, in the metro of the Indian capital New
Delhi. It is clearly characteristic of the organizational methods applied by the private
bus companies operating in the city, where business competition demands decentralized
crowd management. The absence of synchronicity and apparent discipline (to use the
terms in Gandhi’s definition) do not equate with chaos and confusion. The logics that I
have identified thus far emerge in all their singularity:
1) Acoustic salience of the voices

2) Triple semantics (destination, localization, departure)
3) Multiple attraction
4) Sound-action instants
5) Principle of flows
The principle of a multitude of prominent voices finds an echo in the visual logic of the
buses. The colours, motifs, drawings of deities, and ornaments all distinguish each vehicle
and contribute to a visual competition among them (Figure 40.1).
Acoustic analysis of prominent voices

The second phase of my study, executed in collaboration with Vincent Rioux, acoustician
and computer scientist, and member of the research group MILSON, consisted in analysing
the criers’ voices by using the program Sonic Visualizer.6 Here I will present three distinct
examples, corresponding to a variety of individual ways of performing the cry: the content
of the utterance, the vocal technique being used, and the rhythm of the utterance. The
examples are also selected according to the number of audible individuals: one main
vendor dominating the sound spectrum; one main vendor dominating two secondary
vendors; seven vendors crying simultaneously.
Figure 40.1 Buses at Saktan Tampuran, 2015–2016. Photographs by Christine
Guillebaud.
One main vendor

The first sonogram (see Figure 40.2a) represents a sequence where a ticket vendor is calling
‘Palakkad’, a destination in the north of the Thrissur district. It will first be read vertically,
according to three frequency bands:
1 From ± 200 hertz to ± 700 hertz: this band marks the zone where spoken voices,
motor noises, and all the sources of the ordinary brouhaha of the station can be
found.
2 From ± 700 hertz to ± 2,800 hertz: this band marks the performance space of
the vendors, who deliberately place their voices just above the first zone of the
spectrum.
3 From 2,800 hertz to 3,800 hertz, and above: the third zone marks the frequency
zone where whistle sounds are by far the most prominent. They are generally used
when buses arrive or depart in order to guide the drivers’ manoeuvres at a distance.
In terms of perception, this zone is the most easily heard, and little energy is
required to make these signals audible. This third band is inaccessible to the human
voice.
In the vendor’s zone (2), there is a clear strategy to produce a prominent sound. The
fundamental of the human voice falls somewhere in the brouhaha zone (1), which is lower
and less audible. The vendor’s vocal techniques make it possible to strengthen the second
harmonic (an octave above the fundamental). The energy is thus mostly concentrated
around 800 hertz, which is just above the brouhaha and in the zone where the human
voice generally performs the best.
Figure 40.2a Sonogram of the main vendor making the utterance ‘Palakkad’ (duration:
2’43”).
Figure 40.2b Sonogram focused on utterance B.
A horizontal reading of the sonogram (time) reveals six distinct blocks to which I have
assigned letters (A, B, C, D, E, and F). They correspond to successive interventions by the
same vendor. The timing is not entirely regular between the blocks: the vendor listens to
what is happening in his environment and reacts accordingly.
A focus on block B (see Figure 40.2b) makes it possible to visualize the five harmonic
components of the vendor’s voice. On the rhythmic level, he utters the name of the
destination city in a nearly cyclical manner, in three distinct phrases. Each of these phrases
is composed of a continuous repetition of the name of the city (here, an average of eight
times per phrase). However, the time intervals between the phrases in a given block are
not of strictly equal duration. This irregularity is particularly visible in block C (Figure
40.2a), where the vendor adapts to the sounds around him to the point that the impression
of cyclicality is lost for a moment, thereby clearly demonstrating his capacity for listening
and adapting. In block D, another vendor starts to compete with the first (see the box
located between 1’38” and 1’44”). The pitch of this voice is slightly lower than that of the
main vendor, but he uses the same vocal technique. Over six seconds, the first vendor
resumes his cry based on the second vendor, so that he can still be heard. The main vendor
thus places his performance (and focuses his listening) in relation to zone (1), ensuring
that it will be prominent in the spectrum. The concentration of harmonic energy (vocal
technique), prosodic work (the continuous repetition of the name of the destination in
three phrases), and temporal adjustments according to the performances of other vendors
around him complete the desired attraction process.
One main vendor and two secondary vendors

The sonogram in Figure 40.3 shows the interaction between three vendors. The main
one is announcing the town of Peecheedam, the second one Kuntakulam, and the third
Palakkad. The first vendor largely dominates the spectrum in both the number of cries
(four in all) and by the harmonic richness of his voice. A comparison with the previous
sonogram makes it possible to mark off three frequency bands in exactly the same way. The
fundamental of the voice of vendor 1 is in the brouhaha zone (1) while his vocal technique
allows him to strengthen the second harmonic (cf. three boxes) practically in the same
location as the vendor recorded in the previous example, which is around 700 hertz. In this
example, the vendor’s performance is shorter (the town name is repeated at an average of
five times per block) and the vocalizations differ radically. In this instance, the main vendor
systematically uses a rising frequency at the end of the phrase and works on the saturation
of his vocal cords in the last ‘Peecheedam […] Peeche’, which make all the harmonics
emerge quite clearly.
The other two vendors alternate their voices with the first. Their harmonic components
are less visible in the sonogram, which is mainly due to microphone placement and their
being at a greater distance from the microphone. However, the visual representation shows
how these additional voices coordinate themselves over time, either by inserting themselves
into pauses or by brief superimpositions.
Figure 40.3 Sonogram of the main vendor making the utterance ‘Peecheedam’, while
the two secondary vendors call ‘Kuntakulam’ and ‘Palakkad’ (duration: 1’04”).
Seven simultaneous vendors

In this final example, several vendors enter into a sonic competition. Seven of them can
be made out, and each has been assigned a number. They are first of all distinguished by
the content of their utterances (vendor 1: ‘Kodungallur’; vendor 2: ‘Vellur’; etc.) Unlike the
preceding examples, the brouhaha zone (1) is nearly absent, which allows a much clearer
visualization of the voices’ ‘F’ fundamentals.7 Because of this relative clarity, the vendors
place their fundamentals a little lower than in the previous examples (here around 300
hertz), while using vocal technique to strengthen the second harmonic (around 600 hertz,
‘H 2’) and the fourth harmonic (around 900 hertz, ‘H 4’), which are both quite visible.
From a temporal perspective, the sonogram in Figure 40.4 demonstrates the logic of
aggregation of vocal occurrences. The sequence reveals first the successive entry and then
the alternation between the first four vendors. One might hypothesize that two more
vendors (5 and 6) then perceive this presence of the multiple voices and are drawn to
the sonic aggregate, joining it with their respective voices in a concomitant way. After the
sequence starting with four vendors, the opposite logic can be seen: most of them stop
calling out to leave a less saturated space, and only vendor 3 continues his cry. This moment
of relative pause makes the voice of a new vendor (7) burst forth, initially superimposed by
the voice of vendor 3 and then alternating with him.
It is difficult to imagine these interventions – progressing through aggregation,
disaggregation, and reaggregation in succession – as a conscious script planned by each
vendor or as a collective predetermined composition, like a musical score. The logic of
filling busses also influences when voices appear and disappear, just like the pauses for
Figure 40.4 A multiple-configuration sonogram with seven vendors (duration: 2’00”).
breath imposed by the phrasing of each utterance and their inherent cyclicality. Here we
can experience interactions that are built in situ and share a common frequency band.
However, the performances are not static, and the individual performances are not
simply juxtaposed. The space is organized according to a singular relationship between
an individual and a collective performance based on coordinating attraction, competition,
and timing.
Conclusion
This ethnographic and acoustic approach to an Indian bus station’s sound space firstly
illustrates that social interaction in this competitive setting is ultimately created by
occupying different strata of the sound spectrum. The examples of the vendors’ voices are
to be considered as complex practices of sonic manipulation, seeking prominence through
tone, prosody, and timing in addition to a merely modulating sound intensity. The acoustic
events are organized at different scales in this sound environment, relying on auditory
acuity to serve economic ends and efficiently manage the crowd on a daily basis.
By comparing such ‘public voices’, it becomes clear that, ontologically speaking, sound
creates nothing in and of itself, but it does have the potential to create action and co-
action, and this is what characterizes the users’ experience. This approach is in line with
social scientists’ current efforts to address the perception–action dyad through affordance.8
Speaking of the affordances of sound events not only means considering perceptions as
situated achievements, as genuine actions, but furthermore assessing how certain events
do much more than simply attract attention: they reorganize and affect one’s activities. The
example of the Indian bus station can easily be placed among ‘complex’ forms of action
and reaction. It relies upon multiple forms of attention by travellers and weaves together
focal points for perception that are produced by station sounds and reconfigured according
to the effects of various events.9 This reconfiguration also concerns the vendors. They are
more than mere competitors meeting a challenge; within that challenge there is a dynamic
of mutual change. This is not a face-off situation, as between card players, but rather a
relationship that transforms each participating individual: the one is invested in the sound
events he receives from the other, and the other invests in the response he gets in return.
There is, however, an additional dimension that seems to escape the category of
affordance: the self-generating nature of these sound productions. Sound forms are
regulated in situ, beyond the exclusive, individual intervention of each sound producer,
but they are not the result of the simple sum of these contributions. This case study thus
comes within the scope of collective coordination methods and what is commonly called
‘theories of emergence’. Generally designating the appearance of new characteristics and
behaviours beyond a certain degree of complexity, ‘emergence’ has acquired various
meanings and has given rise to very different uses in the arts, humanities, and sciences.
It has engendered research in each of these domains, leading to new considerations of
interactions taking place between the individual and the collective, and highlighting the
complexity of these interactions, that is, of acting collectively. This study of a bus station
in India demonstrates how that collective production and creation is modified when the
conditions for coordination among the vendors are changed. The self-organizing nature
of these sound events raises questions about the methods and behaviours that arise as a
result of sound density and a sonic heterogeneity that would not emerge if the individuals
worked in more homogeneous conditions.
Notes
1. In particular the World Health Organization’s (WHO) ‘Guidelines for Community Noise’,
edited by Birgitta Berglund and Thomas Lindvall (1995), an updated version of the
document published by the WHO in 1980 (see WHO 1999).
2. This research has been developed through the MILSON programme (Pour une
anthropologie des MILieux SONores / For an Anthropology of Sound Environments)
that I have had the honour of directing since 2011 with the support of the Fyssen
Foundation. For further information, see MILSON 2020.
3. For an archeology of the notion of (sonic) ambiance, see notably Thibaud 2012.
4. A comparison was made with other public voices, such as the voice of the Kerala lottery
(which is sped up and enhanced for acoustic prominence), or the announcements in
French public transportation (Guillebaud 2017).
5. Malayalam is the language spoken in Kerala. However, in everyday life, a certain number
of expressions are specifically in English, generally when the speakers wish to convey a
certain element of modernity (as is the case here) or when the message should carry a
certain emotional charge.
6. Freeware distributed under the GNU General Public License and developed at the Centre
for Digital Music at Queen Mary, University of London (see Sonic Visualiser n.d.).
7. Below this band, in the lower range of the spectrum, the sonogram shows sounds that
I made while implementing the recording. In the higher band, the sound of whistles
generally remains prominent.
8. ‘Affordance’ is a term initially introduced in the psychology of visual perception by James
J. Gibson (1979). The word plays on two meanings of the verb ‘to afford’: to offer and
to supply. The affordance of an object refers to its capacity or ability to suggest a use or
make a use possible as soon as the object is perceived. For a summary and analysis of the
relevance of affordance to sound events, see Thibaud 2010, 2011; and Pecqueux 2012:
215–221.
9. For a characterization of the affordance of sound events according to two types, ‘simple’
and ‘complex’, see Guillebaud 2017: 95.
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41
Historical Sounds: A Case Study
Aimée Boutin
If we could have recorded the soundscape of a street in Paris prior to the Industrial
Revolution, what would it have sounded like? There would have been horse-drawn carriages
rattling on cobblestone streets, rumbling of omnibuses, cries of peddlers resonating
in narrow medieval streets, street musicians, muffled conversations and loud shouting,
children playing, dogs barking, pigeons cooing, military parades, church bells, sounds of
labour or machinery emanating from workshops, stalls and shops. By the Seine one might
have heard sluicing and the burbling of the river. In the evening, in the theatre district,
barkers and carriages would have filled the street with noise. There would have been a
frightful din, but we have to rely on our imagination to tell the story of the city of noise.
In thinking practically about historical sounds in an era that predates sound recording
technology, a number of methodologies can be successfully combined to catalogue and
make sense of the sonic past. Historical sound studies, indeed, call for an interdisciplinary
approach. Hearing the past is enhanced when the disciplines work in concert. This case
study will consider the range of sources that can inform an understanding of the sonic
past in the absence of ‘direct’ primary sources such as recordings (if such evidence ever is
in fact unmediated). Bruce R. Smith (1999), Alain Corbin (1994b, 1998), Mark M. Smith
(2001), John Picker (2003), and Jonathan Sterne (2003) – to name only a few scholars who
significantly advanced the field of historical sound studies in the 1990s and 2000s – set
forth methodologies that can serve as models for understanding the role of sound in past
societies. As my research – notably the project that led to the 2015 publication of my book
City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris – has specifically been focused on urban
noise and European modernity, I will draw many of my examples from my own work
with the understanding that the methodology discussed can be applied to other contexts,
both Western and non-Western.1 Sources can yield a deeper appreciation of the rich sonic
textures of past centuries, but how does the researcher go about selecting which sounds
were most relevant? After discussing which everyday sounds best captured listeners’
attention and resonated through the ages, this case study ends by considering whether the
proper task of the historian of soundscapes involves the reconstruction or the interpretation
of the sonic past, and sketches some examples of each approach.
There are many different kinds of sources that contain information about how sounds
were perceived and how they shaped narratives of individual and collective identities in
past societies. The first successful attempts to record sound date to the invention of the
phonautograph by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1857, and more famously, to
the simultaneous invention of the phonograph by the Frenchman Charles Cros and the
American Thomas Edison in 1877. Before the age of sound recording, however, sounds
were defined by impermanence and evanescence. The question ‘How did the past sound?’
takes on a whole new dimension and requires a different methodology when we strive to
hear the past before the invention of sound recording. In the 1970s, the sound ecologist
R. Murray Schafer developed the notion of ‘soundscapes’ in an effort to sensitize people
to the world’s disappearing sounds and to raise awareness of the encroachment of sound
pollution into formerly quiet zones. While some of this advocacy remains attached to
the term soundscape, I use it here to describe the sonic environment without any direct
reference to ecology, though, of course, it is worth stating that research into historical
understanding of auditory cultures can usefully inform the present.
Sources: Musical compositions

Musical sources are the first, and perhaps the most obvious, source to draw from, to learn
how the past was heard, specifically how urban soundscapes of earlier centuries sounded.
Since the Middle Ages, Paris had been characterized by its chorus of street cries known
as the cris de Paris. Inspired by what they heard in the streets, Renaissance composers
such as Clément Janequin and Jean Servin, and nineteenth-century French composers
such as Georges Kastner produced musical cris de Paris.2 These musical compositions
were not intended to represent the soundscape of Parisian streets with any accuracy, but
their persistence as a musical motif over centuries suggests that street cries were culturally
significant. Moreover, how the voices were arranged, opposed, and superimposed – in short
their formal characteristics – reflects the period’s desire to harmonize the streets and to
orchestrate their sounds. Polyphony as a musical form can be heard as an attempt to balance
what might have actually sounded like cacophony and to make it aesthetically pleasing.
Musical performance protocols, systems of musical patronage, and sonically marked
spaces can also provide a record of sonic-spatial divisions, of listening practices, or of
the relationship between music, sound, and power dynamics (Johnson 1995; Born 2013;
Biddle and Gibson 2017).
Sources: Visual art

While visual art makes no noise in a literal sense, prints, photographs, and paintings
prove to be highly useful sources of information on historical sounds. Interpreting the
sonic through the visual is not only methodologically profitable but invites reflection on
intersensoriality. In his fascinating book Sinister Resonance, David Toop uses the term
‘clairaudience’3 to define the hearing of inaudible sounds and examines paintings as ‘silent
recordings of auditory events, some more silent than others. Sound haunts their silence as
Historical Sounds 649
a specter of history that can never be heard in full, yet its presence is buried within their
creation’ (Toop 2010: xiii). In my research on Parisian street cries, I examined medieval
woodcuts as well as suites of street peddlers by eighteenth-century French artists such as
Edmé Bouchardon. I found nineteenth-century French caricatures by Honoré Daumier,
but especially his contemporary Bertall, to be excellent documentary sources on the
social meanings of urban soundscapes precisely because of their humorous but incisive
sociopolitical commentary. In fact, I discovered that Bertall included musical scores in his
Cris de Paris, and realized that my methodology needed to be attentive to the ways that
documents encoded sound events. The spatial layout of a document provides information
about how bourgeois listeners attempted to harmonize street noises into visually orderly
(and therefore pleasing or harmonious to the ear) sequences, suites, or grids. In examining
works of visual arts for clues about listening practices and urban soundscapes, I sought out
pictorial and musical analogies: the checkboard layout was the visual analogy of musical
polyphony.
Other types of graphic works, especially caricatures, convey the social distinctions that
divide the quiet-seeking from the noisemakers. Taking up a theme depicted by William
Hogarth in The Enraged Musician (1741), J. J. Grandville illustrated a modern charivari as
the ears of bourgeois men are assaulted in a public park by street musicians. Visual sketches
such as Grandville’s, which depict the interaction between performers and listeners,
represent an act of listening that encodes class and gender bias, perhaps even xenophobia
(street musicians were often foreigners). In The Sight of Sound (1993), Richard Leppert
draws attention to the inclusion or absence of the body of the performer, the source of
the music or noise, in paintings. Leppert argues, for example, that the visualization of
acousmatic sound (e.g. sound whose source is not visible) in paintings such as Listening
to Schumann by Fernand Khnopff represents a new, properly modern experience of
intense listening and self-absorption, rather than the sociopolitical dynamics of music
performance, patronage, or consumption more typical of early modern representations
of musical experience in social contexts (salons, courts, country fairs). The latter is visible
in an engraving by François Dequevauviller titled The Gathering at the Concert in which
no one listens to the musicians tucked away in the corner despite one patron’s attempts to
quiet the room.4 Visual art therefore can encode sonic experience either by representing
the social context of listening practices (interaction between performers and listeners)
or by focusing on the psychic interiority of the listener shown alone and separated from
the sound source. I found that caricatures about street criers often depicted interactions
between street performers and the passers-by who heard them; in contrast textual sources
heightened the focus on the listening experience.
Sources: Historical and literary texts

I have primarily relied on textual sources to listen to the past. Sources abound on urban
soundscapes given the satirical tradition of describing the unbearable din of the city that
dates back at least to Juvenal’s Satires of Roman noise written in the early second century CE
and to the seventeenth-century French poet Nicolas Boileau’s Les embarras de Paris.
Indeed, I found that caricatures and satiric texts were very rich in descriptions of city
noise – people of all ages are more likely to write about sounds that irritate them than
those that do not. Likewise, outsiders are more attuned to their impressions of a new
travel destination’s soundscape than local residents, making travel writing and tourist
guidebooks eloquent records, or what Schafer (1994) called ‘earwitness’ accounts, of
nineteenth-century Parisian soundscapes. First-person accounts document what sounds
were heard as well as provide a sense of how people felt about their sonic environment.
Nineteenth-century French writers evoked in detail not just the sights but also the
sounds of the city that shaped the feel of modernity. Acoustic impressions in Charles
Baudelaire’s poetry or Émile Zola’s naturalist novels make sense of noise as an effect of the
fragmentation of modern life, crowds, and disease but also as a creative inspiration for
sound art. For a more inclusive perspective, one can combine fictional (literary, subjective)
and factual sources. Novels, poems, diaries, memoirs, editorials in newspapers, as well
as legislation, medical treatises, religious conduct manuals, civic archives, etc. can be
mined for evidence of lost sounds and the sociocultural significance ascribed to auditory
experience. City ordinances, sometimes even material culture (peddler’s medallions
which served as permits to sell in specific areas) provide evidence on which sounds
were deemed sufficiently uncivil to prosecute, how the sonic environment was regulated,
and what belonged in an ordered urban soundscape (Picker 2003; Hahn 2013). Medical
literature, such as reports on noise-caused neurasthenia, can also substantiate the period-
specific meanings and values ascribed to hearing (Trower 2012). Used together, fictional
and factual sources provide a nuanced understanding of the social, political, economic,
and aesthetic dimension of the city of noise (Smith 2004).
Sources: Architecture, maps, and urban

planning
With respect to urban noise and specifically to the relationship between sound and
space, the architect and sound studies expert Olivier Balaÿ (2003, 2017) has argued that
material changes to the urban environment impact how the past was heard. The sonic
past continues to resonate to some extent in architecture. Balaÿ draws on both historical
analysis and on architectural and acoustic reconstruction to show that widening the
narrow streets to make way for boulevards and removing overhangs and awnings impacted
the perception of street noise. He has shown that urban renewal in nineteenth-century
Lyon, as in Baron Haussmann’s Paris, tended to lower frequencies, to produce more
continuous noise, and to end high-pitched intermittent human sounds. Human sounds
would be much less noticeable due to decreased reverberation in wider thoroughfares. If
architectural acoustics helps determine how building spaces sounded, cartography usefully
locates ambiances. Sound mapping can visually capture where sounds are located, how
these locations evolve over time, and how the audible forms a key component of urban
spatial experience, by charting the noise levels or sound qualities of specific spaces, or the
affective responses attached to places (as in the psychogeographic maps of Guy Debord
[1957] or the soundmaps of Norie Neumark [2015]).
There is therefore a variety of textual and non-textual sources on historical sounds,
but at least two methodologies should be common to all: formalist and interdisciplinary
approaches. Formalism focuses on the techniques and devices that construct meaning
as much as on what meanings are produced. Attention to the way form and language
determine meaning keep in check attempts to bring the sonic past fully back to life.
Although peddling is an historically documented ‘real’ practice, peddlers’ representation
as cries are a discursive construction. Key formal and organizational features, for example,
pervaded the musical, visual, and textual sources of the Cris de Paris that I used, always
already shaping the historical reality to which I had tuned my ears. I could not fully
hear nineteenth-century Paris, I could only listen to it orchestrated as cries. The merits
of interdisciplinary methods cannot be overstated as the disciplines of musicology, art
history, literary studies, history, architecture, and urban planning – as well as disciplines I
did not address such as acoustic engineering, psychoacoustics, anthropology, and cultural
geography – work best in concert to enhance clairaudience. The incompleteness of silent
materials can be supplemented by combining sources and what Biddle and Gibson call
‘methodological inclusivity’ (Biddle and Gibson 2017: 2).
Selection: Which sounds are distinctive,

tolerable, or noisy?
Given that unmediated, complete access to historical sounds is impossible, how does
the researcher select which sounds resonated through the ages and captured listeners’
sustained attention? What makes a sound distinctive enough not only to be heard but to
be listened to, or conversely to be tagged noise? More than quantifying, we need some idea
about thresholds of audibility. We owe the notion of thresholds of tolerance to the French
historian Alain Corbin, who explained that ‘the cultivation of sensory refinement was a
means for the upper-classes to distinguish themselves from the lower-classes, thought to
be cruder, louder, smellier and less capable of delicate sensory perception. The leisured
needed the ear to be available for music appreciation’ (Corbin 1994a: 19). In his book
Village Bells (1998), Corbin shows the development of new thresholds of intolerance for
noisy bell chiming in the early morning hours in the city when middle-class urbanites
claim a new right to quiet. When Corbin identified a new horizon of expectation for silence
developing in nineteenth-century Europe he made a methodologically important point:
researchers do well to locate historical shifts in perception in time and in space so as to
scrutinize social distinctions that might otherwise appear natural. Nevertheless, changes to
auditory culture happen slowly, and old and new soundscapes often overlap.
It follows that sounds that cross the threshold of tolerance are historically determined
in relation to changing listening practices (what and how attentively people listened in
different eras, cultures, spaces). Corbin comments that ‘the noise of traffic is today tending
to disappear from the evocation or description of big cities, although it is not clear whether
it is no longer noticed because of its omnipresence and the fact that no one heeds it, or
whether its extreme banality leads insidiously to its being passed over’ (Corbin 2005:
135). Once a catalogue of historical sounds has been established, the next step involves
identifying which sounds went unnoticed and which provoked reactions among listeners.
Traffic noise, which is of such concern today in big cities, may not have reached the
threshold of disturbance in earnest before the end of the nineteenth century.5
Selection: Loudness and frequency,

foreground and background
Is the threshold of tolerance a function of the physical characteristics of the sounds
themselves? Unwanted sounds that are strident and loud are hard to ignore as they move
to the foreground of the acoustic environment. This was one conclusion I drew from
researching peddlers’ cries: street cries rose above the city din to assault the ears of passers-
by and that can explain why they left an indelible mark on how past ages imagined the
city of noise. In textual sources, I frequently encountered earwitness accounts of intrusive
noises and I found that high-frequency noises that were perceived as shrill or piercing were
typically the kinds of sound that marked consciousness and left traces. Textual sources
were rich in adjectives that connoted loud or intense, shrieking or strident sounds, and in
the case of street cries, musical notation also coded the cry’s high pitch. Notions of ‘sound
pollution’ and ‘quiet spaces’ that have been part of the advocacy of sound ecologists also
rely on the distinction among thresholds of tolerance, low-fi and high-fi environments, and
the contexts of listening.
Undoubtedly, there are also sounds that barely registered as audible: rustlings of fabric,
the tinkling of jewellery, the clicking of clocks, the soft treading of footsteps, the wind
whistling in the trees, the hum of machinery, the mythical sound of the grass growing …
These sounds bring to mind the impermanence of sound, silence, and the sonic traces of
things past. Novelists and poets are especially good at tuning their ears to the background
sounds that barely crossed the threshold of audibility. Attention needs to be paid to
ambient sounds in historical soundscapes and consideration must be given to the non-
verbal, the animal, or the natural world – the power of the spoken word notwithstanding. A
methodology that aims to hear the past will necessarily perform a certain amount of sound
mixing and decide how much ‘bandwidth’ goes to ambient noise and how much goes to the
signal, especially when it involves the human voice. In my own work I afforded a privileged
place to the vocalizations of street musicians and peddlers, but other approaches target a
less anthropocentric account of the historical past.6
Purpose: Reconstruction or interpretation?

Once sources have been mined for evidence, and selections have been made to determine
which sounds were most meaningful in a specific context, then the historian of soundscapes
must tackle the project’s purpose: is the task to reconstruct or to interpret the sonic past?
Today researchers can use multimedia to simulate historical soundscapes. A pioneering
example of a reconstruction of the soundscape of eighteenth-century Paris called Projet
Bretez was designed by musicologist Mylène Pardoen and a team of French historians,
sociologists, and media experts at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 in France. Based on the
Turgot map of Paris prepared by Louis Bretez in 1739, it draws on a variety of literary
sources to recreate the sounds one might have heard at the heart of Old Paris, near the
Grand Châtelet on the right bank of the Seine near the slaughterhouses. The purpose
of such a ‘restitution’ is to facilitate researchers’ analyses of historical soundscapes by
objectively recontextualizing facts of sensory experience; for the general public, the benefits
are in the immersive experience.7 Although this example of ‘soundscape archaeology’ is
without a doubt a fantastic project, it has its limitations which are important to consider
if we are developing a methodology about historical soundscapes. The multimedia project
cannot convey how people experienced city noise and how sounds were represented and
discussed in the specific historical circumstances in which the sounds were produced. Did
eighteenth-century Parisians actively listen to these sounds as we readers can (headphones
are recommended), or did these sounds remain beneath a threshold of perception? What
were the modes of attention? At what point, if ever, did eighteenth-century Parisians
perceive these sounds as intolerable noise? Simulations of the past in the present do not
directly address what street noise meant in its historical and cultural context, how sound
reflected and produced distinctions of class, gender, religious, generational, regional, or
national identities. These are the questions that propelled my research. Another aspect
that Project Bretez sidesteps is vocal presence in cities: there are no human bodies in her
soundscape so all sound is disconnected from its physical source, and our senses of hearing
and sight are not always aligned. Nonetheless, historical soundscape archaeology projects
such as this one – or other practice-based approaches that are part of museum displays8 –
are certainly worthwhile because they allow us to imagine or – better – to feel the past, even
while we must remain mindful of the need for contextualization. Soundscape archaeology
has its place alongside contextualization so that we can attend to the ways in which the
perception of sounds and listening practices have changed over time.
The historian Alain Corbin has raised a number of these issues in his pioneering
work on the history of the senses. Corbin refers to the work of Guy Thuillier (1977) who
catalogued and quantified ‘the noises that might reach the ear of a villager in the Nivernais
in the middle of the nineteenth century’ and offers a critical appraisal of this approach’s
‘immersion in the village of the past’ at the expense of ‘the historicity of that balance of the
senses’ and of ‘the configuration of the tolerable and the intolerable’ (Corbin 2005: 129–
130). In commenting on Corbin’s ‘too charitable’ assessment of Thuillier, Mark M. Smith
is firmer about his stance on ‘whether or not we can (or ought to) try to re-experience the
sensate past’ stating that ‘without a dedicated and careful attempt to attach meaning to
those noises, cataloging is not only of very modest heuristic worth, but is, in fact, quite
dangerous in its ability to inspire unwitting faith that these are the “real” and unchanging
sounds of the past’ (Smith 2014: 20).
Purpose: The period ear

The relative merits of attempting to reconstruct or to interpret the sonic past can be
further weighed when placed in the specific context of musicology. While debates about
‘authenticity’ in music and ‘historically informed’ performance are not our immediate
concern,9 consideration of the so-called ‘period ear’ could be constructive to the historian
of soundscapes. The Israeli musicologist Shai Burstyn wrote a series of articles on the
‘period ear’ in the 1990s (when the debate was raging) in which she asked if listening was
intuitively practiced and weighed ‘the possibility that [music practitioners] might not hear
music of the past as its contemporaries had done’ (Burstyn 1997: 693). She foregrounded
how cultural perceptions and attitudes towards time and space as well as other mental
habits and interpretive skills are all factors that historically situate listening.10 The history of
the metronome as told by Alexander Bonus (2017), for example, shows how uncovering the
historical constructed-ness of intuitive listening can involve challenging our assumptions
about everyday sounds that we hold to be common sense. Bonus examines the ‘metronomic
turn’ in the early twentieth century, a ‘pivotal moment in the understanding of musical time’
(Bonus 2017: 77) when precision-oriented, mechanically regulated rhythm supplanted the
embodied or intuitive experience of rhythm as a positive ideal. Bonus argues that although
the metronome was developed by Johann Maelzel for use as a musical instrument, the ideal
of mechanical precision and accuracy spread from experimental psychologists to musicians,
music educators, and composers, not the other way around. Psychologists institutionalized
a laboratory standard that meant that ‘divergence from such scientific sound-boundaries
constituted human error, regardless of the cultural or historical circumstances’ (90). Bonus
cannot help but romanticize the past (justifiably so?) and he concludes that ‘unbeknownst
to those musicians today who subscribe to daily practice routines dictating that every
printed note must synchronize to a metronomic sound (driving an unstoppable “motor
unit” of musical time), their training methods mirror a nineteenth-century laboratory
experiment first devised to measure attention span’ (97).
The investigation of historical soundscapes is a rich interdisciplinary field. A range
of sources from musicology, art history, literary and cultural studies, history, and
architecture, can work in concert to help us hear the sonic past. While reconstructions of
the historical sounds can usefully make us feel the past, their force is all the more cogent
when accompanied by interpretation, to best contextualize the historically variable and
ideologically determined nature of listening practices and thresholds of tolerance. The
need to historicize sound is loud and clear even though we might at first think listening is
innate or natural.
Notes
1. For the application to non-Western contexts, see Chapters 31, 34, 40, 45, 46, and 49, in
this volume.
2. Clément Janequin, Les Cris de Paris (1547); Jean Servin, La Fricassée des cris de Paris
(c. 1578). Jean Georges Kastner, Les voix de Paris: essai d’une histoire littéraire et musicale
des cris populaires de la capitale depuis le Moyen Âge jusqu’à nos jours; grande symphonie
humoristique vocale et instrumentale (1857). For a recording, see Ensemble Clément
Janequin 2009.
3. Clairaudience is used with a different meaning by R. Murray Schafer, for whom it is a
synonym of ‘ear cleaning’ (Schafer 1994: 4).
4. Fernand Khnopff, En écoutant du Schumann (Listening to Schumann) (1883),
painting, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels. Available online:
https://www.fine-arts-museum.be/fr/la-collection/fernand-khnopff-en-ecoutant-du-
schumann?artist=khnopff-fernand(accessed 15 April 2018). François-Nicolas-Barthélemy
Dequevauviller, L’ Assemblée au concert (A Gathering at a Concert) (late eighteenth
century), photograph, Library of Congress. Available online: www.loc.gov/item/
miller.0219a/ (accessed 23 April 2018).
5. Scholars debate the relative disturbance of traffic noise, see Baron 1982; and Bijsterveld
2008, for an overview.
6. For more on the power of the human voice, see Neumark 2017.
7. To consult Projet Bretez, see Bretez Site Officiel n.d.-a. For Pardoen’s description of her
goals (‘restitution’) and methodology, see Bretez Site Officiel n.d.-b. Selected other virtual
reality reconstructions of interest, include: Virtual St Paul’s Cathedral Project: A Virtual
Re-creation of Worship and Preaching at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Early Modern London (see
Virtual Paul’s Cross Project n.d.); and Musical Passage, A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica (see
Musical Passage n.d.).
8. For example, Gétreau (2014), based on an exhibition held at l’Historial de la Grande
Guerre, Péronne, France, 27 March 2014–26 April 2015.
9. For an overview, see Butt 2001.
10. See Pearse et al. (2017), who have moved beyond the entanglements of the authenticity
debate to draw from early-music performance practice and reconstruct the sounds of the
past in an artistic work that mediates between past and present.
References
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658
42
Sonic Writing
Holger Schulze
An anthropological loop
A sound event is not a character. A sound you hear is not identical to a word or an ideogram
or a newly invented or historically conventionalized symbol you write. As I write these
words I sense the fresh air of an early Monday morning coming in through the open door
of my home office, from the inner court of the new apartment house we moved into two
months ago. I hear almost nothing; well, some birds singing. As I was in bed a few minutes
ago, I seemed to almost kinesthetically sense their movements momentarily as movements
in a calligraphic performance. In order to focus on my writing here, I found this playlist I
am now selectively listening to, by the name of Songs To Test Your Headphones With. I am
writing these sonic, material experiences, now. This writing continually embodies a switch
from a sort of sound event to a character: a switch that happens apparently with great ease
in the documented artistic practices and technical apparatuses of recording. It is one of
the most common sound practices that us humanoid aliens – living entities like you or me
(Schulze 2018) – love to perform. I will thus not speak for or about sound cultures of extra-
humanoid aliens in various dimensions or alternate universes; they might actually be very
different in their physical representations of sounds as well as their cultural artefacts having
evolved from those material sonic experiences in their recent centuries or millennia. Yet I
will try to speak and to write about those sound cultures documented in the archives of this
tiny and tormented planetoid at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To start with,
the humanoid aliens on this planet do apparently love to indulge in expanding a given
sonic experience by writing down the sounds and the music they experience. They love
to produce all sorts of scores, euphoric or sometimes disappointed, depressed ramblings,
suggestive drawings, or psychedelic accounts of sensory experiences. In their various and
globally dominating cultures, so it seems, an infinitely running feedback loop has been
growing over centuries and millennia – that is still running, in you as well as in me. I am
in turn quite sure that there were and are cultures where noting sounds plays no major role
in everyday life; though apparently for the contemporary hegemonic lifestyle the various
forms of writing sounds seem to be crucial from ubiquitous listening (Kassabian 2013) to
mobile music (Gopinath and Stanyek 2014).
This anthropological loop I am speaking of connects one specific sonic experience in

a given situated and environmental, material, physiological, and somatic constellation on
the one side to an imminent urge on the other side to continue and to even expand and
to permeate this experience by transposing, transcribing, or inscribing a mark or even
a representation for this experience in some material, some lasting area and thing; and
again to later perform after this very recipe for sound and music in order to generate
even newer sounds, maybe never heard ones – that again might provide a different sonic
material experience in a situated and environmental, material constellation immediately
connected to an urge to expand and to permeate this experience – and so on, and so on,
so forth, and so forth. The loop of experience and generativity cuts transversally through
one’s life’s erratic experiences and one’s idiosyncratic activities. A loop made out of material
consistencies and tensions corporeally felt: ‘A body is therefore a tension’ (Nancy 2008:
134). This individual and corporeal tension generates and apprehends at the same time
the material cohesion of an artefact. In such a truly anthropological loop of practice and
behaviour, of tension and representation, of generating and connecting, of continuation
and transposition, of expansion and compression, the one and only starting point to stop
at is hard to detect. There might not even be one.
The track I have just listened to now went through a break that operated as a bridge to the
next and last verse of that song. Nevertheless, one can indeed find quite different states in the
ongoing feedback between experiencing and writing, sounding and performing, and again
writing and experiencing: between listening, partaking, dancing and noting, scratching,
scribbling, writing, steno-, calli-, or idiographically. Such numerous states represent the
shifting stages and situations in which the process of sounding and the process of writing
intersect or interfere with each other, through the activities of listening and reading. This
situation of notation has recently – in the longue durée of cultural history at least – been
expanded to, added with, and was further explicated by technology and its related practices
of recording of various kinds between the phonautograph, the magnetic tape, and the
codification in and conversion to digital audio files. The advent of modern acoustics since
the nineteenth century and the research and development activities since then have led to
a vast amount of new consumer products, a multitude of new implementations of sound
recording and listening devices entering our everyday lives, every season a new assortment
of devices or software suites can be purchased. Sounding and writing is, since then, at the
same time a technologically enhanced and supported activity as it is corporeally anchored
and individual practised.
The chapter has four parts: (1) ‘An anthropological loop’ discusses the recursive structure
of writing and performing sound; (2) ‘Leap into the nexus’ explores the ontological distance
between the perceptual substance of a sonic experience and the notational codes; (3) ‘Sonic
heuristics’ proposes the various phenomenological options of writing as heuristics in sound
studies; and (4) ‘In a cohesive flux’ discusses this proposed approach with the intricate
stylistic and epistemological challenges that writers in sound studies face.
With these manifold multiplications of the options of writing it almost might seem that
sound can – since the advent of media recording, storage, and reproduction – only be
represented and can only have an effect in these new technologically performed forms of
Sonic Writing 661
writing: be it in actually written signs, notes, words; in mechanically inscribed oscillations

and movements of a materially connected needle as its stylus; or in a transduction starting
from various forms of resonating membranes and surfaces transmitting their movements
to electrical signals that then again get translated into digitized values representing the
energy extruded from these sound events. I can hear the high-frequency sound of this text
file being saved, as scheduled, to the hard disk of this computer. I did not hear though as
it was being saved to a computer in the so-called cloud, a hard disk drive somewhere else
on this planetoid.
There is now only writing and reading and nothing but writing and reading, now, right?
This is what sound is: writing and reading, and reading and writing, nothing else. Any
other operation connected to sounding and to listening, as executed by us humanoid
aliens, might not even be imaginable, right? And yet, such an insisting claim represents
more a compulsive obsession than any actual insight. This claim represents the compulsive
obsessions implemented by and in contemporary media culture and its desire projected
towards the apparatus and its performance. A crystallized artefact covering and shaping
the material culture of humanoid aliens more and more every single day.
Leap into the nexus

How do I do this, actually? Only to take note and then to take notes of a sonic experience
is a strange, an unsettling, and to some extent even a seemingly impossible and unreal
operation to execute. How can one even start doing this as in a situation where a sonic
experience is in itself a rather erratic and strange entity, hard to grasp. More often than not
there are no clear and materially obvious limitations that could even define where a sonic
experience starts and where it ends? How does this certain sensory experience on my or
your skin, in your or my inner ear, in your or my intestines or legs that we might call a sonic
experience even result in some more specific activity executed with your or my extremities:
be it in writing or dancing, tapping or gesturing? What is one actually doing as the very
activity of notating and writing sounds seems to incorporate at the same time an almost
paradox combination of activities: it combines a receptive, malleable, and plastic listening
body, an analytic and detailed attention directed at understanding sensory experiences on
the one side – and on the other side an intensely generative and highly focused and active,
corporeal performativity necessary to move one’s body or certain bodily extremities in an
orderly way to leave traces on some highly receptive surface on which one records these
traces. This complex activity in itself is highly strange, seemingly impossible to undertake
or to complete, let alone to reflect upon; nevertheless, it is incessantly done, probably at
any given time of every day in at least some locations on this incessantly tormented solar
planetoid.
Someone is, right now, for instance, excited to tell their friend about a song or a
composition they recently heard. Right now, someone is writing down notes and rests,
breaks and accidentals, time signatures and dynamics in order to provide one of the
recipes this largely westernized global culture calls a score that musicians use to perform.
And right here and in many places, studios, homes, and offices there are at the same time
technological recording facilities that write down the codified representations of individual
sound events and singular sound sources of a musical or sonic performance onto a given
recording medium, transmitting a highly codified representation of its specific sequences
and layering of frequencies. This apparently ubiquitous desire and general habit of engaging
in a feedback loop of sensing and writing activities when hearing sounds and music, when
thinking of music and sounds, these practices might be understood as yet just another
form of hearing and listening, just as: ‘Dancing is a way of hearing; singing is a way of
dancing: Singing is a way of hearing’ (Schulze 2018: 231). The nexus between kinesthetic
continuation, mimesis, a sensation of being almost inextricably connected to the sensory
events, the sonic events around one, and the following sensibilities, the reactions and
activities, the felt sense (Gendlin 1992) that takes hold of one’s sensory corpus as a whole –
this nexus is not an accidental side-effect of sounding and listening. This nexus precisely
marks the vibrant linkage between the corporeal and individually existential reality of
humanoid aliens – and all the activities, events, processes, turmoil, and erratic instances
that seemingly were not executed by one of us. As a humanoid alien one apparently lives
and listens in this transient yet agile nexus.
However, this nexus requires an incredibly daring and dark effort to bridge this
seemingly unbridgeable abyss: an abyss between two radically different and, as one might
assume, almost completely disconnected materialities. On the one side humanoid aliens
experience the percepts of oscillations and intensities, of pressure waves and loudness, of
timbre, instrumental sounds, of impact and tenderness, desire and repetition, of erratic
sound events and continuous ambient soundscapes, an intrusive power exerted onto you
and me. This is the sonic material of an enveloped and situated experience humanoids can
share. On the other side, though, one finds the material limitations and physical constraints,
the cultural codifications and regulations, the transformative mappings, the legends
and descriptions for how to write certain sounds in the framework of certain notational
practices and in certain techno-cultural constellations and apparatuses of inscription and
automated writing. This is the sonic writing that intends to represent or to crystallize the
experience. But why repeat this sonic experience at all and why prolong it in the form of a
lasting representation? What desire precisely drives this strange urge to solidify a malleable
and ephemeral experience into a stable, archivable document?
Those two seemingly disconnected sides of writing sounds – the side of sonic material
experience and of sonic material inscription – are not only representing different aspects
or perspectives; both are also situated also in radically different approaches to materials, to
the senses, to experience, to formulas, to patterns and schemata, to forms of organization,
selection, and representation. Simply put: Both sides of sonic writing – sonic material
experience and sonic material inscriptions – can appear almost incompatible on all levels
one could think of. Between both one finds an abyss, a void, an erratic non-space of
non-proximity. No connection exists apparently between sonic material experiences
and sonic material inscriptions, so it might seem. Hence, it might be just precisely this
disconnectedness that facilitates a contact. You and I, we are the actual contact zone: the
Sonic Writing 663
sensory corpus of a humanoid alien. Its sonic sensibilities. This touching and almost
impossible contact between a sonic material experience and sonic material inscriptions
is what effectively incites the desire to perform this impossible act. The act of performing
resonances, sensibilities, the act of listening: ‘I’m going to prove the impossible really exists’
(Schulze 2018: 132).
In starting to write sounds or in more general terms: in starting to write the sensory
experiences one actually jumps into this abyss – expecting and awaiting a sudden
connectedness, a surprising new nexus between these aforementioned separated
materialities. ‘But what if there is none? – What if I just fall? And if I crash?’ You simply
jump. Being disconnected to any entity around you, is what apparently can carry you as
soon as you jump. ‘Sound writing is a gong resonating through bodies, sentient and non’
(Kapchan 2017: 2). This gong of which Deborah Kapchan speaks resonates only as soon as
one moves into the zone where it is able to activate resonances: one needs to jump into this
zone of resonance. This daring and necessarily risky jump into the multiple emanations of
sentient connectivities is exemplified by Kapchan with the flight, the rise, and the fall of
the mythical figure of Icarus; according to a poem by William Carlos Williams, quoted by
Kapchan, this fall is unheard, actually unwritten, maybe unsound – though probably not
‘quite’ as Williams writes:
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.
(Williams 1962)
But what if this jump is somewhat forced and strangely uncomfortable? What if it is only
partly desired and partly coerced? What can such a jump then achieve and protrude?
One jumps maybe nevertheless into this abyss – and I like to think of David Bowie’s jump
performed in the song and the music video by the same name, ‘Jump They Say’: Standing
on top of a skyscraper the protagonist doubts if he should jump, yet various people seem
to scream: ‘JUMP!’ – and they ask questions about this humanoid alien standing and
doubting there:
They say
He has two gods
They say
He has no fear.
(Bowie 1994)
Whereas Icarus indeed jumps and rises, flies and falls, Bowie’s persona in this song does
neither; he seems to have neither a pair of eyes, nor a mouth. He doubts and waits, he gets
to be pushed and still doubts but in the end decides for himself to do this jump, this scary
leap into the unknown. Still, in such an instance ‘listening itself is a speculative method’
(Kapchan 2017: 3). The jump into the abyss in between materialities remains speculative,
insecure, partly impossible. This jump and flight and the minuscule horror in between
sensing and codification, between receiving sounds, assimilating sonic percepts on the
one side and the action of inscribing codes or representations on some surface on the
other side, this jump into a sudden movement, into scripture, is a jump from the hard
and unquestionable security of the architecture one is standing on to the soft and highly
irritable qualities of gases and molecules, incessant movements and dynamics. One jumps
hence from the hard to the soft, in the words of Michel Serres:
The given I have called hard is sometimes, but not always, located on the entropic scale:
it pulls your muscles, tears your skin, stings your eyes, bursts your eardrums, burns your
mouth, whereas gifts of language are always soft. Softness belongs to smaller-scale energies,
the energies of signs; hardness sometimes belongs to large-scale energies, the ones that
knock you about, unbalance you, tear your body to pieces; our bodies live in the world of
hardware, whereas the gift of language is composed of software.
(Serres 2008: 113)
The bodies of humanoid aliens are enveloped in such invasive and intense impacts by
sonic emissions on an entropic scale: pulling your muscles, tearing your skin, stinging in your
eyes, bursting your eardrums, burning your mouth; whereas the ephemeral and transitory
textures of language one weaves out of characters and strings, periods and samples, idioms
and metaphors, signatures and symbols carry such smaller-scale energies of signs: they
might just vanish, unknown, if no one cares for receiving, for taking up what might be
woven into them, what meanings, what sense. The emissions around us probably do not
leave us many choices than simply to be under their influence, maybe to give in, maybe to
indulge in their vast radiance; yet the textures of meanings we weave and knit and lace,
they need our ability to lace and knit and also to weave in order to understand, to receive,
to detect, and to decode what is coded in it. However, as so as we started this knitting
and lacing characters and strings, we might never even be able to stop doing so: we then
will have to inhabit this realm of symbols and metaphors, the textures and references. It
remains though a highly skilled, an incredibly refined task one exercises here. It is a bit like
chess boxing – a highly hybrid activity that comes together nevertheless in one nexus that
generates cohesion, movement, and drive: impact and critique.
Sonic heuristics
Here I am now, in a nexus between sounding and writing, connected by listening. So
how do I do this? As troubling as this quite bland, starting question might sound: this is
probably the best starting constellation for a leap into the nexus between sonic material,
sonic experience, and sonic writing. It requires a jump, more often not from an actual
skyscraper, but maybe from a high-rise, a pyramid, or the top of a rocket launchpad of
affects, involvement, repulsion or desire. ‘They say: Jump!’ (Bowie 1994). With this jump
one does not leap into codifications and automation of inscription that would be the
mechanism, a method for an apparatus to record and write. Yet, one jumps into ‘the realm
of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane’ (Cave
2000). Whereas the author of this quote, the singer and novelist Nick Cave, is speaking
about his strategy for writing love songs, exactly this jump into the very close, preferably
Sonic Writing 665
into the too dark, the too intimate, into the erratic is what this leap into the nexus actually
means: it is a heuristic, namely, a problem-solving strategy (cf. Schulze 2005) that claims
to lead one applying it to a more specific focus and to a more specific way of production.
Heuristics are meta-methods: methods to find the in each case specific and new method
to explore and to scrutinize a given sonic situation. They are sonic heuristics, heuristics in
sonic research. This research now begins, again, with a leap into the nexus: ‘Not only is
it the literary that’s useless, all traditional theory is pointless’ (Eshun 1998: 189). The too
clever and too distant and too self-assured forms of knowledge keep you from actually
registering and sensibly observing what happens in this dense and intense situation of a
sonic experience. It is a nexus of the highest volume, it swallows you, this room volume –
right here! right now! – full of sound and sensory percepts, full of movements and all the
tactile and haptic interpenetrations of specific material consistencies:
There is no distance with volume, you’re swallowed up by sound. There’s no room, you
can’t be ironic if you’re being swallowed by volume, and volume is overwhelming you. It’s
impossible to stay ironic, so all the implications of postmodernism go out of the window.
(Eshun 1998: 189)
As soon as the volume of sound swallows you, you can actually sense the sound and hence
write sonically. This is the major prerequisite for sonic writing. ‘(And yet, we could all be
wrong […]. Wouldn’t be the first time)’ (Anderson 1984). Writing sound is a corporeal
and a sensory performance. This performance though is only possible if connecting to the
irrational, the absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane as sources
for its writing. The sensory corpus (Schulze 2018: 136–159) in its fullest and most intense
presence needs to be activated. It gets activated by a reconnection to the felt sense (Gendlin
1992; Schulze 2018: 148–150) of the sonic persona who is writing. Opening up this felt
sense in the sonic nexus refers actually to three main focuses in writing: on idiosyncrasies,
corporeality, and situatedness. I begin with the latter.
Sonic writing does not begin with a historical or critical account of a given sonic artefact.
It starts with the specific, narrow, personally experienced sonic situation, right here, right
now. There are no details of such a situation that would be too banal or too irrelevant or too
intimate or too dirty or too humiliating to narrate. The more insanely obsessive, distracted,
and absurd the narrated details of an everyday listening situation are the better. ‘Got to
believe – somebody’ (Bowie 1994). These details then obviously border and transgress
into imagination, memories, tangible desires and fear, all of them always connected, of
the sonic persona who does the writing. This complexly interwoven and interpenetrating
magma (Castoriadis 1975), this chaosmos of desire in a specific listening situation is where
sonic writing starts.
This writing then includes, apparently, individual corporeal sensibilities, personal
preferences and experiences, inabilities and abilities, poignant formations and biographical
formants that the writer has embodied in her or his sensory corpus (Nancy 2008). This
corpus is not the mere physical body that might be abducted after its death, it is not an
imaginary ideal body that one might find in school textbooks of biology; it is foremost a
sensed, felt, and experienced body, structured by the felt sense of the sonic persona. This
corpus resembles more the corps sans organes (Artaud 1947; Deleuze and Guattari 1972;
Deleuze 1981), the body without organs, in that it is not limited to a notion of the civilized
and docile, the domesticated body: ‘Lorsque vous lui aurez fait un corps sans organes, alors
vous l’aurez délivré de tous ses automatismes et rendu à sa véritable liberté’ (Artaud 1947):
‘When you have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from
all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty’ (Artaud 1992: 329). And in sensing
and receiving the sounds around you, you start to dance, as dancing is indeed a way of
hearing. ‘Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals
musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit’ (Artaud 1947). ‘Then you will teach him
again to dance inside out as in the delirium of our accordion dance halls and that inside
out will be his true side out’ (Artaud 1992: 329). And this dancing is a sequence of gestures
that transgresses into writing the kinaesthetic, the sonic.
Finally, this process of writing the sonic incorporates the most daring vulnerabilities,
idiosyncrasies and strange desires, unacceptable needs and fears of a sonic persona. A
sonic persona as a sonic writer necessarily starts with these qualities of their own sensory
experience. One does not start with the historically documented and critically acclaimed
knowledge about sound and music. But, and that is the next step, all of this knowledge goes
into the writing process. Sonic writing does neither stop in a self-harmed limitation on the
immanence of one, highly subjective listening moment with all its momentary impulses; yet,
it begins there in implicitly carrying a whole lot of knowledge and readings, epistemes and
truisms, false assumptions and strange bits of collected factoids. In unfolding, in carrying
forth the writing on sound, this knowledge again can and should be questioned, added to,
and contradicted with new research findings and enhanced with contrary positions:
All that works is the sonic plus the machine that you’re building. So you can bring back any
of these particular theoretical tools if you like, but they better work. And the way you can
test them out is to actually play the records.
(Eshun 1998: 189)
Sonic writing does not intend to limit itself without need to a stupid and ignorant fiction
of oneself: all practices, experiences, insights, and doubts that the writer encounters
before, during, and after the writing process can and should go into writing about a sonic
situation – revising the written sonic stream of writing again and again; and again. And
again. Until, at a certain point, the resulting text has an appropriate amount of texture of
consistency, of sonic references, auditory epistemologies and ontologies in it. It might then
be considered as finished. For the time being, at least.
In a cohesive flux
In the moment I am writing this, the interpenetration of moments, relations, things,
and sensibilities, of thoughts and concepts, historical ideas, insights, and findings of a
seemingly endless multitude of research fields, might seem to some readers to be too erratic,
Sonic Writing 667
too arbitrary, too random to even constitute a piece of writing with a sufficient degree
of consistency. Yet, this seemingly erratic flux in writing might be the only sufficiently
complex and dynamic, the only appropriately responsive, relational, and transformative
representation in written form that is indeed capable of giving an account of the experiential
character of listening, sensing, and receiving the sonic material in a given sonic situation.
This submerging into the immanence of a sensory experience is precisely what makes sonic
writing possible at all:
Writing about sound and writing sound are two different processes. The first maintains the
positivist position of subject (writer) and object (sound). The second breaks out of duality
to inhabit a multidimensional position as translator between worlds – the writer listening
to and translating sound through embodied experience, the body translating the encounter
between word and sound, sound translating and transforming both word and author.
(Kapchan 2017: 12, emphasis in the original)
This daring jump into the nexus between experientiality and artefact, this dense area
of immanence, is at the same time a risky jump out of the common limitations and
definitions of acknowledged epistemologies of direct objectivity, of an anonymized
and widely camouflaged researcher, and of the arbitrary as well as highly idiosyncratic
motivations, discontinuations, transruptions, and detours that actually make research.
When one jumps into this abyss between sonic materiality and codified artefacts one
opens a whole realm that seems uncharted and void, if not scary and dangerously
personal. And yet, precisely this sense of being lost, of being in a vacuum of academic
practice, is immediately triggered and ad hoc structured by the very sensory corpus and
the material resonances running through you or me, their repercussions and affecting
effects, their surprising reconnections and new emerging structures, in this very instant.
This sudden switch can take place when feeling lost and scared in a state and under
pressure of articulation, one arrives at a moment, when the established and learned
routines and clichés, the phrases and idioms of everyday articulation simply do not make
sense anymore – and different, not so much verbal and semiotic references in history
and in academic writing, but corporeal and sensory references in one’s individual bodily
situation provide the best starting ground for articulation: ‘Bodily implying is a value-
direction’ (Gendlin 1992: 203).
This does not mean that what can be extracted from starting with this bodily felt sense
would be infallible – yet, it is in some instances the only possible and viable starting point.
In sonic writing this is precisely the situation: surprisingly for some, there are no pre-
existing structures: they grow, they are there, they emerge as soon as one is performing
these kinds of movements, inscriptions, writings. If one starts writing on a complexly
layered situation of sonic experience, then the process of writing, this highly erratic and
idiosyncratic flow of memories, sensations, fears, and desires generates out of itself a
sequence, a flux, a kind of connection and consistency that is not a consistency in the
sense of a logical argument: this consistency is a consistency of material – be they sonic or
rhetoric. It is not necessarily a coherent text, that proposes a semantically coherent flow of
propositions, relating to each other in a consistent sequence that provides an intelligible
argument. It is more a cohesive texture, that offers a materially suggestive flow of sounds,
signs, and words, emerging out of each other in a rhythmical and perceptual sequence
that carries its readers and listeners, its audience through this time-based flux. In sonic
writing one creates such a cohesive flux.
I hear the voice of Hildegard Westerkamp, during her narration that drives the famous
soundwalking piece of hers, Kits Beach:
In another dream, when I entered a stone cottage, I entered a soundscape made by four
generations of a peasant family sitting around a large wooden table eating and talking:
smacking and clicking and sucking and spitting and telling and biting and singing and
laughing and weeping and kissing and gurgling and whispering.
(Westerkamp 1996: 5:21–5:45)
I imagine this place, the sounds, the relation of the sonic personae in this situation by the
sensory, situated description of Westerkamp. It is the material plasticity that represents all
the sounds present in this situation. And suddenly, I hear the voice of Alvin Lucier in my
head:
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of
my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the
resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech,
with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.
(Lucier 1990)
Here the narration itself effectively generates the piece of sound art; it activates the sonic
formants of the space it was recorded in. But foremost, again, by the idiosyncrasies of
Lucier’s stuttering, his phrasing and vocalization: the material of his tender yet firm and
distinct speaking. This memory triggers now the first six questions, still sticking in my
head, from Pauline Oliveros’s famous Ear Piece – a narrative opening for almost any sonic
environment:
Are you listening now? Are you listening to what you are now hearing? Are you hearing
while you listen? Are you listening while you are hearing? Do you remember the last sound
you heard before this question? What will you hear in the near future?
(Oliveros 2005)
In the near future, listened to by Kodwo Eshun in the year 1998, I can hear that
Futurhythmachines complexify the beat into what Kelly terms an ‘alien power.’ When
polyrhythm phaseshifts into hyperrhythm, it becomes unaccountable, compounded,
confounding. It scrambles the sensorium, adapts the human into a ‘distributed being’ strung
out across the webbed spidernets and computational jungles of the digital diaspora.
(Eshun 1998: 77)
I can hear these breaks and time stretches, aborted samples and accelerated beat particles.
And yet I ask myself, with Oliveros:
Can you hear now and also listen to your memory of an old sound? (Oliveros 2005)
Sonic Writing 669
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670
43
Silence of Mauá: An Atmospheric
Ethnography of Urban Sounds
Jean-Paul Thibaud
Mauá, according to ambiance

In 2015 a group of Brazilian and French researchers carried out a field investigation at the
Condominío Barão de Mauá (Figure 43.1).1 The condominium is located in the town of
Mauá, some 30 kilometres from São Paulo, Brazil. The complex, built in 1996, consists of
fifty-four buildings housing about seven thousand people and stands on land contaminated
by industrial waste buried there. The residents became aware of the contamination in April
2000 when an explosion occurred during maintenance work on one of the pumps for the
condominium’s underground water reservoirs. It was probably caused by the presence
of methane gas. A worker was killed in the explosion, another one badly burned. Legal
proceedings have been underway ever since, leaving the residents exposed to the risk of
contamination by carcinogenic substances and another explosion.
The purpose of the field work was to test the notion of risk ambiance and understand how
one can go on living in a contaminated environment of this sort. We posit that a risk-prone
environment is embodied in specific ambiances and that it lends itself to particular sensory
experiences that can be documented, and that providing a suitable methodology for study can
be found. Our aim is to focus on the emergence of a resident sensibility to risk, to investigate
what might constitute a risk-sensitive culture, and to highlight the sociopolitical consequences
of day-to-day vulnerability under conditions of this sort. In preparation for this methodological
experimentation, we investigated the ongoing controversy over the situation, in order to
understand what was at stake for the contaminated area, going back over its history and public
life, to pinpoint the various players involved and to clarify the context of our field investigation.2
To approach Condominío Barão de Mauá in terms of ambiance entails studying the
sensory contexts of the lived-in space and how it is experienced, practised, and perceived
day to day. As a first approximation, an ambiance may be defined as a space-time
experienced in sensory terms (Thibaud 2011: 203–215).3 It is always situated (even if its
Chapter translated by Harry Foster and Sophie Provost.

Figure 43.1 A view of Condominío Barão de Mauá. Photograph by Sylvain Dubert.
outlines are fuzzy), it activates all the modalities of perception (sound, light, smell, heat,
and so on) and proceeds by weaving together the material properties of an environment,
social practices, residents’ memories and narratives, and the affective tonalities that colour
a situation. If ambiance gives us a grasp of the quality, singularity, and tonality of a situation,
how does it enable us to experience a risk-prone territory? What can we learn through
ambiental awareness? The present chapter explores the possible make-up of an inquiry in
ambient mode, in short investigating risk by way of ambiance, according to ambiance and
its sonorities.
An atmospheric ethnography
For this field investigation we carried out a five-day experiment in methodology that we
might describe as atmospheric ethnography.4 Before presenting our investigatory approach
in greater detail, I should underline the three key features of ambiance that underpin this
field action. Firstly, ambiance proceeds from a ‘pervasive field’, which places the emphasis
on immersion rather than on face-to-face relations. With ambiance we are steeped in a
sensory milieu which wholly envelopes us at all times. By attending to the order of feeling as
Silence of Mauá 673
much as perceiving, ambiance puts us in contact with the globality of a situation, by paying
full attention to floating attentions, peripheral perceptions and the fringes of experience.
Secondly, ambiance proceeds from a ‘permanent background’, a basso continuo, on which
the world takes on a certain physiognomy, a certain affective tonality. In other words,
ambiance sets the tone for situations and everyday territories. Rooted in the habits and
practices of residents, it makes the forms of social life perceptible and embodies ways of
being together in a particular setting. Thirdly, ambiance proceeds from an ‘unobtrusive
pregnancy’. It gains consistency through low-intensity phenomena, so slight as often to
be imperceptible. Proceeding most of the time by light touches, small inflections, and
micro-phenomena, it is of the order of the infra and of little perceptions, so tiny and mixed
up with each other that they are hard to perceive distinctly.5 These three characteristics –
pervasive, habitual, and unobtrusive – make ambiance a particularly relevant notion for
understanding how risk-prone situations impregnate residents’ experience.
Our proposal for an atmospheric ethnography consists in coming as close as possible to
lived situations in order to gain access to the discreet expressions of resident sensibility,
to the pervasive sensations of the ambient environment, and to the everyday background
to the perceptions and practices of residents. In so doing we aim to capture and describe
what relates to sensory perceptions, material traces and social memory, everyday gestures,
ordinary words, and to ways of being together. This exploratory approach seeks to study
the embodied, situated, enacted, and shared nature of the sensory relation which residents
entertain with their home. The main difficulty here is touching what usually passes
unnoticed, barely voiced, the thousand and one little signs that play a part in everyday
sensory life. It should be immediately apparent that resorting to the conventional methods
of inquiry is of no use here.
Our investigatory approach is designed to make us as amenable as possible to all we
encounter on the spot. Rather than starting from any prior assumptions or preconceived
methodological guidelines, our purpose is to develop a posture of openness to our
surroundings and adopt an attitude of ‘disengagement’ or ‘letting go’, coming as close
as possible to a floating ear and unfocused attention. We refer to this as atmospheric
ethnography because it is a matter of experimenting with a device for paying attention to
the pervasive. To do this we carry out a form of inquiry that is immersed, plural, collective,
and evolving.
- Our inquiry is immersed because it uses in situ investigation, right in the middle
of the Barão de Mauá housing complex. In doing so we aim to take seriously our
bodily presence and our own capacity to be affected by an environment of this sort.
The investigators experience the ambiances of the Condominío, sense their effect on
themselves, and are transformed through contact with them. A sharable experience
is thus possible for investigators and residents.
- Our inquiry is plural, drawing upon various lightweight yet complementary
approaches. It involves techniques as varied as ethnographic observation,
commented walks, floating listening by individuals or groups, audio recordings
with sonic reactivation, photographic drifting, organized encounters with residents,
and a joint logbook.6 Such variety helps to broaden the field of perception while
introducing variations to modes of attention. Resonances take place between open
approaches that initiate the investigation (drifting, floating listening, informal
observations and encounters) and more framed approaches that specify it
(commented walks, sonic reactivations, in situ collective listening).
- Our inquiry is collective,7 bringing into play three dynamics, one inside the group
of investigators, one among residents, and one between residents and investigators.
In this context the joint logbook plays a key role. It is kept on a day-to-day basis, fed
by regular encounters and discussions between all the investigators (all sessions are
recorded). Each investigator’s experiences are systematically shared and debated in
such a way as to articulate and give an account of the atmospheric qualities of the
place.
- Our inquiry evolves, lending itself to all sorts of modalization, reconfiguration,
and branching, as encounters with residents and discussion among investigators
progress. Regular debate on investigators’ respective experiences and recurrent
interplay between collective analysis and field investigation transform, with each
day that passes, the sensibility to the risk-prone environment. A key feature of the
investigatory toolkit, the joint logbook, enables us to register the ongoing process of
exploring, making explicit and sedimenting knowledge.
This proposal for an atmospheric ethnography may be referred to as ‘ambulatory

knowledge’ as formulated by William James ([1909] 2010).8 Its purpose is to explore how a
group of investigators gradually allows themselves to be immersed and transformed by the
ambiances of a place, in such a way as to reveal its tonality and agency.
Listening to an enigmatic silence

The ambiances of the Barão de Mauá condominium are largely impregnated by the risk
of contamination. Sometimes this is manifest and very visible; witness, for example, the
abandoned buildings standing empty after construction work suddenly stopped. They
prompt a sense of desolation, conjuring up images of a territory laid waste by war or natural
disaster. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that the residents do all they can to care for
their living space, paying great attention to its upkeep. In other cases the impression is less
obvious, more secret, as with the presence of odours which permeate the housing complex,
a nagging reminder of the contaminated soil, the smell of the air and earth, more noticeable
at some times than others. According to the residents the strength of this smell varies a great
deal depending on the weather, more perceptible when it rains and the temperature rises.
But at an early stage we encountered an enigma: the strange sense of silence gripping
the condominium. This prompted us to investigate the sounds of the site. The atmospheric
ethnography then turned into a shared listening to local ambiances. From the outset, a
collective impression emerged from our explorations and discussions, but it struggled to
express itself clearly and was stated in a variety of ways. At a loss for words our exchanges
hesitated on how to translate this shared yet largely elusive sensation. Our joint logbook
helped us afterwards in reconstituting the progress of our listening, gradually bringing us
into resonance with Barão de Mauá. As part of its regular meetings, the group undertook
a phenomenological description. The polyphony of remarks, comments, translations, and
reformulations that unfolded among the investigators sought to describe this experience
as closely as possible, gradually attuning our collective ear to the neighbourhood and even
shifting the direction of our inquiry. An interaction loop was set up connecting our lived, in
situ experience and a collective return on experience. On the one hand, field work enabled
us to flesh out our sonic experience, gathering the accounts of residents and additional
ethnographic observations, test new forms of attention and in situ listening modes, and
validate previously shared descriptions. On the other hand, group meetings enabled us
better to share individual experiences, gradually composing a common way of listening
to situations, opening up new ideas for description and interpretation; they also prepared
for further site visits. In this way we tested in two ways the enigmatic silence that became
a key motif in our inquiry: through a collective description, and through an ongoing in
situ investigation. It took all the available time of our stay to gradually come close to this
enigmatic silence, which proved remarkably revealing as to the singular condition of the
neighbourhood.9
Textbox 43.1 is a polyglot composition of excerpts from the joint logbook. All the
investigators contributed to this log, which also takes the form of a collective composition
in the making.10 The sequence of these extracts follows the timeline of the log and reflects
the verbal dynamics between the investigators. Some topics recur during our exchanges
and are reformulated in the course of meetings; various key ideas emerge gradually.
Textbox 43.1. Polyglot recomposition of excerpts

from the joint logbook: ‘The Silence of Absence’.
[…] a risk territory cannot be considered solely from the angle of risk […] there are
inhabitants, there are people living and it is a living environment … therefore it also
means care given to the place where we live […]
[…] yes, but we don’t hear it […] I barely heard any voices […] I heard very very
few inhabitants […]
[…] indeed […] I noticed the very very calm dimension of the neighbourhood
[…] at the beginning it was a peaceful quiet […] and then as I walked I noticed
something ‘between the peaceful quiet and the silence of desolation’ […]
[…] Anali says that it’s the second time she comes here, and that she also has
this sensation that […] uh, the people […] it’s lacking some people […]
Birds and planes

[…] I was very attentive to the transition between interior and exterior, which
happened for me with the soundscape and the birds […]
[…] I’d just add the … the planes in the landscape, they are really present […]
Noiseless interior
[…] it depends a lot on the trips that are made and there is […] it’s true, there’s
much less noise inside the condominium than outside […]
[…] when we came down […] we walked along the stream and there is another
neighbourhood […] there are small houses with fencing at the entrance, and at this
point there is a lot of noise […] it’s much more lively, we found noise, barking dogs,
people speaking loudly, music […] we found a lot livelier, a lot louder […] just like
we expected […] the condominium is still much more silent than the average …
Static and lifeless

[…] here inside, it’s rather static […]. In São Paulo, in a Condominío, you can hear
the TV, smell food … here, you know that dwellers live here because you can see
clothes, but it’s static […] there are no children’s voice […]
[…] when you enter the apartments, you start to see life […] but outside, no […]
[…] the first impression, that’s the buildings […] abandoned […] after talking to
the manager […] today, of course, there’s the rain […] but it’s lacking a welcoming
place for people, you see […]
[…] outside, a lot of movement […] here […] silence […]
Absence of garden
[…] actually, I looked for clues from the absence of clues […] the things that
wouldn’t be here, actually […] in particular the gardens […] would there be
vegetable gardens […] I didn’t see any anywhere […] in many places, I thought to
myself ‘oh, here maybe there’ll be one’ because it looked like ideal conditions for a
garden, vegetable garden, family garden […]
[…] yes, there was this story […] they tried to create gardens but actually,
because of the contamination, the plants, well […]
Vacant apartments?
[…] there’s still some […] there is a lot of vacancy still […] which means that the
buildings that are inhabitable are not completely full […]
[…] some people are gone, you know […] some are gone, and others have
leased again […]
[…] which could explain in part the silence […]
The 2000 explosion

[…] we were with a dweller from step four […] that’s exactly where the accident
happened […] his name is Elton […] and so he was there at the time of the explosion
[…] he was at his place when he heard a boom! […] the explosion […] and because
there’s the petrochemical hub (not far) there are always explosions […] and so he
first thought that it was the petrochemical hub […] and then he saw the two people
that they […] that were injured […] he saw a few people screaming […] and then he
went down to see and found the one that was completely burned […]
Everything is stuck
[…] everything here is stuck […] for example they wanted to build a place for parties,
but they can’t because it’s stuck […] they can’t improve the buildings because
everything is stuck […]
[…] there is a problem because she wanted the approval from CETESB
[Environmental Agency of the State of São Paulo] to build a garage […] It’s the
CETESB that has to give its approval, but the thing is that we can’t perforate
[…] indeed there’s always the threat of explosion, but, well, since we don’t dare
perforating, drilling […]
A place without rhythm

[…] there were several people who were coming by car, were repairing their cars,
two young girls who were playing in the play area and whose phones were used as
speakers for music […] so, all I’m talking about has a sound dimension …
[…] here, it was […] even with the sound, it was super silent and quiet and we
couldn’t hear the city in the background […] I mean, in fact, it really feels like there’s
a rhythm set by the city nearby and like on site we have the sounds of punctual
events, but there’s no rhythm to this place […]
Paralysis effect
[…] and so if I understand correctly, once more, since everything seems impossible
[…] the paralysis effect we mentioned yesterday […] this paralysis effect we
mentioned yesterday about sensory experiences […] here is translated similarly in
the possibilities of dwelling actions, are we clear?
[…] yes, this isn’t simply the impression given by being conscious of the risks,
but objectively there’s a paralysis of any development […] and that paralysis, it can’t
not have an effect on people’s state of mind, on mentalities, all of that […] yes, so
this statement is very interesting […]
[…] for example, there are children, there are women who are doing stuff, there
are young girls who are playing […] that’s what should punctuate the condominium
[…] there a life that should […] that we should be able to hear […]
[…] there’s also an abandoned basketball court because it was in the
condominium that stopped […]
The outside rhythm

[…] you said that the small sounds that you have […] whereas there was sound […]
that the rhythm was coming from the outside, the horizon.
[…] but instead of that, if you want, it’s more partial than that, less strong […] it’s
more […] we can feel it less […] what you can feel strongly, it’s in the background,
the big boulevard, you know […] that drives fast, the big petrochemical hub and
all the little houses we saw, too, that are on the riverside, and that’s what creates
animation […] whether it is about colors, living things […]
The milieu is lacking

[…] in fact, the idea of […] in the sound field, there are three rather simple
categories that are the […] the audible signal […] so that’s an audible signal [knock
knock on the table] […] the soundscape, which is when we’re talking […] and then
the background sound, maybe the wind tunnel, the outside noise […] here it’s like
there is the audible signal, which means the people when they’re doing something
we can hear […] the car, when it’s driving around, we can hear it […] people when
they slam the door or when they play football, we can hear […] and then, there
is the background sound, which is the city in the background, which is another
rhythm, very diffuse, visual, sound […] but the soundscape is lacking […]
[…] we’re not […] we’re not into, except in the silence, into […] into a soundscape
Pumping effect
[…] the nearby space is […] the nearby space is almost a desert […] there’s a
desertification of the nearby space of […] of the body […]
[…] the activities are discreet, in terms of space discretion […]
[…] it’s pumped, it’s completely pumped by a superior ambiance that is given
by the […] I think there’s a pumping effect […] like a blotting paper, the sound is
blotted […]
Crushing feeling
[…] we already said it yesterday, the very strong presence of airplane, either during
take-off or landing […] I didn’t check that […] I can’t tell, but they’re flying low,
and so they’re creating a sound ceiling that is very very low […] It feels like being
crushed by the ceiling […] but at the same time, am I completely trapped? Yes and
no. Why? Because I can find something that Nicolas already mentioned […] that
are the sound horizon in the background […]
[…] I heard the ring-road from below, which doesn’t have a lot […] maybe a little
punctuated, but not much, and I call it the belt […] the fat belt […]
The garden effect

[…] so, here I’ve got an opening […] but I have another one that is even more
beautiful that I call the garden effect […] and freedom […] the sensation of freedom
[…] and what gave it to me? A bunch of dogs that seemed almost free […] country
dogs that were doing their own thing […] they were barking a little in every direction,
and the sound space was animated […] something like ‘ahhh’ [breathing] so here,
almost a contradiction in the soundscape compared to the crushing feeling […] it
was a nice change, to clear my mind […]
The echo from the construction site

[…] I was on the little wooden bench, on the promontory that is at the top […]
so that’s a little elevated […] and there, there was today, yesterday too, a small
construction site [we will learn that it was in fact Geoklock’s site, a society in charge
of the neighbourhood’s environment remediation] […] construction workers using
their tools, with metallic sounds, there were rods […] metallic sounds […] and
where I was, there was an echo […] but not reverberation, though, an echo […] an
echo effect, of very strong rebound that made me think of an acoustic feeling of
confinement […]
[…] so, in conclusion […] yes, there are openings […] the only real opening is
surely given by a soundscape coming from the outside […] from the confines […]
the horizon […] and so this impression of being really […] in a half-grave […] I’m
sorry, but that’s a very impactful place, very much imbued with death, still […]
From felt silence to thickened silence

The research consisted in gradually thickening the felt silence, loading it with social,
historical, and political content, and associating it with a set of contextual elements that
inform it. It was thus not simply a question of sharing an ‘in situ’ sound experience but
also making explicit the frames around it and the conditions that made the experience
possible. Therefore, the study became the building of bridges between the sounds of
places and the form of social and material life that underlies them. The joint logbook
represents the revelation of the way the sounds are embedded in the neighbourhood’s
social history, in the inhabitants’ daily actions, and in the built space’s material patterns.
If the surrounding silence we were facing borrowed both from the action of silencing’s
taceo and the absence of movement’s silencio (Barthes 2005), it can thus be tackled as a
real analyser of the condominío’s problematic situation and the way to inhabit it. In some
way, it is a question of giving silence a voice and researching what it unveils about this
living environment.
This silence, described as voiceless, static, or inconsistent, appears like the expression of
a way of living that is dominated by the inhabitants’ risk and vulnerability. It demonstrates
a neighbourhood that is left hanging, characterized by a depressive tone. This ambiance
reveals the state of a slow-motion territory that is coming to a stop, of a living environment
that is frozen and left out. With the incomplete state of the ghost-like buildings as the most
noticeable trait, the surrounding silence also shows the absence of any internal dynamics.
Everything is at a standstill as if time had stopped. We gradually learnt that it was difficult –
even forbidden – to develop the condominium’s physical structure. For fear of another gas
explosion, it was now impossible to cover or rehabilitate the garages, to drill or perforate
the ground, to build a collective space, or to start new construction works. Moreover, we
noted the lack of vegetable gardens (contamination of plants and appearance of waste on
the ground) and an abandoned basketball court (hardly operable, as it was located in a
contaminated area). The development appeared to be stuck together with many of the
activities that usually provides rhythm and animation to the local life. This is why the
human voices’ frugality and the activities’ discretion within the condominium tended
to produce an inconsistent ambiance, lacking a real internal dynamic, creating a strong
influence from the outside’s sounds: a very lively neighbourhood nearby, a petrochemical
hub further away, a busy boulevard, and a ceiling of airplanes. We thus can talk about a
‘pumping’ and ‘paralysis’ effect to define this ambiance, which is mainly depressive and
struggles to assert itself.
The dwellers’ attention bears the mark of hypervigilance and of dispossession. The sound
presence from the Geoklock company’s works, responsible for the remediation within the
condominium, keeps reminding the residents of the state of contamination, and it tends
to disrupt the feeling of being at home. The most pregnant and audible sounds from the
inside are precisely those produced by people who are not residents of the condominium.
Moreover, many inhabitants remember the deadly explosion that took place in 2000.
Nowadays, when they hear a sudden sound – a car accident, an unexpected noise by
Geoklock or the petrochemical hub – they cannot help but think about the potentiality of
another explosion. Everything unfolds as if the inhabitants are on high alert, expecting a
forthcoming accident. The risk remains in the residents’ collective memory and is a trace
in this hypervigilant attention mode. The feeling of strangeness and the disruption of home
characterize the ordinary sound experience. The condominium’s silence sets itself as the
trace of an everyday life that remains problematic and that struggles to be self-evident.
Activities as trivial as playing, gardening, or tinkering lose their obviousness and keep
reminding the inhabitants of their own vulnerability.
Last but not least, the research also taught us about how frustrating, harmful, and
painful this situation is for the condominium’s dwellers. A long-standing struggle has been
fought by the inhabitants to uphold their rights, since this situation is hardly bearable day
to day and causes severe illnesses (depressed residents, sick or ready to leave when they can
afford it, and children suffering from cancer). This collective disarray struggles to be heard
by public forces, and it reveals the lack of expression and vitality that characterizes the
neighbourhood. Everything comes about as if the silence is the witness of the injunctions
and prohibitions that the inhabitants are subjected to, like the various constraints on
everyday activities. It is also the expression of the depressive state of a distressed group
and the inhabitants’ feeling of hopelessness. Furthermore, it is adding to the inhabitants’
inability to be heard.11 It thus becomes a real analyser of the controversy that is happening
in this contaminated territory.
Conclusion
This outline of an atmospheric ethnography offers to explore what constitutes a form of
social life from the standpoint of its ambiances. The hypothesis is that each way of living,
each collective way of being, is embodied and deployed in particular affective tonalities.12
In other words, a form of social life is always embedded in an atmospheric way of being,
both intertwined. To ignore the social dimension of ambiance would turn the sensory
experience into a purely subjective one, and would eventually lead to a solipsistic version
of human existence. The sharing of an experience involves first the sharing of an ambiance.
Moreover, to omit the atmospheric content of communal life would mean neglecting
the ability to be affected by our surroundings and would lead to the building of a world
devoid of any intrinsic vitality. Living together never goes without feeling the atmospheric
existence of the world at the same time.
One of the major challenges offered by an atmospheric ethnography is to develop a
sensitivity to the tones of situations, to their affective content and their existential value. In
that sense, sound is particularly helpful in order to vibrate in accordance to the surrounding
world, to get in touch and to resonate with an ambient situation. It could perhaps even
present the ultimate medium of an atmospheric attunement (Stewart 2011). The silence
that we came across in Condominío Barão de Mauá is a perfect example: similar to John
Dewey’s theory of inquiry, it works as a diffuse quality that initiates and guides the research
from one end to the other. As the expression of an undetermined unrest, this silence made
us attentive to the neighbourhood’s surrounding sounds. It was less about looking for a
way to describe a soundscape analytically and more about listening to the situations’ tones
and the atmospheric effects around everyday behaviour. Therefore, we tried to get closer to
listening to ‘significance’, at least as much as listening to indexes and signs (Barthes 1991).13
The question was not to identify and catalogue the sounds that we heard, but rather to
grasp its gestures and rhythms, the intensities and paces from everyday life which embody
the living experience. The in situ felt atmospheres were thus the object of a ‘contextual
rebound’ aiming at making explicit their frames of existence and the conditions for their
appearance.
Deeply exploratory, this sound approach consisted in grasping the interior’s tones
and in being in tune with the situations we came across. Between distracted and focused
listening, articulating the doing phase and the undergoing one, it was a question of
being available for the emerging sensory and motor phenomena, letting them come and
following them in their specific dynamic. The researcher’s body thus became a resonator
of the site’s atmospheric vibrations.14 If this atmospheric ethnography indeed involved a
work of genuine attention, it was also about implementing a collective learning process on
the sensitivity to field work. The communing of everyone’s experiences with the help of the
joint logbook allowed to broaden our common knowledge of the field, to intensify and
multiply the interactions with the inhabitants, and to refine our common ability to listen.
This is how our listening never stopped evolving throughout the research, becoming
increasingly sensitive to micro-variations and to the small threads that were weaving
themselves day after day.15 Contrary to the ethnographies that are often carried out in
a solitary way, this approach relied from the beginning, and in a constitutive manner,
on a common experience evolving in time. The relationship that was growing was not
one between a researcher and a group of inhabitants, but rather between two groups
that got together on the basis of diverse and varied modalities. In a provisory way, this
atmospheric ethnography argues for an art of nuances, attentive to the various tonalities
and attunements of social life.
Notes
1. This research is part of a dual framework: the CNRS programme PEPS FaiDoRA Faibles
Doses, Risques, Alertes (CRESSON-UMR AAU, France) and the FAPESP programme
Da Cominicação de Riscos à Cultura de Risco (CETESB, Brazil). The research team was
composed of Silvia Regina Burzaca, Alvaro Florentino da Silva Jr, Anali Espindola
de Campos, Sylvain Dubert, Carolina Poletti Maestri Ferreira, Jacques Lolive, Cintia
Okamura, Norma Lucia Porto, Thiago Rigui, Patrick Romieu, Maria de Lourdes
Pinheiros Simões, Jean-Paul Thibaud, and Nicolas Tixier.
2. This approach was led in particular by Jacques Lolive and Cintia Okamura (see Lolive
and Okamura 2016: 152–172).
3. For a more extensive and thorough approach of ambiance, see Thibaud 2015.
4. This atmospheric ethnography can be related to two major trends of research: on the one
hand ‘atmospheric methods’ (see Anderson and Ash 2015; and Schroer and Schmitt
2017), on the other hand ‘sensory ethnography’ (see Laplantine 2005; and Pink 2009).
5. A theory of ‘little perceptions’ has been developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in his
preface of New Essays Concerning Human Understanding from 1704. A very stimulating
comment has been devoted to this notion by Gilles Deleuze in Le pli. Leibniz et le
baroque.
6. For a description of some of those methods, see Grosjean and Thibaud 2001.
7. Collective ethnography is starting to develop in contemporary social sciences, see Buford
May and Pattillo-McCoy 2000; and Laferté 2016.
8. James makes a distinction between ‘ambulatory knowledge’ and ‘saltatory knowledge’:
‘Now the most general way of contrasting my view of knowledge with the popular view
(which is also the view of most epistemologists) is to call my view ambulatory, and the
other view saltatory; and the most general way of characterizing the two views is by
saying that my view describes knowing as it exists concretely, while the other view only
describes its results abstractly taken’ (James [1909] 2010: 107). Ambulatory knowledge
takes into consideration intersubjective experiences and intermediate experiential steps,
and is played out step by step.
9. This task greatly benefitted from the auditory skills of Patrick Romieu and Nicolas
Tixier.
10. Most discussions were in French, with some input in Portuguese and more rarely in
English. Cintia Okamura, a Brazilian researcher on the team produced a translation.
It would be worth devoting a whole article to the question of translation as part of
investigatory methodology of this sort.
11. At the end of the investigation, Patrick Romieu, one of the French researchers of the
team, organized a ‘big scream’, a collective moment in which the inhabitants were
gathered to shout, together with the researchers – a big scream from the condominio’s
parking lot. This collective performance was both a way to thank the inhabitants for their
hospitality and a way to acknowledge their rights to be heard. Silence was momentarily
broken.
12. An abundant literature exists on the concept of affective tone, emanating essentially
from phenomenology. For an overview of this concept, see Bollnow 1953. The notion
of affective tonality enables one to go beyond a purely subjective view of emotion and
offers an alternative to the object-subject dichotomy. It relates to the overall quality of a
situation.
13. The way of listening we developed may also be related to the psychoanalytical listening
and listening with the ‘Third Ear’: ‘It is not the words spoken by the voice that are of
importance, but what it tells us of the speaker. Its tone comes to be more important than
what it tells’ (Reik 1956: 136).
14. Relying on William and Henry James, David Lapoujade develops the idea of a resonator
as ‘someone who makes audible the tones in the voices, but also in the places, the things
or the atmospheres, the art of the Stimmung’ (Lapoujade 2008: 52).
15. Regarding the approach about small links and attention to nuances in sensory experience
in anthropology, see Laplantine 2003.
References
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44
Sound Design Methodologies:
Between Artistic Inspiration and
Academic Perspiration
Nicolas Misdariis and Daniel Hug
Introduction
This chapter addresses issues on sound design methods in the light of several case
studies implemented in a range of artistic and scientifically grounded paradigms. The
collection (‘gallery’) of case studies that are discussed parses a broad range of approaches
and applications or industrial fields: scientific design of informational sound signals
(watchmaking), innovative product sound design (automotive), and explorative sound
design for interaction. The central aspects are discussed after an introductory presentation
of the topic: what does sound design involve in terms of definition, concepts, and tools?
And before a conclusive discussion: how do methodologies influence and address a
designerly way of making sound design?
General framework
This section outlines the general framework of the topic; it will specify the nature of sound
design and its practices, between art, sciences, and industry. A particular phenomenon,
fixation, is discussed in order to highlight the relationships between creativity, tools, and
methodologies, and to better comprehend the results of sound design, namely, the sonic
artefacts or solutions.
Between artistic inspiration and academic perspiration

When discussing sound design methodologies, it is necessary to first discuss the notion of
sound design. There is a need to clarify the understanding of design as such, as a particular
activity for purposeful creation. Second, the rather novel domain and practice of sound
design in a broad sense has only recently emerged as a discipline and profession, and is still
in search of a clear identity and self-understanding in relation to other design disciplines.
Even for some senior professionals and leading experts in the domain, sound design
as a discipline is quite difficult to demarcate. As a field of professional practice, it not only
appears in the area of radio and film sound, where it originated, but also in the context
of video games, digital information display, product design and engineering, interactive
environments, scenography, communication and marketing, etc. Nevertheless, in the
words of Louis Dandrel, we can postulate that ‘making sound design is making design with
sounds’ (Rodriguez 2003). This perspective establishes sound design as a subcategory of
design, and by its legacy, at the intersection of art, sciences, and industry. The convergence of
practice and theory also makes clear that sound design is a ‘project discipline’ characterized
by a dualism between conception (designing) and realization (making, producing). This
requires a methodology that allows one to imagine the conceptual solutions before their
practical implementation in order to control their complexity and to anticipate their
potential implications for individuals and society.
Understanding sound design as a subdiscipline of design can also help to place sound
design in the field of science of design, that is to say – following Andrzej Strzalecki’s (2000)
or Nigel Cross’s (2001) use of the term – ‘the study of design’, its ‘principles, practices, and
procedures (53)’. This lays the foundations of, and motivation to develop, a conceptual
framework for a science of sound design that inherently involves methodological issues.
This convergence has multiple benefits. It gives access to thinking and formalizations
in that domain (science of design) and makes it possible to consider sound design as a
‘coherent discipline of study in its own right’ (Archer 1979). It also allows one to transpose
Cross’s principles in design research, and to consider his ‘three research loci’ for sound
design research: people, process, and products (Cross 2006). Still following Cross’s ideas,
it finally addresses the question of the existence of designerly ways of knowing and creating
sounds in sound design, and to subsequently ask the question: how can sound design
innovation be achieved and what is the relevance of the familiar, the conventional, and
the expected versus the unprecedented, the surprising, and novelty in the experience of
designed sounds?
The focus on the process further leads to the exploration of the notion of fixation, its
relationships with creativity, and the role of external factors. In design practice, fixation is
defined as ‘a blind, and sometimes counterproductive adherence to a limited set of ideas in
the design process’ (Jansson et al. 1991). This phenomenon has inspired Nathan Crilly (2015)
to conduct an experiment, based on field observations of professional designers, with the
aim of identifying components that encourage or discourage fixation. Prior art (previously
developed solutions), initial ideas (first inspirations), constraints (obstacles to an exhaustive
exploration of the solution space), blame (fear of error and risk minimization), or briefing
(predefined insights) are elicited to ‘increase the risk of fixation or […] the severity of its
effect’ and seem to disrupt a common sense on innovation. On the other hand, teamwork
(collective rather than individual efforts), methods (systematic methodology), facilitation
(expertise of fixation), making (sketching and prototyping), expectations (needs for various
solutions), or experience of variety (thematic culture integration) are in turn elicited as
‘fixation-aware’ or ‘fixation-resistant’ (Crilly 2015).
Sound Design Methodologies 687
For instance, in auditory display design – the discipline concerned with the design of
functional sounds for software and appliances – design fixation can be observed in the
form of dominating design strategies, for example, auditory icons (Gaver 1986) or earcons
(Blattner et al. 1989). At the same time, motivated by the use of sound specific ends – be
it to communicate, to convey emotions, to convince and sell, to convey a brand image, or
to support the interaction with a product – empirical approaches and scientific reasoning
become important. This legitimizes a sound design process guided both by scientific and
designerly elements or standards. However, the scientific method has a strong tendency
to limit the design space to a small amount of well-defined and controllable parameters.
Furthermore, it may lead to thinking in fixed, established categories (see the auditory
display paradigms mentioned above). This results in a conflict in terms of the role and self-
concept of the sound designer (Hug and Misdariis 2011).
Methodologies and tools in sound design

Consideration of the forces related to decision making in the sound design process make it
clear that the key to understanding and dealing with the balance between creative openness
and all sorts of fixation in sound design lies in the related methods and strategies of knowing
and making. Crilly, for example, promotes the exploration of methods beyond the standard
brainstorming or design review approaches and also proposes an approach to prototyping
that allows one to ‘detach from ideas that [are] not satisfactory and move to explore the
alternatives’ (Crilly 2015: 72).
Historically, design methodologies have existed in a field of tension between the
‘artistic’ inspirational aspects of creativity and the aim for rational, reliable, scientifically,
and empirically grounded decision making (Mareis 2016). At one extreme, as represented
by the design methods movement, the design methodology is aimed to deliver results as
objectively and efficiently as possible. In parallel to this, the notion of participatory design
emerged, which advocates the involvement of all stakeholders in the creative process
(Schuler and Namioka 1993). More recently, the design thinking approach proposes design-
based methodical progressions as means to enable creative, new, and even unexpected
solutions to challenging problems of all kinds (Brown 2008). In general, the design process
aims at providing a defined space for systematic creativity and innovation using methods
to generate and synthesize new ideas, thus helping to deal with ‘wicked’ problems (Ritter
and Webber 1973) or the need to identify and exploit new and unknown design potentials,
always integrating sensory experience and abduction in the process (Kolko 2010). An initial
design claim or hypothesis is followed by an explorative phase and an iterative process of
prototyping and formative evaluations, gradually reducing the range of possibilities while
increasing the degree of refinement. The result is not known in the beginning of the process
and there is no conclusive initial requirement analysis and specification.1
Sound design for media

As opposed to other domains, highly standardized production processes of the respective
industries have always characterized design methods for sound in media. For instance,
in film sound design, points of reference for developing the sound generally exists
beforehand, in the form of a script, storyboards, or edited scenes. Here, fixation may
occur early in the process and is often the price paid for stylistic coherence, for example,
to a filmic genre.
But film sound also provides an interesting example of how systematic, analytic, even
scientific, and more spontaneous artistic creativity can be combined in sound design. The
‘Movie Brats’ of the late 1960s, such as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford
Coppola started to treat sound in a new, non-conformist way, inspired by the musical
avant-garde and technological possibilities alike. Ben Burtt gives an example of the attitude
and practice of the ‘New Hollywood’ sound creators, which integrates rationality, scientific
approaches, and artistic experimentation:
Since I was trained scientifically, part of my attitude is first a literal one. I ask myself, ‘If
this sound-producing object really existed, what would it sound like?’ […] I do always
consider the literal aspect of it, because ultimately, you’re trying to convince the audience
of a certain truth.
(LoBrutto 1994: 142)
It is worth noticing here that the scientific approach was not motivated by scientific goals
but rather by the need to achieve plausibility in terms of an ‘imaginary realism’ and,
ultimately, a suspension of disbelief in the audience. The means to achieve this plausibility,
however, were explorative and unconventional, involving the use of broken equipment,
unintended sound phenomena, and unorthodox recording techniques (cf. anecdotes given
by Burtt in several interviews about creating the light saber of Star Wars or the numerous
Wall-E sounds).
Sound design for products and interaction

When dealing with products, in particular interactive computational artefacts and the
‘wicked’ nature of real-life design problems mentioned earlier, sound design practice is
confronted with less standardized and linear design processes, very diverse methods and
tools, and a much greater range of influencing factors to deal with. Still, it is possible to
identify specific procedures and methods.
Nykänen (2008) proposes that the product sound design process might be conceptualized
along the lines of the industrial design process, running through stages of investigation of
customer needs, conceptualization, primary refinement, further refinement, and finally
concept selection, with the help of control drawings or models. Nykänen considers
sonically addressing the conceptual and primary refinement stages as the biggest challenge
in this process. Particularly for prototyping, no established tools exist yet. Following the
notion of sketching design ideas, Ekman and Rinott (2010) and later Rocchesso and
colleagues (2015) have proposed ‘sonic sketching’, using vocalizations as a form of early
representation of a design. But there is no straightforward analogy between sketching in
visual and sound design. In fact, Murphy et al. (2006) report that when presenting draft-
quality sounds to a panel of participants they were immediately criticized for their poor
quality. Similar problems were identified by sound design practitioners being confronted
with clients in the early phases of a project (Hug and Misdariis 2011).
Moreover, the interactivity of the product itself poses several challenges to sound
design, which traditionally is rooted in linear media. To begin with, the actual sequence
in which sounds will be heard (and thus contextualized) emerges along the steps of an
interaction process which may change with every user or situation. This also applies to the
temporal structure of interaction which is highly relevant for the auditory experience. On
the other hand, the sonic context, in which interaction sounds will be heard, is more or less
beyond the control of the sound design – as opposed to sound in cinema or even in home
television. On the production side, procedural sound generation and adaptive composition
are still relatively young design techniques, far away from being industrial standards. Last
but not least, as of today, there is still no coherent notion of a ‘sonic interaction design’
methodology. Rather, the methods are drawn from various disciplines according to the
project at hand.
Following Krippendorff ’s proposition2 for a science of design which draws from
specific experiences related to actual design work, we will present a range of case
studies, ranging from the rather conservative and conventional to the innovative and
experimental: a data-driven product sound design work for the watchmaking industry,
a pioneering sound design project for the automotive industry, and a study on design
and interpretation of sounds for interactive commodities, conducted in an educational
environment.
For each of these cases, we present the specific design issues raised, the method used to
address them, the outcomes, and the resulting insights related to the topic of this chapter,
in particular regarding the balance of the artistic-scientific dimension in sound design and
the numerous connections between artistic skills and practice, scientific knowledge, and
methodologies.
In general, the analysis will frame the design cases along three major phases: ‘orientation
and inspiration’, ‘creation and production’, and ‘evaluation and decision’. While this implies
a strong simplification of the reality of the processes, it represents a common denominator
among them that helps to comparatively address the influences and impulses provided by
scientifically or artistically informed measures.
Case study 1: Functional sound design –

Sound of time
Design issue
This project was a collaboration between the watchmaking industry and the composer
Sebastien Gaxie.3 Its aim was to design sounds of watch ringing, named a minute repeater,
which allowed one to recall the time ‘by ear’. Based on an hour/minute codification,4
the ringing’s character had to match with the brand’s identity. It was produced by two
mechanical devices (gongs hit by hammers), miniaturized, and inserted in the watch’s
body. Thus, this project required the consideration of micromechanical sound generation
and a fresh approach to watch sounds that fulfilled the informational requirement.
Method used
The challenge was tackled with the following three-step methodology developed by the
Ircam/Sound Perception and Design team (IRCAM 2020):
1 Analysis of the state-of-the-art. In this step, an initial sound corpus is formed. It

allows an experimental approach to probe perceptual and cognitive mechanisms
that underlie the perception of these sounds in terms of functionality, agreement, or
aesthetics. This results in specifications and guidelines for sound design.
2 Creation starting from these specifications. It involves other constraints (e.g.
technical) and produces sonic solutions. This step is usually supported by a composer
or a sound designer.
3 Evaluation for identifying solutions. This step usually uses an experimental
approach to compare specifications and solutions. If needed, this step is looped with
the previous step to improve the solutions (Susini et al. 2014).
Within this framework, the minute-repeater project was then implemented as follows:
- Analysis and constitution of perceptual specifications. From initial data, which

was derived from an analysis of sounds used by existing brands, a corpus of
reference sounds was built. This material allowed the experimental construction
of a perceptual space, further described by standard or ad hoc acoustic features
(spectral centroid, spectral spread, etc.) (Peeters et al. 2011). This model was
augmented by experimentally measured preference weights for each sound
situated in the perceptual space. In addition, verbal attributes (previously collected
by a verbalization experiments) were used to describe each corpus sound’s
properties with respect to timbre or source, and then drawing its semantic profile.
Another semantic profile was created in order to map brand identity values
(described by words provided by the industrial stakeholder) with the same corpus
sounds. These two kinds of profiles (sounds ó verbal attributes, and brand values
ó sounds) led to the building of a direct relation between brand-words (identity
values) and sounds-words (sonic properties). This finally provided useful elements
for a brand description by sound prototypes, which helped to guide the sound
design process.
- Conception and creation of initial solutions. Composer Sebastien Gaxie integrated
the whole set of previous specifications as well as the technical possibilities and
limitations, and implemented strategies and tools to complete the creation work. He
defined high-level composition principles: harmonicity (for the spectral contents)
and duality between fusion and transposition (for the minute/hour changes). He
also built a workbench by integrating several models for sound production: initial
Figure 44.1 Image of the minute-repeater device (left) and its physical model: realistic
(middle) and extrapolated (right). Source: left: https://www.apmostwatch.com/pink-gold-
breguet-tradition-repetition-minutes-tourbillon-7087-replica-watch/breguet-tradition-re-
pe-tition-minutes-tourbillon-7087-4/ (accessed 8 July 2020); middle and right: Modalys
physical modelling sound synthesis outputs made by Nicolas Misdariis.
corpus sounds (additive analysis/synthesis), musical or environmental sounds

(e.g. metallic percussions, jingling glasses, etc.), or physical models of the actual
mechanical device (gong and hammer). These physical models could further be
extrapolated with respect to geometries, materials, etc., for the sake of timbral
exploration (Figure 44.1).
- Initial reduction of possible solutions. Subsequently, the approximately four
hundred sounds produced by Gaxie as results from these models were again
placed in the perceptual space as defined in the initial analysis by computing their
respective acoustic features. This approach allowed us to predict each sound’s
position with regard to the reference corpus sounds, also taking into account their
associated brand values and preference weight. This way, a subset of relevant and
targeted solutions could be selected from the numerous sounds produced by Gaxie.
- Selection of optimal sounds. A final scientific experiment filtered the pre-selected
designed solutions by building their semantic profile with regard to brand identity
(brand-words). This protocol led to the selection of two (out of fifty-eight) best
solutions, as the final project deliverable.
Outcomes and insights

The main outcome of the minute-repeater project were the two final ringing sounds. They
were delivered as numerical specifications related to the spectral content of the sounds. The
watchmaking partner was in charge of making the reverse process to reach the mechanical
structures (gongs and hammers) responsible for the specified spectral properties. On that
point, it is worth noting that the feasibility of recreating electro-acoustic sounds with
mechanical means was implicitly integrated in the technical specifications given to the
composer (frequency bandwidth, harmonic properties, etc.), but didn’t form, per se, a
selection criteria early on.
From a methodological point of view, we mainly learned – and demonstrated – that a
deductive approach could efficiently address sound design issues. In other words, artistic,
creative processes could actually be integrated within a scientific protocol, taking advantage
of data analysis and computing (e.g. multidimensional scaling analysis or acoustic features
processing) to inform or guide creative ideas.
We also learned that the three-step looped methodology that we intended to apply tended
to become a linear rather than a retroactive process. In fact, the evaluation was turned into
a simple selection, primarily due to time and cost constraints. The refinement process –
expected from the loop – became a more funnel-shaped approach where propositions were
successively filtered on the basis of objective data or subjective decisions. In summary, this
evaluation appeared to be delivering advisory outputs rather than prescribing and guiding
additional conception rounds.
Moreover, a striking property of this approach was the relatively clear delineation
between ‘scientific’ and ‘artistic’ steps in the process. The artist/sound designer provided
a kind of interpretational and creative hinge between the more scientifically grounded
steps (requirement specification at the beginning, evaluation at the end of an iteration).
Regarding the contribution of scientific and artistically informed impulses on the process,
the orientation and inspiration phase was almost entirely informed by scientific procedures,
resulting in a set of defined parameters for the artist to follow. The production, then, was to
some extent an artistic ‘black box’, where the composer tweaked the provided parameters,
finding new ways of combining and weighting them. This resulted in a surprisingly large
amount of options, which then in the final phase were again reduced to a final solution by
using scientifically inspired procedures.
Case study 2: Innovative sound design –

Sound of silence
Design issue
This project dealt with sound design for silent electric vehicles (EV). It was undertaken
within an industrial collaboration with the car manufacturer Renault on the first electric
model of its brand (ZOE) and in cooperation with the composer and sound designer
Andrea Cera. As electric vehicles are rather quiet but often move in noisy environments,
the fundamental issue arises whether the silence of EVs is a blessing or a curse (Cocron et
al. 2011), resulting in animated debates about questions like: ‘Are vehicles driven in electric
mode so quiet that they need acoustic warning signals?’ (Sandberg et al. 2010). In fact, we
are already facing national or international sound regulations about sound for EVs.5
The project was based on three main postulates: quietness potentially induces danger
within the car’s vicinity (pedestrians, cyclists, visually impaired persons, etc.); quietness
deprives the driver of auditory feedback; and EV sound design introduces a new type of
sound into the soundscape. The main goal of the project was to identify the properties
an EV sound must have in order to fulfil elementary security rules without increasing
environmental noise (Misdariis et al. 2012).
Method used
While some elements of the methodology used for the previous case study were adapted to
the specificities of the current context, the approach differed significantly. The main reasons
for this were the emerging nature of the topic and a very thin ‘state-of-the-art’, preventing
us from working in a purely analytical way, as in case study 1. Also, the integration of the
project in a large industrial process with limited control over the technical implementation
forced us to adapt a methodology with regards to sound production tools and stakeholders’
interaction.
The EV project was characterized by a certain level of non-linearity (several phases
overlapping and interacting). It consisted of the following main steps:
- Multiple sources of inspiration and orientation

❍ Designing brief sessions during which the industrial partner delivered global
insights about the project. This allowed us to grasp the essence of the project,
especially regarding its aesthetic and inspirational dimensions, for instance, that
an electric engine should not sound like a classic internal combustion engine.
❍ The state-of-the-art could be taken into account, in spite of a low number of
inputs, at the beginning of the project. Seminal studies based on perceptual
experiments and modelling were gathered and helped to formulate first ideas.
For instance, ‘engine’, ‘hum’, ‘music’, ‘whistle’, ‘beeps’, ‘horn’, ‘clicking’, or ‘exhaust’
represent relevant EV sound categories in terms of perceptual object-sound
associations (Wogalter et al. 2001). But, ‘engine’, ‘hum’, and ‘white noise’ are more
acceptable than ‘horn’, ‘siren’, or ‘whistle’ (Nyeste et al. 2008).
❍ A context analysis was executed on the basis of acoustic ecology principles
(Schafer 1977) and auditory scene analysis rules (Bregman 1994). This led to the
identification of spectro-temporal areas where an EV sound could purposefully
inform without conflicting with other urban sounds or emitting too much
acoustic energy, and define other basic design guidelines such as temporal
invariance (with regards to urban background noise modulations).
❍ Inspiration from popular media focused on the film industry and how sound
designers of this field addressed the silent vehicle sonification issue. Despite
some difficulties in transposing cinematographic concepts into true-to-life
concepts, this approach started from the following hypothesis: acceptability is
influenced by collective imagination and memory that are partially shaped by the
film-making culture (on that latter point, see also Hug 2010). This could be put
in the larger frame of cultural-interpretational exploration (see below).
- Multiple strands for conception and prototyping

❍ Sonic-functional prototyping, focused on sound production, was executed using
a custom-made real-time sound synthesis engine. The sound prototyping engine
aimed at best simulating the embedded industrial sound device architecture
provided by the client (wavetable synthesis, see Figure 44.2).
Figure 44.2 Functional scheme of the prototyped sound synthesis engine: a wavetable
synthesis with four parallel buffers whose frequency and gain are driven by the vehicle’s
speed. Schematic block diagram made by Nicolas Misdariis.
❍ Contextual-functional prototyping concerned the test of the proposed solutions.

Different contexts (concept cars or prototypes) were used to progressively
evaluate the mapping between sound and object, and the acoustic issues
emerging from the filtering effect of the physical construction of the engine
compartment.
❍ Socio-organizational prototyping concerned the respective role of the
stakeholders involved in the project and how they constituted operational
entities serving the project goal. Three committees were formed and evolved
during the project with regards to decision making (department heads),
expertise (direct stakeholders), and techniques (specific crafts). Within these
groups, collaborative conception methods were applied.
- Multiple processes of evaluation

❍ Acoustical: measuring to verify the complementarity between content
(background noise) and form (sound signature) as well as the saliency level of
the designed sounds.
❍ Perceptual: observing and experimenting to prove the ability of the sounds to
inform about the presence of an EV. Experimental protocols delivered perceptual
data that outlined significant differences between different sounds.
❍ Emotional: interviewing and experimenting to examine evocations generated by
EV sounds. Free verbalizations, as well as hedonic and emotional judgements
allowed us to draw conclusions related to the coherence between final evocations
and initial inspirations, associations between EV sound and visual appearance,
or socioculturally motivated differences in subjective assessments.

There were two main outcomes for this project: the design and production of the ZOE sound
signature and, additionally, the production of concept sounds for different concept cars as
orientation and sources of inspiration, being less fixed by technical constraints. The project can
be considered as project-grounded research (where the project itself constitutes a proper field of
research [Findeli 2015]) from which we learnt many things about the sound design discipline.
By adapting Cross’s three research loci concept (see above), we gained knowledge on:
People: sound designers must show openness, self-effacement (the ability to put aside
-
their own convictions), and pedagogy (the use of demonstrations to convince).
Process: an unusual analysis approach can produce positive side effects by opening
-
up creative opportunities independent from history or heritage. This relates to
the challenge that trying to expand the present is oftentimes less innovative than
starting from the ground up and trying to ‘think out of the box’.
Products: this concerns several issues, which are far from being resolved. For
-
instance, how should we deal with the rather short or repeated sounds usually
produced in sound design, the way they are diffused or listened to (lo-fi devices, noisy
environments), and the relationships they maintain with the objects they are attached
to (e.g. how a heavy moving object should sound like)? All of these reflections lead
to a fundamental question, derived from Cross’s approach: what does it mean to
compose for sound design – is there a designerly way of thinking in sound design?
Regarding the relevance of scientific and artistic impulses, the phase of inspiration and
orientation combined several approaches as layers running through the process in parallel.
The integration of discussions with stakeholders adopted methods of qualitative research
and creativity alike. The scientific contributions in this phase contained ‘empirical’ elements,
based on studies and experiments, as well as ‘theoretical’ elements, based on theoretical
principles or results from scientific work. In the creation and production phase, we could
observe a strong prototype cycle oscillating between sound design, engineering, and empirical
testing in an actual car. This included various configurations to involve the stakeholders.
Here we also noticed a layering of parallel streams, integrating and interweaving methods
and procedures from science and the arts alike. The final evaluation and decision-making
phase involved more rigorous scientific procedures, comparable to those of the first case.
Case study 3: Explorative sound design –

Sound of interactive commodities
Design issue
As opposed to the two previous case studies, this case addresses design for potential
application scenarios rather than for an existing product. Approached from this open
starting point, this project’s goal was to address a challenge: sound design for interactive
commodities faces the possibility to integrate a practically limitless range of computer-

controlled electroacoustic sounds into physical objects. In such ‘schizophonic’ artefacts,
sounds can originate both from the physical object itself or from an electroacoustic source.
In the latter case, sounds can be anything between identifiable, vaguely reminding us of a
material quality or entirely unfamiliar. Moreover, the cause of the sound can be a complex
manipulation, just a button press, or an action initiated by the object’s intelligence or agency.
Thus, the design process for schizophonic interactive artefacts faces particular challenges
regarding function, aesthetics, and semantics (Hug 2008) and has to deal with missing
reference points, with a lack of comparable sonic examples or with non-applicable design
paradigms. A suitable design method should support the creation of solutions without
a priori knowledge. At the same time, it should contribute to a better understanding of
interpretation of sounds for novel (interactive) applications (Hug 2017).
Method used
In order to address these challenges, this specific design method afforded the explorative
creation and the systematic performative study of novel sounds for interaction in an ongoing
reflective process related to interpretation and judgement of sounds.6 This investigation
took place in the sound creation process itself, using real-time sound making during the
interaction, and a dialogue between spectators, users, and soundmakers. Moreover, the
sound design and prototyping process supported aesthetic openness and avoided biases
caused by following a specific auditory display design strategy.
The method for drafting or sketching sounds for and through interaction was based
on the Wizard-of-Oz prototyping approach (Cross 1977), where a computational system
is simulated by an invisible human, triggering events in real time, while another person
uses the prototype. For this research, Foley-style sound making with MIDI-mapped
multi-samples were used, exploiting the ventriloquism effect (Figure 44.3). This method
is referred to as ‘Electroacoustic Wizard-of-Oz Mockup’ and described in more detail by
Hug and Kemper (2014).
Participants were asked to formulate concepts and design hypotheses, and to conduct
evaluations in a three-step iteration. The design process was implemented in a workshop
setting, which allowed the production of a multitude of cases of ‘plausible experiences’ that
could be analysed and discussed. Various fictional yet realistic design briefs were available
as starting points. They covered applications related to social interaction in public space,
medical self-monitoring, task-oriented activities at home or at work (team-building, time
management), and navigation in space or eyes-free object manipulation. In the following,
the resulting design process and the related steps, as followed by all projects, are discussed.7
Design brief, first scenario, and initial design approaches

After formulating an initial interaction scenario, interaction steps were analysed and sound
categories devised. This involved brainstorming and free association methods, which were
visualized in flowcharts or as sequences involving a task analysis combined with identifying
Figure 44.3 (a) Two ‘wizards’, performing their interaction mock-up. (b) Live try-out and
exchange with some participants.
potentials for sound. Then, sounds that would match the initial characteristics were
produced: sound libraries and sound recordings provided inspiring and concrete starting
points. They were turned into sonic moodboards and served to derive semantic profiles;
initial sound material was created based on reference sounds taken from the application
context.
First sound design and evaluation

A first sound design draft was used to test initial design assumptions. The Wizard-of-Oz
method was used to explore sound variations or various levels of effect parameters in test
sessions or to explore the relationship between sounds, interaction gestures, and spatial
movements. Semantic profiles were re-formulated and compared with semantic ratings
by test users in order to identify suitable sounds. This stage often focused on reducing the
broad range of possibilities as well as the design variables so that a simple test procedure
which loosely followed methods from empirical research could be applied.
Expert review and revised design approach

An expert review was conducted with the workshop organizers, Simon Pfaff and Daniel
Hug, both experienced sound designers in media and interactive product sound. Adopting
the role of the clients, they questioned and challenged the proposed designs. This step often
led to a shift of focus from a rather functional, often oversimplifying ‘design to the test’, to
aesthetic, affective, or emotional aspects of the design. At this stage, a reduction of design
ideas and conceptual focus on the core aspects or strengths took place.
Second sound design (iteration) and evaluation

Here, the designs were revised to optimize functionality as well as sonic elaboration. The
sounds should be more distinctive while still adhering to the functional findings of the first
evaluation. Design strategies were focused on fewer aspects (e.g. rhythm, distortion, musical
patterns) with the aim of strengthening them. This also helped to integrate the individual
sounds to a coherent design with a common identity. Moreover, the designs were oriented
towards deriving mapping specifications, preparing for the transition from Wizard-of-Oz
mock-ups to functional prototypes. Evaluations at this stage were usually user tests with a
strong focus on usability and user experience. For that, ‘situated lab settings’ were staged,
which allowed us to study the interactions in realistic, yet controllable environments.
Final revision, demonstration session, and conclusions

The process was concluded with a group presentation of the final design revisions, mimicking
a client meeting. Here, reconstructing the design process including evaluations and insights
from the situated lab tests became central, as establishing new design approaches also
involved convincing clients of the approach by presenting data to back up the final results.

This aggregate case study provides an example of an explorative, strongly design-led
process, combining subjective artistic intuition and design methods with empirical
methods and expert reviews. The process was in correspondence with a typical design
process as described in the ‘general framework’ (see above).
First iterations focused on basic isolated functions and sound aesthetics. Together with
attempts to visualize the interaction process and related sounds, this resulted in a reduction
of design parameters and variables. At the same time, the first steps included intuitive,
abductive explorations of design directions, dealing with aspects not covered in existing
guidelines. The process also afforded ‘unorthodox’ design strategies beyond established
design paradigms.
In later steps, the focus shifted to usability in the overall application context and
refinement of the sound designs. Methodically relevant here is the notion of the situated
lab for user tests. At the same time, interactive demo sessions with users could provoke
unforeseen user behaviour leading to a sonic improvisation of the ‘wizards’, integrating sonic
or musical improvisation and intuition into the decision-making process. Furthermore, the
iterations were intertwined with expert reviews as a means to maintain quality expectations
from a sound designer’s perspective and to introduce a client perspective. This helped
to expand the design beyond the test results by reintroducing artistic exploration and
elaboration of sound designs.
Overall, even without formulating initial guidelines or empirical points of reference, the
approaches all followed some kind of implicit or explicit reference points. This included ‘filmic’
listening, where interpretational references to mainstream audiovisual media were made, as
well as design references to stereotypical auditory displays (computer startup sound, typical
notification sounds). Other references for design and interpretation came from musical
parameters, such as harmonic progression, consonances, or dissonances. Furthermore, many
solutions worked with multimodal analogies, for example relating the object’s visual quality
to its sonic quality or integrating affective sound qualities with indexicality, for instance by
using distortion to indicate that something is ‘wrong’. The method, organized as an ongoing
interpretational exchange, thus allowed interpretational patterns to be revealed, afforded
play with familiarity of sounds, and helped to explore solutions beyond conventional design
paradigms in auditory display.8 Such interpretational patterns can support the creation
of innovative, even surprising solutions which still offer a certain level of familiarity and
orientation, thus opening up new aesthetic and functional directions for sound.
Throughout the process, we could see a strongly abductive, explorative approach
ensuring a sufficiently broad spectrum of creative solutions. Scientific methods were
implemented rather loosely, yet strategically, in terms of orienting the decision-making
process and informing lightweight empirical evaluation methods. The goal of the process
was not to create and sell a product at the end; hence an elaborate scientific evaluation in
the final phase was not necessary. However, scientific methods were adopted in the large-
scale study on design and interpretation of sound for interactive applications and thus
addressed a higher-order research interest.
Discussion and conclusion

We have outlined above three incarnations of sound design processes incorporating
scientific and artistic methods and procedures in varying configurations as they emerged
from actual real-world design activities. In particular, the focus was on their relationship to
specific design challenges, on the various emerging forms of knowing and making: between
artistic inspiration and scientific perspiration, and between conceptual development and
analytical insight and the related methods and tools.
These different case studies reveal some interesting analogies and differences. Each
of them combines artistic skills and intuition with scientific knowledge and approaches,
but the role played by each has a different impact on the whole process and therefore the
outcomes. In some cases, we encounter the following of stringent and rigorous acoustic
specifications as a basis for creative exploration; in other cases the exploration of sonic
inspiration and creativity sets the stage for a refinement process informed by scientific
methods. Moreover, they all concern the creation of purposeful sounds of artefacts, but
they differ in the amount and type of technologies used to implement them, ranging from a
mechanical watch to electro-acoustically and computationally augmented objects. Finally,
some general methods and tools are applied and used in all cases (e.g. state-of-the-art
formation, prototyping approaches, and evaluation procedures), regardless of the balance
between artistic and scientific approaches. The underlying processes are in principle
reproducible in other comparable design situations, but their practical application
differs from one case to another, ranging from model-driven drafting tools to real-time
prototyping setups or handmade ephemeral devices.
The following methodological components can be considered persistent throughout all
cases:
- The role of sonic references is crucial in the sound design process, either as elements
for analysing the existing state (case study 1) – acting as probes to investigate
percepts, and as such, being a more or less limiting guide for design – or as
inspirational actual sonic material to create novel sounds (case studies 2 and 3).
Moreover, referent sounds may be derived from the envisaged application context
directly or ‘imported’ from related domains (case study 2).
- There is a strong need for quick-and-dirty9 sound prototyping methods and tools,
whether they be sonic (case studies 1 and 2) or interaction-centred (case study 3).
This will mitigate the challenge that sound is immaterial and consequently difficult
to sketch or mock-up. Incidentally, this prototype-driven approach follows Crilly’s
observation that making – in the sense of ‘thinking by doing’ – tends to discourage
fixation mechanisms.
- Evaluation procedures are inherent to the design process and constitute the
difference, among other things, between a designerly and an ‘artistic’ way of
composing sounds. Evaluations can be implemented following a more strictly
scientific procedure aiming at ‘objectivity’, on the one hand, by means of acoustic
and perceptual measurements (case studies 1 and 2) or, on the other hand, by
more subjective protocols with a strong focus on ecological validity and pragmatic
application, for instance, using expert knowledge or reviews, usability or user
experience feedbacks (case study 3).
- Evaluation can also lead to creativity, or at least inspiration, in a duality between
normativity and generativity. In fact, a scientific study might show some strange
outbreaks in the data. The scientist would try to filter them out, while the designer
might become curious and focus on such extremes on purpose, drawing inspiration
from them. Further, in the hands of a skilled artist, even seemingly restricting
specifications and guidelines can stimulate creativity and lead to a large amount
of possible solutions, provided that the artist obtains enough space to explore the
possibilities without interventions from the outside, as the first case study shows nicely.
- Finally, sound design seems to be often a quest into developing the schizophonic sound–
artefact relationship, whether the artefact be a mechanical (case study 1), an electro-
acoustically equipped (case study 2), or a computationally augmented object (case study
3). In this quest, which stands at a very early pioneering stage, science and art have to work
jointly in order to produce the best solutions in terms of relevance, usability, and pleasure.
This short comparative analysis can then lead to further discussion and address more
formal issues regarding links and relationships between methods, tools, and creativity,
and finally, on the basis of Cross’s formulation, the relevance of a sound-designerly way of
knowing, thinking, or acting.
Notes
1. This distinguishes the design process from an engineering approach which is often found
in science-driven auditory display design processes where a relatively clear functional
and formal-aesthetic goal is formulated as starting point.
2. The production of a ‘systematic collection of accounts of successful design practices,
design methods and their lessons’ can be the basis of the data for a design science, which
at the same time provides ‘methods for validating designs’ (Krippendorff 2005: 209).
3. For a biography of Sébastien Gaxie, see IRCAM 2013.
4. For example, 5h34min = 5 hours + 2 halves an hour + 4 minutes = H-H-H-H-H + M/H-
M/H + M-M-M-M.
5. See, for instance, the American Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010 or the
regulation 540/2014/EC from the European Union which makes it obligatory to fit a
sound device on all electric or hybrid vehicles by 2019.
6. In that case, we adopted ‘designerly ways of knowing and acting’ (Cross 2001).
7. For more details, see Hug and Pfaff (2019).
8. An in-depth discussion of these emerging points of reference for design and
interpretation of interactive commodities was proposed by Hug (2017).
9. ‘Quick and dirty’ is a conventional term in design/human–computer interaction (HCI)
referring to early agile prototyping phases that occur during conceptual phases, (long)
before functional prototyping. (See, for instance, Design Methods Finder n.d.)
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45
Listening to the 2001 Argentine
Crisis: Soundscapes of Protest,
Music, and Sound Art
Violeta Nigro Giunta
Introduction
The special sense of a town is formed in part for its inhabitants – and perhaps even in the
memory of the traveler who has stayed there – by the timbre and intervals with which its
town-clocks begin to chime. The special sense of a city maybe no longer is given by tower-
clocks and church-bells – by sound, that is, which tell time – but rather by those that tell of
motion. The peculiar sounds of transit are the signature tunes of modern cities. These are
sounds that remind us the city is a sort of machine. The diesel stammer of London taxis the
wheeze of its buses. The clatter of the Melbourne tram. The two-stroke sputter of Rome. The
note that sounds as the door shut on the Paris metro, and the flick, flick, flick of the handles.
The many sirens of different cities.
—Walter Benjamin (1985: 82)
In 2001, the city of Buenos Aires lived one of the biggest economic, political, and social
crises in the country’s recent history – the state was in turmoil and the citizenship no
longer felt represented. The neoliberal model implemented in the 1990s had immersed
the country in poverty. Social protest, which had been increasing exponentially during the
1990s, intensified, and by the year 2000 was led by the massive numbers of unemployed
and by people below the poverty line.
As studied by sociologists during this period, the ways of protest took new and different
forms (Giarracca 2001), which often involved finding innovative and creative ways of
intervening in the public sphere and catching the attention of the press. A whole new
vocabulary of protest specific to this time and place emerged: protests and demonstrations
were joined by piquetes (roadblocks) that would often last up to 72 hours; escraches, a collective
action meant to single out an institution or the house of a corrupt politician; the occupation
of lands and auction houses to prevent the sale of land; and by 2001, the occupation and
recovery of factories by their workers (fábricas recuperadas) and the cacerolazo – masses of
people hitting casseroles and pans in protest against the political class.
Due to the economic cuts in education, by 2001 most of the art schools in Buenos Aires
were mobilized and the Conservatory was no exception. The repetition of sounds that
came from hitting the once-kitchen utensil could also be heard in musical manifestations
of that year such as VejacionesX8, a protest organized by the students of the National
Conservatory in which Erik Satie’s Véxations was performed during an entire week. Erik
Satie’s 1893 piece, consisting of a 1-minute piano motive with the additional performing
indication ‘to be performed 840 times’ has been subject to many aesthetic discussions
and interpretations (see Giarracca et al. 2001; Nigro-Giunta 2014).1 In Buenos Aires, they
played the work eight times, gaining a stellar role as one of these new ways of protest
(Giarracca 2001: 34) that characterized the period. VejacionesX8 began on 29 September
2001 and lasted until 6 October, 7 days, 10,080 minutes, and 6,720 repetitions later. Over
two hundred pianists (or whoever could more or less play the music) succeeded each other,
playing the longest version of Vexations in the work’s history. The manifesto behind the
performance was written in pamphlets around the conservatory: ‘If they continue to vex
us, we will double the bet. The Student Centre of the National Conservatory, force in the
fingers, the eyelids, and the chest.’ The students took up the etymology of the French word
vexation, the violation of one’s dignity, as a symbol to their action. The protest finds its force
in its duration: VejacionesX8 proclaims itself as a ‘gandhian’ manifestation, in alignment
with pacifist manifestations (such as fasting strikes) and the piquetes. But it also finds its
force in repetition: getting a message through is sometimes a question of repeating it.
Activism during that time became a part of everyday life to the point where artistic activity
could not be disentangled from it.
The month of December 2001 saw massive manifestations, during which the cacerolazos
became the iconic sound of the protest. In the sections that follow, I will analyse how the
cacerolazos, sound manifestations that can be traced back to the Middle Ages, took on
different meanings in different contexts. I will then zoom in, with a magnifying ear, on
three very significant days: 19, 20, and 21 December 2001 in the city of Buenos Aires, to
finally consider how these sounds later permeated into artistic musical practices.
To analyse this kaleidoscopic quality of sounds in protest, music, and sound art, I will
draw from a multiplicity of sources, coupling historical and musical analysis: newspaper
articles, television broadcasts, musical performances, and musical works. I will argue that
the heterogeneous quality of the sources allows for a more comprehensive understanding
of sound in its context. One the one hand, I will point at different uses of sound within
certain historical contexts; on the other, the emergence of certain aesthetic practices will
be considered as a direct consequence of how sound and politics came to be intertwined.
Listening back to noise

The cacerolazo as a way of protest has a long history. When analysing the casserolades in
Quebec in 2012, Jonathan Sterne and Natalie Zemon Davis trace these manifestations
of banging pots, pans, and kitchen utensils back to medieval charivari. In their origins,
Listening to the 2001 Argentine Crisis 707
charivari – a ‘noisy, masked demonstration to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community’

– served to denounce sexual conducts that were deemed ‘inconvenient’ (Zemon Davis
1971: 24, [1975] 1992), to later become a way of expressing indignation towards authorities.
These demonstrations called attention
to a breach of community standards in the village or neighborhood. The English called
it ‘rough music,’ and there were versions of it all over Europe and its colonies. Disguising
themselves, young men would bang on pots and pans and ring cow bells in front of the house
of, say, a widow or widower who was remarrying someone much too young. The youths were
the voice of the community, given license by their elders to restore order. The charivari was an
alternative to violent exclusion, instead shaming its target into compensation or reparation.
(Sterne and Zemon Davis 2012)
The practice of charivari then evolved into a form of political protest, where the youths
were joined by the elders, and targeted royal tax collectors that oppressed the families of
peasants and artisans, for example. ‘In the 20th century, rough music got less rough […] and
the political charivari became a form of peaceful protest’ (Sterne and Zemon Davis 2012).
In the case of Quebec 2012, the casserolades were a way to protest a law that banned large
gatherings (Sterne and Zemon Davis 2012). Sterne characterizes them as quite ‘festive’, as
a way for sound to become an ‘expression of popular will’, but also as being inclusive, since
‘nothing is more simple than the rhythm of a protest, meaning that everyone can do music,
and that this music is linked to larger social and collective meanings’ (Sterne, Sklower, and
Heuguet 2017: 181). In their analysis, these forms of aural protest serve as a critique of
authority and power abuse.
From the medieval charivari to Quebec 2012, casserolades were heard during the
celebration of Acadian independence in the 1950s, in Algeria by the OAS (Organisation
Armée Secrète) on 23 September 1961, in Spain against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in
Iceland during the collapse of the banks in 2008, and opposing right-wing candidate
François Fillon during the 2017 French presidential election. In Latin America, during
the twentieth century, one of the most remembered cacerolazos was the one that took
place on 1 December 1971 against Salvador Allende in Chile, also called ‘the march of the
empty casseroles’ and organized by the right-wing women’s movement ‘Poder Femenino’.
In Uruguay cacerolazos were organized against the dictatorial regime, with people hitting
the pots from their balconies to avoid being detained by the military who had imposed a
curfew. In Argentina’s recent history, the groups that opposed the neoliberal government
of the 1990s organized cacerolazos, and in 2008, cacerolazos were planned by conservative
groups to oppose populist measures of the Kirchner government. They were also heard in
Brazil, mostly by those opposed to the governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
As a form of protest in Argentina as well as in the rest of Latin America, cacerolazos
emerged from both the conservative and the progressive factions of society. They had
multiple meanings, most often as a protest against the rise of food prices (as was the case
in Chile and in the 1990s in Argentina). However, I would like to argue that the cacerolazos
of 2001 had two particular meanings: they became a symbol of the citizenship no longer
feeling represented by the political class on the one hand, and a way to defend democracy
on the other. On 19 and 20 December 2001, people heard casseroles from their homes
and went out with their own, deliberately defying the state of siege imposed by President
Fernando de la Rúa (Granovsky 2001), thus opposing not only the government but also
the possibility of a military intervention.2 The protests of those days led to the resignation
of the president, and became associated with the citizenship’s rights to feel represented by
the political class. This is symbolized in the Monumento a la cacerola (Monument to the
Casserole) built in San Juan Province in 2002: a cooking pan that stands on a pedestal with
the sign ‘Civil servant, the casserole is watching you.’ This is the meaning that the journalist
Angela Dillon gave to the casseroles when writing on the August 2018 senate vote against
the law that would have legalized abortion in Argentina:
It’s ten o’clock in the evening, the debate in the Senate is still ongoing, in the country, the
noise of casseroles can be heard. It is the noise of the crisis of representation that this
demand – that does not seem to be heard in the political agora – brings to light. It won’t
be without consequences. Because we won’t return to clandestinely, abortion will be said
out aloud, and maternity shall be wished for or shall not be at all. And without a doubt, the
revolution is feminist.
(Dillon 2018)
The sounds of the Argentine cacerolazos after those of 2001 can be thus considered as the
sounds of participatory democracy (Kunreuther 2018: 24). In his analysis of the Argentine
cacerolazos between 1982 and 2013, Tomás Gold characterized the 1990s as the moment
during which the material metaphor of the ‘empty casseroles’ transformed into a sonic
metaphor of a crisis of representation, through which the protesters asked to be ‘heard’ by
their representatives (Gold 2018). In the next two sections, I will analyse the sounds of the
2001 Argentinazo and its aftermath.
Listening to the Argentinazo (December

2001)
During 2001, the government underwent increasing political and economic instability,
leading to the resignation of two ministers for economy, after which President De la Rúa
assigned Domingo Cavallo. During the mid-term elections in October that year, the
president’s party lost the majority in both chambers. On 1 December, Cavallo announced
‘the corralito’, which froze people’s savings but also their salaries, and which was to last
ninety days. These measures led to Cavallo being named the ‘intellectual author’ (‘Dos días
que cambiaron la Argentina’ 2001) of what was to come, and many of the written sources
refer to the events that began on that first day of December, mounting to 20 December as
an ‘acceleration of historical time’.
On 12 December, political dissent appealed to both eyes and ears: casseroles were heard
in the city of Buenos Aires, and a coordinated power blackout3 took place. A day later, the
seventh national strike that year demanded Cavallo’s resignation. The economic situation
continued to deteriorate and on 19 December supermarkets and stores were plundered

during lootings in the main cities. At 5.30 pm, the president addressed the nation through
an official broadcast, minimizing social discomfort and declaring the nation in a state of
siege (which he annulled on 21 December – his last decision as president), in the hopes
of controlling the social riots. Many historians have attributed this speech as one of the
detonators of the events that night. The state of siege was a reminder of the repressive
politics of the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship, and to oppose it people took spontaneously to the
street armed with casseroles and cooking utensils demanding for the resignation of both
the minister for economy and the president. This protest lasted throughout the night and
continued – in spite of the government’s decision to repress protesters, and with the police
also repressing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – through 20 December. At 7.00 pm that day,
President De la Rúa presented his handwritten resignation to Congress and had to leave
the house of government by helicopter, due to the crowds of people outside. On 2 January
2002, he was finally succeeded by Eduardo Duhalde, who called for national elections in
March 2003, which resulted in the election of Nestor Kirchner on 25 May. The events of 19
and 20 December are known as ‘The Argentinazo’ (Rieznik 2014).
When reconstructing the soundscape of those hectic days in Buenos Aires, I follow
R. Murray Schafer’s classic definition of an acoustic environment as ‘those sounds which
are important either because of their individuality, their numerousness or their domination’
(Schafer 1993: 9) with consideration to the specifics of an urban soundscape, studying the
sound of cities as a fundamental part and not as a by-product (Wissmann 2016). But I
especially consider contributions from anthropology to the study of sensory experiences
(Porcello et al. 2010; Samuels et al. 2010), adhering to an integrated approach of the senses
including language and discourse. In order to determine the way in which not only certain
images but mostly certain sounds prevailed, my first sources are ear-witnesses through
writings in the press and through texts by historians and sociologists written in retrospect.
My second sources are audiovisual recordings of those days.
Sound signals. Those days were very loud. Most of the titles in the newspapers of the
time allude to some kind of aural manifestation: ‘The explosion of truth’ (Kovaloff 2001),
‘Screaming, crying, running, cars breaking, sirens’, ‘The police radio stunning from inside
a patrol car’, ‘Aida cried. Her neighbors cried too’ (Palacios 2001), ‘De la Rúa between
confusion and the denial of a social outburst’ (Natanson 2001); and also many descriptions
of ‘screaming’ and ‘firing of rubber bullets.’ The following quote from a press article resumes
the importance of sound signals during these two days:
The midday sun was burning. A few blocks away one can still hear a cacerolazo of some
shopkeepers of the neighborhood. The sound of a siren triggers a grimace of panic in the
face of a woman. It was enough for her to start running in a random direction. As if the only
thing that was important was to be safe. Images such as these were present all over the city.
(Himitian 2001)
The casseroles. The sound of wood on metal or metal on metal was almost omnipresent
during these days, being part of what Tomás Gold called the ‘action repertoire’ of the crisis
(Gold 2018: 455). A journalist writes that ‘the sound was a blow into the ears of the
government’ (‘Dos días que cambiaron la Argentina’ 2001). The physical presence of the
people in the street, occupying public spaces against the government’s official stance, had
its aural manifestation in the casseroles:
The clanc clanc clanc began in a balcony, gained forces in the corners and exploded in Plaza
de Mayo. Thousands of Argentine men and women, children and adults, were screaming
and hitting casseroles. Clanc, clanc, clanc, throw out the bald one.4 Clanc, clanc, clanc, throw
them all out. Clanc. All of them, OK? Let them go to … clanc, clanc and more clanc.
(O’Donnell 2001)
As it reads from this quote, sound was moving through the city, giving its listener the
possibility of reconstructing what was happening and where. A sociologist writes about
that day, also reflecting on this idea of a signal, a sound-call, that, when heard, provoked a
precise reaction:
It is 22:41 of a hectic day. The sound of the TV yields to the sound of the street. ‘This is why
I have decided to declare state of siege in all the nation …’ The sound of metal is deafening.
The insulation of the walls shatters. We must go out.
(Benítez Larghi 2009)
The cacerolazos took place in the major cities of the country, especially in Buenos Aires.
In those three days its streets served as arteries all leading towards Plaza de Mayo, the
main city square and backdrop of the most significant events in Argentine history
(in the square’s surroundings is situated the Casa Rosada – the excecutive office of the
President of Argentina). To provide an idea of how this sound evolved during time we
can consider the following numbers: during the last thirteen days of December 2001 there
were 859 cacerolazos, 706 during January 2002, 310 during February, and ‘only’ 139 in
March. This decrease reflects the extreme quality of the sounds of those December days.
Although the protests did not come to a halt, they mutated; they found an outlet in new
nets of cooperation and solidarity that emerged, for example, through the consolidation of
neighbourhood assemblies (Villalón 2007).
Silence. So, those days were not silent. However, we find silence metaphorically, as a
lack of response from the authorities. But also when a journalist described the president
sending his resignation ‘in a sepulchral silence’ (Obarrio 2001); as the ‘calm before the
storm’: before a looting, a journalist stated that one ‘could cut through the silence’ (Palacios
2001); and from the fact that ‘in the neighborhoods further away from the center of the city,
it was not necessary to turn the TV on to know that the country had exploded. Shutters
lowered, empty streets, and a deafening silence’ (Himitian 2001).
Music. On 21 December, another journalist writes the following answer to a variation of
Adorno’s question formulated as thus: ‘Can we talk about music in these days of sorrow?’
Music is necessary, indispensable, as is all artistic expression, to help us live better. But today,
it is not possible; there are more pressing needs. Other necessities. Today we need to find a
way out of so much sorrow, so much confusion, and so much impossibility. Today there is
no music, but reality. Today there is no music, but hope. Today, there is no music. Hopefully,
tomorrow there will be.
(Amiano 2001)
For the author, the lack of music and art is used as a metaphor to characterize those two
days as a moment of exceptional violence and despair, and also as a symbol of hope for
the future. Nevertheless, the national anthem was sung in protests in cities as well as rural
areas (Giarracca 2001). Charly García’s controversial rock cover of the patriotic march was
often played, and it was also solemnly sung by Mirtha Legrand, a conservative TV talk-
show host, and her guests on 19 December. The anthem, as a type of state music, had its
unique political history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, undergoing several
transformations and different uses (Buch 2013). Different governments and parties had
encouraged its use as a patriotic symbol, but it had also been sung by social movements
that opposed the state. In 2001, its symbolic quality proved to be as ambiguous as ever,
being used by both protesters in the streets as well as conservative TV hosts, perhaps in
both cases as a sonic embodiment of a nation that existed beyond its inept leadership.
However, the last verse, ‘O juremos con gloria a morir’ (Or let’s swear, in glory, to die!) took
a bleak meaning considering that the repression by the police and security forces took the
lives of thirty-nine people. Yet it could be argued, that it was a new chant that became the
spontaneous anthem of this crisis, sang directly to the establishment: ‘Qué se vayan todos,
que no quede, ni uno solo’ (Throw them all out! Leave no one!).
Hence, a complex soundscape can be reconstructed: singing in protest, hitting
casseroles, feet marching and running, store-windows breaking, screaming, gunshots. But
also phones ringing in the private offices of the politicians involved in decision making,
the sound of a helicopter leaving the Casa Rosada with the soon to be ex-president. Sound
was omnipresent, to occupy spaces, used to make oneself present. It was sound as an
embodied manifestation that came to the front line when the state vanished, demanding a
new government and a democratic transition.
Musical exegesis of the crisis

In the years before and especially after the 2001 crisis, and mainly in Buenos Aires, a new
wave of sound art and site-specific sound installations emerged. These works referred to
elements of national history and were politically engaged, mainly through the inclusion
of urban sounds. Many artists collaborated and performed in ‘recovered factories’ (Figari
2007), factories that were expropriated by the workers who turned them into cooperatives,
meaning that they all shared ownership. One of the biggest was Fábrica Ciudad Cultural,
which started in 1999 at the IMPA (Industrias Metalúrgicas y Plásticas Argentina) in the
city centre, and which held over seventy shows in 2000 (Friera 2001). Artists began to
collaborate with factory workers, and factories became venues for cultural activities. Hosting
these events meant that there were now new places for an alternative culture, simultaneously
serving a political ‘back-up plan’: factories generated work but also culture (Benito 2010).
During the riots of December 2001, the ensemble La Bandina, made up of about twenty
musicians playing wind instruments, guitar, and percussion, and directed by new music
composer Marcelo Delgado, performed at La Fábrica. This ensemble was created in 1994
as the band of yet another collective, El Galpón de Catalinas, a theatre and circus group.
Delgado arranged popular and classical musics for their show ‘Fulgor argentino’ in 1998
and 1999. From Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat to George Gershwin’s I love you Porgy,
from Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango to Los Chalchaleros’s Samba de mi esperanza, Delgado
made his own versions using sounds and instrumental techniques from avant-garde and
experimental music.5
On 21 December, La Bandina played at the IMPA. A music critic characterized this
recovered factory as the ideal setting for the group:
The sounds of this ensemble fit perfectly among machines and pieces of metal […]. Towards
the end of this particular concert and after playing a wedding song by Kusturika, all the
musicians grabbed casseroles and began hitting them, proving that they can show a path of
musical liberation and change.
(Kohan 2001)
For many avant-garde musicians these spaces were what was left of experimental culture;
they were part of the cultural resistance to a certain pre-existing model of culture (Moreno
2001).
Also in 2001, in another recovered factory, composers Juan Pampín and Nicolás
Varchausky presented the site-specific work La Estrella Federal, made up of two electronic
pieces: UOM, by Pampín, and La Bonaerense/La Federal by Varchausky. Varchausky’s work
uses materials hacked from police radios, as a way, according to the composer, to come
to terms with his fear of a powerful and repressive entity such as the federal police. Of his
work, Pampín stated:
UOM is the acronym of the Argentine metal workers’ union (Unión Obrera Metalúrgica),
well known for the lack of representation of its corrupted leaders and their gangster-like
approach to politics. The piece explores the sound of metal in an allegorical way, using digital
samples deployed in space as a representation of the ‘metallic’ without mass, as the sonic
essence of metal. The distance between what is represented and its representation, somewhat
similar to the one between the metal workers and their union, constitutes the dialectic core
of the work […]. The text used for the piece is quoted from ‘¿Quién Mató a Rosendo?’ (Who
Killed Rosendo?), a book by writer Rodolfo Walsh, a central figure of Argentine culture, who
disappeared during the 1976–83 military dictatorship. In his book Walsh investigated one of
the darker chapters in the history of Argentine unions: the murder of UOM leader Rosendo
García in 1966, perpetrated by gunmen of his own union.
(Pampín 2001)
Both composers use reality as material for fiction (in the way Rodolfo Walsh’s literature
also conceives it) – art as a way to tell history. Other sound-art works that deal with history
and politics are Pampín’s OID (2003) and Carmen Baliero’s Oíd el ruido (2015) – both
critical deconstructions of the Argentine national anthem; Tertulia, by Nicolás Varchausky
and Edgardo Molinari – an installation at the Recoleta Cemetery proposing a metaphorical
conversation with the ancestry of the city and questioning the social construction of its
heroes (Varchausky and Molinari 2004); Carmen Baliero’s Caleidoscopio/Bocinas (2006,
2008) – a work for cars that took place in the city centres of Buenos Aires and Córdoba,
using ‘undesired’ sounds of cars and car horns, while beginning with the performers
whistling a military march (The Battle of San Lorenzo), that is meant to celebrate victory
but sounds like a defeat when whistled; and Sodot nayavesek (see Figure 45.1), an electronic
piece by Luciano Azzigotti in which he reversed the 2001 chant Que se vayan todos (Throw
them all out), and recomposed it as a ‘partisan’ song for the artistic collective ETCETERA,
thus making it the group’s own ‘Internationale’.
Figure 45.1 Score of Luciano Azzigotti’s International Errorista.

After 2001, in an unforeseen manner, Argentina was in the centre of the world (Giunta
2009), and the Argentine crisis became a source material for artists, both locally and
internationally. The artist Santiago Sierra, for example, conceived the collective work The
Displacement of a Cacerolada (Sierra 2002): after recording manifestations in Buenos
Aires, he asked people to play it through their speakers in London, Frankfurt, Geneva,
Vienna, and New York. Finally, the collective BAS (Buenos Aires Sonora) put up a nine-
channel sound installation in the central square of the city, the heart of the 2001 crisis and
cacerolazos. In their work Mayo, los sonidos de la plaza (2003, 2006), they tell the history of
the country up to 2001, using documentary materials from the radio and recorded political
speeches, but also from fictional sources such as the explosions from the film Apocalypse
Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and also an electroacoustic piece by an Argentine
composer (see Figure 45.2). The idea was to tell history as it was heard from and by the
central square, Plaza de Mayo (Liut 2008; Liut 2010).
Figure 45.2 Buenos Aires Sonora, Mayo, los sonidos de la Plaza (2003), press release.
When considering aural perception, not only as a physical phenomenon but also as
part of the sensorial and as a cultural construction, in a work such as Mayo, los sonidos
de la plaza, it is social relationships that are recalled through the experience of audition
(Porcello et al. 2010; Samuels et al. 2010). In the finale of Mayo, los sonidos de la plaza we
hear casseroles, steps of protesters, and the sound of a helicopter leaving the Casa Rosada.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a plea for interdisciplinarity as fundamental for the study of
auditory culture. It is only through the analysis of heterogeneous sources that we can fully
place sonic phenomena in the sociohistorical context where it takes on meaning and gains
influence in society. In this case study, the omnipresence of the aural during the crisis and
the unique and powerful sounds of those days were transformed into musical materials.
In other words, the sonic quality of protests permeated into the musical works. At that
moment in time, both music and sound, as part of larger cultural and social spheres, came
to the foreground and channelled a battle cry to transform society.
Notes
1. Among its interpretations, it has been considered as a conceptual piece (not to be
performed); an ironic message by Satie to one of his lovers; an exercise for pianists to play
as many times as they wish (840 being just a way of saying ‘as many times as necessary’);
or a proper music work to be performed, in which 840 times is a specific performance
instruction. This last interpretation was that of John Cage, who organized the first
performance of the work, in 1972, also as a means to put forward his own musical
philosophy around the importance of time and duration in music. When the motive is
repeated 840 times, the piece usually lasts between 12 and 24 hours, although it can be
done in less or more, depending on the speed.
2. During the twentieth century in Argentina, states of siege would often be followed by
military coups.
3. An apagón (blackout) is a form a protest that was employed to reject increased prices
of electricity, common during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It consisted of neighbours
turning off all their lights at a certain day and time.
4. ‘The bald one’ refers to President Fernando de la Rúa.
5. As an example of how protesting was part of everyday life activities: one of the latest members
to join La Bandina in 2001 was asked to do so by Delgado when they met in a roadblock.
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46
The Sound System of the State:
Critical Listening as Performative
Resistance
Tom Tlalim
What is heard and what goes unheard in contemporary sonic experience is subject to
constant negotiation. Although high-powered industrial emissions overshadow fainter
organic vibrations, meaningful signals are still frequently intercepted in spite of the noisy
environment. Such sonic signifiers or ‘cues’ could be considered as the fundamental ‘sonic
blocks’ of ideology.1
This chapter discusses the sonic methodology of critical listening as a means of
interpreting these cues in their political context. This methodology can be used to
reveal the ways in which sound operates as an ideological sphere. I will examine critical
listening both as a method for analysing state sound systems and as a performative act of
political resistance in its own right. The text draws on John L. Austin’s influential theory
of speech acts, outlining the role of the listening agency in setting the conditions for
the failure or success of illocutionary acts. Critical listening is then conceptualized as a
means of resistance that can challenge or subvert the ideological signification of state-
produced sounds. Building upon this performative role, critical listening is theorized as
a method which broadens our understanding of how ideological sound systems can be
challenged and resisted.
The chapter also includes a case study of critical listening, based on my experience
of listening to state-produced sounds in Tel Aviv during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict.
The case explores Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system and its part in the state’s
self-inflicted soundscape of war. The case helps to support the underlying argument that
reading and observing politics and ideology must also be supplemented by listening to
the ‘Sound System of the State’ as one of the central tools of ideology.
The performativity of listening

When considering listening as a method of political critique, it is helpful to think of
sound as a language and of listening as a performative act. In 1962, the philosopher and
linguist, John L. Austin, first introduced his influential theory that utterances can be
understood in terms of the rules governing their social use as ‘speech acts’ (e.g. promising,
confirming, vowing, commanding, exclaiming, questioning, warning, etc.) (Austin 1975:
4). Austin argues, pragmatically, that a performative utterance is only deemed effective
if the conditions for its success have been met. He divides speech acts into a three-stage
framework, where ‘locution’ is the very act of uttering (and sounding); the ‘illocutionary
force’ is the intent of the speaker and the contextual or social function of the uttered
statement; and the ‘perlocutionary effect’ is the resulting act in the particular context in
which the locution is made (99). In this sense, an utterance has a performative significance,
since it operates in a particular contextual setting and has agency, in much the same way
as a physical act. Utterances such as ‘I do’ in a marriage ceremony, or ‘I commend this
statement to the House’ in a legislative assembly, such as the UK Houses of Parliament, are
notable examples of how speech can usher in new realities and is considered as action in
the eyes (and ears) of the law (6). But the discourse around speech acts often neglects to
mention either the corresponding agency of the listener who confirms the performative
function of the uttered words, or the capacity for different modes of listening to yield
different realities.
Austin touches on listening when he considers the situations in which an utterance
would fail because it is not accepted by the other party (Austin 1975: 27). Once again,
he uses a matrimonial example: if someone says ‘I divorce you’ but the intended listener
does not accept this statement, the speech act fails. A speech act is subject to particular
conventions and contexts, and it fails to be performative if it is not accepted by the listening
party. Speech acts thus require a listener; in the absence of a listening agency which
registers and responds to it, a speech act will fail. Moreover, for a performative utterance to
be effective, the listening agency must be aware of the specific meaning the sounds carry in
the particular context in which they are uttered.
A stable operating relationship between sounding and listening is indeed crucial for
ideology to work. Mladen Dolar offers a poignant if amusing anecdote as an illustration of
this. In the midst of battle, an Italian officer shouts, ‘Soldiers, attack!’, three times in a loud,
clear voice – yet none of his soldiers move. Following his third and loudest cry, a tiny voice
rises from the trenches, commenting appreciatively, che bella voce! (what a beautiful voice!)
(Dolar 2006: 3). For the command to be made manifest, the soldiers (the listening agents)
have to be aware of the contextual significance of the officer’s utterance in order to respond
to its interpellation. In this case, the speech act failed because the contexts of the listeners
and the speaker did not align. The listening agency did not register the logic or discursive
meaning in the officer’s performative order, only the phonic beauty of the calling voice.
This example illustrates how a change in the listening mode can subvert a performative
act; it is the listener who listens for, selects, filters, identifies, and determines the utterance’s
Sound System of the State 721
capacity to act. In this case, the different mode of listening led to the officer’s illocution
becoming a musical perlocution instead of a military one. The listening agency altered the
conditions and thus stripped the utterance from its ideological significance, illustrating
how indispensable the listening party is to the performative sequence. Changing the
listener, their attention or their mode of listening, altered the performative function of the
uttered speech act. A similar albeit more conscious performative act of resistance takes
place in critical listening.
Critical listening as resistance

Critical listening requires an awareness of how we listen and what we listen for. An
apprehension of its performative agency enables listening to become an act of resistance
since it breaks the chain between illocution and perlocution. Critical listening entails
recognizing the performative meaning of sounds and considering the ideological
significance embedded in them. It involves suspending any immediate response to the
sound, in order to identify the cultural or political expectation it holds. By withstanding
the automatic urge to heed the meaning of the call, the listener resists the ‘hail’ of ideology.
‘Hailing’, or ‘interpellation’, is the process by which a dominant ideology transforms
individuals into subjects. Louis Althusser uses the example of the moment when a police
officer shouts, ‘Hey, you there!’, and a startled individual turns round; the very act of turning
transforms that individual into a subject as they identify themselves as the addressee
(Althusser 2014: 191). They might not even have turned; their attention and recognition
alone is sufficient as an act of self-production. This recognition happens at the point of
listening. Critical listening becomes an act of resistance precisely at that level – where
the listener acknowledges their position as the sound’s addressee yet questions who the
instigator is, and the purpose and consequence of their call, and then considers whether
and how to respond. For Althusser, ideology is the ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to
their real conditions of existence’ (256). This relationship is mediated in listening, through
the knowledge, stories, or primed expectations listeners have towards the sounds they hear.
In order to resist the call of ideology, critical listening requires some disengagement from
the immediate meaning and affect that sounds can provoke. To adopt Roland Barthes’s
advice, critical thinking involves asking not only what signals mean but also what they tell
us about their producers (Barthes 1991: 245). Listening can establish a critical relationship
between the listener and the emitter if the former questions the message and, by doing so,
interrogates the emitter. Thus, listening critically implicates the listener in the distribution
of ideological sounds by producing a buffer within which the performative link between
illocution and perlocution can be questioned.
Here, I would like to extend the notion of illocutionary acts beyond pure linguistics
into ‘sonic acts’ which, much like speech acts, carry their own performative ideological
meaning and ‘speak’ to the cultural context by which they are heard. Sounds such as car
alarms, sirens, engine revs, or the sound design cues on a phone or game console, all
transmit performative messages and have a similar function and effect to words. Sonic acts
therefore warrant a similar treatment to speech acts, when they are listened to critically,
within their political context.
There are therefore two stages to the critical listening method. First, an attempt is made
by the listener to undo the causal link between sounds and their performative significance.
This act suspends the affective impact of the sounds and questions their ideological
meaning. One way to do this is by distinguishing between the sound’s ‘phonos’ (material
presence) and its ‘logos’ (the discursive signification it carries). This separation is achieved
by withholding interpretation of the abstract meaning of sounds, delving instead into their
concrete material properties so as to describe the sounds and chart their timbral, temporal,
and spatial organization. Second, the illocutionary (social, political, contextual) meaning
of the sounds is isolated from their locutionary (abstract) presence. This stage aims to
unpick the performative significance of the sounds from their immediate affect. While
listening, an attempt is made to listen for the intrinsic structures of the sonic event and thus
to reveal the underlying ideological mechanisms at play. If we follow Austin’s pragmatism,
such an act of critical listening may lead to the failure of a sonic act since its immediate
function as an ideological hail has been undermined by the very act of questioning.
The ‘sound system of the state’

The case study below exemplifies the use of critical listening during a political conflict,
drawing on the notion of the ‘sound system of the state’ (SSS) which has emerged from
my analysis of the use of sound in conflicts in Palestine–Israel (Tlalim 2017). The SSS
refers to the sonic aspect of the state’s ‘apparatus’ – the discourses, legislation, emissions,
and interceptions the state employs to assert its power and sovereignty, manage its flows,2
and forge and propagate its identity, both internally and externally (Althusser 2006). The
performative role played by sounds in constructing ideological spaces is central to this
investigation. As Leonardo Cardoso notes in his introduction to Hearing Like a State,
sound is a particularly ‘tricky’ medium for the state to grasp, due to its ‘ontological fluidity,
measurement complexity, and legal instability’ (Cardoso 2019: 2). Yet, the power of
language, the sound of the voice, of amplification and music, and the echoes of landscapes
and architecture are all too great for the state to ignore.
The ideological use of sound is explored in Carolyn Birdsall’s influential book Nazi
Soundscapes. Birdsall’s investigation rests on the underlying premise that the study of
soundscapes can be particularly helpful in gaining insight into social organizations and the
ways in which power relationships between authoritarian states and civilians unfold within
public spaces (Birdsall 2012: 12). A very different relationship is expressed sonically within
myriads of interactions in the contested borders of Palestine–Israel, where confrontations
often take place outdoors, in and around border spaces. The gamut of noises produced by state
apparatuses, a vast range from military emissions to festive sounds, have been studied widely
by sound scholars. The military use of sonic tactics, for example, includes the sonic booms
produced by fighter jets flying at supersonic speeds, drone sounds emitted by unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs), and the deployment of sonic weaponry such as long-range acoustic
devices (LRADs), sirens, megaphones, and other ‘crowd control’ devices (Goodman 2010:
14; Tlalim and Schuppli 2014; Cusick 2015: 379; Schuppli, Tlalim, and Hoare 2015).
The term sound system refers to the use of sonic techniques and technologies in
social gatherings as a means for sharing knowledge, cohabiting, and directing communal
gatherings. Sound, according to Julian Henriques, offers a dynamic model of thinking,
where the traditional barrier between thinking and doing is crossed, and where embodied
knowledge and gestural codes can be rehearsed, practiced, and exchanged (Henriques
2011: xviii, 3, 252). As group identity (national or otherwise) is often celebrated and
expressed through sound, music, dance, and/or voice, informal groups frequently use
sound amplification systems as part of a process of identity formation. These systems
provide a peaceful means by which to differentiate and demarcate a shared space.
The SSS also encompasses more hostile or violent soundings produced by organizations
or individuals who identify with or embody the state’s ideology. Israeli settler groups, for
example, frequently use sonic territorialization practices, such as song and dance, traditional
herding calls, whistling, and other utterances, as well as sound amplification devices such
as megaphones, to dominate spaces in contested areas of the West Bank. Such sounds are
deployed to produce an exclusionary ideological space using minimal infrastructure. Many
of the settlers’ sonic tactics have been documented by videographers working with the
B’Tselem Video Archive and are used as evidence of the tactical deployment as part of
the Israeli civilian occupation of the West Bank. Some of these documentary videos are
showcased in the performance piece Archive, on which I collaborated with choreographer
Arkadi Zaides and B’Tselem (Zaides and Tlalim 2014; see also Abeliovich 2016; Segal,
Weizman, and Tartakover 2003).
The methodology of critical listening proposed in this chapter can serve as a means of
exposing the presence of ideological sonic cues within the varied soundscapes around the
State and its borders.
Case study: The 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict

As discussed above, critical listening offers an analytical tool, a performative act, and a
potentially powerful means of resistance. Listening to war, sounds are often heard without
the corresponding visual image of their sources. The experience involves listening to
acousmatic sounds as the vibrational forces of weaponry propagate through the air (Kane
2014). Martin Daughtry describes in his important study of a US soldier’s experience of the
2003 Iraq War, that violence was often first encountered as sound, emanating from those
epicentres of explosions into which the eye had as yet no access (Daughtry 2015: 272).
Listening in the midst of battle is a hyper-charged form of listening, involving constant
frantic auditioning, interpretation, and speculation about the origins and nature of the
sounds, their sources, and their spatial location. Critical listening is therefore a particularly
challenging methodology in the midst of conflict as it requires dissociation from the

immediate sonic affects, and a focus on the messaging, patterns, and organizations of
specific sounds.
The following case study offers a specific examination of the ideological role played
by the sounds of the Iron Dome, which is an Israeli missile defence system that was used
extensively during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. The system was deemed by some military
experts to be a political rather than a strategic weapon, and I argue here that the changing
patterns of explosions emitted by the system, alongside the blare of sirens, produced a
soundscape that reified the reality of war for Israelis in civilian areas, affecting their mood
and morale throughout the conflict.
The Israel–Gaza conflict unfolded during the summer of 2014. During the fifty days of
the conflict, the high and extremely asymmetric civilian death toll reflected the horrors
of modern warfare (United Nations Human Rights Council [UNHCR] 2015a). The
asymmetry was also reflected in the difference in costs of the opposing military systems,
as Israeli Iron Dome missiles were estimated (by Israeli analysts) to cost up to a thousand
times that of missiles deployed by Hamas (Azoulay 2014; Blay 2015). The United Nations
Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict found that the scale of the
devastation in Gaza was unprecedented, as ‘Palestinians struggled to find ways to save their
own lives and those of their families’ under the intense Israeli bombardment (UNHCR
2015b). In Israel itself, there was a sense of panic among civilians, especially those living
in the southern regions closest to Gaza, due to the constant threat of rocket and mortar
attacks, with particular anxiety focused on the threat of assaults from tunnels penetrating
into Israel. Residents of major Israeli cities experienced disruptions to their daily lives,
with the regular wail of sirens announcing yet another emergency, forcing them to run
for shelter, followed by the thuds of loud explosions, although a high percentage of Hamas
rockets fired from Gaza were, in fact, intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome. Meanwhile, Israel
retaliated with ground operations and intense aerial bombardment, reducing large areas of
Gaza to dust. The region is still reeling from the intensity of that conflict as civilians were
profoundly shaken by the events (UNHCR 2015b).
The immense destruction, suffering, and horror experienced by civilians, the different
ways in which online and broadcast media were used, and the many violations of international
humanitarian law comprise only a fraction of the aspects of this asymmetric conflict that
call for further investigation. As the sheer volume of subjects to be interrogated greatly
exceeds the scope of this chapter, I will focus mainly on the conflict’s sonic dimensions,
drawing on my experience working in Tel Aviv during the summer of 2014. I hope that my
findings on critical listening during that period can help shed light on the sonic experience
of the conflict from a civilian perspective.
In the early days of the war, I wrote the following account:
2.30 am: I am shaken from my sleep. ‘Quick. There’s a siren!’ my wife whispers, and she
gathers up our six-month-old baby, cautiously trying not to wake her. We grab our mobile
phones and sprint to the Mamad or ‘Sealed Room’ – a reinforced nuclear, chemical, and
biological security room, which has been a statutory requirement in all residential properties
in Israel since the 1992 Gulf War [Weisenberg et al. 1993: 462; ‘IDF Home Front Engineering
Advice’ 2018]. We lock the shelter’s vault-like door and shut the fortified metal window. It is
an eerie feeling to shut ourselves in like this, in the dead of the night, behind thick walls of
reinforced concrete and under an all-scrutinizing white neon light. We have not prepared
ourselves for this. Most households would have installed some comfortable furniture in the
room as well as food supplies, first-aid kits, emergency lamps, spare batteries, and other
emergency provisions. As we are only visiting here for three months, our sealed room is
empty and bare.
Before we have time to reflect on the situation or give rein to our anxiety, we hear four
deep thuds. It is the first time I have ever heard such loud explosions. These are blasts that
shake the room, setting off car and property alarms. Growing up here, we are used to the
shrill of sirens that trigger well-rehearsed, embodied emergency routines. Our physical
memory knows exactly what to do: grab essential items, run to the shelter, ensure everyone
is in, seal the doors, switch the radio and mobiles on, and then wait for confirmation that
it is safe to come out. But these blasts are new to us; they announce themselves very clearly.
Sitting on the floor of the Mamad, my wife is breastfeeding our daughter as we try to keep
calm. We wait for fifteen minutes. Nothing happens. How are we meant to know when it is
safe to come out? I check my phone for news. Eventually, as we have heard the explosions, we
decide that this specific attack has probably passed and we can emerge. Things seem quiet.
No unusual signs anywhere. We go back to bed, distraught, lulling our baby back to sleep.
Inside the sealed room, the connection with events outside was primarily mediated
through sound. The room was isolated and the thick concrete walls would muffle the sounds,
providing some distance from the immediate impacts. Despite its eerie and claustrophobic
atmosphere, the space was conducive to critical listening as it provided the distance required
to evaluate and question the sonic patterns heard outside. As sirens and explosions would be
heard several times a day, the wails and thuds became recognizable sonic cues. The traditional
shelter routine would involve hearing the sirens, entering the shelter, then listening to the
radio for updates. The sirens provided the cue to enter the shelter, but it was always far more
difficult to ascertain when it was safe to venture out. Listening inside the shelter, the terrifyingly
visceral explosions had the effect of punctuating the moment when an interception ‘event’
had occurred. They signalled that an attack was over and that it would soon be possible to
emerge from the shelter. The thuds reified the moment of attack, rendering it audible.
Later, it became clear that the immense explosions we were hearing were not caused
by rockets launched by Hamas but by Israeli interceptor missiles fired by the Iron Dome
(Landau and Bermant 2014), a missile defence system developed by the Israeli defence
manufacturer Rafael and US defence contractor Raytheon. The system is funded by an
annual package from the US Congress; by 2018, it had received a cumulative US investment
of about $6.5 billion and its operational costs are about $1 million a day (Shapir 2013; Bash
and Cohen 2014; Hamblen 2014; Samaan 2015; Winer and Ari Gross 2018).
The loud thuds caused by the interceptors provided Israeli civilians with an awe-
inspiring orchestration of power that boosted their confidence and had a positive effect on
their morale: civilians would cheer and often film the interceptor missile launches, sharing
their videos online. The noise of the explosions emanating from the skies dominated the
soundscape of Israeli cities during the conflict (Samaan 2015; Wood 2016). According
to military expert Yiftach Shapir, due to pressure from the mayors of Israeli cities most
Iron Dome batteries were stationed near city limits rather than next to strategic military
infrastructure. Their audible and visual presence provided civilian populations with a
sense of security. Shapir argues that this supports the view held by some military analysts
that the political role of the Iron Dome was as important as its strategic one (Yehoshua
2011; Harkham 2012; Shapir 2013; Blay 2015; Richemond-Barak and Feinberg 2016).3
One decorated Israeli missile expert caused much controversy by claiming that the Iron
Dome was not intercepting missiles at all, but providing an ‘audio-visual display that
merely intercepts Israeli public opinion’ (Broad 2013; Pedahtzur 2013; ‘Israel Security Prize
Laurate’ 2014). The morale-boosting effect of the system helped secure popular support
for continued operations in Gaza, as Emily Landau and Azriel Bermant explain in their
analysis of the effects of missile defence systems:
Additional benefits of missile defense systems relate to the public mood. Critics of the Iron
Dome have overlooked the positive impact that successful missile defense has had on Israeli
national morale, and its contribution to strengthening public resolve in a war situation. This
is borne out by the very positive response of the Israeli public to the Iron Dome system’s
success in intercepting missiles from Gaza, both in 2012 and 2014.
(Landau and Bermant 2014)
Critical listening in the sealed room

In late August 2014, the temporal and spatial relations between the sounding of the sirens
and the sounds of the explosions underwent a noticeable change. Suddenly, although the
loud blasts continued, the wailing of sirens was significantly reduced, disorienting civilians
who were used to hearing them as an accompaniment to the explosions. In answer to
complaints voiced in the media, the civil defence authorities explained that the reduction
in siren soundings was made ‘in order to prevent unnecessary anxiety among civilians’
(Zeytun 2014). Of course the change caused some initial panic but also reduced the anxiety
involved in running to a shelter in anticipation of the blasts; the panic was replaced by a
strangely mundane experience of simply hearing the explosions and nothing more. The
blasts would produce a momentary shock but then would be gone, causing less disruption
and panic overall. Without the sirens, the explosions’ emotional affect was somehow
diminished. As civilians were no longer primed by the wail of sirens to seek shelter, once
the explosions were over, life continued as normal.
The Israeli distribution of sirens soundings is centrally controlled through a system called
‘Wall and Tower’. This system analyses the path of projectiles and then isolates the area where
a missile is likely to hit, selecting its landing point from a system of 204 spatial ‘polygons’
into which the state is divided (Cohen 2014). It is a human decision whether or not to sound
the sirens and across how many of the polygons surrounding the epicentre. The soundings
are operated by soldiers in a military operations room and based on policy authorized
by the head of operations of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The policy is often changed
tactically during warfare, and decisions not to sound, which may have caused less anxiety, did
sometimes lead to loss of life (Cohen 2014). The siren-distribution system is an emblematic
example of the SSS. For example, the IDF stated directly that the decision to reduce siren
soundings in August 2014 was aimed at reducing the levels of ‘unnecessary’ anxiety in the
population and not due to a reduction in the quantity of missiles. The sound system was thus
operationalized in order to change the civilian experience of the conflict, which was primarily
aurally mediated. The ability to manipulate the public mood in such a way gave politicians
and military planners important strategic advantages. Landau and Bermant, for example,
discuss the strategic significance of the Iron Dome’s effect on public morale:
Public mood can translate into concrete strategic benefits […] [T]he public’s sense of
protection by Iron Dome gave time and space for the government to make calculated
decisions […]. No serious military expert would claim that missile defense systems are
able to provide hermetic protection, but missile defenses do create conditions for enhanced
freedom of action for decision makers – defense systems ensure that they have time, and are
not compelled to resort automatically to pre-emption and retaliation.
(Landau and Bermant 2014)
For the Israeli government, the Iron Dome system provided a lever of control during the
conflict as its effect of raising public morale allowed policymakers space and time to carry
out ambitious ground operations. It can be inferred from Landau and Bermant’s study, and
from the IDF’s statements, that the spatial distribution of siren soundings had a similar
political effect. As the frequency of siren soundings affected the levels of anxiety in the
population, the ability to influence the public mood by controlling the soundscape in this
way provided the government with a second lever of control. When used in tandem, these
two levers formed part of a wider political sound system in which different ‘mixes’ could
create different sonic experiences that had implications for both military and political
strategy.
As the voices of political pundits and military analysts dominated the media and were
heard everywhere – in homes, in shops, and on public transport – during that period,
alongside the pervasive beeping and buzzing of mobile alert apps such as ‘Red Alert’ and
‘Home Front Command’, the political soundscape of war was almost exclusively rendered
audible through the state’s own sound systems and media. These systems operated together
as a ‘heterogeneous ensemble’,4 producing the soundscape of conflict and war (Foucault and
Gordon 1980; Cohen 2014; Hamblen 2014; Sales 2016). This soundscape gave Israelis in
cities far from Gaza a palpable sense of being under attack. It carried a dual meaning: on the
one hand, it had a materializing effect as it reified the population’s anxiety of an imminent
attack; on the other, it boosted their sense of confidence in the state’s military apparatus
(Chion, Gorbman, and Murch 1994; Landau and Bermant 2014). The soundscape of the
Iron Dome thus created an orchestrated ‘ecology of fear’, directed at Israel’s own population,
while projecting a sense of complete protection. The Iron Dome system seemed to appeal
to both the public’s sense of fear and to its need to experience a feeling of power, security,
and confidence (Davis 1999; Goodman 2010: 15).
Abigail Wood’s insightful ethnographic work in Palestine–Israel provides a lucid reading
of the sonic at work. In an article called ‘The Siren’s Song’, she quotes Brian Massumi’s
proposition, that ‘a history of modern nation-states […] could be written following the
regular ebb and flow of fear rippling their surface, punctuated by outbreaks of outright
hysteria’ (Massumi 1993: viii quoted in Wood 2016). Wood adds:
While the experiences of most civilians living in Israel’s central regions during the 2012 and
2014 military operations were very far from the physical destruction that civilians in Gaza
experienced at that time, the soundscape of the war touches on the ripples of fear that armed
conflict causes in the stable surface of the state.
(Wood 2016)
The Middle East’s postcolonial history is fraught with conflict, and Israeli civilians’
modes of listening are well trained to follow prescribed emergency guidance in response
to set ‘sonic cues’. These responses to actionable sounds such as sirens, explosions, red alert
app sounds, coded slogans, and performative military-expert speak, have been rehearsed
and re-performed repeatedly during every person’s life in peacetime, instilling the habit of
fear and institutionalizing trauma. The sonic techniques of the state exacerbate this trauma
as each generation of civilians is trained to embody the emergency response to these cures
following the state’s ongoing emergency response training. The devastation of the 2014
conflict might not have been experienced first-hand by many Israelis living in central
cities, but the collective embodied impulse to respond to the emergency was provoked
by the state’s own sonic apparatus which produced the bulk of war sounds in major cities
through its various defence systems. In the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, the earwitnessed
elements of the system described here included the Iron Dome missile interception system,
the ‘Wall and Tower’ siren-distribution system, and a plethora of analysts’ voices, mobile
app signals, and other sonic cues. The Iron Dome, a most recent addition to the state’s
missile defence apparatus, added a terrifying sonic component to the soundscape of the
conflict. The awe-inducing soundscape of explosions had a dualistic effect of on the one
hand reifying civilians’ fears from attack, and on the other signalling to civilians that they
were absolutely secure. This dualism is an essential attribute of ideological interpellation.
Conclusion
Listening critically to the soundscape of war in 2014 revealed that many of the sounds heard
in central cities – sirens, missile explosions, radio signals, mobile phone alerts, and the like –
were produced by the state’s own sonic apparatus. In this chapter I have referred to the sound
systems and infrastructures producing these sounds as the ‘sound system of the state’ – a
sonic interpellation machine that prompts civilians to respond affectively, either with ripples
of doubt and fear or with surges of confidence and pride. These conflicting affects are
emblematic of the dual nature of ideology which, according to Althusser, simultaneously
attracts and repels its subjects. The dualism is also embodied in the very term ‘subject’
which connotes, on the one hand, ‘a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions’, while on the other, it refers to ‘a subjected being, who submits to a
higher authority, [and] is therefore stripped of all freedom’ (Althusser 2006: 108).
The methodology of critical listening mirrors this dualism by enabling an analysis of

state-produced ideological sounds while at the same time constituting an act of performative
resistance. Critical listening resists the performative power of the state’s sonic apparatus
by questioning and subverting its illocutionary instruction. It is at the point of listening
where performative acts may fail or succeed, and the methodology of critical listening
proposed in this chapter therefore prioritizes the act of listening as an act of resistance.
The listening agency can make or break the causal link between performative sonic acts
and their intended political consequences. Critical listening as a method separates the
ideological content, meaning, and affect of state-produced sounds from their material
properties, temporal organization, and acoustic qualities. As such, critical listening can be
instrumental in unpacking the workings of ideology in its sonic form, and in interrogating
the workings of the sound system of the state.
Notes
1. ‘Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a
wall with some sonic bricks in it […]. Radios and television sets are like sound walls
around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too
loud) […] [O]ne draws a circle, or better yet walks in a circle as in a children’s dance,
combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of
creation […]. A mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it
would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2008: 311).
2. The term flow (flux) is used here in reference to Deleuze and Guattari. who regarded
social theory as a generalized theory of flows (economic, commercial, material, cultural),
the decoding of which is the business of every society (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 262;
Smith 2011).
3. According to Richemond-Barak and Feinberg (2016): ‘IDSs [Intelligent Defence Systems]
neither qualify as weapons nor as military objectives under humanitarian law […]. An
in-depth analysis of the little-known concept of civil defense shows that its rationale to
afford absolute protection to those specifically assigned to protect the civilian population,
even if they are members of the armed forces, is much better suited to IDSs and furthers
the policy-oriented objective of incentivizing the use of IDSs.’
4. In a 1977 interview with Colin Gordon, Michel Foucault refers to the apparatus of the
state – the system of relations between discourses, institutions, architecture, legislation,
science, philosophy, and morality, both spoken and unspoken – using the term
‘heterogeneous ensemble’ (Foucault and Gordon 1980: 194). Foucault does not mean
‘ensemble’ in its specific musical sense, but rather refers to a system of relations between
heterogeneous elements operating ‘in-simul’, in agreement or in concert. In this sense, it
has a political meaning speaking of unity and coordinated organization. The valorization
of ‘simultaneity’, ‘synchronicity’, ‘harmony’, or ‘accord’ in Western music traditions is
perhaps precisely a reflection of how deeply embedded politics is in Western musical
aesthetics.
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47
Sonifications Sometimes Behave
So Strangely
Paul Vickers
The comprehension of phenomena by analysing and exploring data collected for the purpose
is an old and established practice. Statistical methods have become quite sophisticated and
are the bedrock of much modern scientific enquiry. Ever since William Playfair introduced
the line, area, and bar chart (1786) and the pie chart and circle graph (1801) to the world,
the field of information visualization research has refined and extended his ideas and has
developed rules and heuristics for the visual representation of data. In all of this, it is not
evident that the ontological nature of vision has been taken into account. And why would it
be? Phenomenologists and anthropologists have presented varied and competing theories
as to how we perceive the world visually, but it seems that much of that can be bracketed
when it comes to choosing how to lay out a plot or a chart.
Sonification is a family of representational techniques that use non-speech audio to
communicate data and data relations (think Geiger counter for data). With its recent use in
the discovery of gravitational waves, sonification has begun to gain some cultural traction,
but for the most part it lacks the ubiquity and acceptance of its graphical cousin, information
visualization. The term ‘sonification’ was adopted to describe the use of non-speech sound
for communicating data and data relations, and when Greg Kramer established the
International Community for Auditory Display and its associated conference series, the
International Conference on Auditory Display in 1992, the emergent field of sonification
research put down roots.
The idea of sonification at first seems so simple: take some data values and use them
to control the properties of an acoustic signal such that listening to the signal reveals
something about the data or the data relations that are driving it. Tools such as the
Sonification Sandbox (Walker and Cothran 2003) make this process very easy, generating
auditory graphs that step through tabular data with each value altering the pitch of a
chosen tone.
Following the emergence of affordable digital audio processing hardware in the 1980s
and 1990s researchers began to investigate the possibilities afforded by the auditory
modality for data and information analysis and exploration. As they began to explore more
deeply the use of sound as a complement to (and in some limited cases, a replacement for)
visual display techniques, it became evident quite early on that unlike visualizations, and
to borrow from Diana Deutsch, sonifications ‘sometimes behave so strangely’ (Deutsch,
Lapidis, and Henthorn 2011). There was something about the auditory representation
of data that meant issues of ontology and phenomenology kept raising their (often
unwelcome) heads. Unlike graphs, which do not immediately come across as paintings
or pieces of visual art, sonifications kept raising questions of their relationship to music
and the sonic arts. From an engineer’s, computer scientist’s, or even psychologist’s point of
view, all of whom in the early days of the field were trying to find good ways to map data
to sound without any composerly intent, sonification is not music. And yet, as Deutsch
(Deutsch, Lapidis, and Henthorn 2011) rediscovered – Pierre Schaeffer arguably being the
first to document the phenomenon with his account of the sillon fermé (Schaeffer 1967) –
the mind, regardless of our volition, sometimes adopts a musical orientation to listening
(Vickers, Hogg, and Worrall 2017).
Sonification, it goes, ‘is not visualization for the ears, it follows completely different
rules’ (Kosara 2009). At one level this is perfectly obvious and self-evidently true for vision
is (primarily) spatial and hearing is (primarily) temporal. A graph persists over time, the
whole can be seen at a single glance, and it may be compared side by side with another
graph. But the physical phenomenon of sound exists only in its production. To experience
an entire sound requires it be listened to as it unfolds over time, and comparing one sound
with the memory of another is fraught with difficulty.
Further, Cartesian dualism holds that perception involves an outside that we see, hear, feel,
smell, and taste which we then internally interpret by cognition to form an understanding
of the world. This fits very well with a bottom-up account of sensory processing. But in
recent years there has been a shift in understanding of perception, from the Cartesian
dualism of body and mind to an embodied phenomenological account which involves the
‘whole organism in its environmental setting’ (Ingold 2000: 258), an understanding which
has been embraced by the third wave of human-computer interaction (HCI) research.
Information visualization has gradually accreted conventions for the visual layout of data.
Guided by writers such as Jacques Bertin (1981) and Edward Tufte (2001) standardized
techniques and aesthetic heuristics have been adopted. In contrast, since the inaugural
International Conference on Auditory Display in 1992 the question of how best to specify
the data-to-sound mappings remains, to a large extent, an open one in sonification research.
Certain physical properties of sound are well understood thanks to the extensive body
of psychoacoustic literature. Equal loudness contours, the relationship between perceived
pitch and loudness, and so on are well documented and can be factored into sonification
designs. Rules for some types of sonification have been proposed, such as John Flowers’s
(2005) heuristics for successful auditory graph design, with pitch being used as the main
carrier of data values. But, as Bruce Walker’s programme of work demonstrated (Walker,
Kramer, and Lane 2000), there is no universal property obtaining to the polarity of data-
to-pitch mappings; some data are better understood where a rise in value corresponds to a
rise in pitch, while others seem to work better the other way around. A partial explanation
for this might be that we associate sounds with real world events. While we see objects, we
Sonifications Sometimes Behave So Strangel 735
do not hear them, rather we hear the sounds they make, that is we hear events (Rosenblum
2004). Further, the sounds objects and events produce give us knowledge about the objects’
size, density, and type. Low-frequency sounds typically belong to heavy, dense objects so
an increase in weight might be sensibly sonified with an inverse pitch mapping. On the
other hand, physical height conceptually works the other way around, so the greater the
height, the higher the pitch of the sonification will be.
Psychoacoustics is based largely on a laboratory-based bottom-up information
processing model in which raw sounds are given meaning by attending to their context,
what has been heard most recently, prior listener training, experience, and so forth. In
this model the physical properties of sounds are decoded, then cognition is employed to
classify the sounds according to their form, organization, rhythm, and so on. Finally, at the
top level the listener applies social and cultural filters to attribute aesthetic value, meaning,
and any referential properties (Clarke 2005: 11–14). As the sensory interrelatedness of
perception and our interactions with the environment lead us to needing to embrace
an embodied account of perception, we discover that sonification becomes much more
complex than we first thought. As John Neuhoff (2004) realized, we need to discuss
real-world psychoacoustics in terms of ecology and embodied experience. Al Bregman’s
magisterial work Auditory Scene Analysis (1990) serves as a stepping stone between this
bottom-up information processing Cartesian dualistic approach to perception and the rich
embodied experience it is being seen as by many today.
Sonification listening may be said to be an embodied, interactional, and practically
situated activity. Interaction can be with the sonification tool itself, as in the case of
interactive sonification (see Weinberg and Thatcher 2006), but also with the environment
and space in which the listening takes place. Sonification is a lot more interesting than
lab-based stimulus-response tests. Within information visualization there are some
established aesthetic principles which, if followed, are deemed to lead to more successful
representations. That is, representations that the intended user is able to read and
understand without confusion or ambiguity. For example, consider graph layout aesthetics,
such as the goal of minimizing the number of edges that cross each other in order to reduce
the visual complexity. At this point it is not yet clear what an aesthetics of sonification
entails or even if such a thing exists. Music philosophy has several competing aesthetic
accounts but, as has been pointed out repeatedly elsewhere, sonification is not music,
that is, it is typically not designed with composerly intent or with the goal of producing
a musical aesthetic experience. Indeed, if one looks at sonification through the various
lenses of music philosophy it appears to inhabit the (musically) contradictory position of
referential formalism. It is referential because its very purpose is to point the listener to
something beyond itself (the data) yet also formal because the meaning of the sonification
lies within its syntactic and organizational structures.
If the view is taken that aesthetics deals with sensory perception (Barrass and Vickers
2011; Vickers, Hogg, and Worrall 2017) – and this appears to be the reason why graph
aesthetics have been developed – then a way to approach the question of sonification
aesthetics is to come at it pragmatically in terms of how we might design sonifications that
are, as Stephen Roddy (2015) puts it, ‘communicatively effective’.
How do we choose the mapping?

How, then, do we choose the mapping? How does the translation of data into sound affect
the data and our understanding of it and how do we come to decide to translate those
data through particular sounds and not through others (which might influence how we
attribute meaning to the data)? An ungenerous answer to the question (from looking at
many of the sonifications put forward over the last quarter of a century) is that a great
deal of thought was not always given to this aspect. This is, of course, unfair, and belies
much serious consideration, but there is a sense in which much early sonification work was
motivated by the novelty of simply being able to map data to sound. Questions of aesthetics
were usually limited to whether or not the sonification sounded pleasant and there also
appears to have been an underlying assumption that sonifications should be easy to use,
that is, easy for the listener to understand that information being communicated (more on
this later).
More recently, there has been a deeper interrogation of how we listen to sonifications,
what role the aesthetic plays in the experience and the nature of the relationship between
sonification and the sonic arts (including music). This has been informed largely by the
aesthetic turns in the field of HCI which moved from the functional approaches of traditional
HCI through considerations of user experience informed by a pragmatist aesthetics (Barrass
and Vickers 2011) to today’s third-wave which deals with the phenomenological nature of
embodied perception and interaction, for which Richard Shusterman (1999) coined the
term ‘somaesthetics’. Stephen Barrass and I put forth the case for sonification to consider
these pragmatist experiential ideas in thinking about sonification aesthetics (Barrass
and Vickers 2011), and Bennett Hogg, David Worrall, and I took this further by directly
addressing the question of embodied perception in sonification design (Vickers, Hogg, and
Worrall 2017). This was motivated by questions around the nature of sonification listening,
the directness of a sonification, and the prior listening experiences of the sonification
user. The question now becomes ‘how might we in future decide on the mapping?’ Such
an enquiry affords the opportunity to consider the factors involved in sonification as an
embodied and interactional listening experience. Just as no ‘widely accepted model of an
aesthetic interaction’ exists (Lenz, Hassenzahl, and Diefenbach 2017: 81) so is there no
current definition of an aesthetics of sonification. However, as we move from the very
functional view of early sonification research to considerations of the somaesthetic issues,
then three factors become very important in the design of sonifications: directness, space,
and listening, and I will address these below.
Directness
The choice of sound depends, in large part, on the type of sonification approach adopted.
Sonification approaches span a continuum from the very direct, indexical processes
involved in audification to the conventional representations (in semiotic terms) used in
parameter mapping sonifications which can be very indirect and highly metaphorical. In
audification the dataset defines the sonification as it involves transposing the frequencies of
a time series dataset into the human audible range, together with any necessary filtering to
remove unwanted linear distortions and occasional dynamic range compression to flatten
out large variations in sound level. Because the data itself is transposed such that each
data value effectively becomes an individual sample in a digital audio signal, the resultant
auditory stream is very direct and tightly coupled to the dataset. The choice of what sound
to use then becomes one of what filtering and scaling to apply to the signal in order to best
make the audification ‘readable’ and fit for purpose (for a fuller treatment of audification,
see Dombois and Eckel 2011).
When it comes to sonifications in which there is no inherent link between the data and
the chosen sounds, the directness of the representation is determined by the mapping
strategy chosen by the sonification designer. Perhaps the most direct sonifications that
use the data to drive the parameters of an audio signal are auditory graphs. They are so
called because just like a visual graph maps one dimension (typically time) of the data
to the abscissa and the values of the data to the ordinate, an auditory graph represents
the abscissa by elapsed time and the data values by some change in the audio signal. The
simplest way to effect this is to control the frequency of a sinusoidal oscillator with the
data values. A high value gives a high pitch, a lower value a lower pitch. As each data
value is plotted the pitch of the signal rises and falls accordingly. Historically, pitch has
been most often chosen in auditory graphing and parameter mapping strategies alike. For
auditory graphs it is a simple but effective mapping. For parameter mapping sonifications
pitch seems to have been chosen as often for its ease of implementation as for any other
reason.
Directness is a multivalent term in sonification as different writers have used the word
to express different ideas about the relationship between sound and data. For example,
Bovermann, Tünnermann, and Hermann (2010) use directness as a measure of the
responsiveness of an auditory display, such that user interactions lead to quick changes
in output. By contrast, and taking a steer from semiotics, Bennett Hogg and I viewed
directness as the conceptual distance between the data and its mapping, that is, a measure
of the arbitrariness of the data-to-sound mapping (Vickers and Hogg 2006). For example,
a symbolic mapping involving sonic metaphors that stand for features of the data – for
example, the use of real-world sounds such as bird song and frog croaks to represent
features of network traffic (Vickers, Laing, and Fairfax 2017; Debashi and Vickers 2018)
– is an arbitrary mapping in the sense that the sounds chosen bear no direct relationship
to those data or phenomena represented. Contrast this with an audification in which the
sound generated is directly caused by the scaling of the data. There arises, then, a question
as to what sort of mapping is best (indexical or symbolic), a question which, at this point
in time, remains unanswered. A representational view of sonification holds that the data
being referenced should somehow be a part of how the sonification is properly experienced
so that the sonification is experienced in terms of the data it represents (Vickers, Hogg,
and Worrall 2017: 96). If Deniz Peters is correct in his assertion that ‘an essential part of
our listening experience draws on what our own body suggests might have gone into the
making of [a] sound’ (Peters 2012: 22) then the directness of a sonification’s mappings
ought to play a very important role in how successful the sonification is at communicating
its underlying data. On the face of it, the mappings from data to sound should be as direct
as possible with the implication that the more symbolic a mapping is, the less successful
it might be. To this end, Robert Höldrich and I have begun work to explore how to
implement good direct mapping strategies which we call ‘Direct Sonification’ (see Vickers
and Höldrich 2019; Vickers 2020). But this view does not account for the occasions when
a symbolic mapping might be considered by the listener to be direct. For example, if one
wished to sonify the comings and goings of worker bees in a hive over the course of a
week, sensors could be added to register each time a bee arrives and leaves, and this data
could be mapped to a buzzing sound that mimics that of a bee in flight. This is not a direct
mapping in the sense that the data themselves are not the cause of the sound (in the way
that they are in audifications or in the direct sonification mentioned above); because the
data are generated by the activity of bees, and the sounds are of bees, one could argue
that the data have become part of the sonification experience and are thus an authentic
representation.
The idea that the more (causally) direct a mapping is, the less conceptual distance
there is between the data and the sonic parameters, the more likely a sonification is to
be successful is an attractive one. The more complex and richer the mapping, the greater
the possibility that artefacts of the sonic rendering will be mistaken for properties of
the data. For example, the use of tonal musical frameworks and rhythms could lead to
expectations and understandings on the part of the listener that are based in the listener’s
prior experience rather than pointing to characteristics of the data. Perhaps a particular
chord sequence is generated by a particular combination of data, a sequence that calls to
the listener’s mind a meaning that is not intended and which leads to incorrect inferences
being drawn. This is one of the reasons why Hogg, Worrall, and I began a programme of
work to explore how accounting for the subject position in sonification design might lead
to clearer, less ambiguous renderings (Vickers, Hogg, and Worrall 2017).
So far, we have considered the translation between data and sound only as a one-way
activity, but we do need to consider the effect the rendering might have on the data. Of
course, the objection is immediately raised that such an effect is impossible; how can
any sonification affect the data it represents? It cannot, in any real sense alter the data
values, or the underlying phenomenon from which the data were measured. The user
can, of course, on listening to a sonification, choose to change the phenomenon or system
which was being sonified. For example, if I am sonifying my heart and respiratory rates
during exercise, the feedback might cause me to increase or decrease my activity which
will, in turn, lead to changes in my heart beat and breathing. But here the sonification
is a messenger, not an actor. Alternatively, and this is perhaps the more interesting
consideration, the sonification might influence the way we interpret the data, leading us
to change the way we perceive it, a sort of auditory version of seeing something in a new
light: it causes us to appreciate the data, or the phenomenon from which it was measured,
anew. The phenomenon hasn’t actually changed, but it certainly appears different than
before.
Space and listening

The act of listening to a sonification is always situated within a space. Sonifications can
be designed for monophonic, stereophonic, or multichannel sound, or three-dimensional
playback. If headphones are used then virtual listening spaces and ambiences can be created
using combinations of convolution reverberation, binaural recording and reproduction
techniques, ambisonics, head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), surround sound, and
so forth. To create multichannel or three-dimensional sound fields without headphones
requires multi-loudspeaker arrays, or sophisticated equipment such as Sonible’s IKO, an
icosahedral loudspeaker that employs beamforming and ambisonics to create a three-
dimensional sound image (Sonible Gmbh n.d.).
In the early days the majority of sonifications were designed for stereo playback either
with headphones or the small loudspeakers commonly used with desktop computers. The
focus here was on producing the data-to-sound mappings with little regard given to the
listening experience. Headphones provide convenient isolation to reduce the effect of
environmental noise during listening tests and also allow experiments to be conducted
with multiple participants in a single laboratory. Experimental hypotheses revolved
around whether the use of sound (either on its own or in conjunction with a visual display)
improved participants’ ability to construct knowledge about the data. Even when spatial
audio reproduction systems were used, the focus was largely on whether spatial audio
could be used to communicate information rather than on the listening experience as an
interactional embodied activity.
When we consider the subject position and think about designing for embodied
experience, we begin to realize that the sonification designer’s past experiences, listening
skills, and frames of reference could be very different from those of the intended listener.
As Karin Bijsterveld observes, sonification designers tend to have ‘trained ears’ (Bijsterveld
2019: 104), and it is not always going to be the case that the intended listener will have
developed their listening skills to the same extent. In the case where the listener and the
sonification designer are not the same person, such as when designers and domain experts
come together to collaborate on producing sonifications for the domain experts it is entirely
possible that what the designers are able to infer from the sonification is not the same as the
listeners whose data is being sonified.
Not only does the mapping itself affect how we perceive and experience a sonification,
the spatial aspects of the presentation also play a role. Gerriet Sharma’s (2016) concept of
the ‘shared perceptual space’ provides a framework for exploring the sculptural aspects
of spatial audio and how to approach the perceptual issues that arise during spatial audio
production (Wendt et al. 2017). The shared perceptual space is the space ‘within which the
perceptions of composers, scientists and audience intersect in respect of three-dimensional
sound objects’ (Sharma 2016: 3). With it, Sharma discovered that he could construct
generalized descriptions of sound objects and that the ‘collisions of perceptions gradually
informed the ensuing compositional process and led to an expanded understanding
and a different practice of artistic work with these phenomena’ (3). The idea of ‘situated
perspective’ (Harrison, Tatar, and Sengers 2007) has gained traction in the wider field
of HCI, but sonification research has not yet caught up. Even if a sonification is to be
designed for stereo headphone presentation, it would still be instructive to consider the
situated perspective of the listening and to use concepts such as Sharma’s to explore how
better to design and construct sonifications. When moving to more ambitious spatialized
presentations we can ask questions such as what is the impact of spatial attributes
(foreground/background, inside/outside, high/low, 2D/3D, direction) on perception of
spatial sound-textures produced by mapped data? How can an understanding of shared
perception inform and improve sonification design?
Listener experience
All of the above inexorably draws us to consideration of the listener, both in terms of the
embodied experience that occurs during listening, as well as the listener’s past experience,
skill, and knowledge. The subject position is the stance a listener adopts towards the objects
of perception (Clarke 2005). Designing for the subject position is about careful direction of
the listener towards what the sonification designer desires to reveal about the underlying
data. That is, the ‘aesthetic enters at the point of constructing the subject-position such that
[…] something in the aesthetic of the sound has to match the phenomenon being revealed’
(Vickers, Hogg, and Worrall 2017: 105). This, coupled with knowledge gained from
understanding the shared perceptual space, lets us focus on the embodied interactional
experience of sonification listening.
However, in our endeavours to address the complexities of embodied listening
experience it is easy to fail to deal with listener skill. It has often been assumed that
sonification should be designed so as to be as easy as possible to listen to, to require as
little training as possible to use. Sometimes this is because the experiments to evaluate the
usefulness of a sonification are designed to be run over short periods with large groups
of listeners who are typically not domain experts (undergraduates are often recruited as
participants for this purpose). Other times it may be motivated by the fact that sonification
still often fails to be treated as a serious field of scientific research and enquiry, and so
designers have felt that sonifications that are not simple to use will be quickly dismissed.
However, it has long been accepted in other fields that sound-based exploratory tools
require skill to be used well. In the hands of an adept physician, a stethoscope can be used
to diagnose heart conditions; sonar operators need to be trained to use their equipment
to be able to distinguish between different underwater objects and structures; and a
skilled mechanic can often troubleshoot a car engine by listening to the sounds it makes
(Bijsterveld 2019: 2). So why should we insist that sonifications require little skill to use? If
we are using sonification to explore complex data then there is every reason to expect that
the subtle differences in the sounds produced will require a degree of training to detect.
Complex tools require training and skill to use well and if we are to go beyond the very
simple sonifications (that are also often not very interesting) the issue of listener training
needs to be tackled. Of course, someone joining the navy as a sonar operator would have
the expectation of receiving training on how to listen to sonar signals. A climate scientist
interested in modelling the effects of pollution on global temperatures, on the other
hand, might not reasonably have the expectation that they will need to develop analytical
listening skills in order to do their job. But, if sonification users can be trained to listen
more analytically than they might be used to, can we choose richer, more subtle, data-to-
sound mappings that allow deeper and more valuable sonic exploration of data than has
been hitherto accomplished? It will be necessary, then, to determine how ‘ordinary’ users
can be trained to listen in a skilful manner and, hence, to use sonifications more effectively.
It will be interesting to discover what the practical limitations and the implications of such
training for sonification design are.
In the early days, it was largely sufficient to show that sonification could be done, and
some preliminary heuristics on how to map certain types of data to sound were produced.
The underpinning theory was drawn from music philosophic accounts of listening
(particularly those of Pierre Schaeffer, Michel Chion, and R. Murray Schafer) and from
psychoacoustics. More recently, the role of aesthetics has become a branch of sonification
research in its own right as researchers have started to tackle the rich issues associated with
sonification listening as an embodied and interactional experience. It is hoped that this
recent programme of research, with a particular focus on sonification directness, listener
skill, and the space(s) in which sonification listening takes place will yield valuable insights
into how to successfully map rich and complex (and increasingly ‘big’) data to sound.
References
Barrass, Stephen and Paul Vickers (2011). ‘Sonification Design and Aesthetics’. In Thomas
Hermann, Andrew D. Hunt, and John Neuhoff (eds), The Sonification Handbook, 145–172.
Berlin: Logos Verlag.
Bertin, Jacques (1981). Graphics and Graphic Information Processing. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Bijsterveld, Karin (2019). Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and
Engineering (1920s–Present). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bovermann, Till, René Tünnermann, and Thomas Hermann (2010). ‘Auditory Augmentation’.
International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence 2 (2): 27–41.
Bregman, Albert S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound.
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48
The Conflicting Sounds of Urban
Regeneration in Liverpool
Jacqueline Waldock
How can we approach sonic field work in urban areas? In this chapter I discuss a co-
production approach that I have employed in a number of urban sound projects. I will
address why we should use a co-production approach to urban sound studies and how this
approach can be applied in practice.
Late one evening at a conference I was introduced to an academic who asked me
about the methodological approach I was taking in my research. As I was a relatively new
PhD student, I timidly responded that my methodology involved partnering with local
residents to record, listen, and analyse sounds in a form of co-production. This was met
with scorn: ‘Co-production, of course everyone is doing co-production, what a load of
meaningless jargon.’ Sadly, I have not had the opportunity to meet this academic since,
however his response always stuck with me. In the years since, the term ‘co-production’
has in many ways reached semantic saturation in the academic world. In this chapter I
will argue that co-production is an important methodological approach in understanding
sonic communities and analysing conflicting urban spaces within the sound environment.
Co-production allows us to draw upon specific experiential expertise situated within the
sonic terrain by those who live, work, and/or utilize that area. Co-produced research does
not simply consult local residents about their sound environment; instead it is a partnership
with them that values the expertise that they have, such as a specific experience and
understanding of place. In the case of this methodology their expertise is coined from the
everydayness of their experience, the layers of quotidian ritual, and personal connections.
Engaging with this experiential expertise enables us as researchers to be better placed to
decipher the construction of sonic space and its significance in forming sense of place.
Co-production approaches commonly engage with groups of people. This allows
for multiple voices to be heard, compared, and shared. Tripta Chandola, a New Delhi
based ethnographer, in her study ‘Listening into Others: Moralising the Soundscapes
in Dehli’, questioned ‘whose experience of soundscapes – that is, listenings – are given
preference and whose listening is not?’ (Chandola 2012: 397, emphasis in the original). A
co-production methodology allows for a broader spectrum of listening experiences to be
explored. This is particularly poignant in urban areas. The highly populated nature of the
city environment often means that sonic terrains intersect and overlap with each other;
that differing, and sometimes conflicting, experiences of sound spaces crossover and rally
against one another.
I developed a co-production approach, that I have utilized in several urban sound
projects, called the ‘trinitarian methodology’. This methodology partnered with the
residents to record their sound environments. They were considered as artists, academics,
and activists in producing their own sound recordings: artists, through making sound
recordings, capturing, editing, and presenting their sounds; academics, through listening
to and commenting upon the sounds that they had recorded, giving a unique insight into
their relationship with the sonic events; and activists, through sharing the sounds with
one another and with the wider public. This has led to the residents leading radio shows
on BBC radio Merseyside, participating in the curation of sound exhibitions, and creating
public sound sculptures.
Each resident was given a digital sound recorder and asked to record sounds in their
everyday lives. They also had the freedom to delete sounds or edit recordings as they wished.
Alongside the recordings, they were sometimes prompted by questions such as: What
did you record? Why did you record it? This led to residents recording sounds and then
recording their thoughts about the sounds on the next track. Usually these descriptions
included an interpretation of the sounds: ‘This is my door, it squeaks a little.’ Sometimes
the recordings were accompanied by an emotional description: ‘It makes me feel safe when
I hear it click, it tells me that I can relax and not worry.’ These reflections allowed me not
only to be guided by the sound itself but also to provide a context and insight into how the
recording resident was listening to them.
One of the early applications of this methodology was in Toxteth, an inner-city area
of Liverpool facing social and political conflict. There were rows of houses in what is
collectively known as the Welsh Streets that were under a Compulsory Purchase Order
(CPO).1 In this case, the CPO was applied to the homes in order to demolish them.
However, some residents resisted the council’s desire to knock down the houses and
formed a resistance that staved off the council’s plans for over a decade. The streets were
redeveloped rather than demolished in 2017/2018 with many of the past residents applying
to move back to their homes. Prior to 2017 the resistant residents of these streets formed
the focus of my project. They recorded their sound environments during this period of
change, they listened to the sounds and they commentated upon their own recordings
(Waldock 2015). This resulted in 40 hours of recording over a nine-month period. Sounds
ranged from kettles brewing and doors locking to community meetings, house fires, and
the boarding up of homes. The recordings gave me a collection that extended beyond the
public streets. The residents captured their personal spaces, collective experiences, and the
sounds that seeped from one space to another. Although the sounds were recorded and
collected in a small parcel of streets, they highlight the issues surrounding the regeneration
process: how the changes, that regeneration dictates, transform the sonic space and create
acoustic conflicts. The sounds that were recorded in the Welsh Streets lay bare the way in
which regeneration can irreparably change a sound community.
Conflicting Sounds of Urban Regeneratio 747
The streets themselves are layered with history: industrial, musical, and personal.
They mark a significant point in Liverpool’s industrial history (Roberts 1986), the houses
primarily being built to support Welsh families moving to find work at Liverpool’s docks.
The streets are also the birth place of the Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr (Madryn Street),
and form part of the pilgrimage route of fans to the city. The admiral pub that featured on
the cover of his first solo album is also part of the Welsh streets. The significance of this
space to fans can be seen by the graffiti on the door of Starr’s home, the boarded-up house
on Madryn Street which has become a site where fans prize the opportunity to leave their
mark.
Many of the original residents in the street grew up there; their families and grandparents
had also lived within a few streets of one another. One ex-resident described to me how
her parents had lived just one road over from where she grew up because their house was
bombed in the war and when she got married she had moved only a few houses down. The
layers of history in the streets, the length of time that many of the houses had lay empty,
and the dividing battle ground of the residents has led to the houses being seen in several
conflicting ways: an eye sore, a site of pilgrimage (to visit Ringo Starr’s birthplace), a sub-
par housing crisis, a home, a family, a community. These perspectives sit at odds with
each other socially and sonically. There were distinct power relationships at play between
the residents and the council. In The Sonic Color Line Jennifer Stoever writes about the
interplay of these power relationships with sound and within listening: ‘Although often
deemed an unmediated physical act, listening is an interpretive, socially constructed
practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems
riven with power relations’ (Stoever 2016: 14). My project sought not only to capture the
changing sounds of the streets but also the specific value of the sounds to those who listen
to them. What became clear in people’s reflections upon the sound environment was that
the transformation which regeneration had inflicted on the area had led to a change in
the accepted sonic order, and that, without doubt, the listening to certain sounds had
been utterly transformed. The complexities of a divided community, the political rifts, and
economic tensions surrounding the streets had created a group of residents who felt let
down, and who struggled to exert agency in the decision-making process. When I first
met them their sentiments were very much like ‘nothing about us without us’. They were
in the middle of a long battle and had become disillusioned with academics, politicians,
and charities speaking for them instead of with them and running projects that appeared
to make no significant difference. Distinctively the processes employed through this
project enabled me to gain insight into how people’s listenings were dismissed in favour of
‘progress’.
The project gave a considerable amount of freedom to those recording.2 This freedom
enabled a breadth of sounds to be captured but it also meant that some recordings were
hindered by wind, muffled microphones, batteries running out, and many other technical
issues. It took time for people to become confident with the technology. One resident
would only record with the help of another, and spoke to the recorder throughout as if
commentating her world personally to me, often starting recordings with ‘Hiya Jacky, its
me.’ She used the digital recorder much like an answering machine, leaving me messages and
sounds to listen to. The partnering residents of the Welsh Streets, despite being part of the
same project approached recording in different ways. These approaches predominantly fell
into two groups, those who recorded every sound, and those who recorded a specific sound.
One of the residents had left the digital recorder on the window sill and then later
listened back to what had been captured. At first, she was surprised by the amount of
bird song that she could hear; she commented on how the birds could be heard so clearly.
However, she went on to note that the recording lacked human sounds. There were no
neighbours talking in the streets or children chatting on their way to school. The joy of
hearing the birds quickly passed into a melancholy for the sounds of a community which she
missed. The sound recorder that was left on the window sill acted as a tool for a later, more
concentrated listening to the sonic space. The recorders that were left in situ captured many
of the sounds that surrounded that particular home; however, when listening back to these
recordings people commonly talked about sounds that they hadn’t heard on the recording.
When listening back they were struck by the sounds that weren’t captured, sounds that
had disappeared from their sonic space without them noticing. Most of these sounds will
be considered as background, everyday city noises: people getting into their cars, people
walking to the shops or the bus stop, parents out with their prams. It is only in the removal
of these conventional sounds that their significance in regular community life is felt and
appreciated. If I had not partnered with local residents and utilized their expertise, I would
not have been able to understand the importance of these missing sounds.
The second type of recording occurred when partnering residents recorded a sound
they had previously heard. Here, the recording became a reference for a previous listening
experience and it was often commented on in conjunction with the sound. This happened
because the listener had already heard and considered the sounds, and therefore was able
to comment immediately. This approach is only possible when sounds are repeated. What
often occurred was that tracks would contain a description of a sound that had occurred
but not the sound itself. As I was actually interested in exploring both the existence of
sounds in the environment and reflections of the listeners to those sounds, the description
and reference to sounds that had not been recorded was something I had to accept as
part of the variation in using a co-production approach. However, the advantage of having
multiple residents recording the space at the same time meant that sometimes people spoke
about sounds that other people had recorded. This highlighted the importance of sharing
and collectively listening to the recordings made.
In both approaches, whether it was a general capturing of sound or a specific capturing
of a particular moment, the recorded sound would be listened to for an additional time
with me either in the home of the person recording or in the studio. This listening often
highlighted their sonic memories of the place distilled into their sonic present (Jarviluoma
2009; Waldock 2016). In some cases the recordings produced an anamnesis (Augoyard and
Torgue 2006: 21) in the listener, reviving the home that no longer exists.
The Welsh Streets project was the first time I employed the trinitarian methodology.
I have since utilized the approach in several other urban settings. However, the first
application was significant as it highlighted some of the problematics of implementing this
co-production approach.
Inscribing conflict
All of the residents who partnered in recording were women, and over the time they
recorded they gained a confidence in using their recorders and being unapologetic in
their recording presence. The Canadian sound artist and researcher Andra McCartney
has drawn attention to ‘the way a woman’s movements through public space are marked
and regulated’ (McCartney and Gabriele 2001). She tells of the experience of her research
assistant who refused to turn off her recording device when asked by a passing male
cyclist.
At the moment Gabriele met this passing cyclist, he asked her to stop recording, to stop
inscribing her sonic presence in this context. Her refusal and the agency she insists on by
continuing to record are important parts of the sound walk recording experience, and the
sense of entitlement access to such technology can provide.
(McCartney and Gabriele 2001)
Conflict occurs in the inscribing of sonic presence. Because of this many residents were
nervous at first to record outside of their home or yards. To them using the technology in
public drew attention to their presence in what they considered to be an unstable space.
However, as they grew in confidence they felt increasingly comfortable with the agency
that the technology allowed them, particularly the ability to etch their existence into the
public space. The recordings of the actual streets and pathways call attention to the power
of the residents in inscribing their presence onto the very streets. This was a marker of the
agency that they have in that space.
The trinitarian methodology by its nature requires partners to record sound themselves
in places of political and social conflict. However, asking people to step out and inscribe
their sonic presence in a public space comes with added tensions and risks. It is important
to acknowledge this and to accept that, sometimes, the instruction to record in a public
realm is too great an ask. In projects where I have employed this methodology, it has often
been necessary to give people time to become comfortable with the recorders and to walk
alongside them when they first record publicly.
Recording conflict
The method of recording each other allowed me to hear multiple recordings of the same
sound and references to the same sounds by different people. One resident recorded the fire
that had started in the empty houses adjacent to them whilst another recorded themselves
talking about the same fire. This allowed me to understand how people’s lives intersect with
one another and how significant sonic communal touchpoints develop, not just in spaces
such as the paths that connected the houses or the communal stairs in the flats, but sounds
that seep through the bounds of domestic spaces and become part of the quotidian ritual
of the residents’ lives.
The residual community became more connected by uniting against the homes
being demolished; people who were acquaintances had become friends through the
neighbourhood meetings. As the houses had emptied the area had become a target of
anti-social behaviour (thirteen incidents in one month in 2015), arson, and drug taking.
Streets that had been designated as play streets – spaces closed to traffic so children can
play – became considered ‘dangerous’, both within and outside the community. The streets
that had been boarded up ceased to be familiar. Many residents noted that they avoided
walking through them, that going to the shops or visiting friends took longer as they
didn’t feel safe walking along the empty houses. This heightened sense of fear also changed
people’s relationships with their neighbours: they used to listen out for people coming
home, be concerned for those who were late or if they hadn’t seen them for a few days. This
sense of communal care challenges one of the key discussions of urban soundscapes, that
of ‘neighbour noise’. Within the sounds captured we had several references to neighbour
sounds such as, ‘I always hear her radio at tea time’; ‘I can hear him singing on the stairs’; ‘I
know he is home when I hear his door bang.’ Quotes such as these are often accompanied
by a barrage of negativity, the familiar tale of noise pollution by people who selfishly invade
other’s spaces, breaking into someone else’s private cocoon. However, this was not the case
here as these sounds were not recorded as examples of noise pollution or annoyance; they
were recorded as a sign of life, a sign of community, a sign that life still happened, a sign of
resistance. There is increasingly an assumption that ‘our mutual harmony and peacefulness
as a society is predicated on an increasing amount of aural segregation’ (Fluegge 2011).
What became evident from my projects was that aural desegregation in the streets
strengthened communal ties.
Stoever sought to challenge the idea that ‘one has to listen similarly to power valuing the
same sounds in the same way and reproducing only certain sounds that the listening ear
deems appropriate, pleasurable, and respectful’ (Stoever 2016: 20). One of the selling points
of the new houses that the council offered to people was that they were well insulated, with
double glazing and small private gardens. Despite these benefits some of those who moved
felt isolated, unable to hear those around them and being in fear of others not hearing
them. An elderly lady who had moved to her new home worried if anyone would notice
if she fell down the stairs or hear her if she cried for help. She exclaimed that ‘in the old
houses you knew your neighbours, they would look out for you.’ To the council, neighbour
sounds are a problem to be tackled and deemed inappropriate, but in the desire to reduce
‘noise pollution’ there is an element of isolating people from their community. However,
this didn’t imply that the residents accepted all sounds into their private sphere: there were
sounds that they found problematic such as the sound of fire engines at night treating the
arson attacks that intermittently occurred; or the sound of workmen cutting off utilities,
emptying the homes, and boarding them up. Sociologists Hugh Pickering and Tom Rice
write:
In a social context, noise is used as a descriptor for deviant sonic behavior, highlighting
societal norms and delineating what is acceptable and what is not. A neighbor’s dog barking
late at night is ‘noise,’ despite the fact that it is not opposed to ‘music’ or ‘signal’ but because
it occurs outside of the accepted sonic order. Its designation as ‘noise’ implies that the night
is a quiet time and denotes an expectation that dogs be kept under control.
(Pickering and Rice 2017: 2)
By employing a co-production approach through the trinitarian methodology, I was

able to reflect on a number of residents’ experiences of the local environment and better
understand the norms around acceptable community sounds. In this particular project
neighbour noise was not seen as ‘outside of the accepted sonic order’; rather it became a
significant symbol of a sense of place that had been lost and was now yearned for.
Conflict in listening
It is common for people to not like the sound of their own voice, much like seeing a
photograph of oneself; there is a disconnection between how we hear ourselves and how
others do. However, it was not their own voices that caused this unwillingness, it was
emotional distress. Some recordings were heavily emotionally charged, for example two
residents recording another’s moving day (Waldock 2016). This became, unsurprisingly,
too difficult for them to listen back to. Another resident recorded their neighbours flat
being boarded up and the resident who had actually lived there found it too emotional
to hear it again. Since the recording of the house being boarded was made, it has been
played in several places. It is the sound of metal being drilled on to stone; it is loud and it is
uncomfortable, but to those who lived there it holds an extra layer of significance: it is the
breaking of a community and the stealing of a home.
This sound was new to the area, brought in by the council as emptied houses need
to be kept from vandals. The sound was unanimously the most hated sound in the area,
partly because of what it represented and partly because of how it interacted with the space.
Boarding up a home is not a quick process nor is it a quiet one. The drills need to be able
to bore into the stone masonry, or brick of the houses in order to fix steel sheets in place.
The sheets sometimes have to be adapted to the size of the window and are cut on site with
electric saws. To cover every window and door of a three-story house front and back takes
approximately 5 hours, and a row of houses thus took days. The workmen would wear muffs
protecting their ears from the noisy drills and saws, but the residents had no protection
or warning for these infiltrating sounds. There is no other sound that so represented the
relationship between the council and the residents at that time. Anthropologist Pauline
Destree writes:
If […] we can consider noisy tenants as the ‘abject subject’ that fails to comply to the
auditory norms of tenancy, as the ‘haunting specter’ of the normative subject, then we
can understand noise events not only as invoking this specter but as harmful penetrations
of this ‘polluting outside’ into the subject, producing it partly from its own defiling
substance.
(Destree 2013: 17)
The sonic penetration of the drilling into the houses nearby was a marker of power –
power over the homes that were being boarded up, power over the personal lives of the
neighbours who heard it.
Despite never being considered as a sonic weapon by the council it acts very much as
a tool to subdue the remaining residents, to hinder community, and to disrupt daily life. I
received a call early one morning to tell me that the home of one of the recording partners
was being boarded up and they wanted to capture the sound but they needed my help.
I sat with them in their home hearing the workmen board up their neighbours’ homes.
It was a warm sunny day but the sound of drilling made it difficult to have any windows
open and hard to hold conversations in the house. On the street it was impossible to
speak to one another or move without stopping for more than a few moments through the
experience of physical pain from the noise. The men carrying out the work were friendly,
non-inflammatory, even apologetic; however, the sound created by the boarding up was
damaging, physically, socially, and mentally. It is clear from the recordings and analysis
by the residents that this sound stopped people from congregating; it disabled people
from directly communicating with one another and hindered people from gathering. It
sonically stamped ‘we will win, we have the power and we have the control’ into every
home.
The methodology that sought to co-produce with the residents – as artists, activists,
and academics – was both broadened and strengthened by its partnering in recording,
listening, and analysing. However, this also came with some complications and risk.
Throughout the project, digital recorders were lost, some residents never made any
recordings, and some sounds were erased before they could be analysed or shared. The
project was also intensive in meeting with and encouraging those who partnered. It
enabled an understanding of how urban regeneration transforms not only the sounds that
occur in the streets but also shifts the sonic order and the listening of the community that
lives there. I heard how the changes in housing and development changed the community
and enabled them to accept and rarefy sounds that prior to the houses being bought for
demolish were commonplace. These insights provoke a discussion about counter-cultural
approaches to sound and how sound is a tool for exercising power. This was seen most
prominently in the council’s exertion of acoustic control by boarding up the homes and the
way that sound was understood. However, it could also be seen in the way the residents, as
a small but significant resistance, inscribed their own presence into their recordings and,
most crucially, their space.
Notes
1. A CPO is an order that give the local council authority to purchase your home.
2. They were given instructions on how to use the digital recorder and advice on various
ethical protocols.
References
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Chandola, Tripta (2012). ‘Listening into Others: Moralising the Soundscapes in Delhi’.
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London Estate Community’. Ethnographic Encounters 3 (2).
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49
Ethnographies Sounded on What?
Methodologies, Sounds and
Experiences in Cairo
Vincent Battesti
The last decade has seen an increase in academic literature in the humanities and social
sciences on the sonic dimension of our world. This chapter asks ‘what’ sounds are of interest
to ethnography, ‘why’, and consequently ‘how?’
This chapter, like the rest of this Handbook, is dedicated to the thorny issue of
methodologies. From a heuristic point of view, a method (i.e. ‘how’) is only worthwhile if
it is based on the answers given to the first two questions, ‘what’ and ‘why’. It is important
to draw clear distinctions between these three questions, although they often overlap in the
complex and varied context of ethnography (at least for ethnographies that are not fettered
upstream of the fieldwork by theory and programmatic approach).
Therefore, it goes without saying that I cannot suggest a ‘good’ and sound methodology
to be used in doing ethnographic research, as it depends on the purposes and the context
of the fieldwork; and also, as I think of the senses as interconnected and perceive the
environment as a whole, an exclusive sonic modality or category will be avoided.
I will give a quick and partial overview of ethnographies that are concerned with sound
in order to present my own questions in a more precise and informed way. The journey I
propose here does not quite illustrate a categorization that I would come to terms with, it is
too incoherent as such, but it is rather a way of bringing about the different methodologies
that are, or could be, used in sonic ethnography (Figure 49.1).
Ethnomusicologists and their music

Anthropology has inherited a great deal from a long tradition of Western musicology.
Scholars of this field forged a range of tools and concepts to grapple with music. Music
is a highly diverse social practice understood as organized and performed sounds which
Figure 49.1 This chapter is dedicated to Ahmed Wahdan, my master of the Cairo
night, who died in 2018, far too early. Giza, Cairo, Egypt, 30 November 2016, 11.00 p.m.
Photograph by Vincent Battesti.
usually express or communicate ideas or feelings. But music also represents a minute part
of the audible world for human beings, whatever the time or place. Ethnographers have
every right to be interested in music as a part of social life, but the entirety of social life,
in its audible dimension, exceeds that of music. Ethnomusicologists today are scarcely
interested in working on music extracted from its performance conditions, its social and
cultural context of real practice. From this perspective two attitudes prevail towards music,
which are not necessarily in conflict: to deepen the relationship between the production of
music and its environment; and to focus on an aural ethnography that investigates the ways
music is used, diffused, and plays a role at the heart of a society.
A renewed approach towards music phenomenon among ethnomusicologists, coupled
with a greater awareness of sound, has emphasized the social context of music production
(for instance, see Christine Guillebaud [2008] on the Kerala travelling musicians in
India), as well as the natural environment, which refers to the work of Steven Feld (1982),
who described the highly developed practices of listening, hearing, and sounding that
characterized Kaluli engagement with their rainforest environment in New Guinea
(and especially through ethno-ornithology). Methodologically, long-term participant
observation (usual amongst ethnologists and anthropologists) is used together with field
recordings for this approach. Steven Feld’s work was a turning point for ethnomusicology.
Along with classical ethnography methodology, Feld explained,
[I used] extensive playback of the recordings as soon as I made them [with stereo Nagra and
AKG studio microphones] and over long periods of time as a key methodology. I felt that
Methodologies, Sounds and Experiences in Cairo 757
not just being with people in sound but listening and talking about the recordings was an
important way to gain a sense of how to be an ethnographic listener.
I should mention also other prominent ethnographers, such as Ellen B. Basso (1985)
working on the Brazilian Kalapalo Amerindians, or Marina Roseman (1991) on the Senoi
of the Malaysian rainforest, connecting music and medicine, and Nicole Revel (1992) on
the Palawan (in the Philippines) on songs and birds, etc. Again, among Suyá in Amazonia,
Anthony Seeger (1987) reveals the centrality of the music phenomenon in a society and
how Suy singing creates euphoria out of silence, a village community out of a collection of
houses, a socialized adult out of a boy, and contributes to the formation of ideas about time,
space, and social identity.
Ethnomusicologists are not the only ones to practice field recording for the purpose of
analysing sonic data, but they are the ones who have the expertise and social legitimacy
to edit music – often marketed as world music and sold to the public. Many specialized
labels have been created to distribute these albums. Before that, field recordings were
used to analyse musical systems. Due to the existence of different schools of thought,
no universal or objective analytical system has been established (using the Western
system of notation or one fitting the local system, for example, is a dilemma); see, for
instance, the criticism of Alan Lomax’s method of cantometrics (1968) – intended for
universal comparison – by Steven Feld (1984), who rather insists on the local context of
performance.
Music phenomena beyond

ethnomusicology
Working out methodologies deployed for the second option – which does not focus on
‘the study of people making music’ (Titon 1992: xiv) but on people playing back and
listening to music – is uneasy as such works suffer from a common flaw when it comes to
writing, the usual lack of an explicit description of the methodology used: it is assumed
(and not necessarily erroneously) that the method, if not described, is the ‘regular’ one,
that of a participating and floating observation and semi-structured along a majority of
non-structured interviews conducted with an indefinite number of informants over a long
period of time during the fieldwork, with, in general, a command of the language used by
the social group in question (Figure 49.2). The intention here is obviously not to lay the
blame on the habits of a discipline; in fact, most of the time, I do not do otherwise and
often end up omitting the ‘materials and methods’ part of my research. Ethnology and
anthropology do not apply the most prominent norm for the organizational structure of
a scientific journal article, IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), for
valid reasons that will not be discussed here. Regarding the fields we are talking about, for
Figure 49.2 Workshop open on the street, al-Gamaliyya, Cairo, Egypt, 28 November
2016, 3.30 p.m. Photograph by Vincent Battesti.
instance, Nahid Siamdoust in ‘Tehran’s Soundscape as a Contested Public Sphere’ (2015)

deals with music (and not sound despite using the notion of soundscape): not the making
of music but the music consumption diffused in the public space through a small shop, a
taxi’s window, or new media technologies.
Most of the work on music, beyond ethnomusicology, uses classical field data collection
tools in which we cannot discern a methodology specific to the sound dimension, because
it is not necessarily the sound materials and sensory perceptions that are important to the
study. For example, the work of anthropologist Nicolas Puig (2010) on Egyptian wedding
musicians in Cairo deals with the social group of these relegated musicians and their
performance in street weddings.
Forgetting music for other sonic

phenomena
But what if we forget about music as a practice and keep it only as one tiny part of the
myriad of sonic experiences that inform everyday life? What if we are interested in the
broader spectrum of sounds that bathe our lives in order to expand beyond the notion
of ‘worldviews’ and address sensoria? Canonical ethnographic methodologies do not yet
exist, because these academic works that aim to cover the whole sonic dimension of a
social group remain scarce.
However, some works focus, in a very relevant way, on specific sonic phenomena
(other than music) or sonic devices. For instance, Patrick Eisenlohr (2018) provides an
account of the sonic dimensions of Islam in Mauritius, exploring how the voice, as a site
of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral
parts of religious traditions. For once, we have an explicit, though classic, account of the
methodology for addressing ‘the sonic incitement of sensations’ in Mauritian Islam:
In addition to recording these interviews and semi structured and open-ended conversations,
many of which took place in several sessions, I audio-recorded the performances I attended
and video-recorded some of them. I also collected a corpus of cassette and CD na‘t recordings
that were sold or otherwise distributed in Mauritius. And I participated in the regular social
life of several of my interlocutors and made visits to the homes of many others far beyond
the context of na‘t performances and other events connected to the genre.
(Eisenlohr 2018: 19–20)1
Eisenlohr’s audio recordings (which were either recorded by the author or acquired on the
market) do not seem to have been processed in any way other than by listening to them
with care through a linguistic analysis (and trying too to understand the desired qualities
of the voice). Charles Hirschkind (2006), before him, conducted a similar approach in
Cairo by focusing on the sermon tapes that circulate in the city and more importantly
are played in shops, taxis, etc. to offer an understanding of the ethics of listening and an
analysis of rhetorical styles. These are studies that focus on particular sonic phenomena.
The methodologies remain fairly classic, while at times resorting to sound recording and
listening to their own recordings and marketed tapes. To my knowledge, sounds are not
analysed from an acoustic angle either but, rather, the moral, political, and competitive
dimensions of public space are analysed from the perspective of the humanities. In a way,
sociologist Iman Farag’s work on the wide public debate in the press over the governmental
decision to replace the thousands of amplified muezzins by an automatic, synchronous,
and centralized broadcasting of recorded adhān, call to prayer, is not far from this kind of
research (Farag 2009).
Voice, both as a sonic phenomenon and a sonic device, has been an issue for sonic
researchers, beyond calling in linguistic expertise. Olivier Féraud (2010) (discussed below
in more detail), for instance, produced a noteworthy work on the local economy of sounds,
the voice on the one hand and firecrackers on the other hand, in a popular neighbourhood
of Naples, Italy. Jean-Jacques Luthi (1985) inventoried and transcribed and translated the
calls from street vendors in Cairo, Egypt. Noha Gamal Said (2014) did the same in Cairo
recently, extending the description beyond street vendors to all professions making calls in
public space. She used a classical methodology of observation in this work, illustrating it
with sonograms of the street (actually, just time and decibels).
Spectrograms, the visual representation of the spectrum of sound frequencies and volume
changing through time, are notably used by Julien Meyer (2015) in his complete worldwide
study of human whistled languages to demonstrate that whistled speech ‘is adapted to
the structure of each language, to specific traditional rural activities such as hunting or
shepherding, and to specific ecological milieus’. Paul-Louis Colon (2013) has produced a
precise ethnography of professional and amateur ornithologists and their listening skills
when observing birds in their environment. In this context as well, the sonic phenomenon
studied is narrow, the song of birds and its approach by humans, and the methodology
classical, but it allows him to access relevant parts of the mutual dependencies of the senses
and their ambiguities in our sensory models. The same can be said of Nicolas Puig’s (2017)
work on sound techniques (amplification, electro-acoustic effects, etc.) of urban rituals
in Cairo, or Vincent Andrisani’s (2010) on the ‘electrified soundscapes’ of Havana, Cuba,
and Vancouver, Canada, two distinct environments with differences in the social uses of
technology.
Another device that has interested researchers working on sound is the Walkman or
the mobile phone, which allow an urban, mobile person to build their own sound/musical
permeable bubble and to create a unique relationship with the city: for instance, the work
of Jean-Paul Thibaud (1994), Michael Bull (2004), and Anthony Pecqueux (2009a, b). Bull
and Pecqueux acknowledged the difficulty of such an ethnography of a sonic practice. Bull’s
methodology consisted primarily of in-depth, qualitative interviews with over one hundred
personal stereo users living in large British cities. Pecqueux deployed a sophisticated
methodology to circumvent the problem, based on the ‘commented walk method’ (Thibaud
2001), which I discuss more fully below. The solution chosen in order to follow the daily
musical journeys made by individuals belonging to a previously constituted sample is
described as the ‘method of (post-)commented journeys’: on a settled sample, the observer
conducts a micro-ethnography throughout the journey (as in a close tailing, he remains
about three metres behind the subject) mainly by taking notes and collecting in situ and
regular verbalizations of the respondents during ‘interview breaks’ about their listening
and their journey. These interruptions are infrequent, in order to minimize disruption
to the continuity of the route. In situ, the gestures are observed, then confirmed by the
respondent during the interview break; the music listened to is known, listed; the things
seen, heard, and felt are both observed by the researcher and revealed by the respondent
(Pecqueux 2009b: 57–58). While the observations made were able to highlight most of the
ordinary, routine reactions to sudden noise in the urban environment, verbalizations were
essential to account for the more complex interactions, and in particular to highlight the
operations of auditory selection of relevant sounds to be heard (Pecqueux 2009a).
We note, at this stage, that holistic approaches to all sound phenomena remain
insufficiently addressed. Sound has remained unexplored, because it has not been thought
of, or forgotten and excluded within the construction of modern humanities where sight
and visuals have until recently clearly prevailed (Figure 49.3).
No discipline for sound studies

If we deviate from ethnology and disciplinary approaches in general, suddenly, ethnologists
are not alone anymore. Today, a huge panel of researchers offer their multidisciplinary
approaches of the sonic dimension of our world, with urban planning, architectural,
psychological, geographical, historical, sociological (and so on) backgrounds. This
multidisciplinary galaxy focused on the sonic object is often labelled as sound studies. Their
Figure 49.3 In the street of Gamaliyya, Cairo, Egypt, 28 November 2016, 3.00 p.m.
Photograph by Vincent Battesti.
approach is radically different to disciplinary ones as they usually start with a question
requiring them to find their methodology rather than the other way around.
Jean-François Augoyard is a leading figure in the pioneering spirit of research in the
field of sound. Summarizing the work of this sociologist (and of the multidisciplinary lab,
the CRESSON, which he created) would be a difficult task: he has produced considerable
innovative work on the sonic issues of the urban world. He inscribed his work within
an architectural and urban planning school problematic. Inspired by micro-sociology, he
developed theories based on the difference between the space designed by urban planners
and the space experienced by city dwellers, and worked out notions and methods on the
everyday sonic phenomena. ‘In the research, when you’re stuck, you’re forced to innovate’
(Augoyard interviewed by Sevin and Voilmy 2009). First, he fully reversed the canonical
method of sociological inquiries in his field by letting people tell him what they wanted to
about urban spaces rather than by asking people to answer a questionnaire: ‘I’m not asking
you anything, I’ll come back in 15 days, in 15 days you’ll tell me where you walked [oral
account or diary]. What interests me most is how you walk. How is the city for you?’ (Sevin
and Voilmy 2009).
Augoyard coined an innovative methodology he called ‘reactivated listening’ (écoute
réactivée). It is a semi-in situ technique to collect data (even if Augoyard insists on its
innovative in situ feature in the field of urban development). ‘In short, it is about collecting
the reactions of residents or users who are made to hear the sounds of their own environment’
(Augoyard 2001). A sound recordist (possibly the researcher or a technician) records
various auditory scenes of the urban space under investigation and then makes a montage.
‘The objective is not to render with absolute fidelity the sound experience of others – which
is impossible – but to awaken it’ (Augoyard 2001). Two types of soundtracks proposed for
reactivated listening are distinguished. ‘The first is the local track, i.e. the one that evokes
an identifiable concrete place. The second, typologies of objects, spaces, or situations, is
composed of various forms chosen for their evocative capacity; such as a typical southern
market, a Lyon street, a Haussmannian building courtyard, a household vacuum cleaner’
(Augoyard 2001). ‘The important thing is what people would tell me in retrospect about
the journey or the sound sequences […]. It is not possible to render exactly one lived
experience, but with this method, we get closer to it because the respondents reactivate
all their experience’ (Augoyard interviewed by Sevin and Voilmy 2009). Augoyard fully
developed the possibilities of this survey methodology in ‘Entretien sur écoute réactivée’
(2001). His school has developed, along with interesting notions and tools such as the ‘sonic
effects’ (effets sonores) (Augoyard and Torgue 2006) – which can be seen as the coupling
of hard-acoustic with phenomenology – other methodologies that address a range of
urban sonic issues, such as the commented-walk method (Thibaud 2001). In short, the
commented-walk is an urban walk sound-recorded by the investigator and performed
alongside a respondent describing (while walking) the sound as well as their impressions
in situ.
Acknowledging that contemporary epistemology constantly affirms the impossibility of
a dominant position of the researcher vis-à-vis his object of study, on the one hand, and
certain that we can overcome a long tradition of Western philosophy that tends to oppose
the sensitive and the intelligible (in other words, certain that the sensible can be a driving
force for speech and the grounds for verbalization of local ambiances), on the other hand,
Jean-Paul Thibaud considers, with reference to phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
and to the ecology of perception (James J. Gibson), that it is now illusory to dissociate
perception from movement (personally, I am receptive to this idea of ‘movement as the
foundations of perception’). In concrete terms, multiple variations of this technique exist
and were already pointed out by Thibaud (2001). Sound studies practitioners took up the
idea and adapted it in their research (sometimes under the label ‘soundwalk’). Thibaud
presented this commented-walk method as an ‘open method’ (Thibaud 2001: 98), but there
is a definite general trend towards closure: closing the method and granting privilege to an
objectivist approach to data on phenomenology.
In this objectivist logic, Catherine Semidor (2006, 2007) suggests that methods of
‘soundwalks’ can do without informants: she records herself and analyses herself in her urban
journeys. Her soundwalks, inspired by The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch (1960), are
sound recordings made with a binaural system (SEB) and a DAT recorder, on walks along
a route with different urban forms. The different data (commented analysis of each track,
recordings, photos, map, etc.) extracted from the soundwalks are examined in order to gather
information about the relationship between the urban characteristics, urban activities and
the sound environment. The acoustical images (time versus frequency graphs) of the sound
signals can be seen as a representation of the soundscapes. The purpose of this approach
is to enable us to evaluate what is pleasant and relevant in an urban sound environment in
accordance with activities in the area.
(Semidor 2006)
Like many in this field of urban sound studies, Semidor also supports the usefulness of
this soundwalk method ‘to help urban planners and other town designers to improve the
outside acoustics in cities’ (Semidor 2006).
I will not review here all research work committed to improving (sonic) urban planning
using the ‘soundwalk’ as a method, but I will mention two or three articles that give an
overview of the state-of-the-art of the method and offer to further improve, not only its
technical efficiency but also its reproducibility, starting with Jin Yong Jeon, Joo Young
Hong, and Pyoung Jik Lee’s paper, to which reference can be made for a review of these
approaches (Jeon, Hong, and Lee 2013).
Soundwalks were developed starting in the 1970s by several pioneers in soundscape research
[They] have been conducted individually as well as in groups, [but] even when soundwalks
are performed individually, researchers accompany participants to mark evaluation
locations and audio-visual scenes on maps. […] Recent studies have mainly focused on
urban contexts including urban streets, residential areas, parks, and urban squares [and]
several [of them] planned soundwalk routes to include various types of urban spaces and
elements that contribute to the urban environment.
(Jeon, Hong, and Lee 2013: 803–804)
Jeon, Hong, and Lee’s study ‘proposes a soundwalk procedure that is applicable to the
evaluation of urban soundscapes’ in order to narrow the variability of factors that may
influence the results of soundwalks (Jeon, Hong, and Lee 2013: 804).
This whole article deals with acoustic studies or sound studies, not ethnographies.
It means that the sonic dimension revealed has a poor connection with the culture of
the studied social group. Moreover, these soundwalk methods are used in urban and
architecture studies to assess the soundscape qualities of the environment. This is not the
usual programme of ethnographies by anthropologists, more interested in understanding
how local people of the targeted social group deal with the sonic dimension in their
everyday lives. The nuance may appear slight, but it explains why a soundwalk, sometimes
determined by the researcher, based on a listening at ‘evaluation positions’ and survey
using a questionnaire to fill out (when respondents noticed any positive or negative
characteristics of the urban soundscape during that walk), remains disconnected from
their mundane experience of the sonic environment. To complete the survey, structured or
semi-structured interviews concerning soundscape elements such as soundmarks, keynote
sounds, preferred sound sources, contexts affecting soundscape perception, expectations,
and impressions of sites may be administered to participants (inspired of course by
Raymond Murray Schafer’s [(1977) 1994] work). Along the same lines, we can refer to
the ‘Positive Soundscape Project’ of the interdisciplinary team of William J. Davies et al.
(2013).
In the same vein as the methods developed for urban sound engineering, Julien Tardieu
and colleagues (2015) proposes a method to improve the method used by others, much as
Jeon, Hong, and Lee (2013) do for soundwalks. This time, the focus is on ex situ (laboratory)
listening tests to facilitate and improve or make less ‘subjective’ the choice of sound samples
that are played back to subjects. The samples mentioned are the soundtracks proposed for
reactivated listening by Augoyard (2001), to name but one. ‘A typical first step of most
studies involves collecting soundscape samples, which has one major limitation: it is a
selection from the scientist’s own representation of the urban soundscape being studied’
(Tardieu et al. 2015: 1). The tool is being improved, so that the protocol is worthwhile
in all situations, a tool detached from sociocultural contexts and their in-depth studies.
Three questions/situations are offered to online respondents: ‘imagine what you hear in
the city in this situation x’. This is followed by an analysis that groups words according
to semantic categories (‘deduced from the semantic links between the forms, grouped in
two macro categories: sound sources and human activities’) set ex post by the researchers.
‘These different distributions of sound sources and human activities can be used to guide
future soundscape recordings in the field […]. These results can also be used to guide the
selection of soundscapes samples either from a database […] or from a soundscape design
tool’ (5). To summarize, it is about making a sound recording (real or mounted) that most
closely resembles what should sound like an urban sound environment for respondents.
I am not further developing an exhaustive inventory of this type of work here, as the degree
of technical refinement and, above all, the objectives of which are of no real interest to the
questions raised by ethnological and anthropological research.
Psycholinguists finally took over Schafer’s work by revisiting the notions of sound
categories (Schafer forged and used etic categories whilst ethnologists are interested in
emic categories). These categorization issues are of great interest to ethnologists, and
particularly to ethno-ecologists (part of my own work pertains to ethnoecology, which
is interested in ‘ecology, perceived, experienced, practiced, by others’). Danièle Dubois,
Catherine Guastavino, and Manon Raimbault (2006) propose to ‘bridge the gap between
individual sensory experiences and sociological representations of soundscapes’, using the
psycholinguistic analysis which mediates between individual experiences and collective
representations shared in language and elaborated as knowledge. For that purpose, these
psycholinguists apply an ex situ methodology: they give subjects pre-recorded sounds to
hear.
In the following experiments, the acoustic stimuli were acoustic recordings of complex and
meaningful everyday sounds and environments, rather than a priori parameterised stimuli
as the ones involved in studying perceptual categories. We first present results of experiments
using recordings of isolated domestic sounds and recordings of actual urban soundscapes.
We then discuss the findings in terms of cognitive representations of environmental sounds.
(Dubois, Guastavino, and Raimbault 2006: 867)
This cognitive (but non-cognitivist) approach to urban soundscapes uses verbal data to
access everyday life auditory categories. Puig and I didn’t know about this study when we
published our paper presenting our methodology ‘Mics in the ear’ (see below). My ‘sound
postcards experiment’ differs, as I was offering informants pieces of the recorded urban
sonic environment to listen to. The different approach here has noteworthy results which
suggest ‘that the meaning attributed to sounds act as a determinant for sound quality
evaluations’ (Dubois, Guastavino, and Raimbault 2006: 865). Heuristically speaking, the
proposal deserves to be deepened and above all tested in real, ethnographic fieldwork. In
any case, this highlights the value of interdisciplinary avenues.
Figure 49.4 Part of a loud sound system unpacked for a birth celebration (subu‘), Bashtıˉl,
Cairo, Egypt, 18 November 2016, 4.30 p.m. Photograph by Vincent Battesti.
My criticism of those sound studies, as an anthropologist concerns the failure to take

into account the social and cultural dimension of experience. Many of these studies may
not mention the social space in which they are conducted (Figure 49.4): urban informants
are subjects of experience, in Taiwan, Los Angeles, Berlin, or Nairobi, it is the universality of
their psychological processes towards the sonic world that is the focus of the methodologies
deployed.
The global approach of the World

Soundscape Project
This chapter does not follow a chronological logic. I proceed by discussing the World
Soundscape Project and Raymond Murray Schafer’s work dealing with ‘soundscapes’
(Schafer [1977] 1994). Its history is well known, but I cannot afford not to mention some of
these fundamentals in order to position our own approach as ethnographers. These works
inevitably seduce us with their holistic approach to the sound environment. The concept of
‘soundscape’ is intended to conceive of the sound environment by integrating the listener’s
relationship (conscious or not) and the symbolic significance of sounds, especially those
of nature. Musician and environmentalist, Schafer’s pioneering work – contemporaneous
with Steven Feld’s – has had a considerable impact yet contains a range of ethnocentric
assumptions: natural sounds, for example, are presumed to be the object of a harmonious
orchestration (‘the harmony of the world’) that is superior to industrial sounds. His musical
analysis of a landscape structured by tonic and dynamic perspectives (keynote sounds,
signals sounds, soundmarks, etc.) drove him to propose ‘sound design’, understood as
the way ‘to improve the acoustic environment’. His melioristic perspective aims to reduce
‘unhealthy’ sounds or attempts to preserve others that are deemed characteristic of a
place or community (the famous Vancouver foghorn, for instance, see Schafer and World
Soundscape Project 1978). ‘Acoustic ecology’ (Truax 1978) is a direct result of Murray
Schafer’s World Soundscape Project.
An educational ambition to raise public awareness of the sound environment also led
Schafer to propose the first of the soundwalks. ‘Schafer’s method is often still used today
and typically involves a group of people being led around an area or along a route. Silence
is maintained for the duration – which may be as long as an hour – and impressions
of the entire soundscape discussed only at the end’ (Davies et al. 2013: 226). This is an
experiment that voluntarily places the subjects in a state of heightened sensibility to their
sound environment. In many respects, the work initiated in Vancouver by Schafer in the
early days of sound studies promotes a positive approach in the analysis of our sound
environments and analytical tools aimed at an unrecognized cultural universality.
Schafer and sound studies seem to represent a mix of disciplines: history, psychology,
acoustic, ecology, etc. My own approach is equally interdisciplinary; therefore, it is not an
issue I want to criticize. I believe cross-disciplinary analysis opens up new science frontiers.
In a chapter on ethnographic methodologies, however, I am hard put to acknowledge
sound studies to be ethnographic. These approaches are undoubtedly stimulating, and in
recent years there have been many attempts to address the issue of sound, especially in
urban contexts, to overcome the work on ‘noise’ when they were just broaching it in terms
of one-dimensional sound maps; that of decibels.
Methodologies for sonic ethnographies?

Anthropologists have the advantage over other researchers in that, through long-term
participant in situ observation, they have first-hand experience of the sensory lives
of the peoples they study. Participant observation also requires long-term training or
apprenticeship, which they should not play down or forget. The use of ethnographic
observation permits, on the one hand, the acquisition of background knowledge essential
for an understanding and analysis of the practices of daily life of a social group. On the
other hand, it represents a commitment by the researcher, an embodied apprenticeship of
the sensitivities at work, to the practice of decentring their sensory universe to learn that of
others, a new balance of the senses, the always arbitrary (I mean social and cultural) local
division of the senses and their practices, the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the
modalities of perception (Howes 1991: 3) and so forth.
With their fieldwork-proven methodology, do ethnologists explore all dimensions of
existence? Ethnographic works that focus clearly on – or seriously consider – the sonic
dimensions of existence with ad hoc methodologies are (still) rare. This does not mean that
no one is working on it. Many researchers are committed to an anthropology of the senses
– or a sensory anthropology as promoted by Sarah Pink (2009). For the time being, it is the
plurality of approaches that dominates this aspect of anthropology in fieldwork: cognitivist
approaches, use of empathy and the researcher’s body, field recordings.
I will not dwell at length on the many articles and books with pro-domo pleas that state
the importance of the ethnographies of the sensible: the methodologies invented and/or
used to ethnograph the sound dimension of existence are what interests me here.
Some anthropologists argue in favour of a quite radical shift in anthropology: a
cognitivist perspective (for instance, Wathelet and Candau 2013). This represents a
return to the laboratory to conduct experiments and collect data. I regard this, perhaps
mistakenly, as the consequence of a crisis of confidence in ethnographic data and/or an
overconfidence in the supposedly ‘objective’ and often quantitative data provided by a
laboratory experiment governed by positive science. David Howes’s criticism of Sarah
Pink’s position in a debate in the journal Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale seems
appropriate here:
By stating that anthropologists should look to neurology for ‘essential understandings of

sensory perception and experience’, Pink makes it clear that any indigenous ideas about
perception must play second fiddle to the ‘essential’ pronouncements of the neurologists.
While I think that dialogue between anthropologists and neurologists can be informative
for both sides (indeed, anthropologists might be able to tell neurologists something about
how culture tunes the neurons), it is important to keep in mind that neuroscience is itself
a product of culture in its particular research aims, methods and interpretations, and
therefore cannot provide an a-cultural, a-historical paradigm for understanding cultural
phenomena.
(David Howes in Pink and Howes 2010: 335)
Even advocates of cognitive approaches such as Dubois, Guastavino, and Raimbault cool
their ardour stating that ‘the recent cognitivist approach to audition has remained within
the same experimental paradigm, focusing mainly on low-level perceptual features rather
than semantic features resulting from identification and categorisation processes’ (Dubois,
Guastavino, and Raimbault 2006).
Sarah Pink, in attempting to reformulate the anthropology of senses (founded by David
Howes), argues for a sensuous ethnography. In the great debates that anthropology has
been experiencing in recent years, this is one of the issues up in the air, and many people are
trying to operationalize it (but, let us be clear, not necessarily on sound issues). For instance,
Paul Stoller speaks highly of fieldwork through sensuous experience and the ‘importance
of understanding the “sensuous epistemologies” of many non-Western societies so that we
can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach
us about human experience in general’ (Stoller 1997).
Indeed, original approaches have been proposed to deepen the classic ethnographic
methodology: among others, through empathy (Sayeux 2010) and the body (Jackson
2006). In the field on music and dance, a fieldworker’s body can very voluntarily become
a tool of knowledge (this is always the case in the field, but not always in a conscious and
claimed fashion). Evangelos Chrysagis and Panas Karampampas emphasize
the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter and the forms of sociality that gradually
emerge between self and other. Researchers’ immersion in sonic events and the flow of
movement induces bodily responses that render fieldwork an intensely visceral experience.
By employing their bodies as tools of research, ethnographers find themselves in spaces
of sonic and kinetic intimacy and reciprocity with their informants, which articulate what
Rouch called ‘shared anthropology’ (anthropologie partagée) (2003).
(Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017: 3)
It is the case, for instance, of Phil Jackson, who offers a ‘sensual ethnography’ of the clubbing
world:
I started with the notion of ‘presence’ specific to the methodology of participant observation,
but I modified this methodology a little bit so that it sounds more like a ‘participant sensation’.
The first step was to let my feelings run free in order to situate myself in the social space
under investigation. So, I danced, flirted, used drugs and alcohol, spent nights with friends
and strangers. For the first three months, I didn’t ask any questions; I just learned to practice
clubbing.
(Jackson 2006: 95–96)
The basis of Jackson’s ‘sensual anthropology’ represents: ‘the ability to feel, share and
understand with empathy the sensations and feelings of the people around us without
imposing a pre-existing theoretical framework’ (Jackson 2006: 96). The word is out:
empathy. I mentioned above the usual difficult issue of reflexivity that ethnographers
encounter when collecting data during fieldwork, the real ‘black box’ of the discipline
(Battesti and Puig 2006). Pink expresses the same assessment:
I was often disappointed to find how little other ethnographers (whose work demonstrates
so well the significance of the senses in culture and society) have written about the processes
through which they came to these understandings. In this vein, I would urge contemporary
ethnographers of the senses to be more explicit about the ways of experiencing and knowing
that become central to their ethnographies, […] to acknowledge the processes through
which their sensory knowing has become academic knowledge.
(Pink 2009: 2)
I have previously tried to explain the general use of empathy, always in use, consciously or
not (except for hardliner ethno-methodologists) (Battesti 2006: 168). Similar to Phil Jackson,
Anne-Sophie Sayeux made use of her body experience to understand how one is feeling about
electronic music, developing the idea of the ‘body-ear’ (corps-oreille) (Sayeux 2010: 230).
If I have advocated to take into account the use of empathy, use we make anyway, and
finally frame it methodologically, I retain a certain mistrust on its heuristic qualities if
empathy is to become the phenomenological alpha and omega of a fieldwork methodology,
on the sensory as on other fields. As Howes pointed out, ‘by universalising the subjective
sensations of the individual, phenomenology ignores the extent to which perception is a
cultural construct’ (Howes in Pink and Howes 2010: 335).
Whatever the methodology used in ethnographies, the aim is always the same:
approaching as much as possible an adequate description of how people live, experience,
practice, in our case, the sonic dimension of (a part of) their lives. Agata Stanisz, through
‘audioethnography’, opens up a new perspective to do fieldwork. She puts into practice
audioethnography with truck drivers working for Western European freight companies
who inhabit the cabs of their tractor units. It is field recording as a tool, her goal being
to describe through sound the daily life of this occupational group: ‘In the case of my
studies, doing ethnographic research through sound means listening, recording, editing
registered sounds and, with their help, developing acoustic representations of not so much
the drivers’ community, but rather their activities, events which they co-created and took
part in’ (Stanisz 2017b: 58–59). In my opinion, this method is particularly well suited to
research on an occupational group.
Field recording must be understood as one of the research methods of sonic ethnography
and a way to create alternative representations of fieldwork knowledge. Application of
field recording in ethnographic research makes it possible [to] track down social patterns,
connections between collective emotions, auditory practices and social structures, which
usually remain hidden and faded out in textual representations. Doing field recordings
also allows the researcher to experience anthropological fieldwork in a more sensuous and
immersive way. Field recording as an ethnographic practice focuses on extra-musical and
extra-verbal sounds. It is a sort of deep listening: listening with particular attention.
(Stanisz 2017a: 1)
‘What about ethnography in and through sound?’, the question that Steven Feld has
constantly repeated (Feld and Brenneis 2004). Feld not only worked to understand the
sound and aural universe of the Kaluli, but used and edited his field recordings of Kaluli
daily life on LPs (and actually on radio programmes on National Public Radio [NPR],
using multitrack recording and musique concrète compositional techniques) to continue
his ethnological reflection, documentation, and demonstration, since his first LP Music
of the Kaluli in 1982. Inspired by Jean Rouch, Feld introduced what he called ‘dialogic
editing’, playback and feedback with the local community. The continuators of his
approach – ‘to have the sound raise the question about the indexicality of voice and place,
to provoke you to hear sound making as place making’ (Feld in Feld and Brenneis 2004:
465) – can be found in quite different fields of ethnography. Nadja Monnet and Maribel
Tovar, for instance, depict an ethnological portrait of an urban space, the central square
of Barcelona (the square of Catalonia), through photographs and sound recordings.
Photographs and sound ambiances have been ‘truly converted into working tools and
sources of reflection, which have enabled us to build the ethnography of this square’
(Monnet and Tovar 2006: 5). This is done through a distancing from the sound material
itself: it is no longer the devotion to the most faithful sound recording of the reality,
nor a calculation of the best sampling to submit it to a panel of experimental subjects:
‘The photographic and sound registers that we have created have not been considered as
mimetic productions of the reality, but rather as traces thereof. Like ethnographic text,
they are constructed objects’ (5).
Olivier Féraud’s ethnography on the sonic environments in a popular neighbourhood of

Naples expresses a clear statement:
Field recording was a central practice during the case study, the whole methodology
developed around it. Field recording is not only justified by the fact that we are interested
in sound, it is not only a ‘sampling’ tool. It constitutes the methodological pivot of sonic
anthropology […] because it allows, by considering the positioning of the sound recordist,
to reflect the relationships that are established in a sonic dimension between individuals in
their environment.
(Féraud 2010: 243–244)
It is to his credit that he dedicated an entire chapter of his PhD thesis to his methodology.
Along with participant observation, he placed, for his own work documentation, his
microphones at particular ‘points of listening’ (as we have particular ‘points of view’, see
Chion 1985), the actors’ point of auditory reception: from the window of a building where
women hear the call of the street vendor, for example. For the collection of discourses, which
is the third level of his ethnographic methodology, he used field recordings and played
them back to people from the very same neighbourhood or from other neighbourhoods,
allowing for socially situated feedback and to develop his research problematic. He also
used the commented-walk methodology together with ‘situated interviews’, interviews in a
context of listening with the inhabitants.
In those cases, working on sound with sound, a challenging but effective project,
makes perfect sense. It should be mentioned that there are cases of ethnographies whose
fieldwork dictates the default method: Mohamad Hafeda used the pretext of exploring
sonic material to examine notions of division, connection, and negotiation between and
within contested sectarian communities in Beirut, and especially on the borderline between
two adjacent neighbourhoods divided along the Sunni–Shiite sectarian. He collected the
street sounds from inside taxis he used to get around and from walking journeys in the
two neighbourhoods, including voices and sounds overheard from inside shops as well
as those collected outside and on pavements and streets. ‘This research method responds
to the previously found site sensitivities defined by the prohibition of photography and
the difficulty of site accessibility due to security and surveillance performed by formal
political/militia groups in both neighborhoods’ (Hafeda 2011: 32).
Tentative ethnographic research in Cairo

for a comprehensive sonic dimension
For the methodological overview of possible approaches to the sonic dimensions of
existence, this chapter does not aim to list exhaustively ethnographies on sonic dimensions
but, rather, to display some notes on part of my readings that can contribute to explain the
methodologies I chose and tested (while sometimes they were then unknown to me) and
their a-historic phylogeny.
Perhaps I need to clarify why it is necessary to use alternative methodologies to the

canons of ethnography to examine this relationship to the sonic dimensions of existence,
beyond that congenital deafness of the discipline. In our field, in a word: verbalization.
For those who are not familiar with the working methods of fieldwork anthropologists, let
us keep in mind that the customary method is, in addition to – or through – participant
observation, interviewing (clearly distinguished from the questionnaire). The purpose
of the experimental procedure I undertook in Cairo (Figure 49.5) was to obtain verbal
descriptions of the acoustic experiences of city dwellers of diverse social and residential
backgrounds. This endeavour poses a particular methodological challenge in the field
of sensory studies. An ethnography of local acoustic ambiances, received and produced
in Cairo, becomes possible when these are treated as ‘social productions’ (Battesti 2009).
Research in sensory studies and sound studies has demonstrated the need for precise
observations of this neglected dimension of our relationship – which is always first sensory
– to our social and ecological environment. While an analytical grid has been proposed
(Battesti 2009, 2013) for understanding the different ways of relating to this sound matter
– deliberately repeating and modifying the framework proposed by Steven Feld (1984) –
no satisfactory tools have yet been devised or perfected that would allow us to overcome
the obstacle that the weak verbalization that most of our sensory activities represent.
Without a discourse to build on, ethnographers find themselves at a loss. Even keeping my
distance from linguistic determinism (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) which assumes that
‘we conceive a universe that the language has already patterned’ (Benveniste 1966: 6), the
fact remains that I have to consider semantic distinctions and inbuilt ontologies within the
language: obviously, language affects the ways we conceptualize our world, our worldview,
or world hearing as it may be. We need verbalization.
Figure 49.5 Promenade on a bridge over the Nile, Downtown, Cairo, Egypt, 3 November
2016, 5.00 p.m. Photograph by Vincent Battesti.
Studies on sound perception suggest that this mechanism most often operates almost
unconsciously. This is widely verified in the sensory domain: the retroactive loops between
perception and sensation, very fast (almost synchronous), are most often unconscious,
probably avoiding a cognitive overload. Is it the unconscious nature of the mechanism
of sound perceptions that explains why they are weakly able to be voiced? This may not
always be the case. At any rate, in Cairo, the few words spontaneously used to talk about
this sonic dimension give it its evanescent quality: sonic ambiances are a central dimension
of urban life – they teach us about long-term and situated participant observation, a
‘thickly-textured thorough’, in the few but central words of David Howes. To say more than
‘the ambiance is good’ (al-gaw halū) is rare and difficult for urban actors in public spaces;
the judgements tend to be summed up in mere polarized hedonistic terms. The difficulty
is real to verbalize. ‘The atmosphere is good. There you go.’ This relationship between
urbanites and the sonic dimensions of their city, one of the objectives of this research, is
largely unspeakable for the actors themselves, which is not the least of the difficulties of this
ethnographic study.
How to work on the sound dimension? How to design the ‘satisfactory tool’ to
make people talk? These ‘how’ questions depend of course, once again, on the ‘what’ and
the ‘why’. The ‘what’ and ‘why’ said in few words is the everyday relationship Cairo people
have with an essential but scholarly underestimated sonic dimension of the city, varying
with the neighbourhoods, received and produced, highlighting also the relationships
between the inhabitants of Cairo. The overall sonic dimension of the city – that was thick
and present to the outsiders we were – rather than the effects of a sonic device or a special
situation: the everyday life. I, and when the ethnologist Nicolas Puig fortunately supported
me in this project, we aimed to get as close as possible to the local daily experience. I
confessed at the beginning of this chapter that I had unfortunately not established the
complete methodological state of the art in the field of sound studies, a quick overview in
ethnology had not revealed many things to me. So, everything was to be invented. Let’s
evoke two of these trial and error experiments with ethnographic methods.
The aural postcard experiment

To bypass the apparent difficulty of verbalization, I first tried the ‘aural postcard
experiment’, a kind of ‘reactivated listening’ (Augoyard 2001). I used sound ambiances
that I had recorded in different neighbourhoods and situations. The informants had
to comment on the recordings while listening to them on headphones. The experience
showed that the inhabitants of Cairo are able to determine – if not always specific to the
neighbourhood – the type (and therefore a categorization) of neighbourhoods offered for
listening based on the sonic ambiances I had recorded for playback. However, to objectify
their answer, I made them justify themselves, the subjects of the experiment highlighted
some characteristic sounds, some ‘soundmarks’. Listening to a lively evening in the city
centre, towards Azbakiyya, it was the density of repeated hits from the horn of car traffic
or the cry of newspaper merchants (‘al-Ahram, al-Akhbar, al-Gumhuriyya!’); listening to a
shopping street (sūq) in the popular Fatimid district of Darb al-Ahmar, it was the rubbing
in the dust of the šibšib (sandals) and the familiar address of the merchants or greetings
between acquaintances (which sign territories where mutual acquaintance prevails, unlike
the places of anonymous walks downtown). Some sounds can clearly signal an urban space:
the cry of merchants, for example. Nonetheless, this ‘aural postcard experiment’ remained
steeped in my culture, as I choose what to record selecting the orientation of the mic (and
therefore the ‘frame’), I choose the sounding object or situation recorded, I choose when
to press the ‘record’ and ‘stop’ buttons of my minidisc and then my Zoom H4n (a digital
portable recording device), the day and the moment, and so on. This means that I was
creating a kind of sound montage of the sounds I was giving to hear, a montage embedded
in my culture. And the difficulty of capturing the other’s intimate experience of a sonic city
persists: it has to be seized in situ and by the people concerned.
The mics in the ears experiment

To get at least a set of local descriptors and local, emic categorizations of this sonic material
in which Cairo is immersed, a terminological survey seems unavoidable. It was the first
purpose of this procedure, the ‘mics in the ears’, Nicolas Puig and I set up. We opted for
field recording made in situ by the people of Cairo (Battesti and Puig 2016). So, we opted
for informants walking in the street through their neighbourhood with a sound recorder.
Our approach, nonetheless, was radically different from the soundwalks previously
mentioned and different too from the commented-walk method (Thibaud 2001). We asked
local people we chose to perform one of their very daily walks, interacting as usual with
their environment, but equipped with binaural mics: they were to forget they were wearing
mics and not to focus on the recording aspect but on their usual business. A commented-
walk method – an informant walking and the investigator recording the sounds and the
informant’s impressions – would have been too artificial and would have missed the very
everyday interactions of the informant with their socioecological environment. Binaural
mics in an informant’s ears record the most possible intimate exposure to sound ambiance
during a routine alone trip. We used stereo binaural microphones/earphones (Roland),
small enough to fit inside the ears (like intra-aural headphones), along with a digital
recorder and a GPS device. We asked the respondents to take a daily walk route in their
neighbourhood – during their commute from home to work, or while shopping in local
stores, etc. – for a duration of 20–30 minutes, alone (without us anthropologists) with this
non-intrusive equipment. This method does not record a ‘soundscape’. This technique is
a unique and personal experiment and gives unique and personal results, specific to an
informant and a space-time: not an objective or unbiased recording, as even the shape of
the informant’s head plays a role (the shape of the nose and ears, or the use or not of a veil
by women, etc.), the informant’s attitude in public space, whether they bend their head,
greet people, turn their head to talk or to react to sound, smell, contact, and visual stimuli
– especially because while walking, their environment is changing. But still, only sounds
reaching the informant’s ears are recorded, not what this informant is listening to.
The soundtrack was then replayed on the headphones by the informant, with us, and the
binaural’s 3D sound reproduction (and its spatial of psychoacoustic quality) used to trigger
off verbalization, the precious data all anthropologists are looking for. ‘Re-immersed’,
informants are brought back into their own actions, movements, and displacements in their
neighbourhood. They relive their routine trip in the city, and we record their comments:
‘Please, tell us what do you hear?’ Within this approach, what participants perceived as
negative or positive acoustic elements is not an end in itself (to build a better city, etc.).
What motivates anthropologists performing such an ethnography is not noise mapping,
or ‘to enhance and design urban soundscapes from urban planning levels’ (Jeon, Hong,
and Lee 2013: 806) – actually a kind of hygienist paradigm or agenda – but to increase
their knowledge of how social groups or a society works, deals with its environment, or
participates in it.
The GPS device that the informant was equipped with on their walk helped us to check
the route the informant took afterward, and accompanying the transcribed comments, it
helped us to spot the threshold effects, when ‘entering’ a ḥāra (sub-neighbourhood, alley),
entering a shopping street, home, a new ambiance, etc. After listening to the recording, we
had a further brief talk with the informant to deepen some topics.2
Conclusion
To conclude, we have explored other possibilities in our tentative ethnographic
methodologies, such as work with blind people in Cairo, which took place while
Florian Grond and Piet Devos (2016) were exploring the same path (but with a slightly
different purpose) in Canada. Furthermore, other researchers have highlighted the
heuristics of sensory impairment (Keating and Hadder 2010). I would like to emphasize
the necessity to not forget that working on the sonic dimension of the world and of our
existence is an arbitrary cut-out: in Western sensorium, we tie ‘sonic’ to ‘auditory’, but
the ‘auditory’ modality is surely embedded in multisensory practices and competences.
To go back to an uneasy multisensory ethnography that explores the multiplicity of
sensorialities, as Puig did along with his team in Beirut (Kassatly et al. 2016), seems to
me unavoidable.
Notes
1. The word na’t is a Urdu term referring to poetry in praise of the prophet Muhammad,
which is usually said in Arab-speaking contexts as madḥī or madḥī nabawī.
2. This chapter devoted to methodologies is not the place to provide our results – they are
stimulating, by the way. The methodology and initial results (Battesti and Puig 2016) and
then the main part of the analysis have been published along with the raw and analysed
data (Battesti and Puig 2020).
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50
Podcast Preservation and the
Noise of Saved Sounds
Jeremy Wade Morris
Most popular press histories of podcasting reference 2004 as the year the format came
into its own. This was the year Ben Hammersely inadvertently coined the term, and a year
before the New Oxford American Dictionary voted it as the ‘word of the year’ for 2005.
Although many academics studying podcasting might dispute this origin point – there were
audioblogging services in the early 2000s and other podcast-like web audio experiments as
far back as the early 1990s (Sterne et al. 2008; Bottomley 2020) – the coining of the term in
2004 seems to overshadow the lineage of these prototypical podcasts.
Imagine my excitement, then, when I stumbled across what I thought was a rare and
early podcast from July 1970. I found the audio file in a large-scale database/collection of
podcasts my colleagues and I have been building since 2014. Called PodcastRE – short
for Podcast Research and found at http://podcastre.org – the database aims to provide
a searchable, researchable, and preservable collection of podcasts for the study and
exploration of audio culture. We were analysing the date ranges of the nearly 2.5 million
episodes our database houses, and the 1970 data point stuck out. What is more, there are
nine other podcasts that seem to have started that same month. This early flurry seems
to have stopped immediately after 1970, though, and is followed by a lengthy hiatus; the
database shows no further podcasts until 1977, when, in March, there’s evidence of another
feed going live. There’s another one in 1979 and another in 1985, and the ensuing decades
show the publication of close to another few dozen podcasts, all before Hammersely had
even coined the term.
Of course, after examining the files more closely, our initial excitement over our
momentous discovery of these historical podcasts was quickly dashed. Though the
metadata clearly lists the publication dates, the 1970 ‘podcasts’ in question appear to be from
Earwolf productions, the comedy podcasting network formed in 2010 by Scott Aukerman
and Jeff Ullrich. Playing the audio files reveals that they are all 30-second advertisements
encouraging listeners to sign up for Stitcher Premium – a podcast distribution service –
in order to access archives of popular Earwolf shows such as Cracked Movie Club, James
Bonding, and Never Not Funny. The other ‘early’ shows – those from 1977, 1979, and
through the 1980s and 1990s – appear to come from various BBC Radio 4 shows, such
as Desert Island Discs, The Reith Lectures, or In Our Time with Melvin Bragg. Unlike the
Earwolf/Stitcher advertisements, which could only have come after 2010, the BBC podcasts
are rebroadcasts of old interviews and recorded conversations that presumably aired on
radio shows during those dates but were made available as podcasts over the last decade.
Unless we stretch our definition of podcasting far enough to include general public radio
broadcasts in the 1970s, then unfortunately the hunt for the earliest ever podcast is still on.
These are just two of many oddities we’ve come across building and researching our
database of podcasts, and they speak to much bigger questions about audio preservation
and sonic methodologies more broadly. Many of the challenges we have faced are common
to all kinds of digital data collection and preservation, as Lisa Gitelman so accurately
describes in her discovery of the ‘Internet of 1854’ (Gitelman 2006: 123). However,
audio files in general, and podcasts in particular, present a very particular and acute set
of challenges that undermine our assumptions about studying and saving sonic culture.
Accordingly, this chapter looks at the difficulties and opportunities podcasts represent for
studying the longer history of audio, and at some of the sonic methodologies podcasts
make possible. Wrapped in RSS feeds, XML files, and ID3tags, podcasts and other forms of
digital audio create a series of traces that offer new possibilities for the automated collection
of audio files and their accompanying metadata. New sonic analysis tools (frequency
analysis, waveform display, audio fingerprinting, etc.) also bring new digital means of
analysing and studying sound. But audio still remains mystifyingly difficult to preserve in
ways that also make it searchable, analysable, and useable. Qualitative audio analysis, for
example, still has to be done in real time (or longer) and quantitative methods still largely
rely on analysing audio after it has been transcribed into text, often stripping digital audio
of its most important component: the sound itself. Inconsistent metadata standards across
podcast producers and the major distribution platforms as well as changing technologies
for delivering podcasts stifle both the ability to study podcasts and initiatives to preserve
them.
Using the case of the PodcastRE database, I argue that the development of new
sonic methodologies is crucial for researchers to capitalize on the wealth of insight and
information available in the booming audio culture emerging around podcasting. There
are certainly advantages to the affordances provided by digital formats (i.e. metadata,
automated collection, elaborate tools for the visualization of sound waves, etc.) but I argue
we still need to foreground sound itself in our methods and audio collections. Developing
sonic methodologies in conjunction with more traditional/typical digital methodologies
for sound and audio archives will expand the utility of sound databases and will also help
alleviate the problems that accompany the primacy of the visual (Sterne 2003; Hilmes
2005) afforded to most archives. Approaching sound archives and objects sonically, instead
of just visually or textually, offers new perspectives and paths for research, since, as Tara
Rodgers notes, ‘vibrations – including that specific class of audible vibrations experienced
as sound – present alternative ways of apprehending reality that can point to political
sensibilities that emphasize complexity, interconnection and interdependence rather than
modes of distancing and control’ (Rodgers 2018: 234). Placing sound at the forefront, not
Podcast Preservation and the Noise of Saved Sounds 781
just of media artefacts we need to save but as a method for analysing that which we have
saved, gives us a new mode for approaching archives and databases, as well as the sonic
ephemera that lies within them.
Building a database for sonic study

Podcasting represents a significant addition to the collective repository of sound and audio
culture. While music recordings, radio broadcasts, oral histories, and soundscapes have
been the primary forms of audio in archives, collections, and libraries that scholars and
everyday users have turned to in their attempts to explore sounds of the past (and present),
the proliferation of technologies allowing everyday users to make, record, and distribute
audio via podcasts has resulted in a proliferation of sonic artefacts. In 2015 there were over
525,000 podcast feeds and close to 18.5 million individual episodes in over 100 languages
on the iTunes store alone (Locker 2018). Factoring in the last four years of exponential
growth in feeds and episodes, as well as numbers from other aggregation and distribution
sites, such as Podbean, Anchor, Soundcloud, Google Podcasts, and Spotify, pushes those
numbers up even further. Podcasting has grown steadily over the last fifteen years, and
while it may not generate the total number of listeners that traditional broadcasting does,
nor does it draw the influx of ‘users’ that most social media companies hope to garner,
there now exists a substantial body of sound recordings that are publicly and widely
available, with a healthy number of listeners listening to them: 37 per cent of Americans
listen to podcasts monthly, according to Edison Research (2020). This explosion in audio
activity has led to a general consensus in the popular press in the last few years that we are
currently experiencing a ‘Golden Age of Podcasts’ (Blattberg 2014; Roose 2014; Sillesen
2014); a moment where the choice for quality digital audio abounds, and where new voices
and new listeners connect daily through earbuds, car stereos, or office computers.
We know from earlier media ‘golden ages’, however, that excitement over new
technologies, styles, and techniques does not necessarily translate to long-term preservation
and care of the media content produced during those ‘golden ages’. A huge amount of
US silent films, early television broadcasts and radio recordings, for example, have been
lost or destroyed. Although podcasting is far newer than these legacy media and although
podcasts are currently relatively ubiquitous and available, this alone does not ensure they
will always be so. Podcasts may not face the same preservation risks as, say, decaying old
radio tape reels, celluloid film stock, or misplaced transcription discs, but they face their
own kinds of vulnerability (podcast feeds go dead, audio files get improperly stored or
migrated, once ‘free’ episodes get put behind paywalls, etc.). Given podcasting’s ability to
allow for near-instant and constant commentary on current social, cultural, and political
events, the sounds emerging from the format provide a wealth of insight for cultural critics
(Berry 2006, 2016; Hilmes 2013; McHugh 2016). Because today’s podcasts are part of the
format’s infant years, they are also inherently historical; their content, like other media
we use to shape our understanding of history, gives a glimpse into current trends, ideas,
and ideologies and their format tells industrial and political economic stories about the
evolution of audio technology.
Despite the potential the sounds of podcasting represent for researchers of media and
culture, there are few institutional repositories or collections that enable their study and
analysis. The Internet Archive has an impressively robust collection of podcast episodes,
though the user-generated nature of the collection means the interface is not necessarily
built with media researchers in mind, with limited details about the sounds and shows and
ability to search within specific shows or episodes. There are a few library-based initiatives
to archive podcasts and present them in a researchable collection – the Library of Congress,
for example, is earmarking a small subset of shows for long-term preservation – but these
are developing slowly and haphazardly. There are, of course, large personal or community
collections of podcasts available via the internet, though these tend to be show-specific and
highly fan or listener driven and are often hard to locate.
Even if there were large collections of podcasts available, though, the tools for analysing
sound remain difficult to use or highly expensive. Whereas there are a host of accessible
services that cater to textual and visual data (Word Clouds, N-Gram, Google Image Search,
etc.), there has not been similar innovation of sonic analysis tools. There are a number
of good transcription tools for helping to turn audio into text, and tools for mining the
metadata that comes via podcasts and their RSS feeds, but these generally limit users to
studying textual or visual representations of metadata.
The PodcastRE database aims to address some of these needs and gaps, though the very
process of building the database highlights some of the difficulties audio in general and
podcasting specifically poses for saving and studying sonic culture. The database began as
a small and simple affair in 2014 – a personal collection of podcasts in an iTunes database
– but has grown into a much more complex and robust podcast preservation effort that
now holds over 100 terabytes of data, across a dozen hard drives and relies on dozens of
python scripts to fetch and sort podcasts on a daily basis. The collection now indexes over
2.5 million podcasts from nearly 15,000 feeds, along with metadata and audio files for the
majority of those episodes.
I have detailed elsewhere some of the challenges my team and I have faced in both
defining the very object we are trying to collect and the larger curatorial questions of what
to save and what to ignore (Morris, Hansen, and Hoyt 2019). These are, of course, questions
that face anyone who endeavours to create a collection, database, or archive, particularly
with digital artefacts. As web objects, podcasts are sonic media and digital artefacts. They
exist online as sound files that can be downloaded to some kind of physical form (stored on
a computer, mobile device, or hard drive), but they also exist as a part of a wider assemblage
of artefacts that often include a website, show notes, production files, thumbnail images,
and the context that comes with how they are presented in the various podcast aggregator
apps and software they appear. If one’s goal is to archive and preserve podcasts, then this
goal is immediately complicated by the question of what, exactly, is a podcast. Is it simply
the audio file? Is it the audio file plus its accompanying metadata, which provide contextual
clues about the object? Is it the audio file, the metadata, and the supplemental website the
producers built to host the show? The list of possible questions goes on.
These seem like relatively simple questions, but each decision affects how a researcher
or archivist will approach the process of preservation, which in turn affects the kinds of
sonic methodologies that can be developed. Building a database of audio files is one task;
building a database that somehow preserves those audio files as well as all the features
of the websites that helped deliver those files is another matter. Each of these options
will also give researchers different kinds of objects and data to incorporate into their
methodologies. Stepanyan et al. (2012), looking at the blurry boundaries of blogs, raise
similar questions (i.e. should we preserve just the text of the entries? The comments? The
internal dashboard? etc.). They conclude that any preservation effort requires identifying
the ‘significant properties’ of an object, though debate over what counts as ‘significant’ for
any resource or artefact will likely persist among the various stakeholders and communities
who want to access and use the preserved resources.
Beyond the difficulties of accounting for the ‘significant’ elements of any digital object,
any effort to archive or database podcasts is also challenged by the fact that, as natively
digital web objects, podcasts suffer from the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the
web itself (Brügger 2009). As Mél Hogan argues, ‘The web constantly overwrites itself,
but unlike the palimpsest, past iterations are cached in layers rather than made visible
underneath current iterations, if at all retrievable’ (Hogan 2015: 20). Not only do podcast
feeds suffer from the same kinds of link rot that other webpages do, the various platforms
that host podcasts also go through changes and iterations that can affect the ability to locate
a particular file or show. Several of the podcasts in our databases have multiple entries,
each with a different RSS feed, indicating either personal or institutional changes in terms
of who is producing or hosting the podcast. The hit Australian Podcast Science Vs., for
example, has had three different RSS feeds over the course of its lifespan, each indicating
different hosting locations and production arrangements (i.e. the move from the public
Australian Broadcasting Corporation to the podcasting network Gimlet Media):
1 http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:154052752/sounds.rss
2 http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/sciencevs/feed/8604304/podcast.xml
3 http://feeds.gimletmedia.com/sciencevs.
There are also hundreds of shows in our database that have changed their title, yet kept the
same RSS feed, whether that be for clearer marketing purposes (e.g. Sleep With Me’s change
in subtitle from Sleep With Me: Helps You Fall Asleep Via Silly Boring Bedtime Stories to
Sleep With Me: The Podcast That Puts You To Sleep) or more fundamental changes to the
name and content (e.g. The Ethnic Revolution’s switch to MK on the Mic while maintaining
the same RSS feed URL). These slight variations in title matter little for the everyday
listener. Presumably, fans who enjoyed The Ethnic Revolution would also enjoy the show
that replaced it in the RSS feed given that it is from the same producer and covers the same
subject. However, for researchers interested in tracking podcasts over time, these minor
changes in title or RSS feed location create issues for preservation and documentation. This
becomes even more true as podcast producers and distributors shift to models that rely
more heavily on streaming than on downloading, thus making the original audio files or a
fixed URL even harder to obtain.
Further, the reality that not every text, film, radio broadcast, tweet, etc. can be saved
means that choices need to be made and that someone – be it an organization, an individual,
a state or federal institution, etc. – needs to decide what should be saved and what criteria
will govern the choices for what is saved and what is not. Archivists and librarians are well
versed in the strategies for dealing with these kinds of questions, even if their answers
still involve debates over ‘significance’, resources, formats, availability, space, rationale, and
need. Media scholars who build or acquire their own personal collections of media usually
do so with much narrower goals in mind: to facilitate research on a particular set of texts,
films, radio broadcasts, tweets, etc. and sometimes saving them to return to the data in
question. This is not to say media scholars are ignorant of the above questions and issues
facing librarians and archivists, but that often, media collections are a means to an end,
rather than the end in and of itself. We are, in other words, accidental archivists (Gold
2008); our research data can become accidental archives.
PodcastRE has tried to address the issues of ‘defining the object’ by bringing in the
audio files of various podcasts, but also by saving the web links and links to extraneous
material associated with the preserved shows. It may not capture the entirety of the podcast
experience for users (i.e. how podcasts appear in podcasting apps and aggregators), nor
does it preserve the many companion materials that go along with a show (though it
does link to the original sites so long as they are maintained), but it brings in a significant
amount of contextual data around the various entities in the database. We have also
developed a curation strategy that lets us capture the most popular and discussed podcasts
through the automated collection of top-ranked podcasts in iTunes across various regions
and we actively seek out more amateur, marginalized, and vulnerable content through our
extended network of researchers and through the general ‘submit a podcast’ link feature
on the site.
As with other digital humanities projects (see, for example, projects described in
Burdick et al. 2012; Schreibman et al. 2016; and Berry and Fagerjord 2017), PodcastRE
allows for basic keyword searches across a number of fields (e.g. show and episode title,
show and episode description, producer, etc.) as well as more advanced, faceted searches
that allow users to specify one or multiple keywords over a specific date range or across
a specific attribute (e.g. author, description, podcast source). We have also created
some visualization tools that allow for graphic representations of data. For example,
users can create a word cloud of a particular keyword search, with the surrounding
words representing the words that most frequently show up alongside that keyword in
descriptions. Users can also graph the occurrence of keywords in the dataset over time
and compare multiple keywords.
While these tools provide a more robust research interface for studying podcasts than
many of the currently available options, they are still highly visual and textual: they rely on
text from metadata, transcripts, and XML files in order to present their results. As far as
sonic methodologies go, they help us study sound, but they don’t use sound to study. Take
a transcription for example. Transcription errors aside, transcriptions generally provide
an excellent ability to search through an audio file much quicker than sitting through the
entire audio file. So, if one was to search for the keyword ‘Shenzhen’ in the This American
Life episode ‘Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory’, they could quickly find multiple points
when the narrator, Mike Daisey, references the Chinese town of Shenzhen, which he visited
in order to see where many Apple products are made in the city’s teeming factories. But
relying solely on the transcript strips the audio of some of its most essential elements: pace,
tone, pauses, sentiment, and emotion. For example, in the follow-up episode, ‘Retraction’,
where This American Life host Ira Glass is pressing Daisey on the reasons why he fabricated
elements of the story about his visits to the factories in Schengen and why he lied to This
American Life producers, the transcript utterly fails to communicate Glass’s frustration,
Daisey’s floundering, and the extremely long, awkward, and telling pause between that
takes place between question and answer. An automated transcript might simply look like
this:
Ira Glass: And, and at that point you could have come back to us and said ‘oh no no no I
didn’t meet these workers, you know, this is just something I inserted in the monologue
based on things I had read and things I had heard in Hong Kong’ um, but instead you lied
further […]. Why not just tell us what really happened at that point?
Mike Daisey: I think I was terrified.
Ira Glass: Of what?
Mike Daisey: That […] I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work,
that I know is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making
people care, that it would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything.
A more accurate transcription taking into account the non-verbal utterances and emotional
cues might instead look like this:
Ira Glass: And, and at that point you could have come back to us and said ‘oh no no no I
didn’t meet these workers, you know, this is just something I inserted in the monologue
based on things I had read and things I had heard in Hong Kong’ um, but instead you lied
further […]. Why not just tell us what really happened at that point?
[long pause]
[long pause]
Mike Daisey: I think I was terrified. [breathing, uneasily, exasperated]
Ira Glass: Of what?
[long pause]
[long pause]
Mike Daisey: – That—
[long pause]
[…]
[…]
Mike Daisey: I think I was terrified that if I untied these things, that the work, that I know
is really good, and tells a story, that does these really great things for making people care,
that it would come apart in a way where, where it would ruin everything.
While automated transcriptions enable new ways to search through large quantities of
audio files, they also impose a particular understanding of sound, one that centres the
dialogue or the transcribe-able content at the expense of the sound’s greater meaning,
significance, or impact, as well as any of the important sound cues and sonic design.
Relying on standard textual and visual tools also means relying heavily on the metadata
that podcasts offer. Many digital humanities projects involve the collection and ordering
of a significant amount of metadata – information about information – around particular
objects. I have detailed elsewhere some of the challenges we have faced with PodcastRE
in terms of the various kinds of metadata that accompany the audio files for any podcast
(Morris, Hansen, and Hoyt 2019). Podcasts are troublesome objects in some sense because
there are multiple sources for metadata. There’s the information that comes embedded in
the files themselves, usually in the form of ID3 tags (e.g. title, author, date, duration, genre).
Each podcast also has metadata in the RSS feed, which usually includes fields for the show
title, URL, description, and creator. Since most podcasts contain many separate episodes,
the RSS feed has data at the show level as well as at the episode level. Podcasts, then, are a
combination of file and feed metadata; sometimes these data match, other times they do
not. Additionally, with the exception of some automated fields, this metadata needs to be
intentionally produced by the show’s creator or the platform that hosts these shows. RSS
and ID3 tags may have certain customs (i.e. the producer’s name should go in the ‘author’
field), there’s no guarantee that these fields will be used or interpreted the same by various
producers.
Returning to the ‘early’ podcasts at the start of this chapter, for example, is instructive. The
Earwolf shows from ‘1970’ are dated as such because in iTunes and other feed aggregators,
the oldest shows appear first in the feed so that if users subscribe to a new show, they can
begin with its earliest episode. The Earwolf advertisements are meant to drive users to
the paid, premium Stitcher service, so dating the shows ‘1970’ allows Earwolf to ensure
the advertisements for Stitcher will always be the first thing users hear when they subscribe
to new Earwolf shows. In other words, Earwolf engineered the metadata to support the
commercial aims of their podcast network responsible for producing the content.
The BBC podcasts, on the other hand, seem to present a more honest conundrum. The
interviews and shows they were re-airing originally aired during the dates they listed, 1977,
1979, etc. As a national public broadcaster, the BBC holds huge archives and by rereleasing
these archives in new formats (iPlayer, Podcasts, etc.), they meet their public mission to
make culture and history available for its listener-public. The RSS standard, however, does
not offer the nuance between an ‘original air date’ versus an ‘uploaded as podcast’ date.
‘Publication Date’ in this case, can be either the date the recording originally aired, or
the date the BBC exported the recording as an mp3 and uploaded it to iTunes, and this
decision is wholly at the whim of the producer in question.
So, while RSS is a technical standard – and as a standard it technically shapes and
defines what information is included and excluded in the description of audio files such as
podcasts – this does not necessarily mean there is a standard way that podcast producers
encode the details of their feeds. It is also a standard that originated before podcasts. It
was originally a standard for blogging and a way to push textual content from websites
to feed readers such as Google Reader or NetNewsWire. It was only later that users and
programmers figured out how to enclose audio files within RSS feeds. Although there have
been additions and builds to the capabilities of RSS through the various podcast XML
namespaces Apple, Google, and others have developed (Morris, Hansen, and Hoyt 2019),
it is hardly a standard designed with the needs of today’s librarians or preservationists in

mind. The development of RSS was driven by the needs of a relatively small and likely
homogenous group of bloggers and tech enthusiasts in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It
was not meant for, nor did it envision, the potential needs of the various communities
making and studying podcasts nearly two decades later. But as with other standards, its
impact persists in its continued use; it continues to be a major infrastructural component
of the podcasting ecosystem.
Listening to audio databases

As useful as transcriptions, advanced keyword searches, word clouds, and other kinds of
textual and metadata tools may be, they do not capture the musical or sonic aspects of
podcasts, which may contain data or experiences of data that scholars might find useful. As
Tanya Clement notes, most audio analysis tools ‘are designed to leverage human-generated
transcripts and metadata and do not provide any means for analyzing the audio itself ’
(Clement et al. 2014: 2). Clement’s research, along with a number of other ‘sonically-
attuned digital humanists’ (Clement 2016a, b; Foka and Arvidsson 2016; MacArthur
2016; Mustazza, forthcoming) represent some of the few concerted efforts to build usable,
accessible tools for audio analysis, even if they require a bit of learning and a healthy
technological infrastructure to support their implementation. The overall lack of tools,
however, has meant that ‘humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies
for analyzing large, messy sound archives’ (Clement and McLaughlin 2016), as well as the
specific cultural markers one might find in those archives, be it a database of podcasts or a
collection of old poetry recordings.
Rather than textual tools that seek to turn audio into text or that visualize metadata,
there is an emerging set of visual tools that focus more centrally on audio as an object to
be mined in its own right. At the most basic level, most audio editing software programs
provide visuals of soundwaves and, with practice, one can learn to read these visuals for
various sonic characteristics. For example, examining the ‘thickness’ of soundwaves can
be an indication of the relative level of production levels that go into a podcast. The two
soundwaves in Figure 50.1 show different levels of polish and finish. The first is from the
StartUp podcast – a highly edited and professionally produced podcast from Gimlet Media,
that takes care to record with good microphones and employs mixers and masterers to
polish the finished audio file. The resulting audio file is highly compressed and normalized
and thus looks ‘thicker’. The second sound wave shows a more independent and lo-fi
podcast – an interview podcast that is recorded much more informally in coffee shops
and restaurants with presumably one microphone on the table in between the host and
the guest(s). The finished file is sparingly edited and mastered upon export, giving it a
much ‘thinner’ resulting sound wave. An analysis such as this across a much larger number
of podcasts or segments of shows might give an indication as to the level of professional
versus amateur podcasts in a certain corpus or genre or category, and whether or not the
Figure 50.1 Two sound waves from different podcasts, indicating different levels of
production, editing, and mastering for each.
rise in professionally produced podcasts has crowded out shows with lower production
values. While this is still a more visual analysis than a sonic one, unlike transcripts, it
focuses researchers on the sounds embedded in the audio file, not just the speech.
Similarly, many audio editing software programs also provide spectral and frequency
analysis of sound files, meaning that researchers can look for similar patterns, pitches,
and noises that recur throughout sound files. Patrick Sullivan (2017) uses such tools to
examine the sound effects library used in Hanna-Barbera’s animated productions between
1957 and 1985, using a process he calls ‘distant listening’ to explore the ‘rich texture of
the sonic register of the studio’s output’ and to question the ‘deep formal rhythm’ that
structures the sounds of the early cartoons. Given the difficulty in ‘transcribing’ cartoon
sound effects, or in creating useful metadata visualizations, Sullivan’s project shows how
visual representations of sound can turn us towards specific sonic elements of a particular
sample of audio files. A similar type of analysis might be employed to analyse, for example,
the formal elements of podcasts; looking at spectrograms could help researchers identify
different sections of a podcast such as the introductions or advert breaks, or even to compare
the sonic characteristics of various podcast networks (i.e. Gimlet, Audible, Earwolf, etc.).
When Neil Verma (2018) discusses Audible’s ‘house sound’, for example, there might be
ways to track this quantitatively as well as qualitatively.
New audio frequency analysis tools are also emerging that make the study of pitch and
frequency more user-friendly and accessible. Tools such as Gentle and Drift allow users to
create ‘aligned’ transcripts of audio files – a transcript where the words dynamically link
to the audio in the file – and track frequency changes in the voice over the duration of
the audio clip (MacArthur et al. 2018). Looking at the pitch and frequency characteristics
of ‘poet voice’ across a series of poetry recordings, Marit MacArthur and her colleagues
argue that their method ‘in some sense, […] slows down speech by giving us new ways
(new to literary study, anyway) to think about our perceptions of it’ (MacArthur, Zellou,
and Miller 2018: 69). Although Drift has largely been used for poetry and other short
recordings, frequency analysis could easily apply to a number of different kinds of audio
files (for instance, podcasts). For example, frequency analysis may provide a first-pass look
at a large swath of audio files to help direct attention to the kinds of speakers hosting
podcasts. Generally, adult male voices tend to have lower frequencies that feature a
fundamental frequency range of about 85 to 180 hertz, while adult female voices fall in
the 165 to 255 hertz range. Although the human voice is incredibly fluid and measures like
this would obviously miss nuances of voices that fall along a broader spectrum of gender,
tools such as Drift might allow us to test assumptions about how many podcasts within a
certain subset are hosted by men or by women, or how many different speakers appear in
a particular show. Frequency analysis is not, in and of itself, sufficient for answering these
questions, but its mode of distant listening can direct closer listening to specific shows,
episodes, or moments. Mertens, Hoyt, and Morris (forthcoming) use a similar strategy
to measure the variation in pitch among different categories of podcasts and find that, for
example, sports and talk podcasts feature more frequency variation than traditional news-
based podcasts. Mertens argues that news podcasts often employ what has been called an
‘NPR voice’ – the concerted use of looser language, generous pauses, and controlled but
emphatic inflection to create a professional but personal vocal performance – and this
has led to a disadvantaging of speakers with a wider natural frequency range who do not
conform to these sonic ideals.
There are also ‘audio fingerprinting’ technologies which allow for the identification and
comparison of sounds across a larger subset of audio. Unfortunately, most of these tools
are proprietary and highly cost-prohibitive for researchers, like those employed by private
companies such as Shazam or Gracenote. Open source or more cost-efficient versions of
such software, for instance AcoustID, however, could help researchers find trends across
shows and episodes by listening for similar sonic cues, sound effects, or music samples and
by using these results to help support their aesthetic or industrial analyses of the audio in
question.
These more sound-focused tools are, admittedly, still nascent and they often require
technical resources or specialized knowledge of particular software programs, making
their widespread adoption in media and cultural studies, or other disciplines, not currently
feasible. They do, however, speak to new ways of privileging sound in our methods. Sonic
methodologies should, by their very nature, require researchers to engage with the sound
itself and make use of the affordances of audio to provide a different kind of analysis than
might otherwise be possible. This is not to suggest that these tools should replace close
listening; in fact, in most cases, they work better as supplements to close listening. But
sonic methodologies should open up the kinds of questions we can ask about audio, and
thus about the role of sound in exploring and understanding media and culture.
Sonic methodologies from sound

collections
The ‘early’ Earwolf and BBC podcasts from the 1970s are now, like most media, historical
documents. They can tell us about particular moments in time and give us clues to what
might have been happening culturally, industrially, or technologically at those moments.
The Earwolf advertisements, for example, point us to stories about the rise of podcast
networks, the tug of war between free digital content and monetization through paywalls
and premium services, as well as the role comedy podcasts have played in raising the
profile of podcasting more generally. The BBC podcasts are doubly historical; they trace
a moment in the mid-2010s when it became possible to share culture from the 1970s in a
different format.
These examples also remind us that any archive or database for the study of large-scale
artefacts or phenomenon is always as much an exploration of the archive/database in
question as it is of the artefacts/phenomenon. As Hogan argues, ‘The archive is less about
reality, and more about contrived conjecture’ (Hogan 2015: 13) since the archive must
always be as much a site of inquiry itself as it is a platform for primary research (Stoler
2009). The process of building sound archives and collections is fraught with decisions
that will eventually affect the way users and researchers make use of the sounds within
that collection. This is partly why Hogan argues that ‘in a technological landscape with
ubiquitous recording and disseminating, the crux of the archive could become about what
is forgotten, erased, thrown out, deleted and never there’ (Hogan 2015: 14). A 30-second
advertisement from Earwolf directing users to sign up for their premium service is, by
most accounts, highly forgettable and deletable. But its metadata aberration, its presence
in our database remains.
Ultimately, the conclusions we can draw from PodcastRE are limited by its inclusions
and exclusions. In other words, the work researchers are able to do with the database
depend on what the automated scripts and researchers working on it have decided
to collect and not collect and on what the programmers and developers have been able to
build (or not) as features for search and analysis. While we’ve made significant efforts to
capture a representative sample of podcasting culture, and to provide useful tools for their
analysis, there will always be omissions. Many of the earliest podcasts from the mid-2000s,
for example, are already lost or unfindable. Their producers did not bother to save them,
or did not have the knowledge, foresight, or the resources to do so. They may not have
realized that just by the sheer fact they were taking part in a format’s infancy, they were
also, inadvertently, making history. Similarly, today’s podcasts are at risk of becoming
inaccessible to researchers less because of issues of ageing formats or obsolescence – though
these are certainly issues – and more because the sheer ubiquity and availability of podcasts
lull us into thinking that our access to this booming sonic culture will always be thus. As
Hogan argues, there is a lack of archival understanding about what makes digital content
valuable ‘not because digital content is without worth, but because we still do not know
how to collectively assign it to content outside of a scarcity/capitalist model, or how best

to organize large amounts of data within a framework that is about more than the moment
of search’ (Hogan 2015: 13). It is difficult to create a sense of urgency around preserving
something that is seen as both mundane and ubiquitous, and how to allow for the analysis
of such artefacts that go beyond present-day issues and concerns.
All histories of digital objects are, to some extent, marked by their absences – by what
cannot be captured in a dynamic and often-changing environment of code, objects, pages,
sites, and spheres (Brügger 2009). Audio is especially hard to save and study because there
are so few tools to enable these kinds of activities, but also because we rarely think of
what sound might add to our research and about how it might document affect, power,
and the intimacy of human voices and sounds differently than other media. We sorely
need more collections that house and feature audio, and that make audio not just playable
but researchable and analysable. For sonic methodologies to develop, we need sound
collections that enable new ways to explore, work, and play with audio and new ways to
focus on which voices are being amplified through new media, and which others remain
silenced. Developing more robust sonic analysis tools helps place sound at the forefront of
our methods and opens up new affordances through which to study modalities of culture
that are much more difficult to grasp using traditional textual and visual methodologies.
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794
51
The Earview as a Border
Epistemology: An Analytical and
Pedagogical Proposition for Design
Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira
One of the main ideas I deal with in my research is that design, both as a field of study and
a set of material practices, privileges modern, colonial, and colonizing histories and stories
of listening. This privileging, embedded in the affordances of designed artefacts, validates
and perpetuates the hierarchization of bodies as well as the relegation of certain bodies
to a state of otherness within and beyond the auditory space. I use the term ‘auditory
space’ here to refer to the sets of actions, performances, materials, and means which shape
and are shaped by experiences of bodily engagement with vibrations. That I use the term
‘auditory’ rather than ‘acoustic’ is not at all arbitrary; rather, I understand that the spaces
of negotiation amongst bodies and phenomena imply different (and uneven by design)
agencies and performances. The design of an auditory space implies delegating, assigning,
and codifying of different agencies over sonic phenomena. I understand the auditory space
to be a transient space, constituted by different engagements and levels of said engagements
among vibrations – not constrained by those perceived by the ear – bodies – not predicated
by the ability to hear – and their performances within said space.
Design is to be understood as an inherent condition of being human and as such
interacting – in different forms and with different agencies – with the materiality of lived
and living phenomena. In that sense my thinking is much aligned with scholar Anne-Marie
Willis, who argues for an understanding of design as an ontological force. For her, design
inevitably engages with four different aspects of mattering, that is, (1) the object itself; (2)
the process through which this material object comes into being; (3) the agency of those
implicated in this endeavour; and (4) the consequences of said endeavour to society (Willis
2006). ‘There is never a beginning or end of design’, Willis contends, because ‘once the
comfortable fiction of an originary human agent evaporates, the inscriptive power of the
designed is revealed and stands naked’ (Willis 2006: 95). Thus design is a set of ontological
actions which may, but not necessarily must, include designing as it is usually understood;
as such, this ontological force is inextricably implicated on configuring the world, and
this configuring extends well beyond and much before the industrial production of
artefacts. In other words, design is implicated in what informs our human condition as
such, and cannot be anything but product and producer of contingent material practices.
Concomitantly, design acts on the tension between different stories of listening, of bodily
and material engagements with sound; it shapes and produces the auditory space and its
power relationships. This entanglement is what I have named the earview.1
The coalescing of a visual marker – view – with an apparatus that performs
hearing – the ear takes inspiration from the theory of the gaze, much discussed both
in race studies and feminist scholarship.2 The gaze is produced not only by patriarchal
but also by racist ideas and ideals towards othered bodies; in an analysis of ‘human
zoos’ – from the early twentieth century to 2005 Augsburg, Germany – scholar Obioma
Nnaemeka describes how the separation between colonizers and colonized – slave owners
and African enslaved peoples – was deliberately fostered by the European subject so as to
produce enough distance for establishing a ‘viewpoint’ of the black body as alien, deprived
of humanity. ‘The Europeans’, she writes, ‘are not interested in what the Africans “think”
(they are not credited with the capacity to think/reason) but “on what they do” and “how
they look”’ (Nnaemeka 2005: 95). The European gaze directly evokes the coloniality of
looking, the notion that certain bodies are made to be looked at from a distance that
vouches for their dehumanization.
The idea of the gaze makes it clear that who looks matters. For the earview, it matters
who listens, and who defines what and how is to be listened to. While seemingly trivial, the
coalescing of these ideas into a concept such as this is a useful analytical tool for design,
because it re-centres the field’s concern towards not only what design designs but also the
scope of actions, engagements, and performances that emerge from the act of designing,
including those that shape and form the auditory space. Instead of simply transposing the
gaze, then, I use the term earview to demonstrate the narratives conveyed and sustained
by an engagement with and around designed objects and systems – that is, their sonic
affordances. The earview understands sonic affordances as a process of listening forward as
well as backward, projected to the listened phenomena and towards the enunciator of the
listening act. This multidirectional process highlights the co-constitutive aspect of sonic
affordances – and thus configures the earview as a plural entity, composed of phenomena
at the borders of what can be understood as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ – though never
regarding them as fundamentally disconnected or separated from one another. I began a
rough outline of the earview in a past publication (Vieira de Oliveira 2016); yet this idea
deserves to be further unravelled to encompass what design designs back into the auditory
space, and how it does so.
The earview can be thought of as the amalgamation and negotiation of three aspects:
first, a rupture with Eurocentric notions of listening as the idealized and quasi-spiritual
counterpoint to seeing, albeit not eschewing subjectivity in favour of a modern/enlightened
rationalization of listening but instead accounting for other forms of ‘objectivity’ that
break from modern and colonial histories of audition. Secondly, a bodily engagement
with the sonic affordances of designed artefacts, systems, procedures, and spaces – and the
narratives they convey. Third, personal, idiosyncratic, and situated forms of storytelling
Earview as a Border Epistemology 797
that emerge from experiences of listening, never divorcing them from their role in co-
constituting reality. These aspects are not separate but rather always take place interrelated
to one another; therefore, in outlining them in text, overlaps may occur.
Alternative modernities yield alternative

histories of audition
Jonathan Sterne has famously argued that the canonical and almost dogmatic separation
of the aural from the visual, ear from eye, as well as their dichotomous, binary oppositional
framework configures a form of ideology that constrains studies into aural culture to the
position of the ‘other’ of the visual. Sterne calls this framework the ‘audiovisual litany’; for
him, the litany relies on physical and psychological oppositions to build ‘a cultural theory
of the senses’ (Sterne 2003: 15). Within the ‘audiovisual litany’, the separation between the
ear and the eye as sensory dichotomies flattens the understanding of listening and hearing
as being practices of a similar nature – an assumption that, he maintains, is erroneous at
best. For him, listening is ‘a directed, learned activity […] not simply reducible to hearing’
(19). From the moment the ear is trained into rationalizing acoustic phenomena, listening
becomes a technique of hearing, a ‘set of practical orientations’ (93) that manage and
instrumentalize the auditory space.
While for Sterne listening should be considered as much a fundamental constitutive
of modernity as vision, his consideration relies on the discourse of a technicized, rational
objectivity. His focus on a single history of listening in modernity is a constraint of his own
research and properly acknowledged as such – by focusing on what he names the ‘hearing
elites’, who are able to produce enough historical (i.e. technical-scientific) documentation
to sustain his research (Sterne 2003: 28). In that sense, Sterne inevitably sanctions certain
practices of listening – and the bodies that convey them – in detriment of other bodies that
inevitably fall outside these (white, male-centric, Anglo/European) elites; in understanding
that such technological ‘audile techniques’ are enacted solely within the confines of the
colonial/modern framework, Sterne limits the very notion of what audile techniques might
in fact be to the privatization and capitalization of the acoustic space qua narratives of
development and progress.
Colombian sound scholar Ana María Ochoa Gautier provides an insight on alternative
histories of audition happening within alternative modernities. Focusing on nineteenth-
century, colonial Colombia, she thoroughly engages with entangled yet oftentimes
conflicting listening modes across different modernities. For her, aurality ‘is central to the
constitution of ideas about Latin American nature and culture [and] also imply different
ecologies of acoustics’ (Gautier 2014: 75). In one of her case studies, she compares
different historical testimonies of the sounds produced by the bogas – boat rowers that
transported contraband along the Magdalena River. For European ‘explorers’3 such as
Alexander von Humboldt, colonial/modern audile techniques were used to privilege
sounds understood as ‘from the nature’ and in turn dismiss the conversations from
his (racialized) subalterns. However, he would waive such auditory techniques when
certain conversations could potentially offer him insights into ‘traditional knowledge’
(68). In writing about the bogas, he would describe their sounds as ‘barbarous, lustful,
ululating and angry shouting, which is sometimes like a lament and sometimes joyful’
(von Humboldt quoted in Gautier 2014: 32) or resemble them to the howling of dogs.
Similarly, other colonial travellers were seemingly ‘shocked’ by the bogas’ ‘lack of
civilization’ and ‘blasphemous’ practices of praying simultaneously to Catholic saints,
Afro-Caribbean entities, and ‘many more of their own invention’ (Cochrane quoted in
Gautier 2014: 38) in a mishmash of Spanish, Latin, ‘Lengua Franca’ and other indigenous
languages (Holton quoted in Gautier 2014: 39).
Often engaging in such a syncretism that is as religious as it is linguistic, the sounds of
the bogas, Ochoa Gautier argues, are ‘a remix practice that also involve[s] vocables and the
acoustic incorporation of the sounds of natural entities around them, all in the rhythmic
regularity of vocalization for labor that involve[s] repetitive movement’ (Gautier 2014: 41).
In understanding the bogas’ chantings and vocalizations as structured, learned techniques
of (aural) navigation and communication with both human and nonhuman entities,
Ochoa Gautier subverts the dehumanizing logic of the colonial European ear to reposition
the bogas as the centre of an ‘audile technique’ that has in ‘envoicing […] multiplicity’, that
is, mimicking and speaking different languages, both human and nonhuman, a powerful
mode of ‘transformational […] becoming’ (65). In other words, she envisions this form
of nonhuman embodiment to be a conscious, objective technique, a mode of social/
interspecies communication, which understands every human and animal language and
voice to be a potentiality in and by itself rather than the reductionist, racialized view of
a ‘lower condition of animality’ (63). It is a form of redistribution of acoustic perception
to different corporealities and materialities of sound which defy and often negate the
hegemonic, colonial/modern ear.
Sonic affordances
Listening is a subjective, yet cogent mode of attending to the world. A methodological
proposition such as Lydia French’s ‘differential listening’ helps re-frame listening outside
of its constraining, rational logics of ‘technique’. Her writing calls for distinct accounts of
listening – those that move beyond instrumental hearing and as such refrain from a direct
connection with the supposed empirical materialism of auditory phenomena. Drawing
tangentially from Chela Sandoval’s ‘differential oppositional consciousness’, French argues
for a positioned and situated research endeavour that is able to encompass alternative,
plural modes of listening; these modes reconfigure the scope of what we acknowledge as
‘real’, for they are a form of a ‘border epistemology that understands temporal movement
differently’ (French 2014), one which displaces memory and affect by making use of sound
reproduction technologies. In other words, she calls for a decolonizing mode of listening
that embraces the ambiguity of sound reproduction, and its capability of disconnecting
time and event, thus positioned at the constant becoming of the present. A subjective
and interiorized method of listening – clairaudience – is a method for breaking with the
‘interior/exterior’ separation fostered by traditional histories of listening constrained to
the artefacts they enact and are enacted from – in other words, Sterne’s ‘audile techniques’.
The methodology proposed by French acknowledges sound reproduction technologies
to possess the ability to cast memories that are intrinsically bound to their political and
cultural loci. More than that, she argues that from the moment these technologies actualize
said memories in the now of the listening experience, they also displace them in time.
Past and future are reconstructed from the present by clairaudient hearings of othered
voices or, in her words, by ‘alternative histories [which] live in the transitive play between
sounds clairaudiently remembered and those reproduced through sonic media’ (French
2014). In applying a differential listening approach, one is able to pinpoint differences and
dissonances between one’s own positionality and that which is actualized in the materiality
of listening. This mode of listening is thus constantly reconfiguring sonic reality as a space
inherently plural and ambiguous, one which accommodates both dominant practices –
albeit stripping them down from their dominative aspect – and their ‘outcast’ counterparts,
equating both to the same discursive and epistemological relevance. French’s subjectivities
possess, perform, and negotiate distinct agencies within sonic phenomena rather than
conforming to a place of silent (or silenced) otherness.
In regarding Sterne’s histories of listening-for as being histories of highly specialized
techniques, French directly interrogates contemporary practices of ‘pure listening’ or
‘better hearing’ by technological delegation. These practices, she maintains, seek to ‘render
the machine’s noise as ancillary and exterior to faithful sonic reproduction’ (French 2014)
with the desire to accommodate to normative soundscapes, and thus authorizes certain
practices in detriment of others. For her, the search for familiarity (an expanded notion of
fidelity) in listening is also reproduced in social relations that emerge out of these practices,
as a way to cast out the ‘peripheral noise’ of otherness. She contends that Sterne’s history
of listening in modernity is but a history among many, and a practice that is oppositional
and transformative should listen-for non-universalizing ways of hearing that challenges
dominant discourses of what is said to be heard. Thus, a ‘differential listening’ practice
seeks to identify these prevalent discourses of listening and dismantle them; or, in her
words, to ‘[denaturalise] the historical trajectory of the ideological premises on which
fidelity is founded, suggesting that there may exist alternative histories of audition in the
age of sonic reproduction’ (French 2014).
Border thinking
To think of sound and listening beyond the framework of coloniality is an exercise in border
thinking. As both a place from where one inquires as it is a form of counter-hegemonic
epistemology, border thinking relies on the idea of the borderlands as a transitional space
with no fixed point of origin. Walter Mignolo proposes border thinking as ‘not a matter of
“thinking the other” but rather, the “other thinking”’ (Mignolo quoted in Kalantidou and
Fry 2014: 173). For him, it is a way to ‘think otherwise’ that does not necessarily connect
or refer back to Greek, French, British, or German ontologies and epistemologies; rather,
it refers to the ‘colonial wounds’ that emerge from the erased subjectivities of subaltern
bodies and the knowledge that was left in the aftermath of colonization (Mignolo 2000:
66–69).
The image of the border, which Mignolo draws his concept from, has its genesis
in a direct encounter with the borderlands as a transient and contradictory space.
Latina feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa writes from the perspective of a border subject
herself. First published in 1987, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza is an active
call for the decolonization of knowledge, spirit, and the self, exactly by seeing them as
inextricably related, an entanglement of bodily knowledge, political identity, and ancestral
reconciliation. For Anzaldúa, the border is not only the metaphor of how knowledge is
positioned but also its very physical location. As a Tejana – that is, a person whose ancestry
comes from Mexican instead of US-American Texas – Anzaldúa did not move over
borders but had the borders moved around her (Anzaldúa 2007: 28; Mignolo 2000: 72).
In articulating her own multiple identities – queer, indigenous, Mexican, US American,
Chicana – her thinking is inevitably displaced into multiple perceptions of reality, ‘forced
to live in the interface […] to become adept at switching modes’ (Anzaldúa 2007: 59).
Anzaldúa reminds us that a ‘border culture’ determines the places that ‘distinguish us from
them’ (25); there is little we can do but to turn this border culture on its head, and use
the border as the locus of our enunciation. If the modern/colonial reality categorizes her
very existence into a dichotomous narrative, her method for emancipation is to nurture
a tolerance for the ambiguous and the contradictory (101). Border subjects ‘cambian en
punto de referencia […] locating her/himself in this border lugar [the Borderlands she
speaks of and from], tearing apart and then rebuilding the place itself ’ (Anzaldúa 2015:
49).4 They are thus forced to think of the world through dichotomous philosophies, not
opposing them directly nor dwelling on either side, but rather navigating with and within
their very differences (Mignolo 2000: 85).
Thinking from the border is a not a replacement of the dominant discourses of enunciation
with subaltern ones, for this would subscribe to the same logic that governs epistemological
colonialism (Kalantidou and Fry 2014). Instead, it is a promotion of alternatives that must
be situated and ever ‘universally marginal, fragmentary and unachieved’ (Mignolo 2000:
68). To be able to think beyond the subject–object dualism, to act on this ‘saber’, is what
Anzaldúa calls a ‘conocimiento’ (Anzaldúa 2015: 119) – or in Mignolo’s words, border
thinking. Moreover, border thinking assumes the locus of thinking – where one thinks
from – as an important point of departure; a place of ontological design that is never fixed
(Kalantidou and Fry 2014: 6). The ability to balance epistemologies by mapping them
to their ontological loci allows one to listen to the cracks and pops that lie between and
underneath them, and, from there, extract new ways of knowing and sensing the world. A
border enunciation experiences reality through multiple perspectives, shifting from one to
the other while never exactly fully departing from them (Anzaldúa 2015: 127).
Mignolo proposes then, based on Maghreb philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi’s ‘an other
thinking’ (pensée-autre), a double form of critique (akin to, for example, W. E. B. DuBois’s
‘double consciousness’) seeking to emancipate its perspective from both Western and non-
Western thought, belonging instead to the border itself. It is exactly this negotiation of
different forms, that is, how they cannot be compared to one another nor cancel each other
out but rather be seen as juxtapositions – what Mignolo (2000: 84) calls an ‘irreducible
difference’ that paves the way for a decolonization of Western logocentrism. Similarly,
Anzaldúa reminds us that ‘it’s not enough to denounce the culture’s old account – you
must provide narratives that embody alternative potentials […] we need a more expansive
conocimiento. The new stories must partially come from outside the system of ruling
powers’ (Anzaldúa 2015: 140).
The earview understands the locus of auditory enunciation as a site of confrontational
orientations; on the one hand, the predominance of an auditory culture embedded
in material and discursive practices of designing, and on the other hand, practices of
misusing, insolent listening, and relocating auditory practices that enunciate different
earviews, which complicate the boundaries of any form of normative listening
practice. To understand how design articulates the earview becomes, then, a question
of understanding orientation; of attuning listening to certain things rather than others
(Ahmed 2010). In casting attention to how these agencies, performativities and things
may connect, they are regarded as orbiting around a same ‘gravitational centre’, which
might not be observable in the first place but reveals its connections when it is ‘pulled up’.
As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed contends, ‘we touch things and are touched by things
[…] bodies as well as objects take shape through being orientated toward each other, an
orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation or sharing of space’ (Ahmed
2010: 245). Alas, listening is a bodily engagement with vibration – a haptic phenomenon
(Kassabian 2013). Inferring the entanglement of certain bodies, discourses, and objects
by drawing them closer, or taking one element of these sets as a ‘nodal point’, reveals the
underlying structures and systems that make these agents come into existence and come
together as a normative earview. The observation or a normative earview, in turn, creates
the possibility of other, displaced earviews. It is by shifting these entanglements from
background to foreground and vice versa, picking up loose threads and intervening in
them, that we begin to gain an understanding of the world from different orientations
(Ahmed 2010); other sets of temporary connections may emerge, revealing otherwise
silenced earviews.
The earview as a border epistemology:

Yarn Sessions
The earview was developed not only as an analytical tool but also a pedagogical framework.
My design practice makes extensive use of open-ended, horizontal, and collective
narratives to make sense of political problems, often starting from a clearly defined,
tangible phenomenon. From 2014 to 2016 I worked closely with the question of racialized
police violence in Brazil, in particular violence that made use of, or instrumentalized
sounds and music – from the outlawing of jukeboxes in Rio to the deployment of sound
bombs in São Paulo, to name a few. To understand the accountability and implications of
design as that which configures material practices around these phenomena I created a
semi-fictional story, narrated predominantly through soundscape compositions and field
recordings (Vieira de Oliveira 2019). In setting the stage for a discussion around sensitive
topics to happen through sound, and through storytelling, participants of the projects
were encouraged to fabulate, situate themselves, and try to make sense of what they were
listening to based mostly on what they could fathom from listening.
This hybrid format of design project, workshop, and storytelling session was named ‘Yarn
Sessions’ and developed together with Luiza Prado de O. Martins. The name comes from
the verb ‘to yarn’, which is a way of telling a story without necessarily achieving an endpoint
but also from its Portuguese translation ‘tricotar’, which in Brazil can also mean a long
conversation session (Vieira de Oliveira and Prado de O. Martins 2019). In total, five sessions
of the same project were held in four different countries (Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and
Croatia) and welcomed participants from design, arts, architecture, cultural studies, and
science and technology studies. The sessions were always free of charge and promoted as
a designerly inquiry on sound and violence – which prompted participants to come with
already a curiosity and/or prior knowledge on the subject. Sessions lasted from 3 to 6 hours
in length, and merged conversation with more focused tasks.
In these sessions, participants were asked to take a position in which they deal with
their own accountability as privileged researchers, trying not to speak for others, and not
to research from the position of others; rather, they were encouraged to stand together
and in phase with the stories, anecdotes, sonic fictions (Eshun 1998; Schulze 2013; Vieira
de Oliveira 2016), and struggles for which the Yarn Sessions were interlocutors. The
proposal for the earview suggests a form of border thinking as the locus of enunciation for
decolonizing practices. Border epistemologies highlight the controversial, dichotomous,
and conflicting ontological mechanisms imposed by coloniality; however, instead of
negating these conflicts, border thinking embraces them as the point of departure of a
research inquiry. From the moment we understand that the borders of the auditory space
are enforced to cross certain bodies rather than the opposite, and that normative modes of
listening reenact this delimitation of borders through design, we require border thinking
to allow us to confront these borders.
Together in these sessions we attended to the materiality of sound, albeit never divorced
from its cultural implications – they knew, from the beginning, that these sounds were
coming from stories and histories of police brutality. The sounds, however, seldom
conveyed violence, relying instead on crafting an open scenario from which fabulations
could emerge. Participants attempted to plot their own point of listening, and to create
a brief cultural history of the objects, voices, and spaces present in the soundscapes.
Some of them developed short theatre scenes to subjectively convey ideas of rhythm
and consonance; others crafted telltales of revolution and civil disobedience. Attuning to
the multiple layers of the earview encouraged them to think of the recording apparatus,
of the software used to craft the soundscapes and collages, and also the decisions taken by
the recordist to focus on certain sounds rather than others. In the end, most of the sessions
ended up yielding a broad ecology of how listening is able to traverse multiple layers of
meaning which are not disconnected from one another but instead craft together a limited
glimpse of a cultural, social, and political composition which is conveyed by – but never
limited to – sounds themselves.
Conclusion
In my work I take inspiration from other histories and stories of listening as part of a
proposal for delinking from the Eurocentrism implicit and complicit in designerly language.
I constantly negotiate my relationship of subject and object within this study, my own
shifting perspectives and performed identities. The colonized body, Anzaldúa contends,
is a shapeshifter in nature, living and speaking from the borders of different languages,
identities, and knowledges. Thus I attempt to make these shapeshifting processes as visible
as possible, synthesizing the ‘dualities, contradictions, and perspectives from these different
selves and worlds’; as a border subject, I also cross ‘other mundos’ and ‘speak in tongues’
(Anzaldúa 2015: 3), thus inhabiting a space of transitions and intersectionalities.
Earlier on I defined the earview as ‘stories that orbit around design language but that
start, evolve, and end at the ear [which help to] craft narratives that theorize and produce
new knowledge through listening practices’ (Vieira de Oliveira 2016: 51). Hence, I already
positioned the earview as a rough form of a locus of auditory enunciation – a proposition
which I expanded here. In rough terms, the earview should be understood as a form of
storytelling, not constrained to fabulation and speculation only, but also assuming that
these modern/colonial techniques of hearing, as well as the differential listening modes
discussed above also weave a specific narrative with a specific point of listening. What I
argue is that design privileges certain narratives constrained by designed sonic affordances,
enabling the modern/colonial earview and erasing or obliterating others.
Normative listening practices trace the borders of the auditory space within which we
determine the scope of sonic reality. Privileging thinking through sound at the border
opens up for understanding the earview falling outside the sonic affordances of design as
being a proper facultad (Anzaldúa 2007), enabling counter-hegemonic techniques with
which to locate, interrogate, and negotiate the borders of the auditory space. Thinking
through sound comes to the aid of the work of design by exposing the normative earview,
while concomitantly making ground for other histories of listening – both those beyond
rational-scientific techniques of hearing as well as those who emerge as practices of
resistance. Thus, in my work I propose a radical shift in the locus of enunciation to that
of the border between conflicting earviews. Only so we can unwrap and scrutinize the
agencies and accountabilities of design in enforcing a segregation amongst divergent
earviews, the domestication of difference towards consensual pluralism, and the privileging
of hegemonic, violent narratives of sound and listening.
Notes
1. My idea for the earview was inspired by cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun’s ‘rearview
hearing’, albeit not with the same meaning as he conveys in his book More Brilliant Than
The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998). With rearview hearing, Eshun was more
concerned with the insistence on cultural theory and musicology to ‘hear backwards’,
for instance, by calling beat-making hardware a ‘drum machine’ instead of a ‘rhythm
synthesizer’ (Eshun 1998: 78–79, 186).
2. See, for example, Mulvey 1975.
3. I deliberately use the word ‘explorer’ with quotes here; ‘exploration’ of what was perceived
to be ‘untamed land’ by European travellers laid grounds for the understanding of
indigenous peoples and cultures to be in a state of ‘primitiveness’ which needed to be
properly catalogued, described, and sanctioned by the curious ‘explorer’.
4. Anzaldúa writes in ‘Spanglish’, switching back and forth between Spanish and English
arbitrarily and often multiple times within the same sentence. This deliberate attitude
highlights her own border thinking, a stream-of-consciousness which switches between
languages at will and which she does not intend to tame but rather to embrace and
emphasize in and through her writing. Hence, in her work – and in particular Light in
the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro (2015) – Spanish words and terms are seldom italicized, and
translations to English are only provided when done by Anzaldúa herself. I deliberately
chose to keep these faithful to the original text.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). ‘Orientations Matter’. In D. H. Coole and S. Frost(eds), New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 234–258. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, G. (2007). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 3rd edition. San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books.
Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality,
Reality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Eshun, K. (1998). More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet
Books.
French, L. (2014). ‘Chican@ Literature of Differential Listening’. Interference Journal 4.
Available online: http://www.interferencejournal.org/chican-literature-of-differential-
listening/ (accessed 18 July 2020).
Gautier, A. M. O. (2014). Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia.
Kalantidou, E. and T. Fry (eds) (2014). Design in the Borderlands. 1st edition. New York:
Routledge.
Kassabian, A. (2013). Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity.
1st edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Mignolo, W. D. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Mulvey, L. (1975). ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16: 6–18. https://doi.
org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
Nnaemeka, O. (2005). ‘Bodies that Don’t Matter: Black Bodies and the European Gaze’. In
M. Eggers, G. Kilomba, P.Pesche, and S. Arndt (eds), Mythen, Masken Und Subjekte:
Kritische Weissseinsforschung in Deutschland, 90–104. Münster: Unrast.
Schulze, H. (2013). ‘Adventures in Sonic Fiction: A Heuristic for Sound Studies’. Journal of
Sonic Studies 4.
Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S. (2016). ‘Design at the Earview: Decolonizing Speculative Design
through Sonic Fiction’. Design Issues 32: 43–52.
Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S., and L. Prado de O. Martins(2019). ‘Designer/Shapeshifter: A
Decolonising Redirection for Speculative and Critical Design’. In T. Fisher and L. Gamman
(eds), Tricky Design: The Ethics of Things, 103–114. London: Bloomsbury.
Vieira de Oliveira, Pedro (2019) ‘Algerinha Vive’. Soundcloud. Available online: https://
soundcloud.com/ppedrooliveiraa/algerinha-vive-mixtape (accessed 18 July 2020).
Willis, A.-M. (2006). ‘Ontological Designing’. Design Philosophy Papers 4: 69–92. https://doi.
org/10.2752/144871306X13966268131514.
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52
Hacking Composition: Dialogues
with Musical Machines
Ezra J. Teboul
Electronic music was invented before it was composed (Teboul 2017). Hacking as a mode
of invention is intimately related to the continual development of the genre. Yet, there are
few critical accounts of hacking as equivalent to composition, and the implications thereof.
In this chapter I will present examples which illustrate hacking as a shape-shifting method
of instrument design, and discuss its privileged ideological and material connection with
experimental music. How are material decisions equivalent to musical decisions and what
does looking at hacking as a process reveal about both?
Electromechanical hacks
Experimental turntablist Christian Marclay and his 1985 Record Without A Cover offers a
starting point. Each vinyl copy of this record is exposed to the everyday dirt and micro-
violences of record selling, owning, and playing. They evolve independently to reward each
owner with a progressively more unique version, augmented by the pop and crunch of
each new damage. They slowly lose material, via new scratches, and gain material, from
dust and particulates (Thompson 2017: 66). A new conception of additive and subtractive
synthesis as negotiated by the unique material realities of these objects and listeners.
Marclay brings attention to the temporality of the vinyl record as medium of music.
All vinyl slowly warps and decays, even when it is sold with a cover. The very action of a
stylus reading the groove scrapes away some of any disc’s plastic with every revolution. But
more than simply acknowledging that, he takes one aspect of what makes the vinyl record
special as a medium to fix sound – that it is a slab of plastic slowly spinning to its own noisy
death – and turns that into the focus of the work.
This is done by taking away the sleeve traditionally associated with the medium, but
also by the way in which traditional musical material and sound effects are complemented
by sections of layered recordings of silent parts of other records and their vinyl noise
(Thompson 2017: 65). More than a variant of John Cage’s silent classic 4ʹ33˝, the interplay
of the generative crackle and various levels of sonic to musical material makes the piece
an exposition of what Marclay was interested in and had access to, seen through the eye
of the vinyl record as a temporarily living medium. In other words, Record Without a
Cover is the record of a dialogue between the materiality of this specific sound technology,
its potential as a musically generative device, and Marclay’s ideas as an artist. Through
the process of care (or lack thereof) he invites the costumer of these records and their
respective environment into this dialogue.
Record Without A Cover is a significant example of hacking in a musical context because it
is uniquely effective in conveying both Marclay’s expertise in creating poetically generative
experiences while creating the opportunity of a rewarding audience participation.
‘Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things,
or even good things, but new things’ (Wark 2004: [004]). Marclay’s piece creates a new
musical work out of an old technology: by challenging the traditional mode of consumption
of what was then the principal medium for music playing, he crystallizes both his artistic
vision and the limitations of our understanding of the medium, while offering room for
personal salvation from our blindness. Fittingly, here, that salvation can be purchased:
what better way to acknowledge the dual nature of the record as both an artefact of art and
a commodity? The technical bar for innovation is also rendered fairly accessible: all that
was required here was to sell the Record, without a cover.
Record is actively revealed by the electromechanical process of playing the physical
object, which involves the use of the record cartridge, a preamplifier, amplifier, and speakers.
The process that makes this piece is purely mechanical, but it is mostly imperceptible to us
as more than a slab of plastic until its enactment. In this sense, the hack implemented in
the slow personalization of each copy of the record via wear and tear is disconnected from
our experience of the hack. Therefore, Record helps us imagine the breadth of possible
mediums and experiences in hacking composition: what other stuff can we engage with
as composers, and in what ways have these engagements already happened? How can
informed technical experimentation, whether we call it hacking, tinkering, bricolage, do it
yourself, or plain making, reveal both something about the ‘music implicit in technology’
(Collins 2007: 47, emphasis in the original) and our relationship to it?
Electromagnetic hacks
Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks series, begun in 2003 and sporadically reiterated in
different cities to this day, consists of a walk through urban spaces with the help of custom
built headphones. These convert the electromagnetic energy into sound waves (Cox 2006).
Kubisch provides a map of interesting sounding locations she has identified in advance. It
is then up to the participant to explore this somewhat indeterminate experience and form
their own composition, as they explore the space. Here, the medium is the electromagnetic
spectrum, but like Record the piece is also participative. By combining the familiar device
Dialogues with Musical Machines 809
of headphones with the more unusual property of inductors to transduce electromagnetic

waves into electrical signals and framing the resulting device as the enabler of a new form
of soundwalk, Kubisch’s system is an effective techno-artistic development.
The hack is once more only perceptible as it is enacted, using a static device from
components built by others to mediate an active experience. However, unlike Record,
Electrical Walks reveal almost more about the technology that surrounds it than that which
makes it. Kubisch’s work moves us towards the electromagnetic spectrum as a medium,
reminding us that all electronic devices which have come to define modern human life,
as well as some natural geomagnetic events such as storms, emit electromagnetic waves.
And yet the agency of the listener is not just enabled through the act of walking.
Electrical Walks teaches us about the music implicit in those waves that happen to occur
at audio frequencies, and therefore, we also engage with the limits of our perception.
Electromagnetic waves occur at various frequencies below and over the audible frequency
range, and they may be converted to sound waves by Kubisch’s headphones; regardless we
may not hear them without additional signal processing. If Record does in a way produce a
record of dust and action as recorded through scratches, that record is somewhat obscured
and unrecoverable: most pops on a record are indistinguishable from another. In Walks
what the hack says about us is clear: we as a species make a lot of electromagnetic waves
that our natural bodies can’t acknowledge directly. This hack is an extension of perception
that enables us to engage with those signals, those devices, and with the unique boundaries
of each person’s hearing.
Electrical Walks is somewhat less accessible than Record: custom headphones need to
be manufactured, and their use requires walking, if not repeated walking. Where Record
connected the large-scale concepts of manufacturing and consumption with the personal
lives of record buyers, Electrical Walks connects us with our local technological reality
through this inhuman medium of electromagnetic fields. Furthermore, where Record’s
process was almost visible and permanent, the underlying mechanics of Electrical Walks is
somewhat more ethereal. With each medium come nuances in clarity and scale between
the hack (technical decisions) and its results (musical consequences).
Record and Electrical Walks have introduced two mediums with which to engage
through musical hacking: the electromechanical and the electromagnetic. They have helped
me identify three key questions: How can hacking help reveal Collins’s ‘music implicit in
technology?’ What can that say of our relation to those devices and associated technologies?
Since a hack is so deeply related to the material nature of the system at hand, what is the unique
connection between the technical act enabled by hacking and its musical consequences?
Electrical and cultural hacks

The no-input mixer technique is an interesting case where the concept of the recording
studio as instrument is reduced to its most literal and compact form. By plugging in outputs
for channels of an audio mixer back into its inputs, one can create feedback loops. Most
channels on consumer grade mixers include equalization or gain stages which can produce
harmonic and inharmonic distortions when overdriven: by playing with these, one can
tune these feedback loops to specific pitches and timbres which heavily depend on the
characteristics of that particular mixer. Adding additional signal processing devices in the
feedback loop can lead to complex timbral, melodic, and rhythmic structures (Thompson
2017: 148). The composer and performer David Tudor experimented with variations on this
arrangement as early as 1967 to 1968 (Nakai 2016: 137, 267). The behaviour of the system
as revelatory of the components placed in the feedback loop is the focus of the 1978 piece
Star Networks At The Singing Point by Ralph Jones (2004), while Marko Ciciliani developed
a composition and performance technique of no-input mixing through the 1990s and
early 2000s (see Mask, composed in 2002).1 Japanese performer and composer Toshimaru
Nakamura, who has released No Input Mixing Board records since 2000, comments on the
system’s behaviour:
You can’t totally control no-input music because it’s all about feedback. Things like turning
the tuning knob, even by one millimeter, make a big difference to the sound … It’s very hard
to control it. The slightest thing can change the sound. It’s unpredictable and uncontrollable.
Which makes it challenging. But, in a sense, it’s because of the challenges that I play it. I’m
not interested in playing music that has no risk.
(Nakamura, ‘No-input, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura’,
[YouTube Video, 2003], quoted in Sanfilippo and Valle 2015: 15)
In this case, the musical work operates at a purely electrical level. There is no audience
participation, but the structure of what an audience hears is directly related to the structure
of the technical systems and its settings at a given time. Each loop has resonant frequencies
produced by the system. In a sense, this is one of the most direct modes of sonifying the
‘preferred’ signals of a particular electrical system.
This system complicates the boundary between hack and adjustment or tweak. Some no-
input mixer setups do not modify the device itself. However, by simply transgressing on the
previously accepted use of the mixer as a tool, no-input mixing turns this tool into a rich and
rewarding instrument. Nakamura and other no-input practitioners have effectively made a
new system out of existing technology. Therefore, although the purely electrical medium of
operation of the no-input mixer makes it a somewhat more confined practice in technical
terms, the cultural transgression it represents suggests that the physical black box of the
mixer does not need to be broken for a hack to occur; that perhaps some valuable hacks
can in some specific technological circumstances be cultural. This is historically consonant
with the history of technical and artistic experimentation with electronics: the post-Second
World War boom of amateur radio was built on a series of cultural evolutions just as much
as technical ones, and our modern society is effectively a techno-culture (Haring 2007).
Here this techno-cultural hack enables us to learn about the mixer as a system through
the sounds it produces, as negotiated by Nakamura’s, Tudor’s, or Ciciliani’s experienced
hands. The dialogue between the mixer made ‘unpredictable and uncontrollable’ and its
carer make the performance and recordings. Once again, the technologically charged act of
plugging the mixer into itself allows an audience to perceive a negotiation between human
and nonhumans through a poetic, rather than didactic, experience. The music produced
could not be more implicit in the technology: it is literally the produce of its machine noise
building onto itself. The relationship to its user is exposed in real time as we hear the player
attempts to push the mixer in specific directions and listen to the mixer push back with its
own suggestions.
Hacking the music out of technology: Scale,

control, and autonomy with/in electronics
The complication of instrumental expertise brought on by semi-autonomous musical
instruments is a central theme of do-it-yourself (DIY) systems and musical hacking.
Revealing Collins’s ‘music implicit in technology’ involves relinquishing some control to
the system itself at the moment of performance (bringing attention to the asynchronous
nature of expertise in some electronic music works). As such, Nakamura’s expertise is not
in playing famous tunes on his no-input mixing board, although one could technically
modify the system to play feedback-based covers. Neither is it in his ability to play his
own past work. Rather, it is in setting up and continually reorienting his system in ways
compelling to himself and his audience. In that sense, part of his knowledge is expressed
prior to a performance, in his effective setting up of a no-input mixer. For these musicians
working with hacked instruments, there is a decoupling of expertise and performance.
Quoting David Tudor:
Electronic components & circuitry, observed as individual & unique rather than as
servomechanisms, more & more reveal their personalities, directly related to the particular
musician involved with them. The deeper this process of observation, the more the
components seem to require & suggest their own musical ideas, arriving at that point of
discovery, always incredible, where music is revealed from ‘inside,’ rather than from ‘outside.’
(Tudor 1976 quoted in Nakai 2016: 276)
Nakamura, Kubisch, and Marclay all pay attention to the individuality of components in
order to let them develop and reveal their musical potential. These follow directly from
their materiality, but are inextricably linked to the way these materialities were perceived
by these artists. They show that hacking as the basis for musical work is not restricted to
the acoustic, the electronic, the mechanical, or the magnetic but, rather, is defined by the
messy and real-life technologies we may have access to and all the baggage they carry along
because of that.
The composer Nicolas Collins, who worked with Tudor for several years as part of
the latter’s Composers Inside Electronics ensemble, developed The Royal Touch in 2014.
Touch takes any circuit board (for Collins, it is sometimes a dead channel strip from a
Neotek mixer taken out of its enclosure) and uses it as a complex collection of electronic
components. Resistors, inductors, and capacitors do not need power to act as such, but
transistors and integrated circuits act as unpredictable combinations of diodes when
Figure 52.1 The inside of the oscillator box, containing one Hex Schmitt Trigger, 74C14
chip. The capacitors surrounding it set the range of frequencies produced by each of the
six square wave oscillators, and the multipin connector on the left links to the ribbon
connector used to ‘probe’ the dead circuit.
unpowered. A device containing six square wave oscillators based on the 74C14 CMOS
chip (Figure 52.1) connects to the dead board by a ribbon connector terminated with lead
fishing weights. The weights link the oscillator to a part of the circuit, and the erratic nature
of the components in the path set the frequency of the oscillator within the range defined
by a capacitor in the oscillator box (Figure 52.2). As the fishing weights are slowly nudged
across the board, they come in and out of contact with various components, and the
frequencies of each oscillator cut out or evolve accordingly. The final timbrally important
processing step is a diode-based mixing arrangement which takes the already harmonically
rich square waves and implements ring modulation style mixing for three oscillators at a
time.2
The circuit board and the way in which this piece is performed – slowly moving
lead beads – implies a degree of indeterminacy. In The Royal Touch each movement of
a fishing weight also means a new variation on the actual circuit producing sound.
Once again, the boundary between tweak and hack is unclear, although the identity and
performability of the system is quite clear and straightforward. Like Nakamura, Collins
explores the board for ‘good’ sounds, stays as still as possible when he has found some, or
makes minuscule movements in search of variation, and sometimes waits for the circuit
to charge and discharge back to silence or a less interesting steady state. The result is a
chaotic, unpredictable exploration of a physical space mediated by a revelatory circuit.
The Royal Touch operates an electrification of exploration at a smaller scale from Kubisch’s
Figure 52.2 The oscillator box connected to the mixer circuit components using a ribbon
connector attached to fishing weights for The Royal Touch set-up.
Electrical Walks, but it also offers a different relationship to the probed circuits. Indeed,
where Kubisch’s headphones are non-destructive, almost furtive modes of listening,
Collins’s circuit sees that target board as effectively dead until it is activated by his own
oscillators. The systems are still all components, voltages, and fields, but, paraphrasing
Tudor, the particular musician involved with them relates to them in dramatically different
ways. Hacking is a multifaceted and ideologically malleable practice, and this is also true
in musical contexts.
In his book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking, Collins presents
a series of rules meant to facilitate hardware hacking in a musical context.
Rule #6: Many hacks are like butterflies: beautiful but short-lived.
Many hacks you perform, especially early in your career, may destroy the circuit eventually.
Accept this. If it sounds great, record it as soon as possible, and make note of what you’ve
done to the circuit so you can try to recreate it later.
(Collins 2006: 7)
No Input Mixing Board and The Royal Touch are both ways to create a performance system
robust enough to turn hacked instruments’ inherent unpredictability into a recognizable
practice. They are indirect rebuttals to Rule #6. Nakamura does it by becoming extensively
familiar with the recurring behaviours of his system and knowing how to work with unusual
developments. Collins does so by developing a similar familiarity and complementing it
with a novel patching method, through the use of fishing weights.
Hacking and improvisation

Although there are plenty of hacked instruments that offer no particular affinity with
improvisatory contexts, the significant number of systems that are ‘allowed to speak
for themselves’ means hacking has a privileged relationship to the generative and the
improvised. Here, Derek Bailey’s concept of ‘mutual subversion’ in free improvisation can
be connected to the ‘tacit knowledge’ theorized by science scholar Harry Collins (Bailey
1993: 95–96; Collins 2001). Because of the relative ‘user-unfriendliness’3 of working with
an instrument that can never be fully predictable, hacking systems like no-input mixers or
dead circuit boards act as viable improvising partners which challenge and subvert their
human equivalents. In response, the human player will, if not become better at controlling
systems, better at intuiting the complex nature of the system, internalizing its behaviour –
developing a tacit, embodied knowledge of it. Quoting Bailey:
One of the basic characteristics of his [sic] improvising, detectable in everything he plays,
will be how he harnesses the instrumental impulse. Or how he reacts against it. And this
makes the stimulus and the recipient of this impulse, the instrument, the most important of
his musical resources.
(Bailey 1993: 97)
The Royal Touch setup is built with an early digital logic chip, a ‘Hex Inverting Schmitt
Trigger’. Inverting Schmitt triggers look at an incoming voltage, producing a low output if
that input is above a threshold, and a high output if the input is under that threshold (Schmitt
1938). The 74C14 chip was developed in a family of low-power logic chip intended for the
development and manufacture of digital systems (Lancaster 1988: 255). A circuit similar
to the one used for Royal Touch is described in Handmade, it is the first circuit presented
there: ‘In the contrarian spirit of hacking’, Collins writes, ‘the first circuit we build from
scratch is based on the misuse of an Integrated Circuit (IC) never intended for making
sound’ (Collins 2006: 111). More than simply fitting into a narrative of creative misuse,
this fact helps clarify another nuance in the medium associated with hacking in and out
of musical contexts. As evidenced by Wark’s and Jordan’s discussion of the topic, hacking
is often meant to imply software hacking, even when evidence of hardware hacking is well
known (Jordan 2008: 123). In a musical context, however, hacking holds no allegiance to
vibratory mediums (as proven by the previous examples, which hacked electromechanical,
electromagnetic, and purely electrical vibratory schemes), let alone hardware or software.
In fact, the latter distinction breaks down quickly when considering that because of
Collins’s successful book, a wide number of hacked instruments function with digital logic
chips used as signal generators and processors (Teboul 2015: 42). A number of toys prized
by hackers as the basis for circuit bending, such as the Speak & Spell™, are based on digital
signal processing or memory chips (129). The recent resurgence of modular synthesizers
is correspondingly hybrid (Paradiso 2017), and follows a pragmatic approach to getting
music done. Once again, this makes sense historically: early computer music experiments
in academia and industry made materiality a central part of the process because of their
non-real time nature and the physically demanding infrastructure necessary to turn code
into recordings (Kahn 2012). Outside of academia, using early personal microcomputers
such as the KIM-1 meant building custom analogue to digital converters, interfaces,
network protocols, etc. (Perkis and Bischoff 2007). In musical hacking, there is room for
hardware and software, if only because our fingers can only press buttons and turn knobs
and our ears can only hear fluctuations in air pressure. Going further, I would suggest that
in fact, because of the relatively low stakes of electronic instrument design, hacking in a
musical context is uniquely privileged to blend analogue and digital technologies in an
earnestly ruthless fashion. It would almost be a shame not to.
Bonnie Jones is a musician and educator whose practice often focuses on digital delay
pedals. These are opened to reveal their circuit board, plugged into themselves (like a no-
input mixer), flipped around, and powered on. Jones then takes ⅛" audio connectors and
uses them to probe various copper traces and connectors looking for sounds. Digital delay
guitar pedals are not meant to have their output plugged into their input, yet Jones has
developed this setup in the same way that Nakamura has turned the mixer into a feedback
instrument with lifetimes of possibilities. Jones states:
I like when an instrument is indeterminate but there is also a desire to be able to play
something – so yes while the pedals have a certain level of indeterminacy – playing them
for over a decade has really allowed me to understand many of the ways to produce specific
sounds. As for complexity – I use tools for the sounds they make vs the nature of their
construction or code. I like getting to know an electronic instrument, and I appreciate
when that instrument has some surprises or enables me to create and discover sounds that
I wouldn’t expect – but I wouldn’t care if something was complex if I didn’t like the way it
sounded.
(Jones interviewed in Teboul 2015: 188–189)
Considering the highly unusual mode of operation Jones puts these delays through, a
traditional understanding of what happens at the circuit level during her performances
seems, in this case, almost superfluous, coincidental at best. In that sense, Jones is closer
to circuit bending values tacit, embodied knowledge such as the one she describes above
to explicitly technical expertise. Early circuit bending practitioner Qubais Reed Ghazala
states of the practice:
Circuit bending’s chance approach is an act of clear illogic. As opposed to fuzzy logic, a
seeking of norm within chaos, clear illogic seeks chaos within the norm. It is through this
chaos, a powerful creative force, that the instruments are allowed to behave beyond the
theoretical intentions (and limitations) of the designer.
(Ghazala 2004: 100)
Jones’s practice goes beyond repurposing digital delay pedals, also incorporating live
instruments, found sound, text art, etc. Hacking comes in many flavours and can fit within
a larger grouping of methods, as simply one way to approach materiality and meaning.
Jones’s use of digital delay pedals clearly gives these devices an opportunity to build off of
themselves. Paraphrasing Tudor once more, they reveal as much about themselves as what
Jones may want an audience to hear.
With Jones and each previous artist, a local, specialized, and personal understanding
of audio engineering emerged. Up to this point every example has foregrounded the
materiality of hardware, but this perspective of hacking as a method of composition can
also be helpful to understand mostly digital and software-based projects.
George Lewis is a musician, technologist, and professor whose 1993 work Voyager is
both the name of an improvising computer music program and of a record made with the
program along with various human players. The system is innovative in that it could both
produce music independently and respond to musical input. The underlying mechanisms
were programmed using predetermined scales, phrases, and progressions, coded in the
programming language FORTH. The software was built between 1986 and 1988 at STEIM,
the Studio for Electro Instrumental Music in the Netherlands (Lewis 2000: 34). Lewis had a
history of building software mostly on his own, occasionally with advice on test drafts from
various programmers and musicians (Born 1995: 191).
Voyager functions as an extreme example of a ‘player’ program, where the computer system
does not function as an instrument to be controlled by a performer […] I conceive a
performance of Voyager as multiple parallel streams of music generation, emanating from
both the computers and the humans – a nonhierarchical, improvisational, subject-subject
model of discourse, rather than a stimulus/response setup.
(Lewis 2000: 34)
The non-hierarchical nature of this custom, shape-shifting system of humans and machines
clearly illustrate the ‘dialogical’ nature of both designing and playing along Voyager. This is
evident in Lewis’s commentary on FORTH:
Seemingly anti-authoritarian in nature, during the early 1980s Forth appealed to a
community of composers who wanted an environment in which a momentary inspiration
could quickly lead to its sonic realization – a dialogic creative process, emblematic of an
improvisor’s way of working.
(Lewis 2000: 34)
Musical hacking as a dialogue that mimics the dynamics of non-hierarchical improvisation

is therefore just as possible in software as it is in hardware. The notion of agency is central
to Lewis’s scholarship (Lewis 1996). Here I use it to complicate Tudor’s notion of ‘letting
the components speak for themselves’. Although Voyager speaks for itself, it only has
agency over the phrases, scales, and other melodic and rhythmic structures programmed
by Lewis in the software. This is apparent in Voyager’s reliance on MIDI to enact its
musicality, which signals Lewis’s relative disinterest in timbre as opposed to note and
melody-scale events. The non-features are almost as significant a statement as the features
themselves.
Hacking: For whom?

These examples have spanned the following mediums: the electromechanical, the
electroacoustic, the electronic, digital hardware, and software. Real time, techno-cultural,
circuit bending: these are just some of the flavours of hacking where experimental music
meets experimental technology. This is not an exhaustive selection, but a map presenting
some of the principal spaces of musical hacking’s multidimensional affordances. In offering
this, I have introduced hacking in a musical context as a mutually subversive dialogue
between material realities and musical ideas, which often include a large number of people
and objects across time and space. I have presented the resulting system-compositions
as materialized compromises of these negotiated and nested agencies enacted through
various intermediaries, across time and space. These compromises can be partially read
and reconstructed by inspection of the artefacts left behind, a process facilitated by open
sourcing thorough textual or technical documentation and which can serve as the basis for
new works.4 In each case, hacking’s engagement with the materiality of each medium has
allowed the specificities of each device and the users relationship to them to be partially
revealed through sound.
The humanity of technologies, then, is clear. Not because machines act like us, but
because we made machines to act in ways we imagined as potentially interesting: the
arbitrariness of some decisions and standards is visible after close examination of hacked
musical systems. This doesn’t value machine–improviser relationships less than human–
human ones, as a dialogue with machines can be conceived of as a dialogue with nested
and crystallized past human and material agencies. However, as with all methodologies,
in music or otherwise, we should consider the ethics of these techno-social affordances.
Quoting Tara Rodgers:
As soundmakers and sound students […] we should be attuned to how historically and
culturally specific metaphors and descriptive language frame our knowledge of sound, as
well as to sound’s potential for complex communications of its own kind. Instruments and
interfaces are often where these two trajectories join forces: technological designs crystallize
sound knowledge into material forms that, in turn, generate more sounds. Knowing an
instrument’s history and interrogating the logic of its design can be a productive starting
point for creative interruption and innovation […]. Sound is both a carrier of cultural
knowledge and an expressive medium modulated by individual and collaborative creativity.
(Rodgers 2018: 239–240)
I will conclude this chapter by emphasizing the power dynamic inherent to hacking’s
mutually subversive relationship and how this may shape the creation of new technological
systems and musical works. I want to be critical of the optimistic presentations of the
practice, in and out of music, as a ‘democratizing’ force, rather than as an ideologically
malleable tool with undeniable techno-cultural potential. The instances of hacking
described above helped musicians engage with their audiences and the increasingly
technological in-between that connects them, on their own terms, but the degree of self-
awareness varied. Jones and Lewis frame their technical and artistic work and perspective
in the context of an inescapably political existence. Paraphrasing Rodgers, building the

critical tools for connecting technological systems with the labour necessary to their
construction offers new grounds for artistic creation, which hacking and tinkering are
uniquely fit to explore. It also presents the possibility of progress in adequately crediting
and acknowledging the various humans and nonhumans involved in these generative
processes, poetically, through works of art, and explicitly, through written or oral research.5
In framing electronic music composition as a dialogue with machines, I hoped to hint at
the ethical nature of picking who we wish to listen to and who we hope to let speak through
or with technology. If, as Wark suggests, hacking makes the new out of the old, then by
better understanding hacking we can better appreciate its inherently utopian aspects. If
these are realized through music, then the act of the hack comes with the responsibility to
perhaps make our musical systems and compositions embody the values we wish to see in
our fields and beyond. To summarize: I have presented hacking as a compositional method
with the potential to make new works out of existing materials and ideologies at various
scales, where the decision to implement modes of control over technology connects those
materials and ideologies. In situating ourselves within this question of control between
sound and its sources, we reiterate the connection between tools, art making, and cultural
critique, and reify listening and responding as tactics for actively participating in the
making of our actually existing experimentalisms (Piekut 2011: 195).
Notes
1. Email exchange with Marko Ciciliani, 31 May 2018. Additional no-input pieces by
Ciciliani are included on 81 Matters in Elemental Order (Evil Rabbit Records 2008).
2. Email exchange with Nicolas Collins, 21 May 2018.
3. For a longer discussion of electronic instruments, ‘user-unfriendliness’ and Anthony
Dunne’s concept of ‘post-optimality’ in the context of audio technologies, see Teboul
2018.
4. This is, in part, the work of media archeology (see Huhtamo and Parikka 2012).
5. See Haring 2007; Rodgers 2015; Vagnerova 2017.
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Index
acoustics 203–4, 206, 209, 660 graph 733–4, 737

electro-acoustics 205, 206 perception 187–92, 195–7
psycho-acoustics 205 Augoyard, Jean Francios 761
acoustic environments in change 602 auralization 567, 569–70
acoustic profiling 159–62, 165 auraltypical 604
management 217 aural postcard 772
Tag 535 auto-ethnography 119, 121–2, 129, 352
Adorno, Theodor W. 10–12, 18, 24, 17, 373, 710 Azzigotti, Luciano 713
aerial projection 584, 588, 592
affect 116–17, 120–4, 128–31, 135 Barad, Karen 2, 10–13, 175–6, 180
affective tonality 672–3, 680, 683 Benjamin Walter 21
affordance 644 Bennett, Jane 171–2, 173, 174, 179
against method 62, 65, 285–7, 293, 294n16 Big Ben Silent Minute 96, 99–100, 105, 111
ambiance 671–74, 678–82, 684, 722 binaural 773
Amsterdam 557–8, 562–3, 569 Böhme, Gernot 317–19, 321–22
animal communication 75 border thinking 799–802, 804n4
monitoring 7 Bowie, David 663
hearing 81 Brady, Erica 11
Anzaldúa, Gloria 800–1, 803, 804n4 Buenos Aires Sonora (BAS) 714
archive 779–81, 784, 786–7, 790
colonial 533–534 Cacerolazo 705–710
internet archive 782 Cage, John 27, 173–4, 176
Library of Congress 782 Canetti, Elias 601
Argentinazo 708–9 Cairo (Egypt) 770
artistic research 327–8, 363 Cartesian dualism 734–5
method 426 cartography 118–19, 131–3, 135
atmosphere 423 Cave, Nick 664
atmospheric 671–4, 680–4 Chiari, Giuseppe 305, 308
attunement 322 city maker 557–8, 560, 569, 575–6
audibility, thresholds 651–652 city user 557–60, 562, 574–6
audiograph 159–60, 165 clairaudience 648
audioposition 156, 160, 162, 165 climate change 449–51, 453–4, 457–9, 465
audio cohesion, cohesive 660, 664, 666, 668
diagramming 511–25 Collectif Rendez-Vous 602
file 660 Collins, Nicolas 811
procedural 398, 402 community engagement 452–3, 456
technology 481, 483–4, 491 competition 643, 637
auditory experience, (on-site) 558, 564–5, 567, compositional process 391
573–5 conflict 745–7, 749, 751
diagramming 514–15 co-production 745–6, 748, 751
822 Index
contamination 671, 674, 676, 679–80 315–7, 326–7, 330, 334, 336, 339, 343,
Corbin, Alain 647, 651, 653 357–359, 363–7, 387, 400–1, 407, 418,
Cox, Christoff 370 420–1, 423, 427, 433, 457, 479, 481, 483–4,
crowds 636–637, 643 486, 490–1, 493, 499, 507, 559, 577, 580–1,
Cusak, Peter 5, 461, 582, 590 586, 597, 600, 603, 610, 612, 631, 654, 656,
671, 672, 673, 686, 688–91, 693–5, 703,
Darlington Quiet Town Experiment 94, 96, 712, 739, 740, 764, 766, 767, 769, 771–3,
99–100, 106–11 779, 807–8, 815, 817–19
de Certeau, Michel 299–300 evaluation 687, 689, 690, 692, 694–9, 700
De Luca, Erik 461 exhibition 567, 569, 571
Delgado, Marcelo 711, 712, 715
delocalization 399, 403–4 Feld, Steven 756
Derrida, Jacques 9, 13 feminist critique 553–554
design process 686–8, 690, 696, 698–700 Ferrara, Lawrence 287, 288, 294
diffraction 10 field recording 119, 130, 132–3, 450–3, 455, 482,
digitization 532–3 484–7, 492, 493, 582
directness 736–8, 741 fieldwork 766
Dunn, David 461 film (sound making) 688, 693
Dreyfus, Laurence 361, 362 fixation 685, 686, 687, 688, 700
flâneur 297–8, 311, 301–2
ear piece 668 foon/phon 500, 502, 503–7, 508 (fn), 509–10
earwitness 650
earview (defined) 796 Hamdan, Lawrence Abu 176–7, 178–9, 591
earworms 163–164 Harraway, Donna 13
ecoacoustics 614–15, 711 health impact assessment 226
echolocation 80 heuristics 660, 664–665
ecosystem 451–2, 455–8 hearing
environment 612–14, 616–700, 712 imaginative 517
monitoring 87 way of hearing 97, 99–100, 103, 111
impact assessment 223, 589 Howes, David 4, 767
strategic assessment 225 hydrophones 460–2, 470–1, 476
Eidsheim, Nina Sun 172–3, 174, 179–80
embodied experience 734–6, 739–41 ideology 719, 720, 721, 722, 723, 724, 728, 729
Eshun, Kodwo 668 illocution 719, 720, 721, 722, 729
ethnography 118, 122–4, 126, 131, 135, 612–13, IMPA 711, 712
616–71, 674, 680–83, 711, 756 improvisation 325, 328–9, 330–6
multi-sited 123, 125 critical studies in 326, 328–9
ethnology 756 information visualization 733–5
ethnomusicology 755 interdisciplinarity 3, 651–4
eurocentrism 2, 457, 803 internet humour 546
experiential 745 interview (go-along) 564, 565–7
experiment, experimental, experimentation 5, 11, infrastructure 174–5, 176–7, 180
41, 43, 47, 53, 55, 79, 85, 87, 90, 94, 96, 99, installation 450–4
100, 106–8, 111, 113, 117, 123, 125, 131–3, instrument 203–4, 206–7
143, 145, 157, 163, 166, 167, 170, 179, 182, musical 204–5, 207, 211
191–2, 197, 199, 203, 205–9, 213, 215, 221, scientific 205
229, 250, 256, 264, 267, 273–5, 278, builders 204, 207
283–4, 286, 289–94, 304–5, 308, 312–13, digital 207
Index 823
interaction design 423 counter-mapping 591

interpretation 358–66 distortion 587
Iron Dome 719, 724, 725, 726, 727, 728 inside and outside 589
Israel–Gaza Conflict 719, 723, 724, 728 live 594
noise map 583
Jacob, Wendy 461 Marconi, Gugliemo 157–8
Jeck, Philip 461 materialism 170, 175
Jones, Bonnie 815 materialism new 171
materialism, sonic 170, 173, 176–7, 178–9,
Kahn, Douglas 177–8, 179–80 180–1
Klangumweld 513 materiality 171–3, 175–7, 179, 201–3, 207, 211,
Knowledge 358–61, 363–4
elicitation (tacit and explicit) 558, 561, 564, mediation 173, 176, 178, 180
575, 576 media urbanism 120–1
production 532–4 metadata 779–80, 782, 784, 786–8, 790
Kubisch, Kristina 5, 174–5, 176, 178–9, 808 metaphor 61–2, 67–71
Kunzra, Hari (White Tears) 155–8 method, as invention 57–8
live 117, 128–9, 132–3, 135
La Bandina 711–12, 715 as meta-hodos 63–67
Labelle, Brandon 469, 471 triangulation 118, 135
Lane, Cathy 592 micro CT-scanning 85
laser-Doppler vibrometry 84 microphone 773
Lewis, George 816 modelling 219
librettization 163 Mowitt, John 173–5, 176, 178
listening 177–9, 208–9, 673–5, 681, 683–4, 745–8, music 202–3, 205–7, 210, 755
750–2 aesthetics 207
acousmatic listening 489 culture 204, 205–6
active 405 circulation 210
attentive listening 469, 482–4, 488, 491 industry 203
body 661 technology/instrument 204–5, 207
close 481, 493, 535–7 performance 206, 210
critical listening 719, 721–6, 729 mobile 659
cultures 205 metaphor 207
directing 403 notation 358–65
habits 203, 207 pitch 207
new forms of urban 559 musician 204, 207
peripheral 404
together 565, 575–6 Nakamura, Toshimara 810
ubiquitous 659 neoliberalism 543–4, 550, 554
underwater 469–78 and feminism 543, 548–9, 553
Lockwood, Annea 461 Neuhaus, Max 315, 316–17, 322
loudness 262 no-input mixer 810
noise 94, 99–103, 217
magnetic tape 660 city noise 647–51
Manning, Erin 286, 287, 290, 294 control 219
Marclay, Christian 807 cries of Paris 648
maps, mapping 118–21, 131, 132, 612–15, 710 of machines 481
735–8, 739–41 noise pollution 482, 492
824 Index
pink 401–3 Schweighauser, Philipp (The Noises of American

tolerance 651–2 Literature) 159–60
traffic 482, 487 scratch orchestra 305–7
sense/sensory 671–3, 677, 680–4
Oliveros, Pauline 3, 473, 668 anthropology 767
ontological design 795 sensory corpus 662, 665, 668
oscillations 661 felt 662, 665, 667
sensuous sociology 117, 120
Pardoen, Mylène/Projet Bretez 653, 655 Serres, Michel 664
participatory-collaborative process 557–8, 574, Shepherd, Nan 590
576, 612–13, 616, 712 Shiomi, Mieko 181
perception 169, 172–3, 175–6, 179 silence 59, 66–7, 671–81
performativity 719–23, 728–9 situationism 304, 308, 311
phenomenology 169–70, 178 skills 201, 203, 207, 739–41
spatial 193–5 Smith, Bruce R. 647
phonautograph 648, 660 Smith, Mark M. 98–9, 647, 653–4
phonograph 78 social constructivism 201–4, 208
Picker, John 647, 650 socioecological environment 773
Piper, Adrian 369, 373, 377 sonagraph 79
podagogy 142–3 sonification 453–4, 733
podcasting 141–2, 779–80, 782, 784, 786, 790 aesthetics 734, 735, 736, 740–1
Polli, Andrea 461 listening 735, 739–41
pollution 633–634 sonogram (spectral analysis) 637, 639–43
print textualized orality 161–2 song learning 79
practice 201–10 sonic
prototyping 686–8, 693–4, 696, 700 acts 721–2, 729
psychoacoustics 253, 262 agency 5
Pynchon, Thomas 164–165 encounter 97, 103, 105–6, 108, 111
experience 659–62, 664–5, 667
quantification 544–545, 548–551 density 634, 639
quiet 94–5, 99–103, 106–8, 111 extended environment 404–5
material 663, 667
Raaijmakers, Dick 283, 284, 289, 292n1, 294 past (reconstruction of) 653–4
recording 746–9, 751–2, 756 percepts 663
reflexivity 341–3, 348, 351, 353 persona 665–6, 668
reflective practice 344, 352 representation 400, 405
reification 172, 177–8 rupture 315–6, 321
Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg 286, 287, 289, 290, situation 665–7
292n3, 292n5, 293n7, 295 writing 662, 664–8
risk 671–5, 677, 679–80 sonic methodology
RSS 780, 782–3, 786–8 and philosophy 187–99
sonic research, types of 647–51
San Cipriano Picentino, Italy 582 sound
Satie, Erik 706, 715 sound awareness 557–61, 567, 575–6
Schafer, Murray R 3, 28, 253, 512, 600–5, 608, archive 533–4, 536
648, 650 ambient 481, 487
schizophonic artifacts 696, 701 and color 190, 195–7
Index 825
design 397–401, 405 subject position 738–40

everyday 483, 489, 491 syrinx 82
installations 229, 315–22 Szendy, Peter 62, 66, 73, 351, 355, 504, 507, 510
as metaphor 61–2, 70
milieu 634 technologies (sound) 201–9
philosophy of 187–98 telephone 68–70
sculpture 451, 453 theory, grounded 260
and space 187, 192–5 Thompson, Emily 99
technology 147, 151 Thompson, Marie 101, 104–5
and time 187, 195–7 Toop, David 648
wanted 228 transduction 179–81, 661
writing 151–2 transportation (bus) 634–7
underwater 459–67 Trower, Shelly 170–1, 173, 175, 179
sound art 325, 333–4, 370, 372, 705, 711 Thulin, Samuel 581
ecological 449–58 tympanum 60–1, 65
sound artists 558, 562, 566–7 Tyndall, John 584
sounding Dartmoor 604 two-voice phenomenon 83
soundscape 155–7, 159, 254, 255, 258, 260,
450–6, 612, 614–16, 711 urban 298–301, 303–5, 308–10
composition 486 planning 217
environmental soundscape 481, 488 urban square, redesign of 558, 560, 565,
everyday soundscape 489, 492 566–7, 569, 570, 571, 574
lo-fi soundscape 482 urban sound 118–21, 135
hi-fi soundscape 482, 492
planning 227 Varchausky, Nicolás 712
urban soundscapes 485 verbalization 771
sound sources 187, 189–91 véxations 706, 715
sound studies 343–5, 760 vibration 170–1, 172–3, 175–6
soundwalk 119, 121, 129, 132, 135, 259, 261, vinyl records 383–95
298–300, 762 visual perception 187, 192–5
augmented 567, 569, 570 vulnerability 671, 679–80
commented 564–565
self-guided 565, 567 Waldock, Jacqueline 586
Sound System of the State 719, 721–23, 725, walking 297–304, 308, 310–12, 612–13, 618–19
727–29 Wang, Hong Kai 593
space 735, 736, 739–41 Watson, Chris 461
public 304–5, 308–11, 426, 633–4 Werktreue 346
space-use-sound model 560, 566, 571, 574 Westerkamp, Hildegard 3, 600–2, 609–10, 668
urban 745–6, 748, 750, 752 White, Hayden 9
spectrograph 584 wilderness 610–14, 616, 620, 700–11
speech acts 719–22 Wizard-of-Oz (design method) 696–8
spotify 549–52 workshop 561, 564, 566–8, 570, 574
Steingo, Gavin 2–3, 20 World Soundscape Project 3, 486, 585–6, 600–4,
Sterne, Jonathan 18, 99, 156, 647 608
Stoever, Jenny-Lynn 747, 750 World Trade Center 588
Stravinsky, Igor 358–62, 364
stridulation 82 Zukofsky, Louis 169–70, 171, 173, 178–9, 181
826
827
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The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen

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What is the book about?

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What topics are covered in Part I?

What topics are covered in Part I?

The Bloomsbury

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright © by Michael Bull and Marcel Cobussen, 2021

Each chapter © of Contributor

Cover design: Louise Dugdale

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3875-5

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd

Part I Disciplines, Methodologies, Epistemologies

8 Sonic Methodologies in Literature

Part II Sound Arts, Musics, Spaces

19 Fragile Devices: Improvisation as an Interdisciplinary

30 Melt Me into the Ocean: Sounds from Submarine

Part III Geographies, Politics, Histories

39 Sounding Wild Spaces: Inclusive Map-Making

50 Podcast Preservation and the Noise of Saved

5.5 Cover of leaflet announcing the Darlington

5.7 Detail from ‘Do you have a noisy gnome in your

6.1 Chris’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 132

6.2 Ali’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 133

6.3 Martin’s ‘musical London’ map, 2014 134

13.1 The sound conduction pathway in the human ear 245

13.2 Cross section of the cochlea showing the location of

14.3 Methods and instruments frequently applied in

14.6 Unpleasantness group judgements over measured

25.2 P neumatic Sound Field during DEAF07, Museum

26.2 Forest Megaphones by Birgit Öigus 429

26.3 The memorial monument at Mindeparken, Aarhus 430

36.1 Visualization of the process of ‘Crowdsourcing

36.3 Mr. Visserplein, aerial photograph, February 2016 563

36.4 Self-guided soundwalk: trajectory (left) and walk

36.5 Space-use-sound model 566

36.6 Workshop 1 on characterizing the space, use,

36.11 ‘Geluid als stadmaker’ – event brochure 572

44.1 Image of the minute-repeater device and its

44.2 Functional scheme of the prototyped sound synthesis

45.2 Buenos Aires Sonora, Mayo, los sonidos de la Plaza

G Douglas Barrett is Assistant Professor of Communication at Salisbury University.

Vincent Battesti is a researcher in social anthropology at the CNRS. Website: https://vbat.org.

Aimée Boutin is Professor of French at Florida State University.

Lex Brown is Professor Emeritus in environmental planning, Griffith University.

Joeri Bruyninckx is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Maastricht

Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex.

Ben Byrne is a Senior Lecturer, Digital Media at RMIT University.

Rebecca Caines is an Associate Professor in Interdisciplinary Programs, University of

Lucia D’Errico is a postdoc fellow at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium).

Pedro J S Vieira de Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist and educator.

Elvira Di Bona is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Turin.

Jos J. Eggermont is Emeritus Professor at the University of Calgary.

André Fiebig is a visiting professor at the Technical University of Berlin.

Jonathan Gilmurray is a sound artist, writer and lecturer.

Violeta Nigro Giunta is a PhD candidate at the CRAL-EHESS, Paris.

Wouter Halfwerk is an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit.

14.3 Methods and instruments frequently applied in

14.6 Unpleasantness group judgements over measured

25.2 P neumatic Sound Field during DEAF07, Museum

26.3 The memorial monument at Mindeparken, Aarhus 430

36.1 Visualization of the process of ‘Crowdsourcing

36.3 Mr. Visserplein, aerial photograph, February 2016 563

36.4 Self-guided soundwalk: trajectory (left) and walk

36.5 Space-use-sound model 566

36.6 Workshop 1 on characterizing the space, use,

44.1 Image of the minute-repeater device and its

44.2 Functional scheme of the prototyped sound synthesis

45.2 Buenos Aires Sonora, Mayo, los sonidos de la Plaza