The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies

Michael Bull

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317524250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies is an extensive volume presenting a comparative and historically informed understanding of the workings of sound in culture, while also mapping potential future directions for research in the field. Experts from a variety of disciplines within sound studies cover such diverse topics as politics, gender, media, race, literature and sport. Individual sections that consider the importance of sound in an increasingly mediated world; the role that sound media play in the construction of experience; and the ways in which sound has been theorized to produce a distinctive sensory contribution to knowledge.

This wide-ranging and vibrant collection provides a rich resource for scholars and students of media and culture.

1PART I

Introduction: sonic epistemologies and debates

Some years ago, I interviewed a young American man who lived in the UK. During the interview he described driving down a motorway in his automobile listening to music on his sound system. This was not the normal sound system we find in automobiles however. He had a very expensive and powerful amplifier fixed to the chassis of the car and twenty-three speakers placed throughout the driving compartment. He described driving at speed down the motorway to music as loud as he could bear. After a few miles the sound was so intense he had to stop on the hard shoulder. As he exited the car he described having to lean against the side of the car, unable to stand as his whole body felt like “jelly.” The experience was described as intensely pleasurable, indeed exhilarating. The meanings attached to this simple account are multiple. My American interviewee had belonged to an automobile club in the US whose whole raison d’être was to maximise the volume of sound in automobiles. The meaning attached to such activity was sub-cultural in nature whereby members learnt how to experience intense sonic listening practices in automobiles as well as showing off the sophistication of their auto sound systems. These experiences are partially learnt even though the physical response – the jellied body – is largely pre-conscious and bodily in nature. The experience itself is dependent upon forms of technological sonic capability and the legal framework within which it is acceptable to drive under these conditions. My respondent was at pains to point out that he was a considerate driver and that he would not drive through town listening thus as he considered it to be both a dangerous and anti-social activity in such spaces. Thus, the example combines a cocktail of body, sound, culture, desire, and technology in the explanatory mix of the behaviour. This matrix of sonic, and indeed the sensory factors involved in explaining, understanding and theorising such experience, lies at the heart of this Part.

The relationship between the making of and the experiencing of sounds informs many of the entries in this Part as does the very remit of sound studies itself. This Part produces a lively debate from within its contributors who interrogate the nature and meaning of the sonic from a variety of theoretical viewpoints. Epistemologically, the question arises, to what extent does the experience of sound as a sensory experience differ from an understanding of what constitutes experience more generally as articulated throughout the Western philosophical tradition per se? If as the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that the history of knowledge resembles an epistemological graveyard in which successive generations of thinkers have attempted to leap from the subjective nature of knowledge – that which I experience in some way – to the “objective” – 2that which in some sense might be considered ‘true’ beyond that immediate experience – then in the very act of leaping from the “subject” to the “object” the thinker necessarily falls into an epistemological abyss. Nagel merely highlights the dualism of much thought – between subject and object, mind and body, and so on. These dichotomies were articulated in Greek philosophy over two thousand years ago in the metaphysics of Plato and in the empiricism of Aristotle. Plato’s Theory of the Forms and his “simile of the cave” are well known. Suffice to note that for Plato, the empirical world of the inhabitants of the cave is represented by the shadows created by their campfire. They had no notion of the sunlight that created the flickering shadows. Plato proceeds to reject the simply empirical – which includes the sensuous world in favour his theory of “forms” which represent unchanging concepts, such as the form of a triangle that is not subject to change in contrast to notions of physical beauty, for example, which are located in the transitory and the cultural – hence representing, for Plato, mere shadows and as such do not represent “true” knowledge. The desire to prove forms of universal truths are deeply embedded in Western philosophical thought, including notions of the universal nature of space and time which is considered an instrumental foundation to all experience within which any particular place and time is necessarily subordinate to the universal. Universalisms have taken many forms, from the mathematical work of Russell and Whitehead to the general laws of linguistics articulated in the work of de Saussure and Chomsky. In a world of universals, local knowledge, local customs, local places are mere variants of the universal and are subordinate to them.

Universalism has come to sound studies in the form of a post-Deleuzian ontology which, just as in neuro-anthropology, has questioned the cultural significance of a range of differences (Bull and Mitchell 2016). Brian Kane in a recent critique of sonic ontology critiques the position of Cristof Cox whom he feels articulates this post-Deleuzian position in his theory of sonic experience: “The metaphysics of the actual and the virtual entails a specific view about culture and nature. Appearances, or the ‘diversity’ of empirical things, ‘are the products or manifestations of material intensive “differences” that operate at the micro-level of physical, chemical, and biological matter but that remain virtual, unapparent at the level of actual, extensive things’” (Kane 2015: 4). Kane thus articulates and critiques the relationship between the pre-conscious and the conscious and thus cultural in the work of Cox and others.

Most entries in this part understand sonic experience through some notion of the cultural although not exclusively so, and hence can be read as articulating the complex relationship between notions of the ontological and the empirical within sound studies.

The part begins with Holger Schulze who describes the history of sound as theory as an “unfinished project.” He provides the reader with a wide-ranging historical and conceptual analysis of what it is we hear when we are hearing. He begins by pointing to the scientific heritage of the study of sound, to the work of Helmholtz, Fletcher, and Baranek who investigate the physiology of the ear in relation to the science of soundwaves and points to the importance of this scientific framework in the creation of materialist notions of sound as matter. He contrasts this position to the more common sonic narratives that are embodied in the later work of Schafer, Attali, and a range of soundscape artists who reaffirm, in a variety of ways, the importance of the listening subject. Whilst sound scholars might re-evaluate historical narratives that provide a hierarchy of the senses in which one sense, or set of senses, are pitted against the others, Shulze argues that we need to situate sound within a more general sensory mode of investigation that recognises the body/subject as increasingly the site of much sonic research. Equally, he argues that the science of sound should not transcend our understanding of the social meanings attached to sound – sound as pressure waves is not identical to their cultural manifestation. Affect, he argues, is both a cultural and cognitive phenomena, not merely a response to a uniform vibration as argued by a range of Deleuzian-inspired ontologists of sound. Schulze, as 3such, is interested in actual listening practices, the phenomenology of sound, body and corporal resonance, but also in forms of sonic imagination as articulated through the work of Eshun and others. This leads Schulze to argue for the development of specifically sonic methodologies in order to enable us to understand the complex nature of experiencing the sonic within society. He cites the creation and use of sound walks and sound installations in support of Voeglin’s idea that “research on sound needs to be conceptualized, performed, and presented foremost in the realm of the sonic” (Voeglin in this volume). In providing this historical narrative Schulze provides a conceptual framework that enables the reader to situate the more detailed and specific theoretical debates within sound studies that go to make up the remainder of this first part of the Handbook.

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard argues that it is common for scholars of sound studies to investigate sound from the position of its use, role, and meaning in culture while tacitly assuming that sound is as defined in physics and acoustics. Opposed to this standard definition of sound as a sound wave he instead argues for a definition of sound as a perception (more fully articulated in Grimshaw and Garner 2015). By focussing upon sound as perception, Grimshaw-Aagaard is able to cast light upon a variety of sonic experiences that need not necessarily be vibrational in origin. Grimshaw-Aagaard argues that sound studies are at its strongest when it investigates the roles of memory, knowledge, reason, experience, emotion, mood, and so on in order to understand the ways in which sonic perceptions are formed.

This recognition of the centrality of society, culture, and the individual’s relationship to the social is the starting point of David Howes’ contribution in this Part. Howes, a scholar of anthropology and the senses, delivers an impassioned defence of a multi-sensory, historically situated account of the “embodied” subject, arguing that the senses are made, not given, and that all perception represents a cultural act. In arguing thus, Howes, like Kane, is contrasting his work against the work of Ingold and those scholars of sonic ontology for whom vibration or sound more generally underpins the idea of a unified pre-reflective sensory perceptual system. Howes forcefully reminds the reader of the importance of cultures of perception in relation to both sound and the indeed the body.

Nina Sun Eidsheim continues and develops the cultural perceptions of Howes by focussing upon inter-sensoriality in relation to sound, body, and voice, arguing that the discrete investigation of the senses within their respective disciplines often prevents a richer investigation of the phenomena. She illustrates this point through an intriguing range of empirical examples. In the pursuit of the inter-sensorial Sun Eidsheim promotes what she refers to as methodological experimentation: “What I propose herein is to move from binary to simultaneous and concurrent conceptualizing and experiencing of phenomena to which we now refer as sound, body, or voice.”

The aesthetics of sound weaves in and out of sound studies, revisiting the social and philosophical elements of the nature of judgement. We noted in the introduction to this volume Schafer’s preoccupation with an ethics of listening that tended to be anti-urban in nature together with sound studies’ reliance on the work and thought of John Cage and Pierre Schaffer who took listening subjects into specialised cultural and performance spaces – either with a preference for listening to the sounds of the world attentively or culturally situating sonic practices aesthetically within what might be considered the realm of the avant-garde. Verma in distinction to these preoccupations discusses how the philosophy of aesthetics has been more easily framed within vision than with sound. In terms of looking and listening practices, audiences were more likely to accept cubism in art, for example, than the twelve tone works of Schoenberg. Verma argues that sound studies needs to articulate an aesthetics of bodily experience rather than focussing merely upon the cognitive. This point returns us to the intense listening practices that stem from 4attentive music listening practices embodied in the Romantic movement of the 19th century and now embodied in the close listening practices of those subject to John Cage’s 4.33 where audiences could literally hear a pin drop. A listening mode that became increasingly disembodied and analytical – despite Cage’s experience of listening to his own body in the anechoic chamber!

Annabel Stirling continues Verma’s pursuit of bodily and cultural experience by focussing upon affect, rather than the aesthetic and as such approaches bodily affect from a complementary perspective. Stirling moves away from the culturally rarefied atmosphere of listening to 4.33 to the use of Rock and Roll to discuss sound, affect, and politics. She discusses trancing and altered states of consciousness in order to ask what music feels like as distinct from what it sounds like? She argues that if sound studies scholars investigate a range of music practices empirically and sub-culturally that they will discover that affect can be both individual and collective. New affect theories, she argues, lack empirical grounding for their essentialist ontology. Rather they rely upon pre-existing theories as a way of articulating sonic experience in novel ways. Stirling argues that affect does not just work on a Deleuzian pre-mediated level. Her own rich ethnographies of Lucky Cloud Parties demonstrate how “musical affectivity is contingent upon the precise ways in which it is encultured.” Affect, in other words, is culturally pre-disposed and affect theories underplay the empirical at their peril.

References

Bull, M. and Jon Mitchell (eds) 2016, Ritual, Performance and the Senses, London: Bloomsbury Press.

Grimshaw, M. and Garner, T., 2015, Sonic Virtuality: Sound as Emergent Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kane, B., 2015, Sound studies without auditory culture: a critique of the ontological turn, Sound Studies, pp. 2–21, Vol. 1.

51

SOUND AS THEORY 1863–2014: FROM HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ TO SALOMÉ VOEGELIN

Holger Schulze

Sound can be looked at. Yes, you just read this sentence: Sound can be looked at. Yet, what can be seen of sound are mainly translations of the pressure waves – out of which any sound actually consists – into scores, diagrams, into sonograms. One sees the effects these pressure waves can take onto other objects, fluids, gases, onto elastic materials, onto the connected limbs of mechanical or electromechanical artifacts. As indirect as they are, these effects of sounds provide the contemporary forms of Anschauung, of theoria on sound in the early 21st century. Sound is vision these days as sound production, sound analysis, and sound technology are effectively operated mainly via the somewhat strange detour of visual displays. Should there be a natural order of the senses? A vast army of thinkers does affirm this assumption. They actually form the canonical literature of Western philosophy and theory, surely not only starting with Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Introduction: sound studies and the art of listening
• Part I: Introduction: sonic epistemologies and debates
• Part II: Introduction: sonic conflicts, concepts and culture
• Part III: Introduction: sonic spaces and places
• Part IV: Introduction: sonic skills: finding, recording and researching
• Part V: Introduction: technology, culture and sonic experience
• Part VI: Introduction: sound connections
• Name Index
• Subject Index