The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies

Michael Bull, Marcel Cobussen, Michael Bull, Marcel Cobussen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501338762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

The field of Sound Studies has changed and developed dramatically over the last two decades involving a vast and dizzying array of work produced by those working in the arts, social sciences and sciences. The study of sound is inherently interdisciplinary and is undertaken both by those who specialize in sound and by others who wish to include sound as an intrinsic and indispensable element in their research. This is the first resource to provide a wide ranging, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation and analysis of the ways in which researchers use a broad range of methodologies in order to pursue their sonic investigations. It brings together 49 specially commissioned chapters that ask a wide range of questions including; how can sound be used in current academic disciplines? Is sound as a methodological tool indispensable for Sound Studies and what can sound artists contribute to the discourse on methodology in Sound Studies? The editors also present 3 original chapters that work as provocative 'sonic methodological interventions' prefacing the 3 sections of the book.

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

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).

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,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Disciplines, Methodologies, Epistemologies
• Part II: Sound Arts, Musics, Spaces
• Part III: Geographies, Politics, Histories
• Index
• Imprint