Acoustic Justice

Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation

Brandon LaBelle

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501368226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and to be heard that extends toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining capacities of listening, leading to what LaBelle terms "poetic ecologies of resonance." Acoustic Justice works at issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, by moving across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of Deaf voice. Through such transversality, LaBelle captures acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

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Acoustic Performativity

Practices of Composition

The work of architectural acoustics often sets out to refine or reform existing environments, focusing on noise, vibration, reverberation, and other auditory issues or disturbances. This is mostly developed through material interventions that set out to absorb or reflect particular frequencies or vibrations, thereby tuning an architecture or environment so as to better enhance the experience of particular sounds. Acoustics is therefore a work, a set of strategies, that contributes to defining the movements of sound through an environment, producing or supporting the emergence of particular sonic images. In this sense, acoustics may be thought through in order to unpack larger questions as to how hearing and listening, and the arena of sound, in general, are affected by various external forces and knowledges. To do so, I attempt to detail aspects of acoustics, moving from questions of architecture to aurality and the fostering of social life. This leads to an understanding of acoustics as a range of gestures and practices that support forms of physical and social orientation, and what Sara Ahmed terms “the work of reorientation.”¹ I elaborate these perspectives by reflecting upon two different projects, one related to an artistic work I developed at La Tabacalera, Madrid, and the other produced by the research group Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, on the Saydnaya prison in Syria. Following these examples and inquiries, acoustics is underscored as a performativity, a practice of composition embedded within struggles over recognition and justice.

Acoustics: The Distribution of the Heard

Along with defining or shaping the movements of sound, acoustics affects the passing of communicational and emotional feedback, and the capacity to feel oneself as part of an environment or social milieu—how feelings of belonging are influenced by acoustic densities and volumes, reverberations and noises. As such, acoustics can be understood to impact not only on the spaces we inhabit but, also on the affective contouring of private and public life, lending to experiences of place and belonging by conditioning who or what is heard, and whose voice may gain traction within particular environments. Belonging and recognition, attunement and well-being are thus deeply embedded within the question of acoustics, and the capturing of often “agitating” sounds acoustic design works to balance. In this sense, I’m considering acoustics as a question of “design”—a culture of sonic strategies, a science—as what contributes to the articulation of a sonic image and the figuring of sound within environments, as well as a broader more speculative framework for addressing issues of orientation and place-making. In this sense, I’m keen to underscore acoustics less as a property and more as a performativity; acoustics as a practice, as what we do to enable particular orientations, for listening to take place, to have a place. If listening can be understood more broadly as modes of attention, then acoustics is what we do to facilitate attention, and which also allows for thinking through what it means to sound and to listen. From sonic materiality to spatial and platial constructs to the affordances of hearing and being heard, acoustics is posed here in order to critically pursue the social and political matters that condition subjectivity along with the experiences of place, of being placed.

By considering these perspectives, acoustics emerges as a political question—a politics around which the urgencies of hearing and being heard are played out. In this sense, I’m aiming to position acoustics, following Jacques Rancière, as the distribution of the heard in whose practice or operation we may detect a range of contestations and imaginaries, each defining in various ways forms of orientation.² As the distribution of the heard, acoustics contributes to the ways in which we orient ourselves, or are oriented according to the sounds we are able to hear or sense, and how we may feel ourselves being heard—how one is situated within a greater acoustic ecology. While acoustics as a knowledge is often put to use by developers, engineers, technicians, and urban planners as a means to assist in ordering the built environment, regulating excessive reverberation and decibel levels, and organizing particular architectures, I understand acoustics additionally as an everyday practice—a range of gestures in which people actively modify or retune their environments to support the movement or flourishing of particular sounds.

Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter open up this perspective in their consideration of what they term “aural architecture.” Aural architecture is theorized as being both a question of acoustics and the shaping of a given architecture, as well as sociability, where people also participate in defining an “acoustic arena.” As they outline: “The acoustic arena is the experience of a social spatiality, where a listener is connected to the sound-producing activities of other individuals. By manipulating the spatial design, the aural architect influences the relationships among the occupants of a space in a multiplicity of acoustic arenas.”³ Importantly for Blesser and Salter, acoustic arenas are often manipulated through rather ordinary gestures, from opening and closing windows to adjusting home appliances; from listening to music to contending with the sounds of neighbors, building home cinemas or organizing parties, creating comfortable spots and crafting quiet areas often against the sounds one cannot control. Such overt gestures are also complemented by the more nuanced ways in which acoustic arenas are punctuated or attenuated by a general flow and rhythm of behaviors, from daily rituals to caring for the demands of others. In this regard, aural architecture integrates different acoustic registers, from the psychoacoustic to the electroacoustic, from the social acoustic to the bioacoustic; from the experiences of hearing to the diffusions of mediated sound, and the socialities and ecologies shaped and defining acoustic wo rlds. The ongoing movements of acoustic arenas thus come to impact onto the distribution of the heard, recomposing through a range of gestures the articulation of a sonic image—a “room tonality.”

The issue of an acoustic politics, and the practices or acts by which such politics plays out, may be additionally captured by considering ideas of “fidelity” and “reflection,” which are often at work in defining standards of acoustic design. From an acoustic perspective, fidelity can be understood as the resolution of a sonic image which brings focus or intensity onto particular sounds, giving clarity to a particular distribution or diffusion of sonic matter. Within the production of a sonic image, acoustic design often places emphasis on staying true to particular sounds, thereby tuning architectures, within concert hall design especially, so as to minimize disturbance or coloration of a sound. Fidelity is therefore often based upon normative agreements as to what constitutes “good sound” and by extension, distortion, or “dirty sound.” Such agreements therefore contribute to placing value upon particular acoustic as well as aural behaviors on the part of a public.

Nina Sun Eidsheim provides insight into the establishing of “acoustic norms” by addressing the concert hall experience, and, in particular, how experimental forms of music and performance often draw out such normativity, leading us to recognize the often rigid parameters that define how and what we may hear. Importantly, Eidsheim highlights how acoustic norms greatly inform the establishment and maintenance of “acoustic communities” that form around particular musical cultures and concert halls along with their standards of acoustic mediation and reception.⁴ As an example, she highlights how concert hall design within Western classical music traditions have tended toward a two-second reverberation time, which allows for a sense of “immersion” as well as “clarity.”⁵ Such standards wield great effect onto what an acoustic community may come to understand as “good sound” as well as what counts as noise, helping to define beforehand assumptions around the “meaning” of sound. “Here, being faithful entails such virtues as being in tune and conveying the a priori intent and meaning of a particular sound, composition, or musical-cultural tradition.”⁶

Fidelity may be positioned in order to critically tussle with the ways in which acoustics contributes to defining “habits of listening” in which particular sounds appeal to normative codes and conduct. Within such scenes and constructs, noise is figured, following Tim Cresswell, as being “out of place”—a sound whose wayward itineraries and subsequent distortions interfere with music proper.⁷ While such depictions are readily found by following concert hall design, and the cultures of classical music, I’m curious in what ways fidelity, and the question of acoustic norms, impress themselves onto a more general arena of everyday life and daily geographies. From scenes of domestic inhabitation to exchanges on the street, or even across the digital networks that define a great deal of social life, acoustic norms and habits of listening help shape discursive, social, and behavioral patterns. And importantly, what we come to hear, or more precisely, what sounds come to have a place and are therefore brought within reach. To stay true to certain sounds, as fidelity outlines, is to also demarcate particular limits onto what counts as listenable.

Alongside fidelity, as lending to the production of a sonic image, reflection and reverberation support the propagation of sound through a spatial environment. Within architectural design, the use of absorbent or reflective materials, for example, significantly plays a role in facilitating and modifying the ways in which sound moves within a given space. Reflection, in a deep sense, lends a certain life or vitality to particular sonic images—the reverberant responsiveness of architecture, in fact, is often what registers the expressivity of life within places. Reverberation (and echo) acts as a carrier of sound itself and the concomitant sense of vibrancy it imparts; within reverberant “dead” spaces, such as anechoic chambers, one immediately confronts reverberation as key to feelings of being somewhere, and how places come to life through sound: the “room tones” that register the general humming of place. As such, architectural acoustics often works at shaping, minimizing, or controlling reverberation, and, accordingly, significantly contributes to the sense of vitality itself—the tonalities that underpin the ongoing humdrum of life.

Yet, reflection, and the movements of echo, while giving way to the propagation of sounds, also often extend architecture beyond its physical borders (as is often the case, too much reverberation may overwhelm a particular sound source, hindering clarity and communication). As an example, Matteo Melioli highlights how the “reverberant geometries” of the Basilica di San Marco in Venice contribute to aural experiences by acoustically “dilating” the limits of the physical space, giving way to a “ghosted” perception. In this sense, reflection and reverberation may “distort” physical space by transgressing its limits, its fixed lines. In doing so, the life and vitality of these reverberant geometries makes one sense that sounds are coming from a range of directions, thereby dramatically “confusing” an understanding of the location of sound sources. Within the Basilica such reflective dynamics have been put to use within specific music compositions, which, as Melioli suggests, guide a listener into an echoic, reverberant musicality that seeks to extend the physical limits of architecture toward a sense of “infinity.”⁸

The capacity for reflection and reverberation to extend or confuse architectural space, charging one’s psychoacoustic imagination with a sense for the ghosted and the infinite, for an ever-expanding distortion, may also be considered within more social situations. The acoustic experiences of reverberation may lend to gestures aimed at enlarging a sense of place or belonging—a sounding out, a throwing of sound (of voice, of noise) by which to rework one’s sense for being emplaced within given environments, thereby affording possibilities for destabilizing or enlivening the territorial contours of place, to work at reconfiguring the perceptual and spatial lines that fundamentally contribute to the distribution of the heard. Such reverberant enactments, while distorting or animating the architectures around us, may work at capturing a sense of participation through all that may come echoing back: to stir the rather fixed lines of space in order to gain a performative responsiveness from what it means to be somewhere.

Acoustic communities are therefore nurtured not only as a question of musical cultures and their halls of performance, but equally within the everyday environments in which fidelity and reflection are appropriated and reappropriated, captured as terms within struggles over belonging. Whether in the living rooms or the classrooms, the churches or the offices, the acoustic figuring of reverberant geometries are spatial and temporal channels by which to capture ways of inhabiting the everyday.

Reflection and the making of a sonic image are essential to the feedbacking of oneself and a given place, which affects the experience of collectivity and community so important to nurturing this identity one may become: to transgressing precisely the spatial terms that distinguish being in or out of place. Whether toward the infinite and the transcendent, or toward a horizon of togetherness and collective determination and pleasure, or even in the daily routines shaping or reshaping individual life, reflection and the casting of sound it supports contributes a profound sense for moving beyond the physical limitations of place as what is often setting limits or even “disciplining” one’s potential flourishing. As such, reflection and fidelity may be captured as acoustic tools and knowledges, even weapons, by which communities work at definition, at extending precisely the horizon of possibility: to both define a particular sonic image, a configuration, a delineation, a musicality, while animating its given features, stirring geometries with acoustic potential: to make room for life itself.

Following notions of fidelity and reflection, and the issue of acoustic norms and communities, I may begin to unfold a range of questions: What acoustic forces and forms exist that enable one’s voice to resound within certain rooms or environments, and to find place within a particular sonic image or arena? What acoustic decisions have been made to support one’s sense for being able to stand up, a standing in front and a speaking forth, as well as for imagining possible futures? And further, what forms of acoustic economy are at play within a given architecture or environment, and that work at orienting us in certain ways and according to particular norms or values?

Acoustics, as I’m suggesting, is implicated in the shaping of sociability, which is greatly nurtured by how one may align with particular tonalities while distorting others, giving way to expressions of agreement and disagreement, harmony and discord. Here, we can appreciate the practices or gestures by which people rework the distribution of the heard, retuning environments and a dominant tonality, an acoustic norm, in order to hear or feel differently, and to gain traction for other voices: to demand a shift in the project of fidelity by dilating or ghosting the resolution of a sonic image, enabling the reflection and propagation of other concerns and desires.

Acoustic Practices: Modalities and Orientations

Acoustics, as I’m suggesting, allows for a consideration of the ways in which experiences of sound and listening contribute to how one negotiates social and cultural life and one’s place within it. From such a view, acoustics deepens awareness of sound culture as an arena that often forces and facilitates encounters across dominant and marginalized communities: how aural architectures may also figure as political arenas, for not only giving volume to the particularities and positionalities of one’s identity—to state oneself, or to be systematically instated by way of identity—but also estranging the normative arrangements that make identity count by hearing differently. What do I mean by “hearing differently”? To what degree can sound really matter when it comes to struggles over recognition and belonging? In what sense might acoustic justice contribute to notions of justice in general, and specifically within particular scenes of violence and inequality?

I’m moved to understand hearing, and the meaningfulness sound may carry, through a range of particular expressions, including scenes of communal gathering and social ritual, events of collective mourning as well as celebration, for instance, where the importance of hearing in particular ways is potently staged. I’m further moved to appreciate hearing, and the more pronounced forms of listening, by way of numerous pleasures and pains that press upon the body, from the joys and ecstasies of listening to the ways in which sounds may greatly annoy as well as brutally harm. Hearing and listening therefore contribute to physical and mental health, suggesting a greater auditory framework connected to well-being and care. From the material and relational dynamics of sound, which assist in giving shape to ways of living, to the support found through the vibrant touch of others and the shaping of intimacy—this listening that brings us closer—or the frustrations and rage arising from contending with the tonality of dominant political voices. Such experiences and auditory movements greatly influence the ways in which one may grasp potent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Holding, Healing, Attending: Toward Collaborative Living
• 1 Acoustic Performativity: Practices of Composition
• 2 Poetic Ecologies: Resonance, Imagination, Repair
• 3 Skin-Work: Queer Acoustics, Borderspaces, Economies of Desire
• 4 Deaf Attention: Peripheral Visions, Spatial Meanings, Sensory Politics
• Acoustic Support
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright