The Sonic Persona

An Anthropology of Sound

Holger Schulze

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501305481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In The Sonic Persona, Holger Schulze undertakes a critical study of some of the most influential studies in sound since the 19th century in the natural sciences, the engineering sciences, and in media theory, confronting them with contemporary artistic practices, with experimental critique, and with disturbing sonic experiences. From Hermann von Helmholtz to Miley Cyrus, from FLUXUS to the Arab Spring, from Wavefield Synthesis to otoacoustic emissions, from premillennial clubculture to postdemocratic authoritarianism, from signal processing to human echolocation: This book presents a fundamental critique concerning recent sound theories and their anthropological concepts – and proposes an alternate, a more plastic, a visceral framework for research in the field of a cultural anthropology of sounding and listening. This anthropology of sound takes its readers and listeners on a research expedition to the multitude of alien humanoids and their surprising sonic personae: in dynamic and generative tension between predetermined auditory dispositives, miniscule and not seldomly ignored sound practices, and idiosyncratic sensory corpuses: a critique of the senses. I'm going to prove the impossible really exists.

PART ONE

The materialization of sound: A research history

CHAPTER ONE

Quantifying sound

Pro tools and the phonautograph

“Snap it to the grid!” So, my co-producer and good friend did what he had just announced. Both of us listened to this file again. Over and over. Both of us indulged in the fantasy the software offered of supposed exactitude as well as of a radical reduction of anything sounding to visual representations. For quite some hours now—on that hot and humid summer day almost two decades ago—we had been producing a radio feature for a Berlin public radio station. The station was definitely not the largest around; but nonetheless, it was a daring enterprise for both of us. Until then neither of us was really experienced with the production and transmission of major sound pieces. We did not produce it in one of the big recording or smaller production studios of the radio station, but at home, in front of the computer screen of my close friend, using the latest version of Pro Tools that had just been released in its so-called “Free” version. Like any post-production sound work in those days, we had to focus mainly on a rather simple 2-D visualization of the various channels and tracks we intended to integrate in our piece. For hours on end we looked at graphic details, followed and corrected lines and rectangles, adjusted cross sections, and made sensible selections to decrease or increase volume or activate other effects and plugins. There were only selected moments—sometimes longer periods—of exclusive audition, of extended listening experiences: like a stepping back from the canvas, from the designed page of a book or a newspaper, we granted our eyes a break and immersed ourselves, as deeply and as alienatedly as possible, into merely listening to our piece. It was slowly, incredibly slowly, growing and growing, ten seconds at a time. Quite intentionally, even forcefully, we switched from our highly focused stare at the depicted timeline and all those tracks and overlays, from an imagined sonic experience to an actual and physical sonic experience. We disciplined ourselves—so we thought—to subtract our ever-present strong intention to produce a great and stunning radio piece. “Okay: just listen now.” And so we listened. We sat in our chairs, eyes closed, trying very hard to listen only to this artifact as if it were something completely new to us: just being transmitted to us, unexpecting listeners.

In these sequences of specialized and subtracted listening, these long and intensely focused layered seconds and minutes, we trained ourselves in a listening practice new to us. We were transferring our rather intimate practices of headphone listening, developed in times of adolescence and post-adolescence in the 1980s and 1990s while listening to our favorite records, to radio programs or sound pieces, to concert performances of various kinds between New Music, New Jazz, and regular popular music shows, to this new area and task of sounds and music projected in the clubs and discos in these decades. We tried quite hard to dismiss our individual biographical, personal, and highly idiosyncratic corporeal inclinations toward particular effects and excitements related to some sounds, samples, and snippets; and at the same time we still tried to retain and to strengthen our autodidactically well-trained ability to listen to every single, every miniature sound event very precisely, in-depth and in the context of the piece and all its structural transformations, references, allusions, continuities, and discontinuities happening right here, right now in the very late 1990s. A joyful meditation: a listening meditation.

The technology of sound production has become what it was intended to be, a widely distributed commodity. It is not at all a thoroughly new and exciting technology in all its glory, no longer surprising and not a novelty in itself. It is a tool, a very useful and versatile one. Being truly ubiquitously present, it has turned into the preferred imaginary space in which millions and millions of sound producers all over this planet, in all their diverse jobs and aesthetic traditions, in all their different project flows and production contexts, work on their individual sonic artifacts. All these producers imagine sound as an integral part of this software environment. Obviously there are many different software packages to produce and to refine sound, and many more of those since the 1990s; yet the main structuring elements, the main standards and formats of these tools, stay surprisingly unsurprising. Since 1989 the software suite of Pro Tools has been continuously adapted, expanded, refurbished, and relaunched to find its place in the realm of production software. In relation to the environment of musical aesthetics, production styles, and design preferences, the developers and key account managers at Avid Technology managed to promote this software—even more so after their acquisition of Digidesign—as the one and maybe only place of total access to all aspects, parameters, and transformations of any sound possibly being processed in an audio production. Naturally, this cannot be true. Albeit in the early twenty-first century, this is exactly what is expected from a digital commodity; while no one software package can do everything, that is nonetheless what is expected of it.

This book is not a book on Pro Tools. It is a book on the historical, anthropological, and political traces that relate practices of listening and practices of sounding to each other in a mutual interdependency that surrounds us and that shapes and limits, transforms, and freezes the individual sonic experiences of humanoid aliens like you and me. Thus, I trace the historical roots of software like Pro Tools that can be found—as a surprise for some readers—in the invention of the so-called phonautograph or similar devices for sound recording and reproduction in the heart of the nineteenth century. This “cultural origin of sound reproduction” (Sterne 2003) might seem as far as can be from contemporary technologies. Yet, its anthropological and epistemological concepts, its ontological predeterminations of what sounding and listening could be or should be, are present and taking effect in both massively commodified pieces of technology: Pro Tools and the phonautograph. The latter is an astonishing apparatus that occupies, in the history of technological inventions of recent centuries, a remarkable point between no longer being an organic or mechanic extension of a humanoid’s senses and not yet being an inconceivable or even invisible algorithmic representation of sensory signal data processing. The phonautograph is not a musical instrument; it is not a mechanical hearing aid; it is not a piece of automated performances of musical scores; it is surely not immaterial like a piece of software that allows for recording, generating, manipulating, processing, transmitting, and reproducing any sound event audible to humanoids and their state-of-the-art microphones or other audio sensors. The phonautograph is a refined object of desire, physically impressive and in part handmade. It incorporates automated elements as well as the affordances to use specific storage media to record and to play back the recorded sounds. It consists of an (internal or external) writing device that inscribes sounds on a material surface. It also consists, therefore, of a removable, interchangeable, and quite plastic object on which these sounds can be inscribed; fin ally, it consists of a reading device that amplifies these sounds and projects them into a spatial environment in which listeners might be idling or awaiting the one and only sacred transmission. The master—historically gendered in an androcentric culture—might then speak to us.

For an anthropology of sound—like the one I am proposing here—the most exciting part of the phonautograph, though, is not easily visible or palpable. It is to be found in the aforementioned succession of materials, mechanical tools, and objects as convincingly conjoined by its many co-inventors on various continents and various research cultures: in a succession and relation of materials solely intended to assemble various listening and sounding dispositives of a humanoid’s body. The ear, the tongue, the finger, the larynx, the vocal chords, the tympanic membrane—you will find all of these and many more either in this exact succession or in a slightly adapted one in listening and sounding devices being built by humanoid aliens in recent decades. As a distant relative of the phonautograph, software like Pro Tools still today refers to this original corpus of nineteenth-century knowledge about the senses, the process and reach of listening, and the role of a standardized and non-specific body that listens and makes sounds. Our machines that hear for us resemble a bricolage of listening homunculi: May the apparatus be humanoid! In recent research, especially with a focus on the interdependencies between the sciences and the arts, this fact has been taken as an argument for the immense auditory knowledge of researchers and developers in the nineteenth century. This form of knowledge is thus anatomically and physically—let alone aesthetically, pragmatically, or politically—a deeply anthropocentric, solidified (if not paralyzed) form of knowledge: even more so as explored through means of laboratory experiments with various dead corpses of animals and extracted organs as research objects and major references. The knowledge represented in such artifacts, be it a mechanical tool or a piece of software, I argue, is not mainly developed out of the specific material and dynamic requirements of the auditory—but out of arbitrary requirements of a historical period of research, of industrialization, and of a kind of technoscientifist imperialism taking over Western societies indulging in an industrializing frenzy. In the early twenty-first century, you and I are living in the materialized fantasy of nineteenth-century imperialist and nationalist research squads.

The main anthropological question driving my inquiry here as a researcher in the field of historical anthropology therefore reads as follows: What are the historically and culturally specific assumptions about this strange and alien entity called “The Human” as present in the recent history of sound technology and listening practices? How was it possible that pieces of soft- and hardware, Pro Tools or the phonautograph and their manifold descendants and unlikely twins are now occupying sound cultures on a massively large, even global and transcultural scale? Is it possible to imagine a different and even more valid concept of listening and sounding that resembles more contemporary concepts of technology, corporeality, and personality? And what would be the political, social, and institutional consequences of such a thorough transformation and remodeling of contemporary sound cultures? As I remember my friend and I, arduously crafting our first larger radio piece, we were in touch with rather early beginnings of ubiquitous sound recording and sound reproduction. In the course of our constructing activity, in refining this artifact, our individual sonic personae as well were refined and remodeled following the technological dispositive present at this time. My way of listening and my collaborator’s way of listening, my sense of audio aesthetics as well as the sense of my friend, have crafted a sort of longue durée of the history of technology and of anatomy as present in the software apparatus we were working with. Our shared and piously rebellious minutes of audition, though, seem to fall out of this dispositive—or are they even affirming and supporting it in a sense? How do you and I actually manage to live with all these scientific dispositives predetermining an actual situation of sonic articulation? How do humanoid aliens cope with a sonically preconceptualized world as individual, sonic personae?

So, what is a humanoid alien at all? And what is historical anthropology? The background and the main research strategies of historical anthropology I am working with and within now have a history of almost four decades; and this history will also help me in actually introducing the notion of the humanoid alien I am experimenting with in this book. Historical anthropology represents a non-disciplinary endeavor to research the differing transformations and conceptualization of this strange and alien entity called The Human across cultures and eras. Coming from cultural history and ethnography, performance studies, literature studies, and visual as well as sensory studies, from philosophy and various areas of regional studies, researchers came together, in the early 1980s at the Freie Universität Berlin, to review and to rework the age-old and often hopelessly essentialist, Eurocentric and androcentric, decidedly bourgeois, ableist, and Western research tradition of anthropology. Until then most of the approaches to anthropology branded as philosophical or biological were apparently mainly interested in preserving an existing social, habitual, biological, and philosophical state of how to think about “The Human Being.” A being who would resemble, rather unsurprisingly, mainly the lifestyle and the habit of its white, male, professorial or aristocratic authors. From such more normative approaches came the notion of anthropology being a deeply affirmative, a rather elitist and a largely non-critical field of research and of reflection. In the 1970s whoever would have dared speaking about The Anthropological would have been immediately under strong suspicion of promoting an only loosely camouflaged Western Suprematism. Contrarily, the Berlin researchers of those years, such as Dietmar Kamper, Hans-Dieter Bahr, Gunter Gebauer, and Christoph Wulf at the Interdisciplinary Center for Historical Anthropology, would be interested in the quirkier, the weirder and exotic, the idiosyncratic and more troublesome questions concerning anthropology. Together with colleagues not only from Western Europe or North America, but also from South America, from the Middle East, from East Asia, China, Oceania, and Africa, they founded the international, peer-reviewed Paragrana—with topics such as: Selbstfremdheit (vol. 6: Self-Strangeness), Muße (vol. 16: Idleness), Töten (vol. 20: Killing), Fuß (vol. 21: The Foot), and Unsicherheit (vol. 24: Insecurity). And the second volume ever to appear in Paragrana was on the issue of Das Ohr als Erkenntnisorgan: The Ear as an Organ of Knowledge (Kamper, Trabant and Wulf 1993). This focus on the auditory and the sonic, on listening and sensing is a direct result of the constant interest of this research strand of historical anthropology for the corporeality and the sensory experience of individual creatures on this planet. Exactly this focus on the auditory and the sonic, on listening and sensing, represents the constantly provoking interest of this research strand for corporeality and sensory experience. After an assumed End of Man—Western, white, middle-class, academic males, I feel urged to add—and in the advent of an intensely globalized, mediatized, commodified, and heavily networked period of the late twentieth century, a fundamental reflection seemed fascinating again: What varieties, what forms of excess, transgression, and invention, what potential is there, in this creature one might be tempted to call now rather a humanoid alien?

I introduce the notion of the humanoid alien in this book and will be experimenting with this concept throughout the following chapters. It allows acknowledgment of the intrinsically non-standardized, inherently plastic and transformative character of you, of me, of the persons and creatures around us. They and we might show more or less humanoid and anthropoid traits in our looks, habits, our physics, our expressions; but it would be hard to deny the endless differences between her, them, him, you, or me—even more so in our everyday practices, self-perceptions, our bodily specificities, body enhancements and selected deficits, visible symptoms of earlier diseases, our professions or passions not often evident in each moment of our action or inaction. In contrast to the metaphysically petrified and largely androcentric, Eurocentric, heteronormative, and normophiliac concept of The Human Being, the much more malleable and divergent concept of the humanoid alien allows us to actually study in everyday life the minor and often neglected relations between humanoid aliens and sensory occurrences: the obsessions these aliens find in imaginations they like to indulge in the materialist aspects of various cultural practices, and the desires to promote a social situation supportive for such idiosyncratic needs, an urge to political action. Such an anthropology intends not to superimpose an imaginary norm of humanoid behavior—but to open up an endless series of variations of evermore strange and alien extravaganza of how aliens like me and you might perform, perceive, and experience. The study of humanoid aliens performing, perceiving, and experiencing sonic and sensory conditions constitutes an anthropology of sound.

This present inquiry, therefore, starts in the first part of this book, “The Materialization of Sound,” with a historical exploration and critique scrutinizing selected aspects in the development of science and technology and history of sound since the nineteenth century. The main interest lies here in extracting the underlying anthropological concepts predetermining the main research efforts in order to quantify, to materialize, and finally to corporealize listening and sounding. The second and main part, “The Sonic Persona,” takes these anthropological concepts and proposes a thorough rewriting and resignifying of technical, corporeal, and personal processes of listening and sounding. The historically arbitrary anthropological concepts of listening and of The Human are taken into our presence and a projected future, a time in which it might finally no longer be appropriate to standardize one listening homunculus—but to assume a multitudinal variety of humanoid aliens in all their highly idiosyncratic and deeply situated, corporeal differentials of sensing and experiencing. The third and final part, “The Precision of Sensibil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• PART ONE The materialization of sound: A research history
• PART TWO The sonic persona: An anthropology of sound
• PART THREE The precision of sensibility: A political critique
• Sources
• Tak. Danke. Thank you.
• Index
• Copyright