Humming

Suk-Jun Kim

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501324628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Teoria e gusto musicale

Humming is a ubiquitous and mundane act many of us perform. The fact that we often hum to ourselves, to family members, or to close friends suggests that humming is a personal, intimate act. It can also be a powerful way in which people open up to others and share collective memories. In religious settings such as Tibetan chanting, humming offers a mesmerising sonic experience. Then there are hums that resound regardless of human activity, such as the hums of impersonal objects and man-made or natural phenomena. The first sound studies book to explores the topic of humming, Humming offers a unique examination of the polarising categories of hums, from hums that are performed only to oneself, that are exercised in religious practice, that claim healing, and that resonate with our bodies, to hums that can drive people to madness, that emanate from cities and towns, and that resound in the universe. By acknowledging the quirkiness of hums within the established discourse in sound studies, Humming takes a truly interdisciplinary view on this familiar yet less-trodden sonic concept in sound studies.

1

‘My Hums? … Just About Hums?’

‘Do you have songs that would remind you of your childhood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you hum some for me?’

‘My hums? … Just about hums?’

This short book on humming began almost ten years ago. In 2009, I was in Berlin, working on a series of sound projects. One such project was to collect the hums of different people from Berlin. Titled In Tune, Out of Tune,¹ the project required these different people to hum a tune that would remind them of their childhood. Collecting hums from approximately fifty to sixty people in Berlin to realize this project was a fascinating, and in a way, uneasy experience. Asking people who are strangers to you to hum a tune creates a series of fleeting moments that are tense and awkward. These moments, however short-lived and insignificant initially, are deeply felt; both by the person asking for the hum, and the person humming. The person doing the humming is left with the realisation that this task is considerably more difficult than he or she thought it to be.

Inviting and estranging

It was not at first my desire to observe the behaviour of those who agreed to offer hums. But those awkward moments never failed to stop, intervene, and cut through the normality of whatever social, emotional engagements the person and I had had just before. Being strangers to each other, the social construct agreed upon between us was flimsy and suspected, bringing us to see and hear what humming did to those who hummed and those who listened to it. You can witness this action, this process of humming, for yourself. Ask anyone close to you, either in terms of physical or social distance; a stranger would certainly be better for this experiment of humming a tune. In order to ask someone to hum for you, you first need to consider how to approach him or her. This is not an easy task, precisely because you are well aware of what this request signifies: you are seeking the person’s permission to be invited into his or her intimate, personal space. In a sense, it is as if you have been invited to their house, all of a sudden and without much chit-chat. If they agree to hum, you are in a contract with them bound by a certain trust, one that usually would take longer and require considerably more effort to build. But to your surprise, you realize that you already are in it. And soon, they know that they are in it, too, and often, they realize that such trust is not what they had agreed on.

How would they start humming? They do not; they hesitate – they breathe in, and out, make a few coughs, try to clear their throat and tell a couple of stories about the tune and why this tune and not others. They smile, start the hum, but then stop it immediately and apologize for their clumsiness, either because they may have started it with a wrong note, either too high or too low in the register, or because they may have not been able to control tension in their throat, thereby producing an abnormal or unexpected sound – ‘that’s not my tune!’ they may say. They may have completely and suddenly lost the tune, mumbling some of the lyrics as if to re-learn it, trying to bring it back to the melody they know. They wonder how the song could become so strange and forgotten to them: they roll their eyes high up into their skull, searching for the fleeting tune. They swing their body to and fro, sideways, stretching the chest, biting their lips, swallowing the silence, their breath heavy. Then they start humming again.

Once it starts, however, the listener and the ‘hummer’ are soon in the humming. It particularly helps if you know the tune, but it really doesn’t matter much. Smiling is common in many occasions, and sometimes you can notice certain feelings – cheerfulness and gaiety, sorrow and sadness, fondness and welcoming, or melancholia and a sense of loss – that may not otherwise be identified and shared. Furthermore, humming can reveal rather ghostly and mysterious incidences that are usually hidden deep in our consciousness. I remember in two occasions when I became keenly aware of this. One was while I was collecting hums from Gloria Maya in 2012, who was then a professor of printmaking at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, USA. I was working on a humming project called Silver City Humming, and she decided to offer her hum of a children’s song together with her sister, Nellie. Since Nellie was in another town, she called her up and they hummed together over the telephone.² There are three most fascinating – and perhaps, you could say, eerie – aspects about their hum that struck me while listening to them humming on that first occasion and haunted me again and again when I played it back in the studio. Being sisters, the voice of Gloria – whose body was present with me – is uncannily similar to that of Nellie, whom I had never met before. Humming, not singing with lyrics, enhanced the likeness between the sisters, resulting in a strange image of Gloria humming along with a recording of her own voice – her double, her simulacrum. Just before they start humming, they make sure that they are both ready to do so:

Nellie: Okay. Are you ready, Gloria?

Gloria: Okay, okay. Are you ready?

Nellie: Yes, Okay.

Gloria: Okay.

During the short amount of time the two sisters ‘okay’ with each other, I lose track of who is okaying who. Bizarrely, Gloria’s simulacrum is on an equal standing, gaining the same power she has. They start humming well together at first, but gradually, Gloria appears to forget the tune and slowly loses synchronisation with Nellie. Perhaps this was because Gloria became aware that Nellie would have had no way of knowing what was going on between me and her sister in this far away room, or maybe it was just that Gloria could not keep up with Nellie. No matter what the cause was, the effect is striking. At some point, Gloria stops humming completely and we have only the humming of Nellie through the crackling phone line. Almost at the same time that Gloria stops humming, Nellie’s humming becomes stuck in one phrase of the tune, failing to find the resolving note. She continually returns to the note of the dominant chord, thus repeating the same phrase again and again, as if her humming had been on the looped groove of an LP record. The result is as if Gloria and her present body were subsumed by Nellie, her ghostly double, but then almost immediately, that ghost were also subsumed by the very power of subsuming – repetition and doubling, two operations that result in Freud’s uncanny (das Unheimliche).³ Gloria and I had to let Nellie hum for another ten minutes or so as she kept going and we did not want to embarrass her by stopping her. Gloria explained to me about the song before they hummed. I think she said that the tune was a common birthday song, popular among Chicanos (Americans of Mexican descent). And then she mentioned that Nellie’s husband had suddenly passed away quite recently. Being a South Korean and not being familiar with the Chicano culture, the tune was completely foreign to me, even with the lyrics. And yet, I could not help but recognize the irony caused by the conflict between a sense of loss on the one hand, and that of hope on the other, which I could read neither from Gloria’s face nor that of Nellie, but from their heartfelt humming.

On another occasion, I was visiting a nursing home in Aberdeen, Scotland, for another humming project titled Aberdeen Humming.⁴ There was an old lady who agreed to offer her hum, but she kept stopping and apologizing as she felt she could not hum as well as she thought she could due to her recent surgery on her throat to remove tumours. Another lady in a wheelchair, who seemed to have been troubled by memory loss, said to me, repeatedly, her voice wasn’t very good, and her humming wasn’t very good, either. In both incidents, humming bore witness to and was symptomatic of the physical or mental difficulties that the women had been suffering from. At the same time, it brought me into their suffering and pain more immediately, directly, and gently than in any other way.

Humming is inviting. In an instant, humming puts us into a socio-acoustic cocoon as it erects a wall of intimacy and emotion. Its effect is at first towards oneself who hums as its resonance soothes his or her body and its tune brings back memories. In this sense, humming invites oneself to oneself; it guides and directs oneself to a path to knowing oneself whose constitution is sonic, and thus, to the extent of which, humming is epistemological. It is a grasping of the resonant self, whose body and memories – as well as the acoustic threshold of otherness – all contribute to a feedback system that probes into the surface of the body: into the throat, into the larynx, and into the lungs, reversing itself by pushing air out from the lungs to the larynx, throat, mouth and nose, expelling itself back into the world. When offered to others as an invitation – usually to those who are close to themselves, and in rare occasions, to strangers – the emotive and intimate attributes of humming do not lose their power but in fact expand and are empowered by sharing. That humming acts to conceal the tune’s lyrics (as most tunes have them) is a characteristic of its power, for by removing the textural appearance of the tune (because you cannot completely remove its textural structure), it opens up possibilities for a true faculty of the voice. The sound of vocalic uttering, unhindered by the structure of language, demonstrates how the voice is produced, connecting to the apparatus of the mouth, head, shoulders, and upper body, as well as the lungs, through which air is expelled. This concealment is what constitutes humming, a topic to which I shall return later. For now, it is important to note that this concealment of the lyrics while humming is neither a complete nor a successful task. For humming, when offered to oneself or to others, does not aim to hide the lyrics, even though it requires the hummer to do so. In fact, humming functions regardless of whether or not the text of the tune is recognized. In the most distant awareness during humming, we may not recognize the tune or its lyrics, if it is a song, but the fact we can still hear someone humming is enough for a socio-acoustic relationship to be established. Furthermore, if we recognize the tune (‘hey, I know the song!’), we are invited to participate in it, and thus, listening to humming can become a collaborative act if we choose it to be. Or perhaps, we cannot choose it to be, but we have already ended up participating in it as soon as we realize that we know the tune. Finally, when we know the lyrics, humming then takes another turn that binds us completely to its spell; a linguistic communication is made without linguistic means. The effect of humming that binds us to its act – making us hear, listen, and eventually participate in it – takes only an instant. How does humming, despite being a gentle and unassuming act, do its magic at such a speed? What causes its velocity? One answer, although it sounds antinomic, may be because humming alienates us.

Yes, humming is estranging, and thus, is estranged from the self. While pulling us into it, it, at once, pushes us out. Humming makes us worked up and makes us acutely aware of the failing features of ourselves, of the frail link between the voice and the body: the voice that isn’t good, the breathing that is not enough, the throat that aches and cracks, the melody that goes round and round, or the memory that becomes weak and faint. Interestingly, the fact that humming makes us aware of this alienation, this disjointedness of the voice from the self, is clear evidence that it is not (just) the language that causes the voice to be estranged from the self, but something fundamental about the voice that is foreign to it. Mladen Dolar highlights that foreignness of the voice which assumes the link between the two – language and body – but never actually belongs to either:

The voice ties language to the body, but the nature of this tie is paradoxical: the voice does not belong to either. It is not part of linguistics, which follows from my initial argument (after all, Saussure himself spoke of the non-phonic nature of the signifier; Derrida will insist on this at great length in Grammatology), but it is not part of the body either – not only does it detach itself from the body and leave it behind, it does not fit the body either, it cannot be situated in it, ‘disacousmatized.’ … So the voice stands at a paradoxical and ambiguous topological spot, at the intersection of language and the body, but this intersection belongs to neither. What language and the body have in common is the voice, but the voice is part neither of language nor of the body.⁵

Dolar further discusses the paradoxical nature of the relation of the ‘non-voice’ to language elsewhere in his book, where he suggests that the ontology – the topological spot – of the non-voice, which, he lists, are ‘from coughing and hiccups to babbling, screaming, laughing, and singing’, is never independent from linguistics, as if,

by their very absence of articulation (or surplus-articulation in the case of singing), they were particularly apt to embody the structure as such, the structure at its minimal; or meaning as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface: Tactility of Humming
• 1 ‘My Hums? … Just About Hums?’
• 2 The Secrecy of Humming
• 3 Hums of the Other
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright