thanks for not being a zombie

In a comment to the previous entry, Clancy writes of the Beastie Boys: "I find the beats and the delivery of the lyrics really abrasive, to the point that their music can make me anxious." As an extremely sound-sensitive person, I know where she's coming from. Yet I've also come to understand that there are many sounds I find distracting or irritating that others enjoy or ignore and a few sounds that I like that others can't stand. How do we learn to appreciate or despise different sounds? How much is explained by physical differences between us (ears, ear canals, density of bones)? And how much by the different experiences we have that condition our responses? Can we reprogram our responses to sound?

In a related story, there's a lot going on in this New York Times article,¹ of course, but the interesting thing to me is the disagreement about whether the sounds made by small children are euphonous or cacophonous.

Actually, that's somewhat reductive, isn't it? A number of different sound-related questions arise:

• Are people with children less likely to be annoyed with the sounds of small children than people without?
• Should children make one sort of sounds outside and another sort inside?
• Are the sounds expected from children in a coffee and pastry shop in the hip part of town different than those expected from them in a "family friendly" restaurant?

Where do our answers to these questions come from? Why do we have such a hard time resolving these sound-related social conflicts? Why do they evoke such strong responses?² Some, like R. Murray Schafer³ in The Tuning of the World, would argue that we should not pursue noise abatement strategies but rather should create acoustic environments in which the sound we experience is pleasing to us. It's interesting to imagine what Schafer might say about the conflict over children's behavior in coffeeshops. (Of course, I'm unpersuaded that the anecdotes related in the NYT story add up to any sort of meaningful, widespread trend, but that's journalism for you.)

1. "At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops," by Jodi Wilgoren (New York Times; November 11, 2005); see Technorati's list of blogs linking to this article here and here.
2. See this blog entry from Dr. Virago for another example.
3. See the World Soundscape Project, founded by Schafer in the late 1960s. See also this entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Posted by at 7:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sound is both material and immaterial. A voice cannot be touched, but it can touch you. Sound waves push the air in the space separating speaker and listener until those waves make contact with the tiny sensors in your head. Sound penetrates. Sound persists.

You can close your eyes to block out light, but even if you had earlids, you could not establish silence. Sound is within and without.

Your heart, your lungs, your veins, your digestive tract are all constant sources of sound. Sound cannot be escaped.

Posted by at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

On 11 November I was standing in a check-in queue at Heathrow's Terminal Three, on my way to Canada, when an announcement was broadcast, requesting 'cooperation' in the observation of a 2-minute silence. Few scenes in modern life are more redolent of a mechanical toy in action than a major airport during peak hours. The sensation of highly controlled, perpetual and repetitious movement is overwhelming. An atmosphere of fairytale entrancement suppresses the underlying panic that afflicts all sensible travellers (one reason I life artist Mariko Mori's projected work, Miko No Inori, or Shaman Girl's Prayer, with its plaintive incantation performed by Mori as plastic spiritual cyberbabe in the ultradesign of Osaka's Kansei airport). For those processing through this environment, a silence to honour the dead is reluctantly conceded (death may be imminent, after all), easily observed by those like me who still wait in a queue but almost impossible for the airline staff and travellers who have reached their moment of ecstatic confrontation at a desk. Almost imperceptibly, hush oozed downwards through Heathrow, a gentle slide that softened the outlines of jagged chatter, audio alerts, luggage belts and disembodied unwanted information speak. The mechanical toy took perhaps 128 second to crawl to a complete stop, then another 2 second to relocate its life force. (43-44).

Recent air travel entries by KF and Chuck resonate, for me, with this passage from Toop's book.

Posted by at 7:57 PM | Permalink

If you read only one scholarly work on soundscapes, it should be the introduction to Bruce Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. It has everything you need to get up to speed.

If you read only one book on modern music and sound artistry, it should be David Toop's Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory.

Posted by at 10:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Texturl, a whole mess of interesting sound files. Avant-garde poetry and more.

Some of my recent, related acquisitions:

• The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer
• The Acoustic World of Early Modern England : Attending to the O-Factor, by Bruce Smith
• Hearing History, edited by Mark M. Smith
• Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700, by Adam Fox
• The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1850, edited by Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf

Posted by at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Two of the dominant research interests guiding me right now are book history and the history of sound. What a coincidence, then, that the Macarthur Foundation has just awarded grants to

• Terry Belanger and
• Emily Thompson.

I'll get mine, yet!

Posted by at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Murray Schafer, from "Open Ears" (in 2003's The Auditory Culture Reader):

The Latin word audire (to hear) has many derivations. One may have an 'audience' with the king--that is, a chance to have him hear your petitions. One's financial affairs are 'audited' by an accountant, because originally accounts were read aloud for clarity. An accused person is given a 'hearing,' that is, a chance for the accused and witnesses to offer aural testimony in the courtroom. Of course, rooms are often constructed or appointed to favour the transmission of some voices over others, and the courtroom, like the royal court, is no exception, with the judge as the king occupying the most elevated position, reminding us that the Latin word obaudire meant 'hearing from below'--obeying. Similar relationships have been noticed in other languages, for instance in German, where horen (to hear) is also the root of gehoren (to belong to) and gehorchen (to obey). We hear sound. We belong to sound. We obey sound. (30).

Posted by at 9:56 AM | Permalink

"I'm thinkin' about my doorbell./ When ya gonna ring it?"
    -The White Stripes, "My Doorbell" (Get Behind Me Satan)

"Indeed, if we listen to it the landscape is not so much a static topography that can be mapped and drawn, as a fluid and changing surface that is transformed as it is enveloped by different sounds."
    -Michael Bull and Les Back, "Introduction: Into Sound" (The Auditory Culture Reader)

Sound has been on my mind lately as I make my way through some soundscape scholarship. Jason J linked to a NYT review of John M. Picker's Victorian Soundscapes back in December, and soon thereafter I saw a panel at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association that piqued my interest. (Is "saw a panel" the right expression? Should that be "heard a panel"?) Because the people I study were renowned for nothing if not being noisy, this is not a field I can afford to ignore.

How did history sound? The question is not so banal as it might first appear. For example, when we think of "literature" now we think for the most part of silent readers occupied, to use Benedict Anderson's memorable phrase, "in the lair of the skull." However, many genres were and are meant to be spoken or sung: the epic, the ballad, the sermon, the play. And many readers read aloud, even long after words began to be written down with spaces between them in order to facilitate silent reading. As many scholars writing in the wake of Jurgen Habermas have acknowledged, London's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coffeehouses were sites for public reading of (and argument about) the contents of the latest newpapers in a cacophanous collision of caffeine, conversation, and print. (Didja catch that alliteration? That's a trick of the ear, not the eye, yet chances are you're not reading this aloud. Sound--or the idea of sound--can invade the lair of the skull, then, though probably not for everyone.)

Many of the spaces in which sounds were created and heard centuries ago still exist. But even if a space no longer exists, the scholar can study architectural drawings or reproductions from the time, study the materials used in the construction of particular spaces to understand how sound waves (whose function remains constant) would have resonated. Of course, with natural spaces an entirely different set of research methods might be employed.

The human voice is generated by body parts that have remained pretty much the same for the last few centuries. The human ear hasn't really changed. The human mind, however, is a much more malleable thing. This is not to say that the gray matter of the brain has evolved into something different than it was in, say, 1600, but rather that the ways we respond to (or ignore, or generate) sound can be affected as much by culturally-bound cognitive development as by biology. Does a person who grew up on a farm relate to sound in the same way as a person who grew up in Manhattan? What about a Londoner who lived from 1700 to 1780 compared to a Londoner who lived 1920 to 2000? Probably not. And so it's the human relationship to sound--to particular sounds, to particular soundscapes--which is really what's at issue.

I hope to be posting more about this, so stay stuned. See also Kari Kraus's observations on "paleoacoustics" at the end of this blog entry.

Posted by at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

A field of study popped up on my radar screen recently: soundscape studies. I'm not exactly sure how or if this field might be relevant to my work on orality and literacy, but I'm going to investigate. I heard the term while attending a great panel in Philadelphia at MLA 2004:

Sounds in the Eighteenth-Century City

1. “Mother Shipton Speaks: Sounding Oracles in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture,” Laura E. McGrane, Haverford Coll.
2. “Pope, Print, and the ‘Wond’rous Pow’r of Noise,’” Paula J. McDowell, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
3. “Sounds in the Theater,” Paula R. Backscheider, Auburn Univ., Auburn

All three papers were great but the one by Paula McDowell was particularly interesting to me. (Full disclosure: McDowell was on my dissertation committee.) If I followed her talk correctly, her current book project, Fugitive Voices: Literature and Oral Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, traces attitudes towards oral traditions from the late seventeenth through the late eighteenth century in England. While we find a skeptical, or even antagonistic, attitude towards oral traditions in earlier writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, there is a more nostalgic view in place by the time we get to James MacPherson and William Wordsworth. In short, McDowell is researching the ways in which our current attitudes towards orality and literacy developed, including the invention of such concepts as "oral tradition" and "oral culture." This is, it seems to me, extremely important work that is not only carefully researched and deeply historicized but understandable by the layperson.

Too bad some reporters cannot be persuaded to leave the confines of the newsroom in order to actually see what's going on at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, offering their readers instead a tired retread of stereotypes and uninformed sniping.

Posted by at 10:30 AM | Permalink