Week 1

DOCUMENTARY (another word for “Listening & Looking”)

Class 1 – February 5

Assignment 1: Sound Map

Curate a soundwalk for a location of your choosing. Write a one-page description of observations made on your soundwalk (e.g., what did you hear, how did it sound, how did it affect you?) and create a sound map (a recorded representation of the sounds you encountered). 

DUE February 25

STARTING TO THINK ABOUT SPACE, SONICALLY    

Phenomenological approaches to space and sound.

• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994 /1958)(on hold Multco)
• Christine McCombe, “Imagining Space through Sound” In Proceedings UK and Ireland Soundscape Community Conference: Sound Practice (Darrington, 2001)
• Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003) (available online from the New School library.)

AND THE HISTORY OF SOUND, TECHNOLOGY AND THE SENSES        

The history of sound production and technology.

• Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003).

Links:

• 9 Beet Stretch
• Acoustic.Space.Re-Search.Lab
• Sound-Environment Interaction: propagation, incidence, reflection, absorption, resonance, binaural hearing, etc

• Continue with Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003).

On Bachelard's The Poetics of Space and the Sound-Environment website 

In a world that privileges the quest narrative and the surveyor’s maps, Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space brings forth an unusual creative history in contemplating the architectural confines and the imaginative possibilities of the house.

Guiding Question
What does Bachelard’s lengthy expose on the cottage and the castle have to teach us about new territories in sound art?

As the title of the work implies, a poetics of space combines unlikely disciplines, 
contrasting an examination of geometrical planes with the shadow realm of the subconscious. By choosing to explore the ways in which the house both limits and draws forth the imagination, Bachelard threatens to drown us in the dullness of plaster and brooms. But in ignoring the ways in which residential space defines and propels creativity, we miss an opportunity to comprehend how our sense of sound develops and how we experience sound in daily life. Qualities of sound design such as absorption and resonance that are familiar to us generally occur in relationship to architecture, not in isolation inside of our editing programs.

Some of these ideas will be familiar to students of phonography or deep listening. Still, few philosophers, writers, or sound artists have contented themselves with contemplating the humble spaces of the house, almost as if afraid of facing the reality that very little creative work is accomplished beyond the metaphysical limits of the nooks and corners that populate our imaginations. Bachelard illustrates not just how we can re-imagine our relationship to the domestic sphere, but how the house determines our own capabilities to generate new ideas and phenomena.

But life in corners, and the universe itself withdrawn into a corner with the daydreamer, is a subject about which poets will have more to tell us. They will not hesitate to give this daydream all its reality. (Bachelard, 139)

Still, Bachelard acknowledges the house as a shelter for the vulnerable human imagination. And in the realm of phenomena, the human body still maintains its own resonance; the soundbox of the house is the shell around which our bodies sympathetically vibrate. (http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Resonance.html)

Guiding Questions
How can new understandings of domestic space reconfigure our relationship to our own physical bodies and how will this affect our use of soundings, or the mapping of, say an installation space? Bachelard’s book was published several years before the beginnings of installation art. How is his work best expressed and re-contextualized within the history of other art practices that seek to expand our sense of space and the imagination?

Bachelard paints through poetry and theory many sonic phenomena, explaining through poetry and prose concepts such as the anechoic chamber.  (http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook/Anechoic_Chamber.html)

When we have been made aware of a rhythmanalysis by moving from a concentrated to an expanded house, the oscillations reverberate and grow louder. Like Superveille, great dreamers profess intimacy with the world. They learned this intimacy, however, meditating on the house. (Bachelard, 66) 

As practitioners of sound, we may be unconsciously anxious to find the limits of an echo, or to determine the closed-ness of an absorbent room. Sound in the world is a running stream that threatens to engulf us, and it is in the house that we are allowed the safety to first experiment with and test dams and doors, roundness and dead zones. Ultimately, the house is an architectural history of how we first learn to manipulate our relationship to the world and the world of sound. 

Jonathan Sterne's The Audible Past 

In contrast to Bachelard, Sterne examines the ways in which sound technologies evolved in tandem with cultural changes at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. There are parallels to Bachelard in Sterne, sometimes Sterne reads like a history of technology and its habits within the home. The book has much more to do with the history of sound recording and how it evolved, which often involves scathing critiques of American culture.

While lengthy, the following provides a clear window into how Sterne positions his discussion of sound, technology, and  human history.

Technologies are associated with habits, sometimes crystallizing them and sometimes enabling them. They embody in physical form particular dispositions and tendencies. The door closer tends to close the door unless I stop it with my hand or a doorstop. The domestic radio set receives but does not broadcast unless I do a little rewiring and add a microphone. The telephone rings while I write the introduction to this book. After years of conditioning to respond to a ringing telephone, it takes some effort to ignore it and finish the sentence or paragraph. To study technologies in any meaningful sense requires a rich sense of their connection with human practice, habitat, and habit. It requires attention to the fields of combined cultural, social, and physical activity— what other authors have called networks or assemblages— from which technologies emerge and of which they are a part. (Sterne, 8)

Sterne does not hide his ethical qualms with the way that sound recording developed, and especially in later chapters on ethnographers as almost as harshly stated: near genocidal apologists. Sound recordists at the turn of the century concerned themselves with saving Native American languages to tape, but did not concern themselves with the causes of their destruction. While Sterne asserts that Victorians were innured to death (hence the focus on sound as a way to preserve the voices of the dead in early literature) they were also innured to their own role in the destruction of a whole way of life.

Sterne's ideas should have significant resonance and importance for documentarians or artists operating from within the methodology of ethnography. He provides a critical perspective on ethics that is relevant to anyone recording another culture, or even using ethnographic archival materials.

If this seems like a strangely violent or gory history, if all this talk of power and human relations seems somehow secondary to the history of sound technologies and human hearing, if this book seems like anything less than a love letter to the phenomenon of sound reproduction, it is only because, as Walter Benjamin admonishes us, there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism. Our bodies are not givens, the grounds from which we enter social life; they are the domains through which we are constituted (and constitute ourselves) as social beings. The human body is suffused with the struggles of history. It is no wonder that body parts play a major role in a history of sound. (Sterne, 346)

Guiding Questions
What does Sterne's book have to teach us about the relationships between technology, ethics, and progress?
What kinds of ethical questions should be at the heart of any ethnographic practice?