Week 5

Class 5 – March 5

SOUND ETHNOGRAPHY, SOUND KNOWLEDGE

We discuss sound recording as ethnographic practice. What can sound recording tell us about the cultural past and present? How can it do so differently than the written word?

FURNITURE MUSIC:

·       Kevin T. Allen. Field Recordings from the film Crosswalk byJeanne Liotta. 2010.

READ+LISTEN:

·       Steve Peters. Here Ings. Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2003. (personal library)

·       Steven Feld. “The Time of Bells, 4.” 2007.

·       The Sublime Frequencies catalog.

READ:

·       Francisco Lopez. “Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter.” Audio Culture: Readings in ModernMusic. Ed.Chistopher Cox and Daniel Warner. The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2004.(class files)

·       Steven Feld. “A Rainforest Acoustemology.” The Auditory Culture Reader. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. Berg Publishers, 2004. (class files)

Alain Corbin. Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth French Countryside. Columbia University Press, 1998. 95-101. (not found)

·       Susan Sontag. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretationand Other Essays. 1966.(personal library)

·       Kevin T. Allen. “Here-Ings: An Interview with Steve Peters.” 2007. (class files)

Crosswalk

A sculpture of Jesus in repose is carried through busy traffic by a collection of old and young, wearing modern and traditional religious garb. The film clip shows a mix of people, events, and city life that seems possible only in modern day New York City. 

As an ethnographic documentary, the uncanny setting for the pilgrimage creates a strong sense of realism. This is no art project-(despite a momentary blip-the film filter that is added just at the end)  it has not been designed by an obsessive puppetmaster. The film reminded me of a social practice artist who resides in New York, Nicolas Estevez, who performs new variations of Catholic rituals, carefully composed for the camera. I had not thought about how Estevez's work maintains a certain sacrosanct quality, whereas in contrast, this very real ritual felt somewhat casual.

Many independent feature films incorporate this kind of blurring of the lines between art and religious rituals, between modern day and historical settings. I am thinking of Mr. Lonely, by Harmony Korrine, or Peter Watkins'  master work La Commune. I had considered these other narrative works to draw on a sense of the ethnographic documentary to add a certain gloss to their works, almost like a filter. Yet of course, upon reflection, these artists in fact made a critical choice that is imbued with a sense of the history of art criticism and a clear purpose.

As ethnographic documentarians, having a sense of the stylization of the genre in various narrative forms seems critical to maintaining control over the implications inherent in the medium. Yet more specifically, I wondered after reading Sontag's essay Against Interpretation, if this convergence of forms somehow creates a web of resistance to interpretation. Does it matter if it is documentary or narrative? If we get accustomed thinking of the art object as  marked by the "real", does it help us see it for what it is rather than what it"means"? If we see the documentary as more of an artistic craft, are we less likely to treat it as journalistic,tempted to debate its merits in terms of accuracy or objectivity?

The Time of Bells

Steven Feld's project recalled for me the passages in Schafer's book The Soundscape that touched on the cultural significance of bells. In one passage he notes that bells are often cited as beloved by the Swiss, but less remarked upon in other countries. 

In the United States, our culture marks time with buzzers and alarms, rather than bells; our soundscape is populated by digital warnings rather than musical calls. In the passage regarding symbolic sounds, Schafer categorizes bells as either centripetal or centrifugal, as attracting sounds or repellent sounds.(Schafer, 173)

Feld's bells showcase a wide variety of centripetal chimes, a fact which highlights the lack of them in our own culture.

Still, I wondered a little about the purity of the recordings, especially after reading Lopez. Do recordings like these (and perhaps there was a little of this in last week's Annapurna) create a false sense of romanticism about a world that really doesn't exist? I agree with David Dunn that cutting out signs of human interference allows us to continue dreaming of a sentimentalized natural world that disappeared long ago, and being lulled into this perspective is both seductive and harmful on many levels.

As an ethnographer, Feld's article revealed more of this kind of romantic bias, in my opinion, towards the idea of preserving sounds as artifacts of a more pure time and place.There is something dangerously illogical to me about attempting to preserve something so fragile as an undisturbed culture or environment. You run the very real risk that it may not, in fact, exist, and the role of either the artist or documentarian should include being very clear about the difference.

Steve Peters Hereings

Steve Peters' work is another that blurs the line between documentary and art. The source material is carefully archived from one place and even phase of day, but is then blended into compositions that are arranged more for musicality than for an accurate sense of time.

The resulting work shows the mark of an artist, but not so much of a personality, or even a human touch. The sense of time that remains does not include our human sense of the vastness and emptiness of nature. Contact mics pick up insects, elisions in the recordings bring the natural world into the foreground rather than keeping it in the background.

In Allen's interview, Peters talks about the term intimacy, and perhaps intimacy, or a lack of it,  is a better way to describe this piece's relationship to the natural world and its sound. Natural sound in Hereings is closer to us than we expect. But Peters preserves natural and human sound, a fact which lends realism to this work, which above all others, seems to resist interpretation.