Transcript
IN_LISTENING_IN
an ambisonic audio essay
by Gail Priest
NB: If reading on a phone click the hyperlinked word to view footnotes. If reading on computer roll over the number to reveal the pop up.
Part 1: Locus
0:00 | Short stabs of static occurring in different locations of the 360 aural field. There is the reverberance of a large, empty space. At first the bursts are random, before resolving into a rhythmic sequence.
0:34 | Static stabs replaced by bleeps with similar staccato rhythms and spatialisation. The bleeps form a melody that is light and tending toward playful, just shy of joyous.
1:00 | A low subliminal bass tone is added, then longer overlapping static phrases—fizzy filaments—sweeping around in an anticlockwise direction.
1:12 | The sounds continue underneath the narration.
You are in the centre. The centre of this sounding. Sounds may come from different locations, yet you are in the centre of your aural field.
It could be argued that you are also in the centre of your visual field, but to see behind you requires you to move your gaze—to turn around to take in the whole.
Try turning around.
There is nothing to look at behind you. But you might notice that sounds shift. You are in an ambisonic essay. It uses the 360VR format as it enables dynamic audio that will respond to your spatial orientation. While no sense is completely separate, I have chosen to minimise visual distraction to allow you to focus more fully on spatial listening.
From a pragmatic and prepositional perspective we look at, while we are in hearing and listening. However, from our position in our aural centre, we can also listen in—or is it out? The curious ear/body/mind reaches out to sound, seeks to meet it. This the difference between a passive hearing and intentional listening.
Salomé Voegelin says that we experience “sound as a temporal relationship. This relationship is not between things but is the thing, is sound itself…”. She says, “in listening I am in sound, there can be no gap between the heard and hearing.” [1]Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to noise and silence: Towards a philosophy of sound art. Continuum, p. 5.
3:50 | The melody fades out replaced by a series of extended tones, which sound like distant voices (human or animal, male/female, it’s hard to categorise) calling out from a distance and at different pitches. These, too, swirl around in an anticlockwise direction, twisting around the static comets.
I find the total collapse of one into the other a little too confounding. I opt for a conspiratorial union. Like Pierre Schaeffer’s correlation of the objét sonore and reduced listening, one finds its a new purpose through the other. The sound becomes sound object, the hearer becomes intentional listener. I propose that this correlation can be described as sonaurality.
So, if we experience listening from within, and in correlation with sound, how effective is it, to theorise about it from without—to create a distance between the object of study and the student who listens?
4:46 | A clear voice sings/calls, three times, from different places in the spatial field.
Part 2: Above and below
5:00 | The sound of traffic fades in as the voices fade out: beeps of a pedestrian crossing; sirens and alarms; the rush-roar of cars, traveling anti-clockwise; thumps; a machinic squeal. The whoosh of traffic begins to develop a higher frequency fringing, and then the lower sounds sweep up and away leaving a silvery sounding static. This continues with the pedestrian crossing beeps still faintly present. A lower harmonic tune begins. It has a smooth, synthetic, airy organ timbre.
5: 33 | When I started travelling for research and art purposes, I developed a ritual of ascending tall buildings to view the city from above. Generally shunning such touristic activities I surprised myself in this dedicated pursuit. The activities of the world below are rendered strangely mute. And the viewing places are also often hushed and quiet like a church—the occasional child’s overexcited chatter as landmarks are identified and pointed to, fingers smearing the floor to ceiling window. Sometimes there is muzak, some form of ignorable sound, to soften the silence, to ease the vertiginous anxiety.
In his text, “Walking the City”, Michel de Certeau talks of “Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Centre… It’s agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. A gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes.” This perspective, he says, transforms the world “into a “text” that can be read. But de Certeau is sceptical of what is learned from above, warning that this “scopic and gnostic drive” leads to a “fiction of knowledge” and reflects a desire to be a “viewpoint and nothing more.” [2]De Certeau, M. (1984). Walking the city. In The practice of everyday life. University of California Press, p. 92.
I see now that my acts of ascent are a response to the dislocation I feel as a “tourist”, unable to read the city on the ground. I ascend in an attempt to gain what Salomé Voegelin says is the “knowledge through the distance and stability of the object” that the visuality” offers. [3]Voegelin, p. 4.
De Certeau contrasts the desire to be a viewpoint with that of the participant who walks the city down below. He calls these participants “Wandersmänner” [or wanderers] and says their “bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it.” [4]De Certeau, p. 93.
But let us consider the position of the wanderer not as a point of view, but a position of listening. If the participant on the ground has no holistic vision, perhaps they should turn to the aural sense for orientation.
7:55 | Market sounds fade in: voices, footsteps, commercial music, a general underhum of engines. A street vendor calling out in Korean is the most dominant figure. Elements fade in and out as the point of listening moves through the space. Sounds continue underneath the narration.
8: 10 | As a tourist, overwhelmed by an accumulation of images in camera and memory, I prefer to record the sounds of a city on the ground, often using binaural microphones that are hidden in my own ears, recording an undeniably subjective position filtered by the shape of my own bones. It is through this listening (of which the recording is a by-product), that I get closest to feeling like I am part—temporarily, of course—of a place. It is through listening that I find a way of being within a foreign city.
8:47 | Market spruikers continue over the general atmosphere, fading into a footsteps series: high heels on hard surface, interior; fast, flat-footed, slappy, interior, with background voices; hollow, clopping steps with trolley wheels and rattles; car horns, flatshoes ascending stairs…
Part 3: Periplus
9:00 | As narrative continues, slow measured, hard-heeled steps, solo, with reverb from close walls.
De Certeau says: “Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series… Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities.[…] It is true that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths… But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was… The trace left behind is substituted for the practice”. [5]De Certeau, p. 97.
10:23 | Footsteps continue then fade into an open space. Church bells ring—a general toll of the bell swinging back and forth, more distant steps shuffle past.
To bring this back to writing about sonic art, the urge to map, categorise, taxonomise, to separate oneself out from the sounds being studied, silences the richness of the experience of listening. For Voegelin, mapping reflects a “pragmatic visuality” that she says offers “a misleading sense of objectivity”. She proposes that to engage meaningfully with the auditory realm, it requires an exploratory approach: “Left in the dark” she says, “I need to explore what I hear. Listening discovers and generates the heard.” [6]Voegelin, p. 4.
11: 15 | Bells change to a higher chiming complex melody, with street voices, coughs. An arctic gull squawks, close proximity, a loud van passes momentarily drowning out the chimes. The bells emerge again from the mask of noise as a descending carillon. The seagull commences again, now answered by gulls in the distance. Under the gulls the sound of ocean waves has been introduced.
12:05 | So instead of a cartographic paradigm, we might step back to the act of exploration itself. In his critique of the above and beyond pretence of objectivity and neutrality of modernism, literary critic W. V. Spanos proposes the alternate notion of the periplus. [7]Spanos W. V., in Connor, S. (1997). Postmodernist culture: An introduction to theories of the contemporary. 2nd ed. Blackwell, pp. 124–125. A periplus is an Ancient Greek form that presents the itinerary of a journey, a mapping from within, from the point of view of the sailor on the sea.
12:35 | A distant seagull with delay effect. A melody joins the waves—ascending and descending phrases, the instrumental timbre a mid-low metallic hammered sound, but with an electronic glassy tone overlaid, that eventually dominates.
“I begin from the pillars of Herakles in Europe, all the way to the pillars of Herakles in Libya, and all the way to the great Ethiopians. The pillars of Herakles are located opposite one another and are separated from one another by a day’s sail… From the pillars of Herakles, there are many Carthaginian trading stations, clay, high tides and ocean.” [8]Translation: Periplus (Pseudo-Scylax). (2019, August 13). In Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Translation:Periplus_(Pseudo-Scylax)&oldid=9536728
That was from the Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax from 4th or 3rd Century BC.
A periplus of a sonic experiences parallels Voegelin's suggestion of a narration of listening to sonic art, which she believes “introduces the themes central to a philosophy of sound art: subjectivity, objectivity, communication, collective relations, meaning and sense making.” [9]Voegelin, pp. 5–6
But with the periplus are we simply replacing a flat topography with linear sequentiality and still limiting the formal potential of our alternate sound theory?
Part 4: Tomography
13:43 | A rhythmic mechanistic sound, high and hydraulic moving through a 180 degree spatial arc. This is joined by a fidgeting rattle on the edge of the ears—wide stereo.
Perhaps we can find an alternative to topography by considering tomography.
14:10 | Low, layered hums with pulsing cycles. Each have shifting, sweeping harmonics and move through the sonic space. Continues under narration.
14:26 | A term from the medical sciences, tomography is the process of taking multiple scans or slices of the inside of something, and compiling them into an accumulative image, clearly made of parts. It allows an outside perspective from the inside.
14:43 | A higher oscillating tone is added also with sweeping harmonics.
14:50 | In this we can find parallels in the epistemology of situated knowledges offered by Donna Haraway. She suggests that embedded knowledges are partial and located, offering greater context and transparent perspectives. Situated knowledges, an approach that acknowledges its location, challenges the notion of the ‘God view’ that claims to “understand everything from nowhere”. By connecting these knowledges—these slices—we avoid solipsistic subjectivity and relativism that Haraway sees sitting on the opposite side of the coin to objectivity. Both, she says, “deny the stakes in location, embodiment and partial perspective; both make it impossible to see well.” [10]Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3) (1988), p. 584.
Notice here, we are back at the visual as the source of knowledge. An alternate theorising of sonaurality offers knowledge as understanding the negotiation of relations. Sonaurality confounds clear binaries of subject-object, subjectivity-objectivity.
16:04 | A higher metallic tone, tense and wire-like is added.
Karen Barad, using quantum field physics as a metaphor, suggests that there is no inside and out, only multiple insides. Relations are not inter- but intrasubjective—multiple, always shifting possible relations between insides. [11]Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–87.
16: 24 | A melody enters, ambiguous and hopeful in tone. The instrument timbre, like a metallic string, hammered on attack but with a sustained tensile tail.
The thought figure of tomography, focuses on the relations of slices from within. It is a position that is reflexive about its subjectivity in a way that acknowledges the context within which arguments are proposed. The tomographic also highlights the processes of mediation—the experience of the inside enabled by a technological interaction. By embracing and working with processes of mediation a tomographic approach encourages formal play in which digital technologies can allow for “slices” of sound and thought from the inside to be configured in numerous ways that parallel the plurality of the listening experience.
In this instance, I am using the 360VR format for its ambisonic potentials to attempt to offer you a mediated experience from within. The tomographic proposal is inevitably incomplete—a slice of a solution to an alternate sonic theory that is complemented by other more formal approaches.
But for now,
I will leave you here,
in the centre of this sounding—
within layers of listening —
listening in,
in listening.
17: 43 | Level of audio rises and crescendos to the end: sweeping, multifrequency hum-buzz, metallic tension tones, rhythmic hydraulic wheezes and fractured, fricative rattles, which are the last sounds to remain as the piece fades.
Notes
[1] 3:22 | Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to noise and silence: Towards a philosophy of sound art. Continuum, p. 5. -back
[2] 6:26 | De Certeau, M. (1984). Walking the city. In The practice of everyday life. University of California Press, p. 92. -back
[3] 7:13 | Voegelin, p. 4 -back
[4] 7:33 | De Certeau, p. 93. -back
[5] 9:45 | De Certeau, p. 97. -back
[6] 11:06 | Voegelin, p. 4. -back
[7] 12:05 | 12:05 | Spanos, W. V., in Connor, S. (1997). Postmodernist culture: An introduction to theories of the contemporary (2nd ed.). Blackwell, pp. 124–125. -back
[8] 12:40 | Translation: Periplus (Pseudo-Scylax). (2019, August 13). In Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Translation:Periplus_(Pseudo-Scylax)&oldid=9536728 -back
[9] 13:22 | Voegelin, pp. 5–6.-back
[10] 15:32 | Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), p. 584. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 -back
[11] 16:04 | Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 -back
Recordings
Field recordings featured in this work were recorded in Sydney, Australia; Namdaemun Markets and Hoenyeon Underground station, Seoul, South Korea; Bourges, France; and Aalberg, Denmark.
MRI sample by Parabolix: MRI fsk robot servo.wav. Freesound.org. Retrieved 5 August, 2021 https://freesound.org/people/parabolix/sounds/320532/