Eisenberg Space 2015 PDF
Eisenberg Space 2015 PDF
Eisenberg Space 2015 PDF
Eisenberg
space
Spatialities of Sound
phenomenal field
Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan introduced the term “acoustic
space” (sometimes “auditory space” in Carpenter’s work) in the 1950s to
refer to the supposed “boundless, directionless, horizonless” sensory world
and related “mentality” of pre- and nonliterate cultures, and perhaps liter-
ate Westerners in a media saturated world (McLuhan 1960; see also inter
alia McLuhan 2004). The idea, further developed in Walter Ong’s Orality and
Literacy (1982) and the writings of music composer R. Murray Schafer (see
below), reproduced a set of reductive binary oppositions between the visual
and the auditory, positing the former as analytical and the latter as emo-
tional (later critiqued by Feld 1996; Ingold 2000: 248–249; Sterne 2003, 2011).
space 195
In contrast, Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice (2007 [1976]) approaches the
question of how sound mediates human perceptions and understand-
ings of physical space by combining Edmund Husserl’s phenomenologi-
cal perspectives with his own investigations of auditory experience. Ihde
painstakingly deconstructs the supposed “weakness” of the spatiality of
hearing, describing an auditory field that is “bidimensional,” being both
spherical and directional. At the same time, he rejects any simple opposi-
tion between the modalities of hearing and seeing, even in the ser vice of
“antivisualism”—a move that has reverberated in the anthropology of the
senses.
the virtual
An obvious weakness in Ihde’s otherwise essential phenomenological ac-
count of sound and space is his lack of attention to how the history of
“spatialization” practices in audio production has informed modern epis-
temologies of sound (Born 2013: 14). The use of spatial cues—sonic ges-
tures that simulate “the position of sound sources in the environment and
the volume of the space in which a listener is located” (Clarke 2013: 94)—
goes back to the earliest days of recorded music and film soundtracks,
predating the development of stereophony. Spatial effects produced
through reverberation and microphone placement had become a rich
site for aesthetic innovation in popular music as early as the 1920s (Doyle
2005). The propagation of multichannel stereophony in the post–World
War II period then added another layer of spatiality to an already richly
spatial art of audio production, transforming production aesthetics and
home listening technologies in popular music (Zak 2001: 148–149; Dock-
wray and Moore 2010) and fostering a rich array of approaches to elec-
troacoustic music, marked by “multiple-speaker projection techniques,
spatial simulation methods, and custom-built architectural installations”
(Ouzounian 2007; Valiquet 2012: 406).
A literature on sociotechnical practices of sound reproduction, much
of it explicitly aligned with sound studies, explores the production of
virtual sonic worlds and their complex interrelations with physical and
social spaces. Various works on audio engineering explore the record-
ing studio as a laboratory-like setting in which sounds and human actors
are “isolated” in order to be reconfigured in a sonic spacetime (Hennion
1989; Meintjes 2003; Porcello 2004, 2005; Théberge 2004). In addition to
outlining the technological production of recorded musical space, this
ecol ogy
Ecology refers to an environment—often the environment, the “natural
world”—as a space of relations. The notion of “acoustic ecology” as an
object or mode of inquiry has for half a century been tethered to the term
soundscape, first popularized by R. Murray Schafer and his World Sound-
scape Project during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Schafer conceptual-
ized the soundscape as an increasingly “polluted” global environment of
humanly perceived sounds that composers and music teachers should
work to understand, and ultimately to transform. Inspired by McLuhan’s
conception of art as “an instrument of discovery and perception” (Mc-
Luhan, quoted in Cavell 2003: 185) and John Cage’s definition of music as
“sounds around us, whether we’re in or out of concert halls” (quoted in
Schafer 1969: 57), Schafer founded the World Soundscape Project with the
aim of assessing sonic environments through rigorous audio documenta-
tion and analysis of recorded “soundscapes.”
The idea of taking a composer’s ear to the environment spawned a va-
riety of approaches to mapping and analyzing inhabited environments,
natural ecosystems, and interactions between humans and their environ-
ments (see e.g. Wrightson 2000; Atkinson 2007; Pijanowski et al. 2011).
Schaferian soundscape-related concepts have also been operationalized in
sociocultural analysis, particularly in ethnomusicology. Schafer’s notion of
“schizophonia,” or the anxiety-generating “split between an original sound
space 197
and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction” (1977: 90), has
proven useful for opening up questions about the dynamics of authentic-
ity and ownership in recorded music (Feld 1994; Moehn 2005), and con-
cepts like “soundmark” and “acoustic community” (Truax 2001) provide
ways of thinking about the relationships between emplacement and social
orientation, particularly in contexts of social struggle and transformation
(Lee 1999; Sakakeeny 2010).
But Schafer’s soundscape is deeply problematic as a central figure for
sound studies. Not only is it grounded in normative ideas of which sounds
“matter” and which do not, it groans under the weight of the irony that
it is born of the very modern technologies of sound reproduction that
Schafer decries as sources of “lo-fi” “pollution” (Helmreich 2010). Even
the term’s greatest strength—the fact that it “evokes a whole complex set
of ideas, preferences, practices, scientific properties, legal frameworks,
social orders, and sounds”—is also a weakness insofar as it diminishes
the term’s heuristic value (Kelman 2010: 228).
Other scholars have sought to describe the interrelations of sound,
space, and the social in different ways, often with limited or no engage-
ment with Schafer’s term. Sterne (1997), for example, approaches pro-
gramed music in commercial space as an “architectonics” with attendant
modes of listening. Alain Corbin (1998) uses auditory landscape, which em-
phasizes sensory experience and its discursive framing, in his history of
church bells in the French countryside. Emily Thompson similarly rede-
fines soundscape as “simultaneously a physical environment and a way of
perceiving that environment” (2002: 1). Drawing on Schafer but taking
a radical turn toward emplacement, Steven Feld (1996) coins the term
acoustemology (acoustics + epistemology) to describe a way of knowing
place in and through the sonic environment. At once a subject-centered
approach to ecology and an ecological approach to the subject, acouste-
mology attends to “local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and
imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place” (Feld
1996: 91; see also acoustemology).
Place might be described as another modality of space but is in truth its
own keyword. It is a human engagement with the world that stands apart
from, and indeed prior to, space. Abstract conceptions of space, time, and
spacetime are, in a sense, purified versions of the contextual, contingent,
messy experience of place (Casey 1996, 1998). Sound-oriented approaches
to place have become an important domain of recent ethnomusicology,
territory
Territory, a spatial figure that has received significant attention in sound
studies, is about boundary making, enclosure, and the production of in-
teriority and exteriority. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) expound on the in-
timate link between sound and territory in a discussion of the home as a
“milieu”: “Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of
sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it” (311). Sonic practices
territorialize by virtue of combining physical vibration with bodily sensa-
tion and culturally conditioned meanings. This is particularly audible in
the sonorous enactments of publicity and privacy in inhabited spaces, as
scholars of sound have shown in relation to the city (Picker 2003; LaBelle
2010), the car (Bull 2003), the office (Dibben and Haake 2013), the hospital
(Rice 2013), and perhaps most powerfully Islam, which mediates the pub-
lic/private distinction in relation to the sacred, and the sacred in relation
to sound (Hirschkind 2006; Bohlman 2013; Eisenberg 2013).
circulation
The movement of mediated sounds, especially commercially recorded
music, reveals how understandings, if not the very natures, of place and
territory have changed in the era of intensified globalization. Connell
and Gibson (2003) suggest that mediated music is crosscut by opposing
dynamics of “fixity” and “fluidity,” which shift and change in relation to
technological and legal regimes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the
case of commercial “world music,” whose aesthetics, power dynamics,
and complex interrelations with ethnic and national imaginaries reveal
globalization’s “increasingly complicated pluralities, uneven experiences,
and consolidated powers” (Feld 2000: 146; see also Meintjes 1990, 2003;
Guilbault 1993; Taylor 1997; Stokes 2004; Ochoa Gautier 2006).
Paul Gilroy (1993) offers another powerful approach to global musical
circulation in his formulation of the “Black Atlantic” as a space of trans-
national, diasporic connection and consciousness grounded in what Al-
exander G. Weheliye (2005) aptly terms a “sonic Afro-modernity.” Gil-
roy’s provocative description of black music in commercial circulation as
a mode of nonrepresentational “metacommunication” across diasporic
space 199
spacetime has been enormously influential and lays the groundwork for
recent discussions of phonographic aurality (Weheliye 2005) and cosmo-
politan acoustemology (Feld 2012 [1982]).
David Novak’s ethnography of transnational underground Noise music
introduces a new approach to sonic circulation with the heuristic of “feed-
back,” which he develops in dialogue with the rich anthropological litera-
ture on circulation. Feedback—defined as “circulation as an experimental
force, which is compelled to go out of control” (2013: 18)—works as both
an aesthetic and a cultural logic in Noise. The sounds of Noise, consti-
tuted through the technological effect of positive feedback, emerged and
are sustained by practices of sounding and listening constituted in con-
tingent and experimental feedback loops connecting Japan and North
America.
Noise’s feedback loops comprehend two different sonic spatialities—
the global circulation of sounds and individual experiences of immersion
in sound: “To close the distances of global circulation,” Novak argues,
“listeners and performers alike become deeply invested in the personal
embodiment of sound” (2013: 22). Here we have a powerful example of
how sound can serve as a medium through which spatialities articulate
or interfere with each other. I will close with an example from my own
research in coastal Kenya (Eisenberg 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013) to consider
how sound studies might lend a more attentive ear to the interactions of
discrete sonic spatialities.
space 201
ethnographic object, enables one to analytically separate, and then recon-
nect, the “perceived, conceived, and lived” spatialities that Lefebvre (1991)
enjoins us to keep always visible and audible in any analysis of space and
social relations. As a phenomenon that exists at once within and beyond per-
ceiving subjects, sound cannot but reveal social space as an artifact of mate-
rial practices complexly interwoven with semiotic processes and the “imagi-
nations, fears, emotions, psychologies, fantasies and dreams” that human
beings bring to everything (Harvey 2006: 279; see also Lefebvre 1991).
Notes
1. In philosophy and sound studies alike, one finds multiple, competing ontologies of
sound, which mostly seem to turn on the question of location—that is, of whether sound
resides in the listening subject, the sounding object, the air (or other material medium)
between them, or somewhere else entirely (Sterne 2012b; Casati and Dokic 2012).
2. The distinction I am making between silence and soundlessness here is based
on a definition of silence as a lack of audible sound. According to a vibration-centered
ontology of sound, the silent experiential world of the profoundly deaf is not soundless
(see deafness; Friedner and Helmreich 2012).
3. The term phenomenal field comes from Merleau-Ponty (1958).
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