Ecologies of Noise
September 11, 2010
Here’s the draft / structure of a paper I gave at Sounding Out 5 in Bournemouth this week:
As Douglas Kahn says in Noise, Water, Meat, ‘Noise is the forest of everything’.[1] As the practitioners and producers of an acoustic ecology we must take a walk back into the woods, into the forest. Yet this walk is not one of a retreat from the cities, from our houses, drum kits, synthesizers and iPods; certainly, it may require us to leave the city for a while, yet this forest does not peter out in the suburbs but extends itself into the cities. This forest remains immanent with regard to both the wild and the urban, it is comprised not simply of great oaks, wild moose, sky larks, rivers and daffodils, but also nails, your front door, tent pegs, microwaves, a smashing window, a cry for joy and someone’s not quite looping ringtone. David Tudor knew this well, his Rainforest was full of iron bars, steel hoops, pots and pans, microphones, transducers and a group of friends. Schafer did not know this quite so well—although he almost got there—he feared too much for the integrity of his mind, which resided in the barren and frozen land of the North, which humans have been chipping away at with their machines:
such instruments are destroying the “idea of North” that has shaped the temperament of all northern people and has germinated a substantial mythology of the world […] it was pure, temptationless and silent. The technocrats of progress do not realize that by cracking into the North with their machinery, they are chipping into the integrity of their own minds.[2]
Schafer’s North is not Nunavut, nor is it Greenland, or at least it is not only these places. This “idea of North” constitutes the transcendent conditions of Schafer’s ecological praxis—its grounding in silence—as well as the ideal state of his spiritual being, that which exists in frozen and petrified form, atemporal, pure and silent. The idea of North is also the ideal of an auditory subject, that which describes the plane of an unspoilt, authentic and unified relation with the natural—considered in the most common ideological sense—it is the auditory plane of existence of a pre-industrial listening subject.[3] Listening, as we know from experience, changes with time, with context, it is mutable and culturally contingent; yet Schafer’s listening subject remains petrified, frozen in the North, set apart from the ebbs and flows, the noises and the difference of the world beneath the arctic circle.
Despite these reinforcements of what are now somewhat common criticisms, we draw from the excerpt above an observation of particular importance: the relationship Schafer posits between sound and mind, between sound and self, touching upon the extent to which one may inform the other. Despite his reservations and concerns for the integrity of the mind, Schafer nonetheless points towards a sonorous individuation, towards sounds which make a difference to and within the auditory subject through their confusion in the mind. Insofar as he remains committed to a position of purity wherein changes in audition are cast negatively as divergence and a threat to the stability of a natural order, this individuating force is identified as the polluting ‘throb of the machine’ which ‘began to intoxicate man everywhere with its incessant vibrations’.[4] Beyond Schafer’s conservatism, we might say that these ‘incessant vibrations’ are not solely the preserve of machines but rather that of sound itself, the murmur of an ever present background noise and subtle influence, that which brings difference to audition. It is insofar as sound propagates and influences by means of impacts, abrasions and displacement that this incessant and intoxicating throbbing can be considered to be a more appropriate analogy for the auditory self, for a listening subject not petrified, frozen in time, but mutable, open to the noise of the world, understood less according to an a-temporal purity than what Steven Connor has called a ‘disintegrative principle’.[5]
Against stasis, homogeneity and conservatism, against a notion of silence as a pre-Cagean purity silencing the noise of the world, posited is an equation of noise and difference as that by which we can come to understand the diversity of signals. We find such an equation in the work of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze, but also in the more popular orientated work of Dick Hebdige and Jacques Attali.[6] For all of these authors, one way or anther, noise is a force of difference, the amorphous embodiment of a generative potential. It is as an embodiment of generativity that this equation is invoked, rather than as some kind of post-modern juxtaposition of the given as diverse, a clash of symbols and signs. Noise as generative potential may be a more subtle thing, not necessarily loud but nonetheless confused, a background murmur, those sounds which slip in somewhere between hearing and listening.[7] Yet we need not become embroiled in Deleuzian jargon to reach such an understanding of noise, as such a thing exists within one of the core texts of acoustic ecology, in the work of Barry Truax who adds depth to the potential Schafer identified—yet shied away from—in those incessant vibrations:
Noise, in the sense of information that is unpatterned and unordered by the brain, is the only source of new information […] People often use the word “noise” in a non pejorative sense to mean any undefined or unrecognized sound that is potentially meaningful […] noise as the source of new information is open-ended and offers the promise of all that we may possibly experience.[8]
Although somewhat marginalized in Truax’s text this non-pejorative sense persists, remaining underdeveloped in his own work but becoming more thoroughly engaged with in most recent ecological work such as the Positive Soundscape Project. The Positive Soundscape Project has set out to address the issue of noise and negativity within earlier ecological work in moving beyond the praxes and philosophies of Schafer and Truax towards a more inclusive, expansive and nuanced praxis. Yet this necessary movement might perhaps progress by means of an inversion of acoustic ecology, rebuilding its ideological core around its own marginalized notion of a generative rather than negatively divergent noise, moving beyond Schafer and Truax by reading them inside out.
According to such a restructuration noise is no longer ‘the enemy of the acoustic community’, but rather its sustenance, the condition of its existence, the central problematic defining its ground.[9] It is both that which is produced through the frictions of a population and that which persists beneath and informs them or, rather, us. In centralizing noise, positioning it at the heart of acoustic ecology, the discretion of traditional ecological territories are confused, an overlapping of the natural, the societal and subjective. These three territories correspond roughly to Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies which maintain their respective distinctions but not their discretion, territories which are not fixed or static but which ‘drift in relation to each other like tectonic plates’.[10] Guattari provides a basic framework or provocation for what we might initially think of as an inter-disciplinary ecological praxis that maintains a degree of intra-disciplinary specificity. Yet more profound is the extent to which Guattari characterizes the ecological as that which operates according to openings rather than strictly preservations, as that which seeks out new connections as much as conservation: ‘at the heart of all ecological praxes there is an a-signifying rupture, in which the catalysts of existential change are close at hand’.[11] It is in this notion of an a-signifying rupture that we can identify the affectivity of a generative noise, that which appears not as sign or symbol but according to a displacement and confusion cast not in negativity but felt as catalytic. While Guattari’s ecological model is interesting for its inter and intra-disciplinary orientation, it is to the extent that it opens onto an infra-disciplinarity, onto the field or interactions, confusions, noise, figured as antecedent to disciplinary specificity, that it is particularly powerful, expressing an ungrounding of ecological ideas, images and orientations towards their reconnection or reconfiguration. It is such an ungrounding according to a praxical opening onto noise that is required in the move beyond Schafer and Truax that nonetheless passes through them.
Here we must return to the North, to Schafer’s ideal and transcendent domain of pure and frozen silence, as that which constitutes the ground of Schaferian ecology. Insofar as Schafer’s North persists in silent homogeneity, in looking to an ecological praxis open to difference, a praxis that understands ecology not simply according to reductive naturalism but a far broader interconnectivity, a diversity of practices and differential noises, we seek an ungrounding of this Northern territory according to the ruptures described by Guattari, opening the pure and the ideal onto the noise which persists to the south and within the subterranean. Despite Schafer’s warnings the North—a pure and frozen territory synonymous with the ideological sanctity of the mind—is something that must be chipped away at, tapped into in order to produce an opening, yet an opening that is not taken too far, an opening-up that proceeds according to subtle gestures as opposed to gross violations.
This ungrounding of acoustic ecology, its opening onto noise, is of course well underway in contemporary practice. We hear something of the interdisciplinary or inter-territorial ecological praxis that Guattari describes in a number of Room 40 releases—in particular the Audible Geographies and Incidental Amplifications compilations—wherein a confusion of site and intervention, of the social, technological, organic and inorganic constitute the auditory environment.[12] Ubiquitous in these recordings is the presence of a certain background noise, noise that is not considered the enemy of the ‘acoustic community’ but the persistent and constitutive expression of its possibility, a determinant of the space it occupies and to which it lends definition. In these recordings we hear the necessary problematization of acoustic-ecological practice, a foregrounding of that which is stifled where this rubric is left to its traditional romanticization.
Russell Haswell’s work can also be heard as chipping away at Schafer’s North, inviting an opening of the mind onto the noise of the world. In his binaural recording of the entrance to a wasps nest—placing a microphone either side of the entrance—the wasps are located not at a distance but relocated within the head, crawling inside.[13] Haswell’s acoustic documents exemplify an approach to environmental recordings that wholly discards the romanticized earth and idealistic naturalization that the term might immediately engender. The environments documented and catalogued by Haswell are set apart from any puritanical naturalism; inclusive of the noises that mark participation within an environment, the notion of an objective audition and transparent observer are jettisoned in favour of an audible engagement. In Haswell’s work, field situations common to the nature documentary, such as the inside of an ant colony, are frequently interrupted by the noise of passing military aircraft, noises that attest to a variety of spatial contestations as well as the mutability and ambiguity of ‘natural’ environments. The ant colony we hear in Haswell’s recordings has been subjected to the violence of his hydrophone placements: the sound we hear is possibly that of ants, according to Haswell’s liner notes, rebuilding the disturbed area of their colony into which the hydrophone has been forced. Here we come across a practice in which recording equipment is used to scratch beneath the surface of the earth to reveal the noise which resides therein.
This movement beneath the surface towards the establishment of a subterranean audition is taken much further in Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion, wherein a hole drilled approximately one mile beneath the earth reveals a tectonic murmur, the audible expressions of the earth’s constant deformation and internal disquiet. Through the Sonic Pavilion, Aitken attempts to establish “a new relationship with the earth”, one which must be heard to add depth to the constitutive connections of an ecological practice. In this new relationship the listening subject finds an opening into the transcendent realm of subterranean conditions and geological noise, the audible expression of the earth’s generative potential, its potential to both engender and destroy. Aitken’s pavilion gives expression to that which persists beneath apparent quietude, the noise active beneath the petrified form of Schafer’s North, a noise which persists to the south. Here we find a relationship to the natural formed not around the purity of silence but the generative impurity of noise and confusion brought to the surface, a relationship which foregrounds activity as opposed to stasis while directing the auditor to that which lies beyond and in excess of the immediately apparent. The ambiguous productivity of the subterranean receives considerable attention in Jacob Kirkegaard’s Eldfjall, in which accelerometers grant audible access to the activity residing beneath the Iceland’s surface; the ambiguous catalysis of geological depth finds expression in the titles Kirkegaard gives to his recordings: Ala, Kali, Gerd, Nerthus, gods of both life and death.[14] Kirkegaard’s recordings provide an opening onto the rumbling of a continuous productivity and deformation, a vital emergence and formal dissolution; this is the noise of a creative potential that simultaneously threatens ultimate destruction, the medium of a chaotic ground that presides over the oscillations of existence. Within this plutonic murmur resides the frictions and agitations informing the productive potentials of sound. The ground to which Kirkegaard places his ear is one of a fundamental chaotic impurity productive of an anti-essentialism that is found to reside within the flux of material interactions rather than the eternal formal stasis of the heavens. With Eldfjall Kirkegaard can be heard to return to the North, yet in order to probe beneath its surface, revealing not a homogeneous, ‘pure, temptationless silence’, but the ceaseless activity of a heterogeneous Northern territory driven by its internal and subterranean differences.
Through such openings, acoustic ecology’s relationship with the earth acquires depth through its ungrounding, through its opening onto and inclusion of noise amidst its subject matters. The isolation of noise to the exterior of both the natural and the private in many ways ignores the existence of an inescapable problematic, remaining ignorant of Truax’s assertion that ‘the soundscape and the phenomenon of noise are not things that are “out there”, apart from ourselves. They are inextricably related to us’.[15] Here we must take Truax’s point further; noise and the soundscape are, in addition to not being ‘apart from ourselves’, not apart from ‘themselves’, from each other, but inextricably linked. It is in the work of the artists mentioned above that Truax’s proposed interrelation of noise and soundscape finds its most precise expression through the identification of a noise residing at the heart of ecological practice. Such work performs an ungrounding of acoustic ecology, rebuilding its ideological framework around the ambiguous catalysis of a noise that displaces the stasis of silence. It is this praxical and ideological restructuration that opens acoustic ecology up to difference, dramatically increasing the field of interactions with which it is capable of engaging. Where acoustic ecology has concerned itself with the natural, with a specific image of nature taken as its ground, its ungrounding through listening practices orientated towards a protean noise that persists within nature and throughout the world leaves it less likely to limit difference to divergence—to that which strays from the conservative image of the natural—and leaves it increasingly open to a more nuanced understanding of the noises of everyday life.
[1] Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 22.
[2] R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977), 21.
[3] Similar criticisms are voiced by Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 20-21.
[4] Schafer, Soundscape, 74.
[5] Steven Connor, ‘Sound and the Self’ in Mark M. Smith (ed.) Hearing History: A Reader (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 61.
[6] Michel Serres, Genesis (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1979), Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
[7] On this distinction see Sterne, The Audible Past, 2 and 96.
[8] Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (Westport and London: Ablex Publishing, 2001) , 97.
[9] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 66.
[10] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London and New York: Continuum, 2000), 36. It is also notable that this tectonic analogy suggests a certain subterranean activity, defining fields of influence that operate outside or in excess of human consciousness.
[11] Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 45.
[12] Various Artists, Audible Geographies (Room 40: EDRM416, 2008), Various Artists, Incidental Amplifications (Room 40: EDRM405, 2006).
[13] Russell Haswell, Wild Tracks (Editions Mego: 099, 2009).
[14] Jacob Kirkegaard, Eldfjall (Touch: T33.20, 2005).
[15] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 106.
Comments (0) | Tags: Acoustic Ecology, Douglas Kahn, Jacob Kirkegaard, Russell Haswell, Schafer, Subterranean | More: Subtractions
Leave a Reply
