Singing with Durham Cathedral: exploring the relationship between architecture and singing

ABSTRACT

Acoustically, cathedrals can be challenging spaces. The long reverberation lengths created make singing well without prior knowledge of the building an almost impossible task. It is necessary then to understand and work with the building to achieve the sounds expected during services. Taking influence from the question of whether architecture can be heard, the article explores how singers in Durham Cathedral maintain an embodied awareness of their relationship with the building. Furthermore, it argues that the music used in Durham Cathedral developed symbiotically, emerging from a material engagement between singers and the building. The article concludes that the sound of worship cannot simply be a performance in Durham Cathedral, but a performance with Durham Cathedral as the singers works through an embodied knowledge of the architecture and its unique traits.     

Sonic Envelopes

ABSTRACT

This article examines ways in which an individual's experiences of spatial environments are informed by physical and psychic perceptions of sound. It explores how sonic images, memories, voices, spaces and events constitute “sonic envelopes.” These aesthetic figures are developed out of the late-nineteenth-century writings by the philosopher Henri Bergson and from contemporary audio-walks by the artist, Janet Cardiff. Each shows that sound, space and time are embodied in the individual's powers of sensory perception. Bergson and Cardiff's sonic envelopes may therefore enable reevaluations of the relationships between sound, space and time that connect the individual to his or her environment.     

Unruly Voices in the Museum

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the use of audio recordings and oral memory for the critical engagement with colonial pasts in ethnographic museums by focusing on the traveling exhibition What We See, curated by Anette Hoffmann (2009). Specifically, it draws on Jeffrey Feldman's notion of colonial “contact points,” i.e. material traces of colonial encounter, to highlight the exhibition's ability to convey and critique the sensory experience of colonial contact. In What We See, this colonial contact consisted in an anthropometric project conducted in South-West Africa, today's Namibia, in 1931, resulting in an archive of anthropometric measurements and photographs, life-casts, and phonographic recordings. The exhibition proposed an innovative way of reworking this archive by staging an intricate interplay between sound and sight, thereby disrupting conventional ocularcentric forms of display. However, this multisensory approach provoked highly divergent reactions at its various exhibition venues. This article argues that the divergent reactions in Cape Town, South Africa, and Vienna, Austria, were due to different levels of what Ann Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”—that is the context-dependent difficulty of addressing disquieting colonial pasts and its sensory dimensions.     

Manchester through the Ears

ABSTRACT

As part of a wider sensory ethnography on the development of place attachments and situated knowledge amongst international newcomers to a city (Manchester, England), this article tells the story of my collaboration with Phoebe, a student of acoustics from bandung, Indonesia. Using a participatory sensory ethnographic method, Phoebe was encouraged to devise her own contribution to my project, which was modeled around her own sensory preferences and technological expertise. Our work together took place over a period of 4–5 months and yielded a series of soundscape compositions and accompanying narrative texts, all of which conveyed Phoebe's newly acquired sound-based knowledge, or acoustemology, of Manchester. Using narrative textual accompaniments to her recordings, Phoebe ascribes qualities to her surroundings that overlap with her own personal qualities, in effect showing how much she blends with her new city. As Phoebe and I subsequently listened to and “talked over” her soundscape compositions, they evoked sound marks, or sensory memories, of the landscape, sounds and music that Phoebe left behind in Indonesia. these sound-elicited interviews added further layers of emplaced knowledge to both of our constructions of the city.     

The Sensory Dimensions of Gardening

ABSTRACT

This paper considers the multiple sensory dimensions of gardening and their synesthetic significance in an ethnographic study of gardens and gardening in England and Sweden. It challenges the notion that the different senses (vision, smell, sound, touch and taste) can be considered in hierarchical terms i.e. some as being more important than others in an assessment of the meaning and significance of gardening as an everyday practice. It argues that there is a significant difference between what people say and what they actually do and that when we study the latter the significance of all the senses in relation to each other is highlighted.     

Acoustic Cocooning

ABSTRACT

Since the late 1990s, car manufacturers increasingly underline their cars' interior tranquility. Both this acoustic condition and the availability of car audio sets enable drivers to transform their car into a highly personal, controlled and relaxing sonic bubble.

Yet how could the car, once a noisy contraction, evolve into such a space for acoustic cocooning? This article studies the introduction of car radio and interior car sound design in Europe between the 1920s and the 1990s. The car radio's meaning shifted from an artifact that brought companionship to lonely drivers, to an instrument that helped drivers to mentally block out their fellows on the road. At the same time, listening to engine sounds changed from a drivers' skill to a practice drivers had to de-learn. Moreover, car sound construction shifted from reducing noise to creating target sounds for specific consumer groups.

This article employs three forms of cultural analysis to understand these shifts: an “archeology of corporate culturology,” the symbolism of sound, and Gerhard schulze's theory on the experience society. Finally, by analyzing the rise of acoustic cocooning in the car, it aims to contribute to the study of “techno-cocooning”: the use of technology for creating sensory privacy.     

Learning How to Listen: Kroncong Music in a Javanese Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider several weeks of music rehearsals that took place in an urban neighborhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. The music “rehearsed” by a group of men is kroncong; an urban folk music incorporating a string band, flute, vocals and sometimes a keyboard that in Indonesia dates to the arrival of the Portuguese and the establishment of urban enclaves of traders and slaves in the sixteenth century along the north coast of Java. The melancholy and other historically anchored sensorial sentiments evoked by the totality of sound and image that comprises the songs, as well as the activities and associations that go into making kroncong music, are referred to as kroncong sensibilia. The discussion of sensibilia follows an analytical path that begins with the poetics of the musical genre and moves on to an examination of the politics of kroncong sensibilia in a particular context of social relations. For the Javanese men of the neighborhood, the making of kroncong music was at one level a nostalgic response to their urban lives. However, perhaps more importantly, making kroncong music was a tactical and strategic act of sound and sentiment, a particularly masculine one, seeking “recognition” within an “aesthetic community” and built world of social relations increasingly organized around and by, if not centered on, women.     

Sensing Cittàslow: Slow Living and the Constitution of the Sensory City

ABSTRACT

In 2004 Aylsham, Norfolk, became Britain's second Cittàslow Town (Slow City). Embedded within the slow living ideology of Cittàslow is the assumption that the “better” life it advocates involves heightened sensory experience and concomitant pleasure. In contrast to contemporary fast life, it wishes that “suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment [may] preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency” (The Slow Food Companion 2005: 6). In the first part of the paper I analyze how the sensory elements of slow living are represented in the Cittàslow and related Slow Food movement's literature. Then, based on my ethnographic fieldwork centered on Aylsham's Cittàslow events and projects, I examine how the routine and creative sensory practices of the individuals who produce and participate in Cittàslow policies and activities are constitutive of a “sensory city.”     

LOUD silence: Turning Up the Volume on Deaf Voice

Abstract

From 2014 to 2015, I curated an exhibition entitled LOUD silence, which was held in two different venues in California: Grand Central Arts Center at California State University Fullerton, followed by gallery@Calit2 at the University of California, San Diego. The exhibition offered the opportunity for viewers to consider definitions of sound, voice, and notions of silence at the intersection of both deaf and hearing experiences. The exhibition displayed prints, drawings, sculptures, videos, and several film installations, and featured work by four artists who have different relationships to deafness and hearing, including Shary Boyle, Christine Sun Kim, Darrin Martin and Alison O’Daniel. These four artists explored how the binary of loudness and silence might be transformed in politicized ways through their own specificities, similarities and differences in relationship to communication and language. The stereotypical view of the deaf experience is that they live a life of total silence, where they retain little to no concept of sound. But on the contrary, deaf studies scholars Carol Padden and Tom Humphries state that deaf people actually know a lot about sound, and sound informs and inhabits their world just as much as the next person (Padden and Humphries 1998: 91).Through these artworks, the artists aimed to loudly explode the myth of a silent deaf world, and they troubled just how “inaudible” sound really is through their own visceral experiences of it. Ultimately, I argue that the work in LOUD silence offers an avenue for eradicating deaf oppression.     

To Know Beyond Listening

ABSTRACT

In music production, “monitoring” refers traditionally to audile strategies intended to reveal the “true” sound of mediated audio. Here, it is expanded to include new, digital technologies intended to better know and control the record-object beyond what listening and listening technologies allow. Surveying traditional, contemporary, and emerging tools of record production and distribution, this essay addresses three types of monitoring: audio, visual, and data.

In sum, monitoring entails the supplementation and subversion of the ear through protocols promising to surmount the biases and distortions of audio media. Key technologies include reference speakers, room correction systems, digital audio workstations, open mixes, pre-sets, social networking sites, and automatic music information retrieval. Situating these within a “techoustemology” of monitoring, the central argument is that many innovations in digital audio are non-auditory and, therefore, displace sound and listening as the central means of producing relevant knowledge about music mediated in the digital age.     

Music,rowing, and the aesthetics of rhythm

Having “good rhythm” is essential in both music and competitive rowing, but what exactly constitutes “good rhythm,” and how do we achieve it? Although rhythm is often discussed in purely auditory terms, I argue that rhythm is fundamentally a multisensory, kinesthetic phenomenon. By drawing parallels between music and rowing, I illustrate how biological motion principles underlie the parameters of rhythm in both disciplines, and how the cognition and appreciation of rhythm is deeply embodied. I suggest that the two main ways in which rhythms generate pleasure in both music and rowing are by enabling behavioral synchrony between individuals, and by engaging the body in the cognitive process of rhythm perception and prediction. In essence, “good rhythm”—a rhythm that is enjoyed and appreciated—is rhythm that moves.     

Sing … Then Think: Musical Interventions and Nondeliberative Forms of Practice in Social Work Groups

ABSTRACT

The positive effects of music have been demonstrated worldwide in many fields including social work, psychology, medicine, and education. Musical interventions including music listening, lyric analysis, and singing have also been found effective in group work. This article, guided by Norma Lang’s nondeliberative theory, aims to provide the “why,” “when,” and “how” of incorporating music into social work groups. It also provides the reader with a toolbox of musical interventions and the encouragement to utilize these “artful, actional, and analogic” activities in group work.     

Sonic air-conditioning: muzak as affect management for office workers in Japan

Muzak is what musique concrète composer Pierre Schaeffer referred to as “acousmatic sound” – sound we hear without seeing its source. Muzak’s presence in public space is particularly relevant in Japan, a country often critiqued or celebrated as a “sound saturated society” where background music is engineered to a spectacular degree. BGM, as Muzak is referred to in Japanese, is simultaneously unnoticed, dismissed, ironically appreciated, and, more recently, used to heal, calm, and manage white-collar office workers at a time in which mental health issues, work-life balance, and the negative effects of overwork on office workers are increasingly on the rise. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with background music employees in Tokyo and analysis of the company’s print media literature concerning their music for office workers program, this essay explores the relationship between background music and the affective management of worker stress in contemporary Japan. I argue that BGM in Japan is emerging as a form of ambient labor control that exploits a particular mode of sonic engagement. The essay focuses in particular on the culture industry surrounding the use of BGM as a means to effectively manage office workers and their environments in post-economic bubble Japan.     

Strawberry feel forever: understanding metaphor as sensorimotor dynamics

ABSTRACT

Metaphor is a useful way of explaining how to do things. The literature on metaphor in the learning of physical skill has generally explicated its efficacy by examining its actionable directives for motor enactment. And yet from the perspectives of phenomenological philosophy, ecological psychology, and enactivism, action is immanently intertwined with perception, so that models of metaphor-based learning should foreground the role of sensory activity modulating motor behavior. As such, metaphor is retheorized as a sensorial constraint one imaginarily projects into one’s action–perception phenomenological landscape. I present two metaphors from an instructional video on cello technique. Whereas these metaphors are couched in action language (what one should do), their potential impact, I argue, lies in emergent goal sensations (what one should feel). These explorative sensorimotor accommodations may, in turn, bring forth yet new scopes of latent sensations coupled to unanticipated performance possibilities, which suggest further modifying and calibrating enactment in the target domain. Attending to, achieving, and maintaining emergent intermediary goal sensations regulates instrumented action by forging new affordances that bring forth new motor coordination. As teacher and student co-imagine images for action, they should attend to sensory perceptions. And the same goes for scholars of metaphor.     

Fingerbombing,or “Touching is Good”: The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch

ABSTRACT

The development of new interface technologies involves reimagining perceptual processes. Grounded in histories of perception, this paper examines the discursive framing of touch in the advertisements for Nintendo's Dual Screen portable gaming system, explaining the way that the ads posit the DS as a means of reconnecting with a lost and repressed mode of perception. In the process of technologizing touch, the ads paradoxically assert a nostalgic memory of a pretechnological sensorium that can be restored using technology. However, in doing so, they displace older models of touch and attempt to redefine what it means to touch. I argue that the DS ads, in addition to demanding new body habits, call for a reconfiguration of perception that brings it into accord with the limits of the present technology. The DS interface serves as sensory armor that allows the subject to touch without feeling, to manipulate without sensation.     

Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library

ABSTRACT

Public libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking about sound in the library, not as something to be eliminated or controlled, but as something to be orchestrated, and even designed for. In order to do so, I propose that we consider first what sounds people, buildings and media make, and then use architectural design to promote their cooperative interaction.     

Sensing Through White Gloves: On Congolese Objects in Swedish Sceneries

ABSTRACT

The article discusses collectibles acquired by Swedish missionaries and military officers active within the ill-reputed Congo Free State (1885–1908). Objects are approached here not primarily as tokens of Congolese material culture but as traces of a transnational cultural history and as points of entry to a critical museology. Drawing on case studies of collections I discuss the ways in which artifacts have been selected, joined and charged with new functions and meanings on their voyage between hands, narratives and genres.

In focus are five examples of objects that, analytically, have worked as what Roland Barthes (1980) calls punctum: the detail that disturbs and fascinates by force of seeming ungrammatical in relation to the larger context of which it forms part. By adding material to the Barthian concept I want to stress that such analytical impulses may be evoked by all senses. During an inventory of Swedish Congolese collections, when the historical state of stored museum items as untouchables could temporarily be broken, their multisensory material presences proved able to challenge textual discourses, serve as alternative witnesses and demonstrate hidden significances of ethnographical museums and collections.     

Exemplary sound and hearing in sensory treatises from the early modern Spanish-speaking world

This essay considers sound in sensory treatises from the seventeenth-century Hispanic world: Jerónimo Becerra’s Estvdioso discvrso philosophica anathomia, y theatro ingenioso de los organos y sentidos interiores, y exteriores del hombre (Mexico, 1657); Tratado de los bienes del silencio y males de la lengua, attributed to rector of the Colegio de Manila Diego de S. I. Bobadilla (Manila, 1645) and Diego Calleja’s Talentos logrados, en el buen uso de los cinco sentidos (Madrid, 1700). My purpose is to draw out the authors’ engagement with aural discourses that intersect with other areas of early modern thought. Above all, I underscore the reconciliation of existing ideas about sound’s spiritual significance with developments in medicine and anatomy. The study is the first in-depth examination of each of the three treatises it considers. It advances our understanding of seventeenth-century sound culture and underscores the need for re-reading cultural production from this time period through an aural lens.