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.     

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.     

Rethinking the Soundscape

ABSTRACT

This article takes critical issue with the well-circulated but often misapplied term “soundscape.” Coined by Canadian composer Murray Schafer in his book “The Soundscape,” the term has become one of the keywords of sound studies, but in its wide circulation it has become disconnected from its original scholarly concept and used broadly to apply to nearly any sonic phenomenon. Scholars either misapply it or redefine it to suit their needs. This article is an attempt to trace an intellectual history or genealogy of the term, and to open a conversation about the term's use, application, and utility for scholars of sound. This article draws on Schafer's work in an attempt to ground the term in its own intellectual history, and then traces the use of the term in a variety of sound studies works. The term “soundscape” emerges as at once indispensable and elusive, provocative and limited. By calling attention to background sound, Schafer shaped the field in ways that exceeded his own contribution.     

The Inequality Effect of Urbanization and Social Integration

On the basis of the China Social Survey (CSS2011) and related urban statistics, this article conducts an analysis of the “unequal” effects of urbanization and of problems in rural migrants’ social integration with urban residents in the course of their urbanization. We found that although the increased rate of population urbanization did not produce a significant difference between “rural migrants” and “city people” in terms of income, migrants fare considerably worse than city people with regard to social security, cultural life, psychological acceptance and status identification. This kind of inequality transforms the original urban/rural dual structure into a new dichotomy that divides urban dwellers into the migrant population and residents with urban household registration, thereby impeding social integration. This finding will help us understand the causes of the social barriers in current urbanization and may provide theoretical and empirical reference material for “new-type urbanization,” particularly as it relates to the transformation of the rural migrant population into urban citizens.     

A Transversal Lineage

ABSTRACT

This article proposes the term “perceptual abstraction” to describe the methods of artists who take bodily contingency as their medium. It focuses on the low-frequency drone work of an anonymous figure called Eleh. Like others in the Minimalist tradition, Eleh follows a processual ethic that begins from a minimum of structural elements and asks how they might reshape one another over time. What sets Eleh apart, however, is its singular focus on frequencies within, and sometimes beyond, the lowest reaches of human hearing. These tones play strangely on the sensorium because they can evade cochlear audition even while haunting other registers. This is bass as an agent of bodily mystification, and in Eleh's hands it becomes a sonic strategy for modulating felt space and fleshy thought. If Eleh diverges from most Minimalists in these ways, then liner notes and cover art point to another, more like-minded body of work. Might Op(tical) Art—with its interest in “charging fields” and rhythmically unraveling retinal perception—share at least as much with Eleh, at the level of affective strategy? If so, could we posit an alternate, transversal lineage of artistic practices defined not by form or tradition, but by a desire to confound perception, by whatever aesthetic and sensory routes?     

A body passes by: the flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur is not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984).     

Learning to smell: on the shifting modalities of experience

ABSTRACT

How can one learn to perceive? The study of an expert training shows how olfactory learning combines two operations and modalities of experience: firstly, it rests upon doubt and the questioning of perception to turn its undisputable evidence into a changing plurality. Secondly, perception is reconstructed and stabilized according to a set of chosen constraints, thanks to a perpetual control and reworking of the inadequate perceptions.

This analysis brings us to reconsider the interpretation of the notion of “attention”. Trainees focusing on their perception do not make it more salient, precise and detailed, as per the representational interpretation of perception. They question it. In so doing, they foster a surge of “shades” and make it plural and variable. Attention denotes here a process of perceptual destabilization, through doubt.

Additionally, in the cases studied, the reflexivity that enables learning shows deconstructive aspects: through doubt, the surrounding world turns from self-evident to changing and plural. This does not fit the usual constructive character of reflexivity, as in “mind-” or “self-building” processes, for instance. At the core of the learning process, the shifting modalities of perception seem to open the door to a larger variety of understandings of reflexivity and their correlative selves.     

Head Cocoons

ABSTRACT

Listening with the aid of headphones was at the heart of the early radio culture of the 1920s. After those years, however, earphones became the exception as loudspeakers became the norm. For quite some time thereafter, the wiring of hearing was limited to the use of monaural earbuds in situations where the use of loudspeakers would have disturbed others. In West Germany, the binaural headphone started to make a comeback in the late 1960s due to the growing fragmentation of family life along with the widening range of electronic leisure possibilities and the rise of hi-fi culture. It was only at the end of the twentieth century, however, that binaural headphone listening emerged as the dominant culture of listening and caught up with the burgeoning mobile urban life style.

Taking the case of West Germany, this article asks: What is the impact of ear-wiring on social life? And, what new kinds of perception result from headphone listening? It traces how the use of earphones turned from being a static “technique of listening” into a mobile “technique of acoustic privatization.” Ultimately, this article interprets today's portable headphones as “head cocoons” that enable mobile listeners to actively carve out sonic privacy while on the move.     

A Study of the Development of Alcohol Use Disorder in Muslim Immigrant Workers in Korea

Abstract

This study examines the process by which Muslim immigrant workers, prohibited by their religion from drinking, develop alcohol use disorder when working in Korea. Participants were seven male immigrant workers who have lived in Korea for 6–10?years and all experienced a change in immigrant status, shifting from registered to unregistered. Utilizing grounded theory devised by Strauss and Corbin, 87 concepts, 24 subcategories, and 10 categories were derived as a result. By converting these categories into a paradigm model, participants moved through stages of “self-monitoring,” “confusion,” “self-despair,” and “daily collapse” as they developed alcohol use disorder, and began to take on an existence as drifters, not settling into life in Korea. Their “learning experiences of drinking to survive turning into experiences of causing social death” is considered a core category. The study’s results suggest that a rehabilitation program for immigrant workers needs to be developed wherein the program not only enables them to reflect on their current existence but also allows them to develop specific coping skills. Future research should be broadened to consider social support mechanisms and viewpoints of other people, including female immigrant workers, and local community members in close contact with Muslim immigrant workers.     

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 Menagerie of the Senses

ABSTRACT

The term “menagerie” convenes two claims: firstly that our relation to our senses is one of active and constructive management (the old sense of the word “menagerie”), and that animal senses, or our idea of them, play an indispensable part in that management of the senses. While our senses mediate the world to us, animals mediate our senses to us; animals are thus the mediators of the mediation. A review of the use of animals as emblems of the five senses in medieval and early modern illustrations shows that while, on the one hand, animals were used to enforce the idea of the lowliness of the senses, on the other hand, the awareness of the superiority of certain animal senses encouraged the imaginative recruitment of animals to augment or transform human powers. This is brought to a focus in representations of the fly. Finally, this essay considers the part played by simulations of animal perception in the development of new technologies for augmenting and extending human senses. The new organs, perceptions and forms of awareness of our world continue to implicate and improvise upon the animals, which helps us to take leave of our senses.     

Sounding Out Vision

ABSTRACT

The late-twentieth century development of a range of digital imaging technologies has led to claims that we are in the midst of a transformation of representation. This essay takes two such technologies—ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)—and considers how their extraordinary mediation of the invisible using radio waves, magnetic fields and sound waves confounds the terms of reference which have governed the way we think not only about images, but about visual perception itself.

The nineteenth-century visual technology of the stethoscope, and its synaesthetic fusion of sound and image, is posed as a way of thinking through medical imaging technologies' sonic and haptic picturing of a world beyond light. Hegel's aesthetics, and his consideration of sound as a more ideal medium than light, is also used to consider the ways in which ultrasound and MRI images mediate the products of sound—the depth, interiority and identity of a body—into the realm of vision and the image.     

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.     

身体资本与打工妹的城市适应

身体是被社会性地建构和生产的,身体的呈现方式不仅取决于微观的社会互动场域,也取决于宏观的生产和消费方式。本文以作者通过观察和访谈所掌握的广州餐馆等服务业中从业的农村打工妹的日常生活等资料的基础上,对这些打工妹如何通过对自身身体资本的挖掘、借用和改造,去建构自己的城市生活世界、适应城市生活及其要求的展开了细致的分析。作者指出,虽然“做个城市人”对大多数打工妹来说是一个不切实际的梦想,但通过改变身体这样的微观策略,起码“像个城市人”还是能够争取的,而这一目标的实现是她们在城市生存的前提条件。     

Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals

ABSTRACT

This paper considers contemporary practice in “fused” or transcoded audiovisual art, focusing on the work of Australian artists Robin Fox and Andrew Gadow. In this practice sound and image are tightly linked by a cross-wiring of media signals. Synesthesia is often invoked around such work, proposing a parallel between perceptual and technical cross-wiring. This synesthetic analogy provides a historical context as well as an analytic frame; it is tested here through a reading of relevant neuro- and perceptual science that illustrates some striking parallels. Ultimately, however, an alternative model is proposed based on cross-modal binding, where stimuli in different modalities are “bound” into correlated wholes. Understood as cross-modal objects, transcoded audiovisuals direct us to the signal that underpins both sound and image, as well as to the map, or domain of correlation, between modalities. The wider significance of this practice, it is argued, lies in its ability to provide an aesthetic and affective manifestation of these abstract structures—structures that are central to new media culture, but largely imperceptible.     

The “Socialization of Elderly Hospitalization” in China: Development,Problems, and Solutions

ABSTRACT

Objectives to analyze the development of the elderly patients with chronic diseases and to make some suggestions for the elderly social hospitalization. Methods By using yearbook data and theoretical analyses, the paper respectively presents the problems and furthermore solutions of China's elderly services. Results The elderly patients with chronic illnesses have formed a new group, and the phenomenon of “socialization of elderly hospitalization” has become a major social risk. Discussions China needs to promote the idea of “long-term care” in elderly social security, establishing long-term care insurance and fostering a private, professional elderly service system.     

The Loss of Urban Order and the Ethical Construction of Urban Order in Contemporary China

快速城市化的中国处于建构城市意义、城市秩序的关键期。城市是一个空间有机 体，是人类文明要素的空间化有机聚集；城市意义是城市有机体的伦理纽带，一个没 有意义归属的城市将充满风险、冲突频发。在建构城市物质形态的同时，使城市整合 为一个有秩序的意义共同体，是实现城市可持续繁荣的内在要求。重构城市空间，从 城市物性空间、社会空间、心理空间的整合性与互动性出发，建构合理的“空间—伦 理生态”，是建构城市秩序的重要现实路径；以社区、社会组织等为载体，合理推进 以意义为纽带的集体行动，是建构城市秩序的重要伦理选择。

关键词: 城市本性?城市意义?城市秩序?空间生产?城市正义

Rapidly urbanizing China is at a critical period in the construction of urban meaning and order. The city as an organic compound of space represents the organic integration in space of the elements of civilization, while its meaning provides the ethical ties that link these elements to form an organic whole. A city without a locus of meaning will be buffeted by risks and confrontations. The realization of sustainable urban prosperity requires the integration of the city as an ordered community of meaning at the same time as its physical forms take shape. An important practical path to achieving this aim is restructuring city space in a rational “spatial‐ethical ecology” based on integrity and interaction of physical, social and psychological urban space, by means of collective action knitted together by meaning and carried out by communities and organizations.     

中央公园与民初北京社会

中央公园是北京城第一个近代意义上的“公园”,作为一个新兴的城市公共空间,中央公园接纳了近代社会生活的大量内容,新与旧、中与西、政治与文化、国家与社会,均在此有充分的呈现。可以说,中央公园为我们提供了一个社会史研究的模型,它见证了历史,也映射了民国初年北京社会的驳杂面相。     

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.”