Category: sound and listening

1. failure

   Posted on 11:00am Tuesday 31st Aug 2021

   The past few weeks I have been working to finish my final draft of my PhD thesis. Going over the whole project has made me think a lot about failure – not, however, necessarily in a negative way. ‘failure’ is often thought of as something to be avoided, something very negative. While my PhD journey would undoubtable have been smother without some of the ‘failures’, the end result would have been very different. It made me thing of the importance of accepting failure, and what leaning into failure can bring to your creative work (but I guess it’s true about other areas of life as well…) I will explore some of these failures and what they meant for my research in this post.

   Context

   At the star of my project, the biggest issue I had was with establishing a context for the research. There really isn’t much prior work – academic or creative – on the subject area of ‘inner sound’ – sounds we experience as part of our thoughts and inner worlds. While this, on the one hand, created a justification for the importance of my research, it made it quite difficult to define a context for the research. What it meant was that I had to expand my reading for beyond sound and sound art and establish a sort of ‘patch work’ context across various fields. While this was a bit of a struggle at the start of the project, it did mean I could draw on and discuss a lot of interesting writers and artists I would not have come across otherwise.

    

   Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

   Language

   Speaking about sound is difficult (at least in many European languages). We often do it by talking about the sound off something – like the sound of a car or a kettle, for example. But with inner sounds – where there might not be a recognisable source – this way of speaking about sounds becomes impossible as well. This, of course, is kind of an issue when you are trying to write a thesis about inner sounds… What it meant in practice, as I was trying to get around this particular ‘failure’  - was that I decided to create a taxonomy of inner sounds. This was so that we could at least in some way speak about inner sounds – to find out if there where different kind of inner sounds and what they meant to us. This, I would argue, is one of the more important achievements of the project – and I would not have created it, if it was not for this ‘failure’ of language.

    

   Taxonomy

   One of the main outcomes of the taxonomy might actually be that it fails somewhat to capture all inner sounds (however strange that might sound!) In thinking through why some inner sounds do not fit easily into a taxonomy if inner sounds, I discovered a lot of interesting and thought-provoking aspects of my inner sound research. This would not have happened if I didn’t investigate why and how my taxonomy had certain ‘failures’.

    

   Practice

   Finally, my practical creative work, which is part of the PhD, is pretty much all driven by these failures. The failure to communicate about inner sounds lead to the exploration of a collective inner listening experience. The reluctance to admit to an inner sound world - and the questions of why we perceive inner sound as dangerous – is central to my performance 'Sonic Confessions'. Analysing these pieces brought me to thinking about affect theory and inner sound, and the performance work ‘Sonic Contagion’.

    

   Photo by Tom Crew on Unsplash

   So, in conclusion, my PhD could perhaps be considered one failure after another. But these failures are also where the most interesting and though provoking things happen within the project. So I am quite grateful, in the end, for these failures

2. the weird, the eerie and the sonic

   Posted on 10:00am Thursday 27th May 2021

   In his book the ‘The weird and the eerie’, Mark Fisher discusses what constitutes the ‘weird’ and the ‘eerie’ by analysing a number of novels, movies and records. I think it is a great book, no doubt partly as I enjoy a good sci-fi or fantasy tale.

   As I was re-reading it recently, it struck me that there are overlaps with what Fisher identifies as key aspects of both the weird and the eerie, and key aspects of our experiences of sound and the sonic. This piece is a short outline of a few of those overlaps.

    

   The Weird

   “ It involves a sense of wrongness; a weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist , or at least it should not exist here.”

   (Fisher, p 15)

   Fisher defines the weird and ‘that which does not belong’ - something which elicits the sense of ‘wrongness’ in the quote above. To illustrate this, he discusses the fiction of America author H. P Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s fiction sits somewhere between horror and sci-fi, where what is thought of as the ‘outside’ – ancient and extra-terrestrial beings, other words – breaks through into our world in various ways – through both time and space.  “… there is an interplay, a confrontation, and indeed a conflict between this world and others.” (Fisher p 19)

   

   Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

   Sound shares some qualities of this ‘other-worldly’ quality, especially when it’s source is un-know or hidden. Think of a horror move, where there is a strange sound in the dark, or a sound you hear late at night, without knowing its source. You cannot be sure, but there is a possibility, a feeling, that this could be something that should not exist, not here and not now. The Weird.  

   In his book 'Sinister resonance - The mediumship of the listener’ David Toop remarks that hearing and listening “…allows us access to a less stable world, omni-directional, always in a state of becoming and receding, known and unknown.” (Toop, 2011, p. 38) Sound opens up the possibility of different worlds, overlaying and existing alongside ours.

   In his 2010 sound installation in Kew Gardens Palm House, sound artist Chris Watson brought the sound of the Amazon to the UK. The sounds of wildlife recorded in the Amazon, when played in the Palm House at Kew Garden, managed to suggest a different world, overlaying and interplaying with our own. This is of course not the weird and frightening worlds imagined by Lovecraft, but still illustrates how sound has the ability to suggest and open up ‘portals’ to other worlds, other experiences – in and out of time, in and out of space - “becoming and receding, known and unknown.” .” (Toop, 2011, p. 38)

    

    

   The Eerie

    

   “The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence.”

   (Fisher, p 61)

   

   Photo by El Mehdi Rezkellah on Unsplash

   Fisher distinguishes the eerie from the weird, where the weird is the “presence of that which does not belong” (Fisher p 61) while the eerie is “something present where there sound be nothing, or nothing present where there should be something.”  (Fisher p 61)

   One of the examples Fisher uses to discuss the eerie and the ‘presence where there should be nothing’ is a television series written by Nigel Kneale, called ‘The Stone Tapes’. In it, a group of scientists take residence in a new research facility, working on finding a new, more durable recording medium. It quickly becomes clear that the space is haunted, and that a female scientist in particular is sensitive to the ‘ghost energies.’ It is suggested that the haunting is ‘recorded’ by the place, the stone itself (hence ‘The Stone Tapes’) and that humans becomes the ‘player’ for this recording. The story takes a darker turn when something else, something ancient and dark, stirs beneath the ‘recording’ of the ghost (a servant girl from the 19^th century), causing the female scientist to fall to her death, just like the servant girl ghost once did.

   Other than the idea of hauntings can be thought of as ‘recordings’ this might, at first glance, not seem to have much of a connection to sound.

   What I find interesting is how, in imagining the human as a ‘player’ there is a connection to how sound refuses to respect boundaries and barriers – among them our barrier of ‘self’. Famously, the ‘ear has no earlids’ - we can’t shut our ears like we shut our eyes, therefore sound can be very hard to keep on the ‘outside’.

   In 'Sinister resonance - the mediumship of the listener' David Toop writes of sound that the “relative lack of form creates perplexing relationships between the properties of states: inside and outside, material and immaterial, the way thoughts become sound through speech, and external sounds become sensory impressions that may be thoughts as they pass through the ears and outer membranes and into awareness.” (Toop, 2011, p. 36)

   Sound has the ability to haunt us by transgressing what we think of as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ - sounds pass between these to states effortlessly, and outside our control. The eeriness of the haunting and the eeriness of sound overlap as they both effortlessly penetrates into our inner selves - ‘something where there should be nothing’.

    

   These examples highlight two aspects of sound I find particularly fascinating - its ability to conjure other/different worlds within or perhaps overlaying our own. And its ability to transgress and cross boundaries, existing entirely outside our control.

   As I am writing this, I keep thinking of other interesting avenues to explore where the weird, eerie and sound intersect, so no doubt this is an area of enquiry I will return to in the future.