Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  All sound is memory.

  The sun—that lent us its last rays to cast the trees in bronze and rust—fell towards the horizon. The path was laid with grey fragments of stone, the biggest the size of biscuits and the smallest only a little larger than dust. The weight of our feet set the stones in motion, grinding some together, sending others skittering down the slope. The grating footfalls were by far the loudest sound; when we stopped, it took a breath or two for our footsteps to finally disappear. An evening blackbird and at last I heard our totem name: Silent Mountain.

  Sound is memory in that whatever is audible can only ever be a repetition of an event that has already occurred. Sound finds its prior origins in a release of mechanical energy whose force creates that pulse that is shaped by the twin vectors of compression (where molecules are squeezed together) and rarefaction (where molecules are pulled apart). This pulse is the soundwave with its peaks and troughs; as the energy that we call sound leaves the starting blocks, it races away at three hundred and forty meters a second. If atmospheric pressure, temperature, and humidity are each consistent, it will travel at the same speed whether the source is the rubber sole of my boot dislodging one of those gray chips of rock and its destination is my hairy ears some two meters above or whether the source is the eruption of Krakatoa that sent a chain of vibrating molecules extending from the volcano all five million meters to Mauritius.

  Beams reveal the area that we clung to in last year’s darkness as a short, low-ceilinged ledge jutting out over a massive cavern. Fine mist steams rolling from our lips and nostrils through the torch-light. Sliding down the slopes, passing equipment between us (I waver between vertigo and claustrophobia). Water drips from the cave roof far above into glossy bowls hollowed from the rock, loose chips like dregs. The LED strips cast shadows from a large marbley protrusion in the centre of the cavern that guards the descent to the next level. This is: the mountain within the mountain.

  Sound is memory, too, in its capacity to recall the characteristics of the world it has traveled through. In the cave, each splash remembers the size of the water droplet, the height that it has fallen and retains an acoustic sense of the dimensions of the pool that it has struck. But the sound of the splashes that arrives at our ears—along with a cold spray of moisture—has now also accrued the colors lent by echoes off the rim of the bowl eroded into the stalagmite’s peak. Sound’s potential to preserve the shape of its originary mechanical cause and to hold onto the details of its path of propagation—how it was reflected by the edges of smooth limestone and how it reverberated off the rougher walls of the grotta, how a portion of its morphology got absorbed and how other qualities might be masked by the roar of the subterranean river further into the mountain’s lower depths—is an enduring matter of memory.

  This conception of sound as vibration was first popularized in the nineteenth century by John Tyndall whose “lectures and books had a profound effect on the knowledge of the subject of sound among English-speaking people, and on the teaching of acoustics during and after his lifetime” (Beyer 1999: 70). Tyndall’s lectures were delivered through pedagogic technologies of explanation, laboratory demonstration, and illustrative examples, the latter involving boys pushing each other, cannons, Alpenhorn, fog, munitions exploding, and jumping from cliffs. Tara Rodgers’s compelling interpretation of Tyndall “shows how audio-technical representations are condensations of worlds in which social differences have been produced and naturalized as neutral, physical properties of sound” where the disturbances of soundwaves are feminized just as their agitation and investigation is conversely registered as masculine (Rogers 2010: 80). If, for me, vibrations lead to memory, for others they lead elsewhere. For Steve Goodman in Sonic Warfare, for example, the trajectory twists once towards acoustic weapons that deploy sound pressure against bodies and buildings and twists again into affect: “[f]rom vibes to vibrations, this is a definition that traverses mind and body, subject and object, the living and the nonliving. One way or another, it is vibration, after all, that connects every separate entity in the cosmos, organic or inorganic” (Goodman 2010: xiv).

  Smoke curled into the morning air. The smell of burning wood was one of my first sense-impressions of San Cipriano Picentino, a smell that still hung there when I returned two weeks later, a smell of heat against the cold, a smell of food being cooked to warm the belly, a smell of the land in flames, the special tang of the local trees being used as fuel. And in the palazzo, the fire in the wide hearth blazed through the irregularly shaped logs (more like roots). Lucia stooping to grasp a smouldering branch and reposition it to her satisfaction.

  The mountains that comprise the Picentini range in the hinterland behind Naples in southern Italy each possess their distinct qualities—their beauties—but each, in their own way, represent a threshold which sound’s inherent homeopathy struggles to breach. Here sound’s memories—of origin and of path—become muted. Hence the totemic name for what began in early 2012 as a residency, became an exhibition and continues today as an unfolding project involving the creation of field signals, a flag, an album of stories and compositions, and a film that is a collaboration with the filmmaker Chiara Caterina: Silent Mountain.1 That name was initially born of an instrumentalist frustration that these special “high places” offered so little to my ears and to my microphones. The emblematic expression Silent Mountain has since evolved for me into a productive acknowledgment of the limits of the technological apparatus of capture and the phenomenological capacities of the reminiscing agent, limits that are thrown into relief by the light shed by what I am proposing is sound’s inherently memorial function.

  Headlights swayed as the car rolled down the slope, manoeuvring between the potholes and boulders. I waved and began to climb through the rain. Reaching a squat plateau some 400 metres below the summit, I unshoulder my dripping backpack and crawl through the stunted trees towards the edge. The wind gusts and buffets, drags tears from the corners of my eyes, rattles my cagoule’s hood, groans branches and flickers sodden leaves, offering itself as sound but also dragging scraps from the village below the lip of the cliff: a squashed dog bark, a stretched snatch of birdsong, a distended bell.

  Working in the field to record the transmission of mechanical energy through air molecules as sound, I come to a special appreciation of that energy’s vulnerability to being disrupted, to losing its memories (whether of origin or path) whenever the wind starts to rise. Moreover, through the artificial mechanisms of the microphone, you are allowed auditory access to the prevalence of micro-turbulence, so slight as to be otherwise imperceptible, and begin to appreciate wind—as gust and as breath—as an often-unacknowledged participant in sensory experience.

  As sunlight hits the earth, it converts solar energy into heat in a ratio that depends on the directness of the beam of light. At the poles, which are struck in a more oblique fashion, there is less heat produced and as a consequence they are colder than at the equator where light impact is more direct and the temperatures rise accordingly. The temperature disparities fuel the vast complexity which earth scientists call the “global heat engine.” This engine cranks out its power through two major systems—the global wind field and the great ocean currents. These two systems propel the earth’s weather through its cycles, cycles that are shaped in relation, tempo, and meter—in rhythm—by more local features in the Picentini mountain range.

  So the sound of wind ultimately carries with it its own memories—even as it conspires to render other soundwaves forgetful of theirs. The memories of wind are reminders of the distant operations of the mammoth gear systems of the global heat engine and the souvenirs of the effects of local terrain and the temperature, pressure, and humidity gradients that it structures. High up on the silent mountains, it is the wind that usually dominates.

  The swirling of the swollen streams fell away; trees thinned and birdsong became sporadic. The others left me sitting on my coat connecting cables in a high mountain pasture. With no wind i
n the sky, time passed almost without external sound. Twice the soft snarl of a far-off chainsaw and once a jet tearing at the sky. Leaving the clearing I found the panorama at the rocky outcrop empty. Descending the summit on the faintest of tracks I got lost and then got disorientated. Fear lodged deeper with each stumble and deeper with each thorn snag until I heard voices.

  At this local level, wind can arm itself against the field-recordist as an enemy. When it raises itself up in a violent assail, gathering its forces to pummel and swirl, venturing outside with the microphone running becomes a fraught experience. Sounds that would otherwise hold a sonic identity long enough to be captured in some fidelity are stretched and torn; even the most sophisticated windshield, further barricaded by its fluffy fabric, remains susceptible to the rumbling attack of wind noise. On other occasions, this enemy creeps up on the unwary recordist who has decided to make a sortie unguarded by a windshield, the apparent calm suddenly disrupted by a wind that comes from nowhere (often, it seems, at the very point that a delicate acoustic scene is working its way out before our ears).

  And yet, wind can also defect, turning sides and becoming the recordist’s ally. Wind sets things into motion on the mountains, starts new chains of mechanical energy, making them sound, offering opportunities for other kinds of memories: flurries on the surface of the deep pool near where we found the wolf tracks; the strumming of wire fences on the steep cliff down to the cave; the garlands of wet snow brushed from the drooping holly; the dried chestnut leaves blown down the stone path above Vignale.

  In a way, sound is wind (as it is memory). If wind is the movement of air across the earth, then sound—at least airborne sound—is the movement of energy transferred between vibrating molecules through that air. In the Oasi wildlife refuge, amongst the streams of acqua bianca, there is a tall waterfall; as the water cascades down over the limestone cliff, it is difficult, crouching down, to determine what it is that is sheeting over me in harsh waves: water, wind or sound? The sounds we hear rarely reach this level of perceptible currents of air but, below the threshold of our skin’s sensitivity, we are being blown on all the time.

  Tim Ingold has put his finger up to feel the currents of the wind as part of his wider rendition of life lived not in isolation on a closed surface but through an immersion in “the incessant movements of wind and weather, in a zone wherein substances and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings that, by way of their activity, participate in stitching textures of the land” (Ingold 2011: 121). Accounts of the immersive power of wind at the turbulent end of the meteorological scale are given muscular construction in Chris Watson’s “Low Pressure” (1996)—where the limits of recording technology are rendered graphically audible at the track’s culmination—and in Francisco López’s Wind [Patagonia] (2007). Cathy Lane’s “Gaoth (Wind)” (2014) does not shelter itself away from more ferocious squalls and the presence of these is made felt, intermittently flapping the fabric of the composition into vigorous motion. Yet those gusts find themselves breezing in and out of other winds, ones that range across a graduated spectrum of force and frequency, that are enemy and ally. Moreover, in the creation of the recordings, in their arrangement and in their manipulation, Lane eschews addressing the wind in its alterity alone. We hear microphone wind noise unadorned and unaltered but we are also made to hear, through the percussive rattle of fence and gate, the thrum of turbine blade, the whistling between glass and brick, that the winds are imbricated in our lives, in our gathering of energy, in water for our thirst or our crops, in the design of our dwellings, in our management of livestock, and in the dunes that shelter us from the seas. Reading the writing that accompanies The Hebrides Suite, we become sensitive to the participation in Lane’s compositions of her own memories of over two decades on the islands and of the memories “collected in interview and conversation as well as oral history material from national and local archives.”

  The jeep stops below the treeline and we climb down. The early evening’s rain drips from pine branches and heat leaves the engine in “pings”, “pinks” and “tings”. The soles of our six shoes crush the stones on the trail, bend the wet grass stalks. The swinging bunch of keys still seems to ring. The headlights’ glare leaves our eyes and the dark starts to fade; tongue tastes of sour wine. Along the slope my ears find owls faintly calling; I cannot bring them into the headphones I have pulled on. Something has disturbed a crow from its night roost.

  If sound summons up the detonation of force at its source and recalls the properties bequeathed by its propagation path, the mechanical devices we employ to reproduce those recollections each remember things in their own ways (buried in the etymological strata beneath our word “record” is the Latin recordari; literally as “restore to heart” and figuratively more at “call to mind” or “remember”). To risk a tautology, the operations of mediatization in the context of visual recording are visible. Optical media devices materially register themselves in grain, stock, color balance, and shutter speed. These discernible textures are now deployed as markers of historicity, clues pursued in forensic analysis as much as opportunities to embed a flashback sequence within a purported chronology: the hair-in-the-gate jitter of black and white, the sundrenched saturation of Super 8, the mottled glare of VHS, the strangely muted tones and never-black-blacks of Hi-8, the shifts from blocks to bends within the evolving spectrum of digital moving image. For acoustic media, the registration gets resolved on the auditory plane, with successive recording technologies simultaneously imprinting their distinct circuitries as channels, frequency ranges, and compression artifacts while also bestowing whichever media substrate is involved with its own identifiable relationship to loss and decay. The microphone wind noise that has already been remarked upon is another instance where the ostensible transparency of media devices—their supposedly silent operation—clouds over into sonic presence.

  In the late 1990s, a plug-in for the Wavelab software was developed (whose name I have since forgotten) that enabled users to manipulate a graphic representation of a rotary knob in order to dial up the distinctive pops, crackles, wobble and flutter associated with particular eras of vinyl playback (throwing a virtual switch alternated the simulated presence of AC or DC current). This plug-in, and successors that followed it, constitute aural analogues to the ubiquitous processing in retinal media practices, where even the instant Hier und Jetzt mobile phone snap is liable to be filtered through a lens that articulates “60s,” “70s” or “80s.”2

  The oblong head of a goat leads its body towards the house. The goat was surrounded by others, some young, some much older, some more shaggy, some more energetic; together the goats managed to occupy the full spectrum of the palette that interior decorators would call “off white.” A sheepdog hunched its shoulders above its back as it slunk along beside the herd, ears alert to the calls of the shepherd with a black sports cap and long forked walking stick. Around the necks of the goats, flat-ended bells hung from leather straps that were dulled and softened by use.

  If recording devices each offer their own perceptible powers of retention, the files that are encoded into their digital memories also constitute, in projects like Silent Mountain, aides-mémoires that get stowed in the baggage hold on the flight home and then unpacked on my kitchen table when I pull my headphones on and start to compose. In parallel, perhaps, to the anthropologist’s field notes, to the architect’s site drawings or the Sunday painter’s sketches, the sounds that the apparatus of capture has retained on its recordings—sounds that themselves carry reminiscences of originary force and of propagation path—“remind me to remind me” of my experiences in southern Italy. It is in this sense that my frustrations with the shortcomings of my own compositions—castigating myself by contrasting them with those of Watson, López and Lane—may ultimately be redeemed. My shame at my recordings lack of amplitude or clarity or presence and the muddiness of their composition might be assuaged through a comparison with Michael Taussig’s un
derstanding that “the fieldwork diary is built upon a sense of failure—a foreboding sense that the writing is always inadequate to the experience it records. Nevertheless, on rereading by its author, the diary has the potential to bring forth a shadow text that can simulate the experience that gave birth to the diary entry, not only for what is said, but more likely for what is omitted yet exists in gestures between the words. This is what Barthes called the ‘role of the Phantom, of the Shadow’ ” (Taussig 2011: 100).

  I am conscious that the specifics of the compositional approach I tend to adopt—one that primarily deploys the selection and assembly of fragments of field recordings into layers rather than the alternative strategy of leaving those recordings intact, allowing them to unfold as they are into the world of the heard—amplifies the role of recordings for me as mnemotechnologies.3 When I am working on Silent Mountain in my headphones at the kitchen table to create a track for a CD or soundtrack for a film, I am working with circularity: listening to my recordings as prompts to trigger memories of being in the field while simultaneously using those very recordings—now cut into fragments and overlapped—to construct something of a facsimile of that memory. To adapt the terms that Wittgenstein offered in one of the two epigraphs to this essay, the lexical commentary in my head that describes what I can recall of the appearance of the goats at 5 o’clock in the afternoon on February 19, 2012 are my “memory-words.” The sound-shaped residues of the keening shepherd’s cries, the hiss of the school bus’s hydraulics and the peeling of the flat-ended bells that I can dredge up from submarine depths become the “memory-sound,” a configuration that, in the manner of Wittgenstein’s puzzle of how in memory you “see” yourself and your friend at the table rather than just the friend and table that you saw from your own POV at the original time, is inflected with a remainder. This remainder incorporates sounds heard between the ears that I have attributed to the scene of the goats retrospectively: ex post facto interior sounds that have been conjured by later goats, by earlier bus journeys, by my spoken words describing the shepherd’s cap in another context, by the acoustic atmosphere that was present in that subsequent conversation. Wittgenstein’s metaphorical allusion to “photograph” gets recalibrated as a series of literal recordings that while not “evidence for that past situation”—at least in any uncomplicated way—nonetheless help “to convince me now that this was how things were then” and to compose accordingly.