Sonic Thinking

by Bernd Herzogenrath

  There are many ways of making kinds of men and women. In each way of making kinds of them there is a different system of finding them resembling. Sometime there will be here every way there can be of seeing kinds of men and women. Sometime there will be then a complete history of each one. Everyone always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime someone who sees them will have a complete history of everyone. Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone.

  Stein 1966: 290

  I hear Gertrude Stein’s voice right now. And you will encounter her voice again later in this chapter. The mingledness of my individual listening experience right now throws me inmidst of the paradoxes of sonic research: research on sound is often motivated by the noble if not paradoxical ambition to think with, through and beyond sounds all at once. In the twentieth century various artists and composers, instrumentalists and architects, engineers and mathematicians did extensive research on sound: starting with R. Murray Schafer’s bold ambition to archive and analyze the soundscapes of the world (Schafer 1977); passing a number of more elitist approaches to sound from the realm of composition and sound art (Born 1995); arriving at a series of more traditional academic approaches to understanding sounds by means of culturally reflected and historically informed inquiries based on field research and critical analysis (Bull and Back 2003; Sterne 2003, Bijsterveld 2008; Schulze 2008; Erlmann 2010, Bijsterveld and Pinch 2011; Sterne 2012).

  In the early twenty-first century, the authors of this volume (and probably many of its readers) live in a world where a lot of audio (a rather barbarian reduction implying total inclusion) is being transmitted, researched on, and post-produced in almost every single second in a wide variety of cultures all around the planet: new mixtures of analog and digital media, of ancient and cutting edge forms of performance—new technologies, new gadgets, new products, and software applications are being developed. In this maelstrom of auditory extravaganza or sonic ennui (as some prefer to call it), one question seems to remain unanswered. It is a question that concerns the very foundations and the reflexivity of research in sound: How is sonic research in the strictest sense possible? Could it be necessary to approach the often separated areas of sonic research—for instance the auditory in everyday life, in design, in the arts, in perception—as one cohesive research field? How can it be possible that an entity like sound, resulting out of physical movements, processes, and actions—often initiated by creatures one could call anthropoid or humanoid—is investigated by an individual research practice like listening? Could it be appropriate to think any material sounding and any researcher listening as one cohesive aggregation, a sonic corpus? Sirens and ringtones inhabit this edifice. The effects of actual sonic vibrancy can be scary, disturbing, even humiliating and disorienting from time to time. But were it not precisely such experiences which guided many researchers into this whole new, unsettling field of research in the first place? Is a large truck driving down the road? Or is it the neighbors’ kids who are jumping up and down? Can you do research on sounds while immersed in exactly these sounds? How could it thus be possible to do research on sounds that leaves more traditional logocentric approaches of academia behind—and indeed proceeds by thinking and researching sonically and not verbally, visually, diagrammatically? Would that not qualify as a trembling resonance in research—disturbing and shattering research practices, scientific entities, academic dispositives? Could you imagine a post-logocentric aesthetic lest a post-logocentric theory of the auditory? Or in other words: How could one imagine thinking sonically? Thinking with, through and beyond sounds? Firstly, and as an outline of the remainder of the chapter, thinking sonically could be narrowed down to a process, which is:

  (a)not reducible to mere alphanumeric, logocentric translations or Aufschreibesysteme (Kittler 1985). Physically inscribed and visually represented numbers, letters, words or mathematical operations are literally not what one listens to.

  As a consequence, sonic thinking implies a genuine sonic approach, which is

  (b)not ignorant of how specific and highly dynamic spatial environments shape and condition one’s experience. Sound is always experienced in particular situations, and not in abstract graphs, flowcharts or statistical distributions.

  This sonic way of thinking, moreover, should

  (c)not ignore the fundamentally corporeal character of auditory experiences for anthropoids (as the factual main listeners in research), because their bodies are in fact their primary and very material receivers, amplifiers and interpreters of sound.

  Finally, sonic thinking should

  (d)not be ignorant of the imagination and its sensorial and proprioceptive aspects—as sound resonates with the entire anthropoid’s body, whose various senses are not too easily separated from one another.

  These four implications for sonic thinking will guide my investigation. “Everyone always is repeating the whole of them and so sometime someone who sees them will have a complete history of everyone. Sometime someone will know all the ways there are for people to be resembling, someone sometime then will have a completed history of everyone” (Stein 1966: 290). Following this, the present chapter is sort of a memento audio: What could be the crucial methodologies concerning central epistemological and ontological questions within sound studies?

  How to think spatially?

  To think sonically is not isolated from other epistemological changes and challenges in current theoretical discourse. It is part of a broader effort, which has been going on now for almost two decades, mainly related to developments in research on performativity, on emotion, and on the cultural history of sciences and humanities. Examining sonic thinking hence leads to an issue recurrently addressed in recent efforts of cultural research: How to think spatially? How can a researcher find a way to articulate and to discuss sound and reflection as genuinely defined by, generated in, and emanating from specific spatial constellations of materials?

  Sound events are spatial by definition. But reflections on sound events avoid to easily their particular spatial and non-spatial implications. At present, there is a specific group of sounds which oscillate between and are propagated through these buildings in ways that makes them hard to localize. They seem to almost flood the spaces and chambers, as they are permanently present in every single instant. One might therefore quite easily forget them. Nevertheless, they might produce a general tension or even an unease, which both permeates and perforates one’s body—I do not feel well in this room as soon as you turn on the video projector. The windows seem to be stiflingly closed. It feels like a coffin in here. The static humming and high-frequency buzzing of the loudspeakers and the screens around us engulfs me and almost chokes me.

  As a researcher one has to accept that all of her or his thinking and reflection is situated per se: it is spatial and located—as it is individual and personal (even if skillfully camouflaged). There is no such thing as a consistently abstract and non-situated thinking, unrelated to the person inhabited by thought, though Western philosophy (as well as a number of administrative logics) might have wanted us to believe otherwise and still does so from time to time in various publication formats and situations of public discourse. In fact, to recognize this as a mere camouflage of a postulated non-situativity in academia is a major leap. To actually accept the inherent performative reality of research might provide—if applied with a sensible subtlety—a way more complex and critically reflected road to understanding sound cultures and historiographies of listening.

  The sociology of spaces or Raumsoziologie of Martina Löw (2001) might be a first step into this new realm of situated research on sound. Löw explores how humanoids are, on the one hand, phenomenologically situated, and on the other, how they construct and situate the spaces in which they find themselves. As anthropoid one generates this physical order via two operations, the first of which Löw calls spacing, describing the mental apprehension o
f the distribution of locations of different objects, beings, and processes. The other operation she terms Syntheseleistung or achievement of synthesis, meaning the formation of a coherent impression of a situation, which one might call a space (Löw 2001: 158f). More specifically, in 2007 Barry Blesser (the inventor and programmer of the first digital reverberation algorithm) published the outlines of an approach to an aural architecture (Blesser and Salter 2007), which does not primarily operate in the visual or sculptural domains—but proceeds via the auditory. Even for the architectural practices of the 2010s, this is still a bold claim, seeing that architecture still relies heavily on the cultural techniques of drawing, physical scale modeling, 2D-blueprints and rather static 3D-rendering. In his volume, Blesser succeeds in finding a specific language to describe how human beings experience architectural settings aurally, without re-invoking well-known terminology or the schematics of building acoustics and room acoustics. Among other things Blesser proposes that one reflects on the acoustic horizon (Blesser and Salter 2007: 20–34) in which one hears (a limit of the audible, which is not represented by visual walls or other optical or physical hindrances). He also proposes a way to analyze how an edifice can be aurally illuminated by sounds (Blesser and Salter 2007: 12–19). A building, he argues, does not sound by itself but needs to be activated via sound. Though such terminology might still be regarded as being full of visual metaphors, it nevertheless changes the concept of space by directing one’s attention towards a sonic form of propagation and a genuinely aural way of perceiving the propagations of sound. Aural architecture as a set of terms and descriptions allows for a spatial analysis of experiencing sound.

  Finally, I would like to introduce a term here that the German media researcher, musicologist and trained jazz musician Rolf Großmann coined in 2008. His concept of the auditory dispositive [auditives Dispositiv] is capable of radically directing one’s perspective toward a spatial analysis of sound. It becomes an approach that takes the very material and physical nature of auditory effects and processes into account. At this very moment of reading for instance, you could be part of the auditory dispositive of a library or an office space. Both locations and spaces have their very own regulations, their historical predecessors and their ethical and moral codes which pile up to a whole anthropological concept of what human beings should be doing in such spaces. Take the situation of the library: as an auditory dispositive, this spatial arrangement is related to the history of designing and building places for, e.g., philological research, for detailed close reading and an intensely, if not intimately, executed analysis of texts and documents. The architecture of shelves and tables, lamps and chairs, of draperies and aisles are all spatial arrangements that provide essential elements to what constitutes library proper. All its material, its geometrical and its ornamental appearances thus provide a specific aural architecture that frames, distorts, and focuses your and my listening and reading activity. The silence postulated in buildings for storing books and analyzing texts, is thus of a very specific, historical quality. This auditory dispositive implies and demands the bodily tension of a concentrated reader from its visitors and users—a reader who might easily be irritated or distracted. At the same time it also implies that a state of non-silence, of noise and babble, would be distractive to any reader and that distraction would result in an inadequate form of concentration for textual analysis and proper academic work. The silence of the library—having its origins in the history of work and prayer rituals in monasteries—is thus a moralizing silence, a silence that almost automatically implies worshipping of the individual text and of the whole archive of stored texts. Reading in the library is probably the most prominent reverential (if not religious) activity in Western writing culture (besides writing itself, of course). Consequently, whenever one is in a library, one tries to discipline bodily movements and minds to grasp the meaning of the words one is reading. I try avoid making noises, moving my body, whistling, or finger snapping in order not to distort the activity of reading. Even a—presumably all-silent—activity like reading has its highly spatial and material sound practice connected to it, which, in this case, is mainly a practice of non-sound.

  The approaches by Großmann, Blesser, or Löw all stress that a sound event and a listening experience take place in specific spaces and situations. Moreover, any sound event can only be materially manifest in a specific physical situation—be it a concert venue, an art gallery, a tablet computer with poor loudspeakers, or a pair of headphones. The materiality of the situation in which a specific noise propagates is crucial. One cannot speak substantially about a listening experience without also describing and analyzing the specific material and physical situation, including (but not limited to) the architecture, technologies, and designs in which the experience takes place. In thinking spatially and sonically, one then focuses on:

  The Auditory Dispositive and the Aural Architecture as the historically, culturally, and materially determined, and thus highly situated and immersive, conditions of any sonic experience.

  How to think corporeally?

  Within this material framework and the immersive and situated positions it offers, one can hardly avoid speaking of a genuinely corporeal quality of listening. It is the individual anthropoid’s flesh—a brute physical and material existence in a certain space, in a particular place and with a specific corporeal condition—that is the actual means of access to a spatial thinking. Following the argument on spatiality, the second methodological challenge becomes the question of how to think corporeally? How can a reflection on sound manage not only to articulate and discuss theoretical propositions on the nature of sound, but also reflect the highly individual and idiosyncratic bodily aspects of sounding and listening?

  Imagine this situation: You are in a room, talking with some friends and colleagues. Suddenly one of your colleagues silently points at the ceiling. You may be surprised that she or he would do such a thing, but you follow the direction of the index finger and realize that it is pointing to the video projector hanging from the ceiling, still projecting an image onto the wall, at which no-one looks anymore. Though you heard it all along, you now realize that the video projector’s cooling fan has been getting continuously louder for a minute or so. Actually listening to this noise now, you also become aware why it seemed as if the words of the person pointing at the projector barely left his or her mouth. She barely heard the words herself—let alone the possibility of you understanding what was said. The aural architecture of this space was darkened; it was grayed out by this continuous humming noise. Only now you realize how uncomfortable you perceived this space for the past moments. The rather banal growing noise from the projector had a certain influence on your (and other’s) self-perception and on your kinesthetic and proprioceptive bodily felt sense (Gendlin 1992).

  The fundamental question implied here is: how does one perform her or his auditory bodily sensorium via specific techniques du corps (Mauss 1934)? To explore this question, one might turn to Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the status of the humanoid body in contemporary culture, developed in Corpus (Nancy 1992, translation: 2008). Here, Nancy argues that the Western concept of the body as a signifying structure—deeply rooted in Christian religion, in Western writing culture, and in cultural and technological practices—is currently undergoing a major transformation (Nancy 1992: 7–11). Among the major causes of this transformation are global developments that confront us with non-Western concepts of the body, with the experience of expanding mass societies and with a vast amount of non-traditional cultures worldwide. This newly discovered sensorial subtlety of the body, or Leib (Schmitz 1990, Waldenfels 2000), is reflected in the term tension that Nancy introduces in characterizing this corpus. By this term he differentiates the dead corpse of Western anatomical analysis from the living, interacting and interpenetrating bodies in cultures traditionally not adhering to a hristianized writing culture. Nancy writes:

  When the body is no longer alive, has no mo
re tonus, it either passes into rigor mortis (cadaverous rigidity), or into the inconsistency of rotting. Being a body is being a certain tone, a certain tension. I’d also even say that a tension is also a tending.

  Nancy 2008: 1341

  Tension and tonus, tone is his definition of a living body. Stressing this individual tension leads him in other writings to reflect on how listening—as a cultural practise in general and as a specific form of habitus—shapes individual thinking today, on the fringe: