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September 12, 2016  

SO! Reads: Roshanak Khesti’s Modernity’s Ear

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SO! Reads3“I drifted to another place and time,” reminisces drummer and musicologist Mickey Hart in his 2003 book about salvaging indigenous musical traditions, Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music. He continues, “Every day I rushed home, put on the sounds of the Pygmies [on the old RCA Victrola], and melted into their very being.” For the Grateful Dead drummer and world music producer, this experience of disorientation would eventually shape his transformation into a “songcatcher,” or one who seeks to preserve the intangible cultural heritage of indigenous music. In Modernity’s Ear: Race and Gender in World Music, author Roshanak Kheshti interrogates the “origin myth” presented by Hart, along with other collective fantasies and historical narratives that urge listening to world music. She argues that we must look beyond the political and economic exploitation of actual musicians to consider the economy of desire in which the conditions of possibility for such exploitation are formed. In contrast to a critical discourse on musical appropriation and exploitation among ethnomusicologists, one that Martin Stokes acknowledges is “marked by an anxious awareness of complexity and complicity” with world music (835), Kheshti deftly tunes into racialized and gendered yearnings for the recorded sounds of others.

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Sounds in bodies

Crucial to Kheshti’s argument is her radical proposition for what occurs as, to briefly return to Hart’s aural memories, the sounds of others “melt” into our “very being.” In a crucial maneuver that focuses on how what is being heard is shaped by the embodied experience of listening, Kheshti proposes that “the object [of listening] becomes a part of the self by being taken into the body” (41). Thus when “sound, the listener’s body, escape, and affect fold into one another” (54-56) in the act of listening (a Derrida-derived encounter that Kheshti dubs “invagination”), selfhood is performatively constituted through the aural other. Moreover, the pleasure of imagining the other through listening, writes Kheshti, is not only the hegemonic form of listening within the world music industry but an experience of desire that Western media markets have historically capitalized upon.

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“Whispers” by Flickr user Nicola Colella, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Given the ways in which listening embodies an economy of desire, Kheshti tells the history of this libidinal economy through a narrative in which modern selfhood is constructed through the racialized and gendered aural other. The Godzilla in this narrative is the World Music Culture Industry (WMCI), an entity conjured by Kheshti in reference to the historical juncture of comparative musicologists in the early twentieth century with the popular music recording industry, a coupling that she argues spawned the globalized product of modern media known as world music. As a set of hybrid musical practices designed by and large for Western media markets, world music is the key object of her inquiry (in contrast to the diversity of musical practices worldwide).

 

The imagined listener

songcatcher-coverThough the book does not proceed chronologically, the first chapter seeks to interweave memory with history by opening with the early twentieth century. Stressing the pioneering role of white female sound archivists, this chapter is crucial for setting up the historical significance of the feminization of listening, a process familiar to readers of Jonathan Sterne, Louise Michele Newman, and William Howland Kenney. Kheshti puts Songcatcher (2000), a feature film about a fictional comparative musicologist who dives into Appalachian country and “discovers” Scottish and Irish ballads thought to have gone extinct, into conversation with the iconic images of Frances Densmore, an ethnologist affiliated with the Bureau of American Ethnology in the 1910s, who famously staged phonographic recordings of the Blackfoot chief, Mountain Chief (Nin-Na-Stoko). The point of convergence between these materials is the gendered and racialized politics of who was sent where to record whose sounds: white female sound archivists, spurned by their male colleagues and sent to the periphery of their respective fields to practice their craft. Once in the field, these comparative musicologists, one fictional and one real, committed acts of racial appropriation and erasure. The song catcher deracinates Appalachia by stripping the region of its Native American and African-American histories in favor of the ‘collective origin fantasy’ that links European and American genealogies, while Densmore, among others, domesticates indigenous sounds in her work for the Bureau.

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Frances Densmore recording Mountain Chief. Picture by Harris & Ewing [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The very presence of these upwardly mobile women in the sonic-social worlds that they listen to leaves a trace on their phonographic recordings. These aural traces, Kheshti contends, mark the processes of settler colonialism and salvage ethnography by which indigenous bodies are subjected and made subject through phonographic recording techniques (what she calls ‘phonographic subjectivity’), and in particularly gendered and racialized ways. Kheshti traces the performative effects of these aural traces on contemporary world music in her fieldwork with a Bay area world music label in the early 2000s. In particular, she reveals that the target listener for contemporary world music is white and female, and, that this fact is an apparent truism among music executives, or at least the executive who she worked for. This revelation is the cornerstone for Kheshti’s unfolding of the aurality of this figure, the white female listener of contemporary world music.

Though the book tends to favor intensive re-readings of critical and psychoanalytic theory (from Adorno and Benjamin to Freud and Lacan) over thick ethnographic description, Kheshti touches upon key encounters in this culture industry to explain how listening to world music engenders modernity’s ear. For instance, she transcribes segments from a radio show in Northern California in which the host, a middle-aged white female, discusses what constitutes “African rhythms” with a record label executive. The two banter about this misnomered subject for some length. The host interprets what she is hearing as “African rhythms coming through.” Her visitor, an expert in world music, affirms and clarifies this attribution: “Yeah, absolutely. The rhythm on this particular song… is from a style of music called Afro-beat… that rhythm you’re hearing is definitely African, so, you don’t know nothing, you’re learning” (52). Kheshti interprets this banter as an example of how world music listeners “cherish” the experience of listening to sonic difference as a moment to live out “fantasy and imaginative play” (54), in other words, that the pleasures experienced through aurality have become definitive of twentieth-century modernity.

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“world music 2” by Flickr user wayne marshall, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In other chapters, she details how record labels fulfill this fantasy through the production of hybrid sound media. The orchestration of these sounds in the studio not only enables the listener to feel “lost” and transcend the contingencies of the listening event, they also “pronounce and suppress presences and absences of all sorts of bodies and grains” (77). Drawing on phenomenological descriptions of her own listening experiences as well as liner notes and other commercial media, she describes how non-Western sounds are encoded as feminine, whereas the synthetic production and digital manipulation of sounds are rendered techno-logically modern and masculine.  Racialized and feminized bodies are put to work in constituting the modern cosmopolitan listener. Furthermore, Kheshti argues that market mobility and aesthetic mobility are gendered male and alterity is gendered female in ways that link, for her, to miscegenation. The listening self reproduces dominant forms of heteronormativity in the consumption of modern sound media.

The listening self reproduces dominant forms of heteronormativity in the consumption of modern sound media.

Kheshti offers a radical alternative to these normative listening practices by turning to field recordings taken by Zora Neale Hurston between 1933 and 1939. Trained by Franz Boas in the traditions of nascent cultural anthropology, Hurston is kin to Densmore and those who worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology a few decades earlier. Like them, she goes to record America’s aural others, or “black folk.” But unlike her white foremothers, Hurston does not attempt to splice out the “noise” of the recordings. She “refuses fidelity” (126). Instead of staging field recordings, she made studio recordings of herself performing songs and discussing rituals. When recording her interlocutors, she interrupts, interjects, and poses directorial cues that Kheshti reads as an attempt to resist the desire to faithfully (re)produce an archive of phonographic subjects.

Zora Neale Hurston with Musicians

ca. June 1935, Eatonville, Florida, USA — Author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston sitting on a porch in Eatonville, Florida with two musicians, Rochelle French and Gabriel Brown. — Image from Stuff Mom Never Told You

Recommended for advanced graduate students and faculty, this virtuosic and tightly rehearsed tour through critical and psychoanalytic theory offers an ambitious and groundbreaking retake on an industry that we thought we understood, perhaps too intimately. Kheshti asks her readers to hold themselves accountable to their own forms of aural pleasure. In so doing, she offers a fresh perspective on the role of embodiment in relation to knowledge production. Rather than embracing somatic methods of inquiry as a welcome challenge to inductive reasoning, she argues that taking pleasure in listening enables the commodification of desire that sustains the world music culture industry.

Kheshti shifts the discussion of world music qua music (aesthetics, history, representation) towards issues of alterity and sound. As such, this book contributes to sound studies by holding the field accountable for difference, and, by inscribing this accountability within the history of the field itself. Indeed, Modernity’s Ear is about how the forces of desire that constitute the modern listening self are enveloped in the aural other as phonographic subject.

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Featured image: “ear” by Flickr user Leo Reynolds, CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research generally examines the performative processes of politics, culture, and society in relation to sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East. Her current book project examines the performance tradition of Syrian dabke as a means for the strategic contestation of social class, postcolonial difference, and gender dynamics in contemporary Syria. She has contributed to peer-reviewed journals and several anthologies including The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, and Modernity, Islam and Popular Culture, the Sublime Frequencies Companion, and Syria: From Reform to Revolt. Previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Humanities Forum, Shayna received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and her BA in History from Yale University.

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Lokananta: Sounds of Crisis and Recovery from Indonesia’s National Record Company — Ian Coss

Saving Sound, Sounding Black, Voicing America: John Lomax and the Creation of the “American Voice” — Toniesha L. Taylor

August 25, 2016  

Sounding Out! Podcast #57: The Reykjavik Sound Walk

Grafitti in Reykjavik. Image by Rog01 @Flickr CC BY-NC-SA.

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Standing in front of our rented apartment in Túngata, a residential street just a few blocks from central Reykjavík, I am struck by the stillness of the city that surrounds me. Having lived most of my life in the densely-populated suburbs of northern New Jersey, my experience of urban soundscapes has typically been frenetic and noisy. Here, even the busiest parts of town seem subdued. It’s a pleasant contrast. At 8AM on a weekday, the quietness is eerily enveloping, broken only occasionally by a gust of arctic wind, a passing car, or a neighbor closing her door and setting off for work.

Quiet tranquility and natural beauty have attracted a growing number of tourists to Iceland in recent years, my wife and I included. With only 330,000 people inhabiting an area roughly the size of Kentucky (and two-thirds of those settled in and around Reykjavík), one needn’t venture far out into Iceland’s otherworldly landscape to feel far removed from civilization – like exploring a distant planet. While the island may be still now, the belated realization that Iceland’s bizarre terrain, its vast lava fields, meandering fissures, and Dr. Seuss rock formations are the result of earth-shattering eruptions – like Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, Bárðarbunga in 2014-15, or the more recent rumblings around Katla – can be a little unnerving. Travelling through the Icelandic countryside, one imagines the thundering cracks, seething magma, and the infernal growl of the awesome geophysical forces that churned up these vast panoramas.

Reykjavik Soundwalk Map

To a certain extent, the absence of sound here heightens a sense of the sublimity of the world around us; that from certain perspectives, nature is fundamentally ineffable – incapable of being fully represented by language, data, or art. Sound, I think, can complicate this experience. On the one hand, the extraordinary sounds of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, of great storms, or the roiling of heavy seas, contribute to the overwhelming experience of the grand and fantastic. On the other, these sounds, like perhaps the everyday noise of a busy street corner, may also break the spell by yielding up the audibly familiar. Wandering around Reykjavík at this early hour, a settlement that has clung defiantly to a desolate rock in the North Atlantic for over 1000 years, I become acutely aware of each new sound to disrupt the ethereal silence. Each of these, even the most mundane and urban, seems to take on larger significance and intention as audible signs of the ways in which human beings have forged order and meaning from a wild and indifferent world.

But for now, all remains quiet, and the island’s primordial silence seems to reach even into the capital itself. Of course, Reykjavík is a vibrant international city resonating with the familiar sounds of urban life. But at certain times the quietness that seems to subsume everything else – a subtle reminder of the relatively small scale and frailty of the human compared to the geological.

Soon enough however, as I walk up Túngata there’s a siren in the distance, and the neighborhood begins to echo with the sounds of children playing in the yard at Landakotsskóli, one of Iceland’s oldest schools. I follow the street as it arcs towards the city center, passing several foreign embassies and the imposing gothic edifice of Dómkirkja Krists Konungs. A few other cars motor past and there’s a brief gust of cold wind, but these are momentary disruptions. Soon enough the world returns to the now-familiar stillness.

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Grafitti in Reykjavik. Image by Rog01 @Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA.

But the sounds of morning traffic pick up a bit as I walk further down the hill – the rush of passing cars, the groan of a utility truck turning off a side street, and the muffled sounds of a radio floating from a car window. At its end, Túngata bends to the left at the bottom of the hill, where I see a large excursion bus stopped in front of a hotel, and a knot of tourists quietly talking nearby. It’s time for morning pickups, and the idling of these busses, and the hushed, expectant voices of day-trippers outside hotels and guesthouses around the city turn out to be common vignettes along my morning walk. They’re a reminder of the vast growth in tourism this year, which is expected to increase 29% over 2015 to 1.6 million foreign visitors.

Continuing straight onto Kirkjustrӕti, I pass the Alþingishúsið (Parliament House) on my right, and Austurvӧllur, a large public square on my left. The place is relatively quiet now. The cafes lining Vallarstrӕti and Pósthússtrӕti are closed, and there are only a handful of people walking through the square. Later on, the cafes will be buzzing with patrons enjoying the balmy (for Iceland) weather and the long hours of sunlight.

But aside from the nightlife, Austurvӧllur’s proximity to Parliament means that historically it’s been a focal point of political protest in Reykjavík. Two months before our visit, some 24,000 people crowded into this space to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who was revealed by the Panama Papers to have undisclosed connections with an offshore shell company with interest in failed Iceland banks. Walking past the square today, I can only imagine the chants, claps, whistles, shouts, barricade-banging, and yogurt-throwing of Icelanders expressing their collective frustration with corrupt officials.

Construction in Reykjavik. Image by Patrick Rasenberg @Flickr CC BY-NC.

Construction in Reykjavik. Image by Patrick Rasenberg @Flickr CC BY-NC.

This morning however, apart from the early morning sound of chirping birds and pedestrian commuters, there’s a bit of construction going on here – I can hear a few landscapers and  a pair of contractors clanking and clunking as they lay out equipment for work on a building next to the Alþingishúsið. From these men and others I pass along this stretch of road, I hear the hushed and slightly groggy speech of early morning. The talk is all in Icelandic of course, a language whose place and street names I valiantly try to pronounce when I visit. Icelandic is a notoriously difficult language for foreigners in general, and its tongue-twisting staccato and subtle consonants, not to mention its intimidating alphabet, usually leave my mouth sounding a bit too awkwardly Jersey (as you can hear for yourself in this podcast!).

Continuing on my walk, I follow Pósthússtrӕti as it threads around Dómkirkjan and out to Lӕkjargata, the main avenue in this section of town. Here, the soundscape is more typically urban. The sound of trucks and cars passing, a bus groaning into gear as it pulls out into traffic, the multi-lingual chatter of pedestrians at a crosswalk, a group of teenage volunteers chatting in Icelandic as they do groundskeeping work near the Stjórnarráðið government offices, all speak the language of a city’s morning routine.

Street art in Reykjavik. Image by Toni Syvänen @Flickr CC BY-NC-SA.

Street art in Reykjavik. Image by Toni Syvänen @Flickr CC BY-NC-SA.

Bankastrӕti, the main commercial district, is also coming to life. It’s still early, and most shops are closed, but heading east up the street, I hear a few snatches of conversations in Icelandic and American English – and there seems to be more of the latter than I remember from the last time we visited, testament to Iceland’s growing attraction for U.S. tourists. All along Bankastrӕti, the sounds of lively conversation, music, and the clinking of tableware floats out of open doors as people pop in and out of cafes and restaurants for breakfast and morning coffee. As I bear right on Skólavӧrðustigur and up the hill towards Hallgrímskirkja – the Lutheran church that dominates the city skyline like an art deco rocket ship – these sounds start to thin out again. Apart from a passing car or pedestrian, and the occasional rumbling of a tour bus or ATV, I am left in the comforting hush of a Reykjavík morning.

At the top of the hill, the large stone plaza before Hallgrímskirkja echoes with the clattering sounds of workers hammering at the roof of a nearby building, as the great green statue of Leifur Erikíksson silently watches on. I turn left on Frakkastígur and head downhill towards Faxa Bay, which looms in the middle distance. Frakkastígur turns out to be the noisiest stretch of my walk: there’s the roofers; the slapping of lanyards on the flagpoles that surround Hallgrímskirkja; the busy bakery where I buy morning croissants surrounded by Beatles music, the English and Icelandic chatter of customers, and the pounding, rolling, and cutting of dough; and finally the two large construction sites that I pass between Laugavegur and Hverfisgata streets. Here, the motoring of earthmovers, the shrieking of a circular saw, and the pounding of a massive pile driver jar the neighborhood with an intense mechanized racket.

I’ve noticed a fair amount of construction around Reykjavík this trip. The skyline bristles with cranes. It’s another marker of the booming tourism industry, and its complicated place in the Icelandic economy. Since the financial collapse of 2008, there’s been pent-up demand for residential housing. But with the local construction industry strained from the current spate of hotel building, it’s been difficult to find builders to work on residential projects. What I hear around me is a sign that Iceland’s economy has improved, but it’s also a reminder that improvement sometimes makes life more difficult for local residents.

Sculpture on the shore of Reykjavik. Image by Ainhoa Sánchez Sierra @Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA.

Sculpture on the shore of Reykjavik. Image by Ainhoa Sánchez Sierra @Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA.

The sounds of heavy construction fade as I wind my way down to the bay and cross over Sӕbraut to the promenade that lines the shore. Like any highway, at this point in the morning Sӕbraut fairly hums with commuter traffic; here, the ambient sound of suburbanites making the morning drive to work, complete with attendant sound of brakes, horns, and Icelandic drive-time radio mix with the rushing sound of wind rolling off the waterfront. Walking along the promenade now, I pass a few joggers and bicyclists as a walk over to Harpa, the newly-built glass and steel concert hall that is home to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra and which, every autumn, becomes a focal point of the week-long Iceland Airwaves music festival. It’s this annual event, I muse, that should be the subject of a future sound walk (for me or someone else) – five days in which Reykjavík pulsates with the sound and music of dozens of bands playing formal and informal shows at venues, cafes, bookstores, and basements around the city.

From a large dig site next to Harpa (the possible site of yet another hotel), I cross back over Sӕbraut to the clicking sounds of a crossing signal for blind pedestrians. I pass Bӕjarins Beztu Pylsur (The Best Hot Dog in Town), which is closed for the morning, and walk back into the city center, which is by now clearly awake and buzzing with locals and tourists. After stopping in a 24-hour supermarket for some morning milk, I walk east on Austurstrӕti past the Laundromat Café and other restaurants that are now busy serving the breakfast crowd.

Up through Ingólfstorg square (which appears to double as a skate park, but is right now a stopping point for a walking tour group), south on Aðalstrӕti, and around the turn by the Reykjavík Settlement Museum, I’m soon walking back up through the quiet neighborhood lining Túngata.

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Featured Image by SambaClub | Camisetas com conteúdo (a t-shirt site) @Flickr CC BY.

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Andrew J. Salvati is a Media Studies Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University. His interests include the history of television and media technologies, theory and philosophy of history, and representations of history in media contexts. Additional interests include play, authenticity, the sublime, and the absurd. Andrew has co-authored a book chapter with colleague Jonathan Bullinger titled “Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past” in the recent edited volume Playing With the Past (2013), and has written a recent blog post for Play the Past titled “The Play of History.”

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June 20, 2016  

Curatorial Dispatches from the Nendu Archives: The Journals of Rui Chaves and Tiago Costa

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Rui Chaves will be documenting his creation of Nendu—an archive of Brazilian sound artists—in real time on Sounding Out! throughout  2016-early 2017. A Portuguese version of Chaves’s journals was published in Linda, an online platform created by a composers’ collective called NME.  Rui Chaves’s postdoctoral research is funded by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) Project 2014/15978-9.

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Nendu—the title of my archive—envisages the creation of an online platform dedicated to presenting and mapping the work of contemporary Brazilian sound artists. I have based my based upon the following four objectives:

1) Creating a ‘map’ that enables the dissemination and discovery of local praxis;

2) Prompting conversations or different types of documentation that better illustrate individual creative processes (‘journal’);

3) Re-affirming the idea of the ‘archive’  as a research tool;

4) Writing a historical and critical report on Brazilian sound art;

Nendu’s online ‘map’ will enable users to discover different practitioners based on location, but more importantly on what categories the artists themselves have asked to be associated with.

These categories consist of designations of practices that cross the current imaginary of sound art historiography and reflection. A porous and rizomatic territory, to be sure, the categories will echo the obvious specificity of the experience and presentation of sounding artworks — temporally, spatially and formally — without excluding practical, historical and conceptual connections with music, architecture, performance or visual arts.

My selection framework interweaves individual research with contacts with curators, friends, and other researchers. It is important to mention that this process remains open to any individual that wants to be part of the platform until the end of the project in June 2017.  This openness facilitates a dialogue between the archivist and interested parties, while at the same time enables reflection regarding the relationship with the idea of “sound art” and the role of sound within different artistic practices.

The second element (called a ‘journal’) consists of field work (to be done until the end of 2016) where I–together with a smaller selections of artists–attempt to present different in-depth reports of  “ways of doing”  sound art. The journal will consist of interviews, photos, videos, audio recordings and other relevant items. I will publish this material in tandem with the map in the form of a blog and I will share dispatches from the journal with SO!’s readership regularly throughout 2016.

The articulation of the map and journal foregrounds a critical reasoning regarding the idea of the archive as a research tool.  My archive will not only be a repository of artists and work done, but also a way of doing an ‘archeology’ of discourses, made objects, and creative processes of sound practitioners. Methodologically, I support my archive via an ethnographic approach,  tracing common ideas or patterns between conversations, materials, and/or other artifacts (texts, videos, audio recordings or photographs) gathered during the project. This not only allows an understanding of a possible formal aesthetic discourse (collective or individual), but also offers insights and possible contextualizations of various thematics within a broader cultural arena. Through mapping particular ways of doing, I argue, my archive will allow participants/artists—and also future users—a better comprehension of the prevalent cultural terms.

In the end, this methodology is geared toward the creation of a historical and critical report regarding the current panorama of Brazilian ‘sound art’. Because Nendu is also Tupi for “listening to one-self,” it functions as a metaphor for the creation of an archive that envisages alternative reflections and historiographies from European/American narratives.

For my introductory presentation for Sounding Out!, I want to take the opportunity to present a a ‘journal’ that I made with the artist Tiago Costa in the town of Tiete (state of São Paulo). We perform this activity with “two-voices,” each one of us writing about their experience — starting with me.

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RUI CHAVES: 

Day 1

My rendez-vous point with Tiago was at the Barra Funda metro station and bus station. Our meeting results from a series of conversations and our eagerness to record the sound of the cicadas in his home town (Tietê). He was also interested in using binaural microphones, which end up being the main recording setup for what we did in the weekend between the 29th to the 31st of January 2016. Over the course of this weekend, I ended up in a series of conversations where I try to explain how these microphones work—in a very imprecise manner.

Our trip begins early in the morning, so I wake up early and still in night time to travel to the metro station, carrying all the recording equipment. When I arrive, there is already a lively buzz in the place. I have breakfast and, still feeling hungry, I have a second. As always, I arrive way too early and I look for the travel information center in order to try to find the right bus ticket sales booth. Fortunately, Tiago also arrives really early and I get an SMS from him telling me that he had already bought the tickets. We meet up and immediately get along. The conversation between us will constantly flow during our time together. He is an artist with a vast experience in audio post-production and he’s also pretty active and interested in São Paulo’s experimental music scene. This type of in-depth knowledge will also be a good source of jokes and gossip regarding particular musicians in the scene.

The conversation continues inside the bus, during which I compliment the vehicle’s air conditioning set temperature, quite mild at that time. Everyone that has travelled by bus in Brasil is acquainted with the cold that one has during long distance travels. While we continue to chat and get farther away from the city, we start to gaze a landscape that cuts through our daily experience of living in São Paulo—it is so hard to see the horizon in that city!

We came across and stop briefly in a town with a weird and funny name to me: Boituva!

Boituva is really well known for its paragliding activities. Sometime during our weekend together, I discover that Tiago is afraid of heights and that he is not planning to paraglide any time soon—I agree. It also during this stop over that Tiago describes to me a regional musical traditional called “Cururu”: a form of song-off duel between two “violeiros”; based on that description, I commented to him that it sounded a lot like a rap battle. A smile comes up on Tiago’s face, a smile that grew larger and larger due to my inability to say “Cururu” the right way: Pururu, Cururuca, Pururuca.

We arrive to Tietê early and sleepy. At first sight, the city has a contrasting scale and size in regards to São Paulo. The height of the buildings is relatively small, punctuated by a few condos slightly off the main urbanscape. The bus station has a small boteco, and not much else.  Botecos are common in Brazil; to me, they seem like a cross-over between a pub, restaurant and coffeehouse. There are a few clouds in the horizon, but Tiago tells me that the city is much warmer and drier than São Paulo. He also tells me that signs of Italian immigration are quite present in the city, as well as assorted religious events. Not long after, Tiago’s mom arrives and she is extremely kind.

At Tiago’s place I have my third breakfast (called café da manhã here). With some effort and excitement, we go out to check a few places near Tiago’s home for recording and I’m impressed by the relatively diversity of the nearby soundscape. Besides the sounds of birds, insects and some motorbikes—there is a pungent smell of sewer in the air that envelops us.

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Bairro Seis Irmãos – Tietê (São Paulo). 29/01/2016. Picture by Rui Chaves

We also see a series of houses with an architecture that reminds me of other parts of the world. We make the most of this small trip and Tiago records a small route in that area using the binaural microphones.

Tiago Costa field recording // Best heard with headphones

We go back home and Tiago listens to the recording we just made. We have a small talk about this process. We sit at the table to have lunch and I try to explain to Tiago’s mom my research and what the process of binaural recording entails:

The head is a filter that enables to create a 3D image during the recording process.

I think I have a limited understanding of the process.

We end up having a quiet afternoon. I’m still a bit excited, so I decide to go out to run a few tests with the camera I bought to document my research work. Tiago and his mom suggest that I go and visit the river.

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Rua Júlio dos Reis – Tietê (São Paulo). 29/01/2016. Picture by Rui Chaves

I do a small video recording through the city using a gadget that enables me to strap the camera to my head. Following their indications, I find the river Tietê. The color of the water is really brown and there is a smell that I can’t explain. It seems that in bygone times one could have a swim there, and that there was also a swimming club. With time that changed, but there is a small religious celebration where two boats meet in the same place.

I find a small wooden stage near a construction site and inadvertently, I hear a conversation about which national team has the biggest number of fans in the country. I start to get really tired and decide to go back home. I try to transfer the files to watch the videos. The computer has problems playing them, so I give up and fall asleep.

We wake up for dinner and after, we go on a stroll through the city,  literally going in circles around the main plaza. The conversation is good and we continue talking over a few beers on the porch of Tiago’s house. I don’t know if it was on that day or the next, but we comment on the lack of representation of certain groups in the São Paulo experimental music scene.

Tiago also describes to me a map of the local labels. We decide that it might be interesting to have a dedicated field recording label, because there are none in Brasil. We laugh at the possibility of the project being profitable or manageable. It would be one of those things that you would do out of passion, as were most things that we talked about during that evening.

We decide to wake up early in order to do our first recording of the day and try to capture the local dawn chorus. It was a really warm night, so I fall asleep to the sound of the ceiling fan refreshing me.

Day 2

I had an idea for a possible project between us, having sent Tiago a plan beforehand. The project consisted of using the binaural recording process as a metaphor for a collaborative recording process.  I soon realize that that could be too complex for the time we had, and that I didn’t want to condition our weekend meeting and recording process. From now on, the focus would be on documenting Tiago’s work.

The alarm rings and I prepare the audio and video recording equipment. We both look tired, but are in good moods. The idea is to document the recording/path that Tiago is going to make—so I strap the camera to my head and Tiago sets up the binaural microphones; for some reason there is a glitch with the audio recorder SD card, but I manage to solve the problem.

Tiago – Field Recording // Better heard with headphones

We go back in order to get bit a more rest; we must, as later on we are going to do a few more recordings. I try, but I end up staying awake. It starts to get hot, so I get out of bed and have have breakfast. Tiago’s mom is already doing some house chores. It is a beautiful day and I am quite excited about what we are going to do in the afternoon. The area surrounding Tietê is quite beautiful with sugar cane plantations all over the place, supposedly for the production of bio-diesel.

We were meant to go out early, but we are going to meet a friend’s of Tiago and he suggested that we went after lunch. So we did that, just before leaving an intense rainfall strikes Tietê. We head out anyway, toward a place whose name I forgot. After we arrive, and while we wait for the weather to improve, we decide to recording the momentary ambience.

When the rain stops, we meet up with Marcos—a really gentle and nice person. On our way, I explain my research project to him and lend him my recorder to listen to how binaural recordings sound. He tells me that it feels like the sounds are happening around him. Discreetly, I record their conversation and I am briefly taken away by stories about friends and TV shows that discuss the evolutionary nature of pain.

We arrive at the dirt track where we are going to do a few recordings. We have to jump a fence and my shoes get all dirty with mud. In the end, all of our clothing ends up wet and dirty and Tiago’s mom’s car will suffer the consequence of our little adventure. At the same time, I can’t understand if we are actually allowed to enter this property.

The surrounding landscape is amazing and we walk, hopping a few more fences until we reach the river. We stop there in order to do another recording. The river water has an intense brown color and the sky is still cloudy. We mainly record the sound of the water coursing. After we finish, Marcos goes out to do a recording and disappears for a few minutes.

Marcos André Lorenzetti recording // Best heard with headphones

After a while, we get a bit worried about him, but he soon arrives saying that we have to change to another, more interesting place. We start walking, avoiding our initial choice of a route due to the possibility of existing spiders or snakes, crossing a small ranch where we encounter a family getting ready for a barbecue. Marcos, a former vegetarian who now eats chicken, asks Tiago if he misses eating barbecue. He says he doesn’t.

At another part of the river bed, for some odd reason we decide to go through a complicated route (especially for people carrying equipment!). I worry I’m going to get wet. So it was, but Tiago and his friend helped me with my bag. We arrive to a small island of rocks and we do another recording. The weather is nicer now and it feels really wonderful. Tiago and Marcos go for a swim in the water and I get in a little bit to make a video recording. After a while, I felt obliged to go for a swim too, although I was a bit phobic regarding germs, bacteria or other nasties that could be in that water. I join them and suddenly we spot a sewer drainage pipe. I ask Marcos if the water is clean and he replies that:

Clean, clean, it never is!

Returning to  the ‘mainland.’, I accidentally misplaced one of my feet, and slip on my back on one of the rocks. Fortunately, none of the equipment gets wet and I leave with only a few bruise marks.

TIAGO COSTA

In mid-November 2015, there was a strong heat wave in the interior of São Paulo. I was in the city of Tietê, my home town, two hours west. I remember being home, the seasonal dry air and the surrounding sounds picked up my attention, in particular the strong sound of the cicadas. I became interested in capturing them, and imagined myself in a recording situation in the middle of the woods, just a few meters from my house. At that time, I had been listening to a few interesting works that utilized binaural microphones and start querying colleagues that used that type of setup in their work. That’s when I contacted Rui.

Rui is developing research about Brazilian sound art, and for that he interviews and documents a series of artists that work with sound. Part of his process consists in spending some time with them, documenting what they usually do and proposing interventions. I explain what I wanted to do; Rui got interested and he invited me to do something in Tietê.

Due to our agendas, our meeting had to be postponed a few months after this conversation, unfortunately when he finally had time, the cicada weren’t ‘sounding’ as as much as before. We decide to maintain our intent to meet, and during the month of January, we left for a weekend to do some field recordings together.

We went to Tietê on the 29th of January and the soundwalk happened briefly after we arrive. With the recorder and binaural microphones in hand, we visit the outskirts of the woods in proximity to a neighborhood called Seis Irmãos (literally translating to “six brothers”).

In the past, that part of town had only a few small farms (called chácaras in Brasil), and although today it has been replaced by urban development, it still maintains a considerable native green area. Well, partially native. as we encountered a mix and pipes that send untreated sewage to a water stream called Ribeirão da Serra.

ribeirão-da-serra

Bairro Seis Irmãos water stream/sewage – Tietê (São Paulo). no date available. Picture by Tiago Costa

During that walk, we had a go with binaural recording, and we discussed a possible ‘narrative’ that could be done the next day, This ‘narrative’ would consist of emphasizing the first morning sounds, starting in the middle of the neighborhood houses, until a particular moment when we would enter the woods for a more contemplative appreciation.  We also recorded a few ‘urban sounds’ during the walk, inside a car on the way to the next recording spot: a brief rain storm, the car’s mechanical sounds and our casual conversations.

Rui Chaves field recording // Better heard with headphones

The second stage happened in a nearby town, Cerquilho. This was a plan parallel to the cicadas that we made at the banks of the Sorocaba River, a place with less human intervention and strong currents, so it demanded the help of someone that knew it well. I invited my friend Marcos to accompany us. He had practiced canoeing and regularly frequents that spot, building a very close relationship with this river. During the trip he told us about an experience he had spending the night close to the river with only a hammock. He described how the sound part of this experience transformed his perception:

One time I went to sleep close to the river [. . .] in the hammock, and during the day the sound of water is harmonic, but during the night it transforms into something really intense. And since it was night time and our perception gets a lot sharper, more alert, because there could be an animal close, so with any noise made we become more alert. There were times where the experience of the water  ‘noise’ became so intense that it somehow even changed my consciousness [. . .] it was incredible [. . .] because it is a constant sound, right, [. . .] the current is constant [. . .] and if you don’t feel trapped by it, you set yourself free.

Tiago Costa Field Recording // Usar fone de ouvido

The sound recordings made in that afternoon captured a river with a strong presence in constituting that acoustic space, taking upstage presence in regard to all other sounds. After the recordings, we had a swim and talked until the end of the afternoon.

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This multi-vocal diary manifests the methodological frame for the ‘type’ of archive that I am building — a performative endeavor that envisages presenting process and work through a multi-layered weave of text, audio-visual documentation, and online material. Ultimately, its format signals a dialogical movement between archivist and artist, the underlying force in building a critical and historical report on Brazilian sound art. This publication is part of a series of installments that will run until mid-2017. The next post will focus on the work of Lilian Nakao Nakahodo, a composer/performer and researcher that created the Curitiba Sound Map.

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Featured Image: In a ranch between Tietê and Cerquilho. 30/01/2016. Picture by Rui Chaves

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Rui Chaves is a Portuguese sound artist, performer and researcher. His research and work foregrounds a discussion of presence — both physical and authorial — in the process of making sound art. This endeavor is informed by a contemporary critical inquiry and exploration of the thematics of body, place, text and technology. He has presented his work in several institutions and events throughout the United Kingdom, Brazil, France, Canada, Portugal and Germany. He holds a PhD in music from Queen’s University Belfast and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at NuSom (University of São Paulo).

Written in collaboration with Tiago Costa.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:tape reel

Six Years in Nodar: Sound Art in a Rural Context–Rui Gomes Costa

SO! Amplifies: Ian Rawes and the London Sound Survey–Ian Rawes

Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil–Leonardo Cardoso

Reflective Sound Gathering via the New England Soundscape Project

–Daniel Walzer

 

 

June 6, 2016  

SO! Amplifies: Think About Sound App and Map

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soampSO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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What is it about the environmental soundscape which makes us ‘tune-in’ or ‘tune-out’ to particular sounds? Do we as humans tend to seek out quiet zones for our acoustic pleasure or are there those among us who find urban soundscapes a more comforting prospect?  Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK have developed a mobile phone application to allow the personalized assessment of such questions regarding environmental soundscapes. I developed the free Think About Sound interactive map–downloadable as a mobile app and viewable online–to allow users to experience various locations in Glasgow by using 3D audio recordings and panoramic visuals.

mobile_screenshot

Think About Sound is a novel tool which shifts the traditional paradigm of environmental soundscape assessment using an experience sampling methodology. Over the last decade, smart phone ownership has increased immeasurably; I applied the technology here in order to allow local, in-situ soundscape assessment as participants go about their daily routine. Based on the Adobe PhoneGap Build platform, the application has been developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, employing jQuery Mobile to provide a simple and clean navigational structure to the user.  Crowdsourcing data in this way has enormous potential to create rich and diverse data sets, where both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of environmental surroundings can be gathered in a flexible and non-invasive way.

By using a self-reporting methodology, Think About Sound removes the listener from traditional laboratory-based soundscape evaluation and locates them in real world experiences as they go about their day-to-day activities.   The application aims to find out the various types of sound encountered as users understand them, asking how users feel before and after a recorded sound event and enabling them to describe the circumstances in which they heard the sound event. Think About Sound also asks listeners to provide semantic descriptors for the sound, toward the ultimate aim of creating more sophisticated environmental sound maps which communicate both location-specific sound information and the subjective effect of sound upon the listener.

To further enrich the experience, data sent from the application can be viewed online at http://www.thinkaboutsound.co.uk/ with an accompanying map where the public can view and audition submissions using the familiar Google map format.  You will also find links to download the app in multiple formats.

webpage_screenshot

I hoped that by collecting data in this way and to this scale, that I can obtain and share a greater understanding of how we perceive soundscapes. The next steps for the project includes the development of audio technology to analyze sound recordings, automatically predicting annoyance, valence (the emotional value associated with a stimulus), and the arousal features of environmental sounds for particular users.

While locale remains important, this research has far more reaching implications beyond my local region. Submissions on an international level can help us to understand how we perceive our environmental soundscapes, help shape local noise policy, and provide others with an understanding of sounds in their local area.  What I want from you, the reader, is your help via contributions to this worldwide soundscape project. Stop for a minute and take in your sonic surroundings. What can you hear? How does it make you feel? Comfort? Anxiety?. . .Stop for a minute, listen and think about sound.

app_logo

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Adam Craig is a Ph.D researcher studying at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK within the School of Engineering and Built Environment. After obtaining a first class honours in his undergraduate Audio Technology degree in 2011, Adam went on to embark on a Ph.D concentrating his research on using advanced audio technology for the creation of environmental sound maps. He Is currently a member of the AudioLab Research team at GCU and is a member of the Institute of Acoustics and the Audio Engineering Society. Out with his academic research, Adam teaches sound engineering to high-school students at a community based service within his local education authority, and at West College Scotland.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:tape reel

SO! Amplifies: Ian Rawes and the London Sound Survey–Ian Rawes

SO! Amplifies: Cities and Memory–Stuart Fowkes

SO! Amplifies: Feminatronic

SO! Amplifies: #hearmyhome and the Soundscapes of the Everyday–Cassie J. Brownell and Jon M. Wargo

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