Introduction: Medieval Sound
A text arrives and the buzz of a cell phone jolts you from your idle thoughts. The sound–like an alarm, another kind of bell to mark out the day–shifts you from one audition to another. The spatiality of competing sounds fills our consciousness and shapes our attitudes towards music and noise, privacy and pollution. These themes surround the issue of sound and articulate a variety of questions and problems. How does one delineate between noise and sound? How does sound individualize us within the community? How does sound create space? Why is the scopic the privileged sense?
Sound studies is the name for an interdisciplinary field encompassing the study of noise, music, vibrations, and what T.S. Eliot called “auditory imagination” in The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (111). It is a capacious field, encompassing examinations of the individual sonic space of iPod use and the historical sound of rural and urban life. Sound (or the lack thereof) immerses a subject in worlds that may not be, or can distance the listener from the world that is. To put on headphones, to lose oneself in chant, to be awakened by an alarm, to lose the sound of voices in the crashing waves, transfers us, immerses us, and connects us in a variety of sonic worlds.
Medieval musician reinactment. Image borrowed from Byronv2 @Flickr CC BY-NC.
Each of the essays in this month’s “Medieval Sound” forum focuses on sound as it, according to Steve Goodman’s essay “The Ontology of Vibrational Force,” in The Sound Studies Reader, “comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body (70). These investigations into medieval sound lend themselves to a variety of presentation methods loosening up the “petrified body” of academic presentation. Each essay challenges concepts of how to hear the Middle Ages and how the sounds of the Middle Ages continue to echo in our own soundscapes.
The posts in this series begins an ongoing conversation about medieval sound in Sounding Out!. Our opening gambit in April 2016, “Multimodality and Lyric Sound,” reframes how we consider the lyric from England to Spain, from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, pushing ideas of openness, flexibility, and productive creativity. We will post several follow-ups throughout the rest of 2016 focusing on “Remediating Medieval Sound.” And, HEAR YE!, in April 2017, look for a second series on Aural Ecologies of noise!
Multimodality and Lyric Sound
The essays clustered in the group “Lyric Sound” re-center lyric soundscapes—onomatopoeia, mashups, music box, witnesses to queer temporalities—in order to reorient the critical terrain of our understanding of the medieval lyric. Recent criticism on digital rhetoric has defined multimodality as the process of creating, rather than the product. In Daniel Anderson et al’s “Integrating Multimodality into Composition Curricula: Survey Methodolgy and Results from a CCCC Research Grant” (2006), multimodality, “acknowledges the practices of human sign-makers, who select from a number of modalities for expression (including sound, image, and animation, for example), depending on the rhetorical and material contexts within which the communication is being designed and distributed.” In this body of criticism, the term “multimedia” becomes condensed to the “integration of multiple forms of media” (59-84).
An illuminated music manuscript. Image by Richard White @Flickr CC BY-NC-SA.
This interest in semiotics is, however, not a new one; rather, it is one that has deep roots in medieval rhetoric, especially with regard to music. The two medieval writers most important to the discussion of rhetoric and music in the thirteenth century are John of Salisbury, particularly his twelfth-century work Metalogicon, and Gilbert of Crispin’s well-known debate Disputatio Iudei et Christiani from the late eleventh century. John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, lays out the relation between symbols, sounds, and notation, writing:
Letters, that is, written symbols, in the first place represent sounds (voce). And secondly they stand for things, which they conduct into the mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently, they even communicate, without emitting a sound, the utterances of those who are absent (Book 1, Chapter 3, 59).
John of Salisbury also links the notation of music with the notation of writing under the rubric of grammar, noting:
That such great import has existed in such tiny notations should not seem strange, for singers of music likewise indicate by a few graphic symbols numerous variations in the acuteness and gravity of tones. For which reason such characters are appropriately known as “the keys of music” (Book 1, Chapter 13, 59).
Gilbert of Crispin also considers the semiotics of visual notes. In the Disputatio Iudei et Christiani, he writes:
Just as letters stand in one way as images and notations of words, so also pictures exist as likenesses and notation of things written (qtd. in Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record 290).
Therefore what Isaiah saw, said and wrote, what Ezechiel saw, said and wrote, may after them be said and written and signified by some pictorial notation (290).
Both of these writers rework material from Isidore of Seville, and both describe correlations between reading “nota” in relation to music and images in post-Conquest Britain.
The elision between writing down letters and writing down musical notes is furthered by the slippery quality of the Latin from which the term “note” is derived. The Latin word “notare” means “to record writing,” while the second most common meaning of the noun “nota” [noter] means “to sing, to interpret musically.” The resulting duality of the term “note” survives today in both English and French, as Ardis Butterfield has pointed out in a November 2009 conference paper “A Note on a Note,” writing that “a note is both a sound and a sign.” The ambiguity of the term in Latin also indicates that the distinctions between the two meanings—“to record in writing” and “to interpret musically”—are constantly in flux.
The issues of the development of musical notation—a recording technology of sound—and the interface issues at stake in medieval manuscripts mean that our view of the medieval lyric comes primarily through the eyes. In other words, the medium—the manuscript page—in which the medieval lyric is recorded explains how our interpretations are deeply ocularcentric. However, we believe that we can think of the medieval manuscript as a flexible recording medium that allows for a “mise-en-système,” what Joanna Drucker describes as “an environment for action” in Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (139). A digital mise-en-système is a digital ecology in which the main question posed is how the interface can create the subject/user/reader. Interface then becomes a “border zone between cultural systems and human subjects;” it is the co-dependent space where “speaker and spoken are created. (148, 158-59).
“The Story of the Written Word” from the NY Public Library McGraw Rotunda. Photo by Wally Gobetz @Flickr CC BY-NC-SA.
Drucker tackles the theoretical stakes of digital visuality by explaining that “all images are encoded by their technologies of production and embody the qualities of the media in which they exist. These qualities are part of an image’s informations” whether this be illuminated manuscript, daguerreotype, painting, photograph, or digital image (21). The issues of layout, marginalia, paratext, columns, table of contents, indexes, chapter headings, are as Malcolm Parkes discusses in Scribes, Scripts, and Readers, a development of the medieval scholarly book (121-142). These experimental page structures became standard in printed books and eventually in digital texts.
In this series, we push back a bit on Drucker’s idea that the manuscript page is actually just a static mise-en-page. If the codex (as it developed in the Middle Ages) is one of the earlier kinds of informational “interfaces” then we should consider it as a mediating apparatus: one in which the mise-en-page and material features, its myriad graphic cues explain how to read, use, navigate, and access information in the codex book. We argue today with the example of the medieval English lyric as it emerges, that manuscripts are functionally an interactive media ecosystem, a mise-en-système where subject/user/reader can pull different threads and create and recreate meaning.
Over the next six weeks, the writers featured in our forum on Lyric Sound–Christopher Roman, Dorothy Kim, David Hadbawnik, Marla Pagán-Mattos, Katherine Jager--examine the different forms that medieval lyrics take and how the lyric is ensounded in terms of the mouth, recording medium, as well as the performance. Historical sound is always about negotiating the past through the present. Silence in the Middle Ages would not be our silence, just as music or noise today may not be defined as such then. These essays ask us to listen, create, make noise, open our senses in multimodal and multitudinous ways. We close with Andrew Albin‘s meditation on what it means to remediate medieval sounds in our contemporary moment, an intellectual call to the present as well as the future, as we will return with more on “Remediating Medieval Sounds” in April 2017. –Forum Guest Co-Editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman
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Dorothy Kim is an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. She is a medievalist, digital humanist, and feminist. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Ford Foundation Fellow, a Frankel Fellow at the University of Michigan. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a Korean American who grew up in Los Angeles in and around Koreatown.
Christopher Roman is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University His first book Domestic Mysticism in Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe deals with the creation of queer families within mystical theology. His forthcoming book Queering Richard Rolle deals with the intersection of queer theory and theology in the work of the hermit, Richard Rolle. His research also deal with quantum theory and Bede, ecocritical theory, and medieval soundscapes. He has published on medieval anchorites, ethics in Games of Thrones, and death and the animal in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.
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Of Resilience and Men: How Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo Play with Gender in “Where Are Ü Now”
Justin Bieber caught me off guard last year. There I was, minding my own business, listening to a pop station, and this breathy little thing, this delicate vocal wrapped in a halo of shimmering effects starts piping through my car. I didn’t even realize it was him at first; it had been so long since I’d heard a new Bieber song. And I had no clue the production was from Skrillex and Diplo (from their 2015 Skrillex and Diplo Present Jack Ü), which is why I was probably also not ready for the drop, that moment when the song’s tension releases and I’m suddenly gliding across a syncopated bass synth while Bieber’s vocals are pinched into a dolphin call. Somehow, two of the most notoriously unsubtle producers and the posterboy for “too much, too soon” had snuck up on me with “Where Are Ü Now” (WAÜN).
WAÜN’s drop from nowhere isn’t brand new. Subtle soars and understated drops are officially A Thing. More importantly, they do work beyond the sonic aesthetic. In this case, I want to listen to WAÜN in the context of Bieber’s performance of gender, specifically with an ear toward the way Skrillex and Diplo mix elements from dancepop’s 2015 toolkit to produce a track that plays on feminine tropes, which articulate a kind of masculinity. Listening to WAÜN alongside Robin James’s Resilience & Melancholy (2015) amplifies the male privilege at play in WAÜN. James calls attention to the way drops can sonify feminine resilience, and WAÜN’s surprise drop toys with that resilience in a thoroughly heteromasculine way. I’ll first set up how drops usually work, then read James in the context of Bieber’s gender performance as heard in WAÜN.
Drops, at their most basic, are climactic moments when a song’s full instrumental measure hits (hence “drop”), often after some key elements of the instrumental have been removed so that the climax can sound more intense. At that broad level, any genre can employ a drop of some sort. EDM and dancepop drops—the kind that most directly inform the music of Skrillex, Diplo, and Bieber—are bass-heavy and typically follow a soar that intensifies volume, texture, rhythm, and/or pitch: you soar to a sonic plateau or a cliff, and with a “YEEEEEES!!!!!” coast on some wobbly goodness to the next verse.
The pre-chorus soar in the Messengers/Sir Nolan/Kuk Harrell-produced “All Around the World” from Bieber’s 2012 Believe is a solid example. In the video below, the soar starts at 0:45, the chorus enters at 1:00, and the drop lands at 1:15. It’s textbook: the instrumental is stripped back and filtered, and in the opening moments, we hear a descending bass glide. A filter does what its name suggests–it filters out a prescribed set of frequencies so that we only hear a certain range, and in this case it’s the low end that comes through. The effect makes the synths sound like they’re pulsating through water, and the higher frequency overtones take on a shimmery quality. Over the course of the 8-measure soar, the higher frequency range is brought into earshot, and then, on the second half of the eighth measure…nothing. This nothingness is integral to James’s central argument in Resilience & Melancholy: nothingness intensifies what follows. In these eight measures, we’ve glided down to the low end only to soar up up up until all that’s left is Bieber’s voice, confident, nasally, with just a touch of autotune as he sings the titular line that will take us to the chorus. That chorus bangs harder because of the soar to oblivion before it.
WAÜN’s drop lands at 1:09. For full context, start from the beginning and listen for the soar. (If you also need to stare dreamily into Bieber’s eyes, then by all means.)
There’s not really a soar there. No intensifying volume, texture, rhythm, pitch. The not-soar (starting at 0:48) is even a weird length, clocking in at 12 measures after an 8-measure intro and 16-measure verse have established a multiples-of-8 structural rhythm; even if we were expecting a drop, it comes four measures early. The clearest sign we get that a drop is imminent is that moment where the instrumental reduces to a quiet hiss for two measures as Bieber sings “Where are you now?” That hiss is the structural equivalent of the nothingness we hear just before “All Around the World”’s chorus, and with no traditional soar before it, we have just enough time to think “Oh shit, are they gonna….?” before we’re off, clutching tight to Justin Bieber as we ride a dolphin through the more tender parts of Skrillex’s and Diplo’s musical oceans.
Until that nothingness, this could just as easily be one of those heartfelt Bieber tunes where he reaches to the high end of his range for a chorus full of feels. That Bieber? He’s incredibly self-assured, bearing his soul because he’s certain you’ll love him. The bait-and-switch of WAÜN’s soarless drop highlights Bieber’s insecurity in this song—he’s just dolphin calls and “Where are you now”s—by creating expectations for a different persona.
So what we have here is an atypical drop, a drop that calls attention to itself by behaving differently than we expect it to, a drop that’s a study in understatement–all courtesy of three of dancepop’s resident maximalists.
“143 Diplo and Skrillex at Burning Man 2014 Opulent Temple” by Flickr user Duncan Rawlinson, CC BY-NC 2.0
Atypical soars and drops aren’t new, as producers will always toy with musical conventions as a way to disrupt expectations. Skrillex’s own “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” (2010) includes a pre-drop that doesn’t soar at all. In 2015, two big acts in the dance scene, Disclosure and The Chemical Brothers, released singles that don’t soar right, either. Disclosure, whose big 2013 hit “Latch” soared rather traditionally into Sam Smith’s chorus, is coyer on “Bang That” and “Jaded.” “Bang That” includes three separate 8-measure phrases (at 0:30, 0:45, and 1:01, respectively, in the linked video) that never take off, finally settling into a descending bass line (starting at 1:09) that just repeats a rhythmic motif, running out the clock on the final four measures before the chorus. “Jaded,” at the other end of the spectrum, includes only a 4-measure pre-chorus (1:18-1:27) that seems to be sweeping upward like a traditional soar, then roller coasters down and back up over the final two measures. The instability of this soar/not-soar is punctuated with an additional eighth note tacked onto the end of the fourth measure, throwing the chorus off-kilter. The Chemical Brothers employ a similar roller coaster sweep in “Sometimes I Feel So Deserted” that marks out an even eight measures (0:58-1:13) without either intensifying rhythmically or pushing to a pitch ceiling at the drop.
These soars and drops stand out precisely because, like WAÜN’s, they aren’t the norm. To help theorize WAÜN’s not-soar, I want to think with Robin James, whose Resilience & Melancholy hears soars and drops in the context of contemporary race and gender politics. James situates soars and drops as the sonic equivalent of resilience–a performance of feminine overcoming that ultimately only strengthens the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that inflicts the damage that is being surmounted. In other words, women can only attempt to overcome through the damage that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy inflicts upon them. Sonically, the soar is an accrual of damage that is spectacularly (and profitably) overcome in the drop, the music that resiliently endures on the other side of nothingness. Melancholy, on the other hand, is failed resilience, a handling of damage that does not directly profit white supremacist patriarchy and that could sound any number of ways, including like a non-traditional soar. While admittedly these soars and drops aren’t always about gender politics, R&M opens space for us to think about gender and soars/drops together.
I don’t think WAÜN’s non-soar/drop is resilient or melancholic, but I do think it’s helpful to think of it as being about resilience and melancholy. This is where Bieber’s performance of masculinity comes into play. From his earliest poofy-headed, babyfaced performances, Biebs has done a modified bro thing: his heart’s on his sleeve, but mostly as a strategy for sexual conquest. “All Around the World,” again, is exemplary. In the lyrics, Bieber uses his worldly experiences to woo a potential lover, who he also negs, keeping himself in a position of power as someone who knows more, has seen more, and is willing to accept this woman despite her obvious flaws.
“143 Diplo and Skrillex at Burning Man 2014 Opulent Temple” by Flickr user Duncan Rawlinson, CC BY-NC 2.0
In WAÜN, though, I hear his performance of masculinity complicated further, as he tries out a number of more feminized tropes all at once. Lyrically, Bieber is the scorned lover who claims to have done all the care work in his relationship. Visually, he’s the pop icon whose body is ogled, scrutinized, and marked. Vocally, he receives the pitch-shift treatment that has most recently been associated with DJ Snake’s production of diva vocals (think “You Know You Like It” and “Lean On”). He also sings in a breathy style that James has elsewhere noted mimics Ellie Goulding’s vocals. Musically, Skrillex and Diplo give him the soar/drop construction to undergird his pain, a musical technique that most often signifies feminine resilience.
What bubbles up is a heteromasculine play on resilience and melancholy. Skrillex and Diplo liquidate the soar until all that’s left is a nothing-hiss before the drop. In the context of the other feminized tropes Bieber is messing with in WAÜN, this failed soar could feel melancholic, a refusal to spectacularly overcome. Overcome what, though? Bieber gets to sound resilient or melancholic without ever experiencing damage. That’s his male privilege. James points out that one of the most violent outcomes of resilience discourse is the re-enforcement of damage. If resilience is the way women become legible and profitable, then the damage inflicted by ablist white cisheteropatriarchy becomes a necessity, something that must be endured to gain access to power and resources. This is the lynchpin of James’s critique: resilience is a harmful discourse because it ultimately benefits the system it purports to overcome. Melancholy turns resilience logic on its head by refusing to treat damage as something an individual is responsible for overcoming. WAÜN, though, erases damage altogether in its initial drop. WAÜN’s feminized tropes ultimately highlight instead of unsettle Bieber’s performance of hetero-masculinity: what’s more man-ly than accessing power and resources without the threat of institutional violence?
Importantly, these feminized tropes don’t undermine Bieber’s heteromasculine performance; rather, they only seem to add nuance to the slightly bro-ier [that’s a word] Bieber performance we’ve become accustomed to. That’s what I mean when I say WAÜN is about resilience and melancholy; Skrillex and Diplo use the markers of queer or feminine overcoming and failed overcoming to re-construct Bieber’s masculinity, to toss some more ingredients into his manly mix, and the not-soar is a big component of that. Skrillex and Diplo tap into this soar experimentation, then drop it into the middle of a slightly more gender-fluid Bieber.
Screenshot from “Where Are Ü Now” official video
WAÜN’s high water mark is a few months behind us at this point, but Bieber remains hotter than ever, with “What Do You Mean?,” “Sorry” (another Skrillex production credit), and “Love Yourself” still dominating US and UK charts. Several more singles from Purpose (including two more Skrillex collaborations) are poised to do the same in 2016. Each of these singles extends some of the same tropes Bieber, Skrillex, and Diplo explore in WAÜN—breathy vocals, misunderstood and mistreated pop icon, resilience and contrition and care in the face of a failed relationship—and I hear WAÜN’s initial drop as the sonic moment that preps Bieber’s return to the pop charts. He wades back into the mainstream with a more complex performance of heteromasculinity and reaps the profits that come with it.
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Justin D Burton is Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, and a regular writer at Sounding Out!. His research revolves around critical race and gender theory in hip hop and pop, and his current book project is called Posthuman Pop. He is co-editor with Ali Colleen Neff of the Journal of Popular Music Studies 27:4, “Sounding Global Southernness,” and with Jason Lee Oakes of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies (2017). You can catch him at justindburton.com and on Twitter @justindburton. His favorite rapper is Right Said Fred.
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They Do Not All Sound Alike: Sampling Kathleen Cleaver, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis — Tara Betts
Tomahawk Chopped and Screwed: The Indeterminacy of Listening–Justin Burton
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