Experiments in Aural Resistance: Nordic Role-Playing, Community, and Sound
Editor’s Note: Welcome to Sounding Out!‘s fall series titled “Sound and Play,” where we ask how sound studies, as a discipline, can help us to think through several canonical perspectives on play. While Johan Huizinga had once argued that play is the primeval foundation from which all culture has sprung, it is important to ask where sound fits into this construction of culture; does it too have the potential to liberate or re-entrench our social worlds? SO!’s Multimedia editor Aaron Trammell reflects upon using sound in role-playing games as a form of resistance. Ready, players?
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When we play with sound, how does it influence the ways in which we understand, configure, and experience the world? I have already argued that non-diegetic sound can produce a visceral and emotive effect when connected to player interaction within a game world, that sounds are often structured within games to construct a sort of feedback between player and system, and that often within this feedback loop the narrative voice perpetuates problematic tropes of sexism and racism through its scripting. While I focused on the often dystopic production efforts of large and middle sized game companies in those prior essays, here I will be focusing on autonomous and grassroots examples of how sound is used as a way to stage social experiments which resist these often hegemonic ways that these dominant narratives constrict our views of the world.
Role-playing games, the focus of my post today, offer a more viable path of social resistance than better-known video games. Nordic larp style-games, for example, are written and played within not-for-profit communities, and they utilize themes of social inequality, transformation, and activism within their very scripts. Second, role-playing games, unlike computer games, do not require that their developers are able to code. Instead, games are often circulated by word-of-mouth, or in script format through player communities. In this sense, the genre itself is untethered from many of the problems of consumer capitalism. Many underground role-playing games are designed both around social issues and for local community needs as opposed to the market demands that necessitate big budgets, big programming teams, and few risks in the video game industry today. Finally, because role-playing games necessitate neither big budgets, the ability to code, nor mass audiences, they are an ideal site wherein game designers and referees can stage social experiments that speak to the unique wants and desires of the communities within which they are run.
In The Larpfactory Book Project, a forthcoming book containing several ready to play examples of Nordic larp (a big shout out to Lizzie Stark for hooking me up with an advance copy of this portion of the manuscript!), larpwrights Matthijs Holter and Fredrik Hossmann propose a game entitled “Before and After Silence,” focused on thinking through the collective experience of silence. From the game description:
In a world of more and more sound, silence is becoming more valuable. Before and After Silence is about limitations and listening, and about doing almost nothing. It is non-verbal and uses silence as its starting point. It is about shifting the point of view from “what is” to “what is not,” about shifting the focus from “the sounds” to “the spaces between the sounds,” from “the actions” to what is “between the actions,” and to “what is not done.” Rather than playing characters, we examine how we look at ourselves and how different filters can change how we see ourselves and others.
The game is structured as a social experiment for five to twelve players who are made to select two cards, one of which prompts players with an action they must complete only once during the hour of silence (one example reads “Go over to someone and whisper something in a language you don’t know”), and another which prompts players with a setting through which they should interpret the actions of the other players in the room (one example suggests a player imagine themselves in a community of prisoners, another makes a player imagine themselves as one in a society of telepaths). Before the game there are a set of workshops aimed at orienting players to the scope and silence of the game, and afterward there is a debriefing session where players compare their experiences of silence during the game.
Tons of great examples of work in the Nordic larp genre are in this book. Image borrowed from FransBadger @Flickr.
Unlike American larps, which often take place in high-fantasy settings and direct their action around combat scenarios, Nordic larps often focus on the everyday and comparatively mundane, and as such tend to be more concerned the problems of the everyday as well. Even those that take place in more exotic environments, such as System Danmarc, a game set in the cyberpunk future of Copenhagen, engage players in real issues regarding class and poverty. After living in a shanty-town simulating the future streets of Copenhagen for a week of game-time (In Nordic-style larps, game-time is often equivalent to real time, and so a week in-game is equivalent to a week out of game) players are shown a documentary about the actual slums of Copenhagen where they realize that their experience within the space of play was made to mirror the experience of those struggling with the these very issues in the real world.
In the case of “Before and After Silence,” it is interesting to consider the ways in which the game designers here play with sound, and how these experiments in sonic game design might provoke new modes of subjectivity. As described earlier, players are both given a particular action and or noise to perform, but also are prompted with a way to imagine the actions that the rest of the players in the room are performing. The resulting group performance is an acid dream of sorts wherein each player is made to imagine the room’s soundscape in a very different way. Is the setting a long-lost silent film, or are you drifting through an ether of emotions and past romances? The game focuses on playing with silence in a way that makes the din of communication an unfamiliar and distant memory. The game affords players an opportunity to imagine the world sound. In doing this, “Before and After Silence” displaces the dominance of the voice as a mode of communication and through this questions the ways in which we imagine the world.
Not all is perfect, however, in this utopia of resistance. As Lisa Blackman (2009) argues in her essay “Embodying Affect: Voice-hearing, Telepathy, Suggestion and Modelling the Non-Conscious,” play with the exchange of subjectivities and sound marks an ontological shift from a praxiology of what bodies are to what bodies can do (p. 170). Moving forward from her work in understanding the ritual practices of voice-hearing communities, Blackman explains that similar forms of sonic play (including play with silence) allow for the experience, embodiment, and trade of desire, fear, and trauma. In the context of “Before and After Silence,” this means that as players sculpt and adjust the sonic space of the room, they run the risk of also shaping and altering each others psychic conditions, in unpredictable and perhaps dangerous ways.
The conflation which occurs between these spaces of real emotion and play emotion is, in fact, well documented, and referred to in larp communities as “bleed.” As role-playing scholar Sarah Bowman (2013), explains in her essay “Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study,” even though bleed does occasionally create rifts in relationships (some participants that she has interviewed reported in-game events disturbing their out of game relationships), others seek it out as a form of extreme play. For this reason Nordic larps require ethical behavior on the parts of their players, and because of the nature of the psychic and social sculpting which can occur within the play spaces of the game, the possibility exists that a single unethical player could create a negative and perhaps concerning experience for many others. That said, there are several ways the community mitigates the possibility of this problem including meticulous casting processes, before-game workshops, after-game debrief sessions, and safe words for use during play.
Players debrief after a game. Image borrowed from Fiezi @Flickr.
“Before and After Silence” is a valuable cultural artifact that lies at the intersection of scholarship on sound studies and serious play. At the same time that it promises several new ways to think through how sound, communication, and silence influence the how we frame and approach the world, it also raises deeper questions regarding the nature of social control and the viability of autonomous modes of organization. As silence allows players to explore and interact with a world where the soundscape takes on an increased prominence, do sexist, racist, and homophobic modes of socialization still manage to creep into the play space? And does the voice, along with its physiological and cultural embodiment of race, class, and gender, offer an escape from these experiments in silence if and when they turn dystopic?
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Featured image: “Larp” by Flickr user marten vaher, CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Aaron Trammell is co-founder and Multimedia Editor of Sounding Out! He is also a Media Studies PhD candidate at Rutgers University. His dissertation explores the fanzines and politics of underground wargame communities in Cold War America. You can learn more about his work at aarontrammell.com.
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Goalball: Sport, Silence, and Spectatorship— Melissa Helquist
GLaDOS, The Voice of Postfeminist Control— Aaron Trammell
Video Gaming and the Sonic Feedback of Surviellance: Bastion and the Stanley Parable— Aaron Trammell
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Sounding Boards and Sonic Styles: The Music of the Skatepark
Welcome back to our summer series on “Sound and Sport.” In today’s post, Josh Ottum discusses the sonorous sounds and unique rhythms of the sport of skateboarding. For an instant replay of last month’s post, click Tara Betts‘s “Pretty, Fast, and Loud: The Audible Ali.” For May’s post, click Melissa Helquist‘s “Goalball: Sport, Silence, and Spectatorship.” Next month’s grand finale will feature a doubleheader on Brasil, with a post by Kariann Goldschmitt on the promotional sounds of FIFA 2014 and a podcast by Andrea Medrado entitled “The Sounds of Rio’s Favelas: Echoes of Social Inequality in an Olympic City.” We’ll close with another take on the Olympics, excerpted from David Hendy‘s recent Noise broadcasts for BBC Radio 4 on the politics of boos at the games. For now, get out your board, strap on your helmet, and prepare to jam. —J. Stoever-Ackerman, Editor-in-Chief
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Seven layers of screen-printed, sugar pine maple whack the concrete. Aluminum axles pivot on rubber bushings as they slide across steel coping. Circular, molded polyurethane encases lubricated bearings that spin in midair before slamming onto birch. Vocal cords are strained as exclamations are made in response to a maneuver. These are the unmistakeable sounds of the skatepark. As skaters ride through the park, a unique sonic tapestry emerges revealing a constantly shifting array of timbre, pitch, and rhythm. This sliding aural space is similar to the compositional flow between rehearsed maneuvers and improvisatory actions, connecting skaters in the skatepark to musicians improvising in a jam session.
Just as the results of a musical performance depend on acoustics of the venue and the idiosyncrasies of the instrument, the skater is beholden to a similarly complex signal chain. The aural atmosphere of the skatepark relies on the number of other players, as well as their chosen instruments, and unique approach to playing. While surveying the sonic and social dynamics of four skateparks in Ohio and California for this study, the line between performer and listener was often unclear. Skaters are consistently sliding between roles as passive observers and active participants, watching and being watched, making sound and listening to the sounds of others. And, just as an improvising musician aims to develop her own unique voice, the skater intertwines sonic and visual elements into a unique stylistic signature all her own. In this study I will look at the skatepark as a site for skaters to express themselves much in the same way that a musician plays an instrument at a jam session. I will explore the board and terrain, the importance of style, and the culture of the park itself. To begin, I will contextualize the ways in which the skateboard has been constructed as a sonic instrument.
The Instruments
As a skater lands an ollie in the Vans Skatepark in Orange, California, the sound of hard polyurethane wheels slamming against a hollow birch ramp emanates throughout the warehouse, entangling with distinctive sounds made by other participants. The listener is made acutely aware of each skater’s instrument and stylistic approach to performance. What differentiates the rider on a board in the skatepark from a guitarist playing in a rock club? Just as the materials of the electric guitar and its signal chain inform the sonic nature of the instrument, the skateboard and its engaged terrain sound out unique and identifiable characteristics of each device. I spoke with a skater at Flipside Skateboard Shop in Athens, Ohio about the specifics of wheel construction and his own personal preferences:
Abrasion test chart, Flipside Skateboard Shop, Athens, Ohio
Just like the layered wood of an electric guitar body, boards are made through a multistep manufacturing process that involves layering thin plies of wood. Maple is most commonly used with the relative flexibility of the deck determining qualities of audible resonance as a skater ollies or railslides. And trucks, which function as axles, can be heard grinding along a surface such as pool coping, a painted curb, or a handrail.
In order for these materials to make sound they must be controlled by a rider and engage with some kind of terrain. The combination of what materials are chosen and how they are used result in a rider’s unique approach. In the skatepark, skaters swathe themselves in clothing, pads, and helmets while riding devices wrapped in visual signposts of self-expression that sound out the priorities of the particular rider.
Sonic Style
Following Henri Lefebvre, Iain Borden speaks of the skateboard as a “lived component of the body, its actions and its self-image in relation to the terrain” (28). Similarly, from my time spent at skateparks in Ohio and California, I have noted the malleability of terrain as a domain to express one’s own unique style. Skaters use their devices as instruments, playing the park, repeating phrases, overlapping with sounds emitted from their peers. All the while, advertisements adorn both bodies and instruments and maneuvers mimic the iconic moves of sponsored skaters viewed in magazines. Visiting Focus Boardshop across the street from the Etnies Skatepark in Lake Forest, California reminds the observer that the elusive, focal point of style in the world of skateboarding is not only confined to the visual realm. As reissued decks from Powell Peralta, Slimeball wheels, and multiple videos adorn the walls of the shop, teenage skaters hang out, asking to bend and stand on decks and spin wheels, all the while watching and listening to newly released videos. Just as guitars and synthesizers reflect the users aesthetic outlook, the look and sound of skateboards signal to a skater’s audience (often other skaters in the park) what kind of skater he or she is.
Tara Rodgers’ insightful article on wood paneling on synthesizers for Sounding Out! has its analogue in the spiritual aura of the object in skateboarding. Bound up in this aura are genre-shaping histories that have taken the sport in innumerable directions. Whether it is the catwalk ethos of Vision Street Wear, Danny Way’s connection with Monster and Red Bull energy drinks, or enjoi’s self-referential marketing, the graphics that wrap around skate gear carry with them weighty connections to the sport’s most original moments. These moments are, of course, defined by marketing campaigns, hosted in influential magazines such as Thrasher and Transworld, and the zietgeist of the time. Intertwined with these branded materials is the sonic quality of the instrument. The sound of the instrument itself reflects the particular ethos of the skater who selected it. In the clip below, an employee working at Focus Boardshop in Lake Forest, California talks about the particular way his board’s sound reflects the idiosyncratic nature of its components. Notice how he skater speaks about the sound of his bearings as a direct link to his style, connecting to Borden’s idea of the board as a lived component of the body.
During my visit to the community skatepark in Athens, Ohio I come across two skaters who have returned to the sport after a two-decade break. One skater sports a longboard with 70a wheels so soft you can’t hear him skate through the concrete pool. Immediately after interacting with the longboarder, another skater finishes a session in the pool at the Athens skatepark with a long slide. I ask him about the role of his wheels and what he calls “the best sound in the world”:
Soft Wheels
Hard Wheels
Skaters related the histories of their boards to me with a sense of fond nostalgia. These histories functioned, primarily, as a mode of individuation, through which those observed were seen refining their identities within the community through conversation. As more time is spent at each of the parks, I begin to notice communal flows of conversation between skaters and their engaged terrain as well. Competitive aspects to out-do each other, synchronized maneuvers, and vocal responses are percolate the soundscape. As listeners perform and performers listen, connections with well-formed cultural codes of improvisational music begin to emerge.
Jamming the Skatepark
Improvising musicians often use the context of the jam session as an opportunity work out new ideas and rehearse repertoire. Minton’s Playhouse in New York is one of the original sites for the jazz jam session. Here, “cutting contests” allowed players the opporunity to outplay each other with virtuosic displays of improvisational prowess. Musicians play to hear each other individually and as a unit, often pushing each other to extremes. The sound is composed, listened to, and then reacted to. Skateparks provide a similar atmosphere. A trick (like an ollie) is immersed in the sonic flows of the surrounding skaters. The skatepark is simultaneously encouraging and competitive, forgiving and relentless.
When I visited the Vans Skatepark on National Go Skateboarding Day park employees tempted skaters to display their best moves throughout the park with the promise of free swag. The environment remained friendly and encouraging as skaters rose to the challenge, welcoming the pressure.
The rituals of the skatepark are varied in their scope. When a skater lands a difficult trick, it is common to hear the tapping of board tails on the ground; applause. Vocal reactions to maneuvers (landed or failed) are also quite common.
What sets the sonic atmosphere of the skatepark apart from the sound of skating outside the park is the palpable lack of intruding sounds from the outside world. As communities continue to accept the skatepark as part of their permanent landscape, the once transgressive sound of the sport takes on a new meaning. The scrapes and slides that once signaled intrusion are now contained in a controlled space. While visiting these jam sessions, it became clear that the sounds of the skatepark remain a mostly male-dominated activity. While the instruments and terrain remain available to the wider public the sound of the skatepark reflects a relatively closed environment often shrouded in platitudes of youth culture. However, once a sense of acceptance and experimentation is cultivated, some other aspects of the skatepark are revealed. The skatepark is a place to play and explore the range of one’s repertoire. It is a place to engage with the limitations of the instrument and one’s own physical faculties. And, it is an environment that encourages friction, noise, and distortion. The skatepark is a communal amplifier, obscuring and reflecting sound as the players immerse themselves in the ultimate sounding board.
Bonus Material:
While immersing myself in the sounds of the skatepark for this project, the idea came up to reimagine the sounds of the skatepark as a musical composition. I asked musicians Michael Deakers, Casey Foubert, Junior High, and Ryan Richter to make a piece that used any portion of the recordings of the four skateparks I visited. Their work reflects a deep connection to the rehearsed and improvisational aspects of music-making and skateboarding. The sounds of these pieces emerged from hours of practice and spontaneous decisions allowing for a particularly effervescent creative outcome. To hear these, check out out my Soundcloud here.
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Featured Image, “Grinding” courtesy of Luke Hayfield Photography
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Josh Ottum holds an MFA in Integrated Composition Improvisation and Technology from UC Irvine and is currently a PhD student at Ohio University in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts. His research interests include sound, energy extraction, Van Dyke Parks, Southern California, library music, and synthesizers. As a singer-songwriter, composer, and producer, Josh has released multiple records on various labels, completed numerous international tours, and composed music that has appeared on MTV, AMC’s Mad Men, and NPR.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“Tofu, Steak, and a Smoke Alarm: The Food Network’s Chopped & the Sonic Art of Cooking“–Seth Mulliken
“Sounding Out! Podcast Episode #5: Sound and Spirit on the Highway“–David Greenberg
“Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil”–Leonardo Cardoso
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