Though we are enveloped in a constant continuum of sounds—many of which we have little control over—our perception of them is not entirely passive and inborn but rather shaped by cultural, historical, and political conditions. If sounds are reflective of social, political, and geographical dimensions of places, the practice and techniques of listening by those who populate them are also culturally relevant. Like any other sense, the practice of listening is subjective; we inevitably omit, filter, distort, and accentuate sounds, limiting our access to the full range of sounds to which we are subject. For this reason, in considering sound we should not, as Ingold warns, “lose touch with sound in just the same way that visual studies have lost touch with light”; both sight and hearing are, he insists, “organs of observation, not instruments of playback”, emphasizing the process of rendering things up to be sensed (2011, 137). The gap between sound and hearing is partially shaped by subjective mediation and individuals’ propensity to omit, dull, or notice different sounds is attuned by the cultural milieu in which they interact. As Brian Larkin (2014) reminds us, Walter Benjamin argued that perception is not just an invariant cognitive process but a historically contingent one. Following Benjamin, we can understand listening as an act of historical and cultural contingency as it is particular to different states of social and material conditioning.
Between sound and hearing. from Popular Science Monthly Volume 13, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Amid distracting environments saturated with constant sensory overload and populated by agents vying for every individuals’ attention, attention becomes an activity of exclusion to discern where our focus is directed at any given time. This engenders what Larkin calls “techniques for inattention” (2014). These arise from a psychic trait of apathy—the “blasé”— that Georg Simmel (1903) identifies, consequent of an overstimulation of the senses and perpetual micro interactions with strangers. The outlook that results, he suggests, flattens and subsumes differences between things and cultivates a highly rational “intellectual quality” that serves to protect the inner life. This effectively shields affect and emotion from public life, insulating each with a dry unaffected immunity. This serves as a clear instance of a transformation of the senses by sound and physical space, and an unaffected, numb body politic drawing up collective spaces in turn.
Audio recordings necessarily involve re-creating, re-mixing, and curating sounds. Though we may have minimal control over our sound environment, recording audio data for ethnographic accounts inevitably involves interpretive framing, residing between creative practice and documentation. As Eisuke Yanagisawa affirms, for methodological purposes, the recording of sound critically shapes the noise in “particular” ways as it “deconstructs and reconstructs the sounds of reality…transforming them aesthetically, socially, culturally, and economically” (2021, 88). The possibility of recording and curating sounds opens new research questions, avenues, and analytical focus and their presentation draws on certain aesthetic sensibilities. Soundmaps (see Droumeva 2017) are an explicit example of curation and remixing. They are inevitably derivatives of the sound environment from which they are taken, as such they accentuate or quiet certain sounds. They are thus but one possible audible expression of the place. Droumeva emphasizes that attempted objective/neutral documentation—in providing a closer reproduction—can pattern the sound inequalities already existent in a place, positing that creative interpretations can support in locating and amplifying subaltern sounds.
Works Cited
- Droumeva, Milena. (2017). Soundmapping as critical cartography: Engaging publics in listening to the environment. Communication and the Public, 2(4), 335–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317719469
- Ingold, Tim. (2011). On Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge Press.
- Larkin, Brian. (2014). Techniques of Inattention: The Mediality of Loudspeakers in Nigeria. Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 87, No. 4, 989-1015 DOI: 10.1353/anq.2014.0067
- Simmel, Georg. (1903). The Metropolis and Mental Life. in Wolff, Kurt (ed/), The Sociology of Georg Simmel, New York: Free Press, 1950, p.409.
- Yanagisawa, Eisuke. (2021). Methods and Issues of Sonic Ethnography as a Practical Research Method Based on Field Recordings. JRCA Vol. 22, No. 2, 85-93. https://doi.org/10.14890/jjcanth.86.2_197