Symbolic significance is derived from the more fundamental field of indexicality—as the sound reaches and relates to an “other” listener—and indexicality relies in turn on intrinsic material properties and propensities for noises. The pre-symbolic force of sounds—manifest through movement, vibrations, materiality, and effect—come from their form, rather than their content or derived meaning, and thus relay something more direct and amount to “[s]omething larger than the words where they dwell” (Makagon & Neuman 2009, 25).
Shockwave interactions of aircrafts. From NASA Ames Research Center / JT Heineck, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Though the meaning conveyed in sounds receives lots of focus, as Paul Stoller points out, their actual force and form are often analytically neglected. Stoller argues that it is important to avoid reducing sounds to their perceived meaning or symbolic order since there are often significant elements to sound beyond their intended meanings. Sounds themselves possess an intensity and evoke, in Stoller’s words, a “veritable force of life” (1989, 112). To retrieve a conceptually clear symbolic understanding of a sound generally requires its elevation and concomitant reduction of its ‘excess’ ambiguity and materiality.
Stoller outlines the trend in anthropology to regard intangible objects of perception—“wind, sound, smell”—as objects given their affect on our minds/bodies, an analytic strategy, he contends, that should follow through to the materiality of sound (1989). The materiality of sounds reminds us that we do not only register the symbolic immaterial significance of sounds, we also interpret them indexically and experience their physical, spatial, and dynamic dimensions. Sounds are, as Ingold puts it, neither “mental nor material” but a feature of our immersion in the world. This view reveals more of the process of interpretation, potential—and potentially constructive—ambiguity, and influence of subjective mediation.
What does it mean to appreciate sound as a force? What can ethnographic practice—through multimodal techniques—learn from the fact that “sounds carry forces which are not only good to think, but good to feel” (Ingold 2000, 112)?
Works Cited
- Ingold, Tim. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.
- Makagon, Daniel., & Neumann, Mark. (2009). Recording Culture: Audio Documentary and the Ethnographic Experience. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226590
- Stoller, Paul. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press.