I thought I'd offer a reflection on our meeting at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis this past Wednesday - which turned out to be a stimulating conversation about sound studies and its intersection with new media theory.
We concentrated on the following three readings:
R. Murray Schafer, "Music, the Soundscape and Changing Perceptions," in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994), 103-118: https://sites.google.com/site/scotttrudell/files/Schafer%2CMusic%2CtheSoundscape%2CandChangingPerception.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
Jonathan Sterne, "Conclusion: Audible Futures," in The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 335-51: https://sites.google.com/site/scotttrudell/files/Sterne%2CAudibleFutures.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
Frances Dyson, "Aural Objects, Recording Devices, and the Proximate Apparatus," in Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 54-82: https://sites.google.com/site/scotttrudell/files/Dyson%2CAuralObjects.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1 (and the notes: https://sites.google.com/site/scotttrudell/files/Notes.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1 )
Dyson explicitly places Schafer and Sterne into conversation in her chapter, and (we thought) provides a helpful way of opening up the problems involved in treating sound as an object. And because the aim of her book is to situate sound studies in relation to new media studies (for Dyson, traditions of thinking about sound offer a series of enabling fictions for concepts like "virtuality"), the book worked nicely into the interests of our "Literature and New Media" working group.
I started us off with a few thoughts on Dyson, including a move that I take to be at the core of the chapter we read. Both Sterne and Dyson critique some of the assumptions at play in Schafer's classic account of the "soundscape," particularly its reliance on the notion of "an original, identifiable and thus singular sonic event, an event that conforms to the visually based on ontology, that sound theory is attempting to escape" (77). But Dyson goes on to argue that Sterne falls into a similar trap. By describing sound in terms of "embodied" vibration, Sterne is "already working within an epistemic system that defines 'being' in the first place" and "ignores both the importance of locational hearing and (relatedly) the signifying aspects of sound" (77-8). Another way of putting this, to import some of the vocabulary of the Performing the Book conference, is that once it is treated as a mono-medium with set material or metaphysical properties, sound has a tendency to be dislocated from its atmosphere - or what I would call its history.
Carter Mathes provided some apt guidance at this point, drawing our attention to the larger debate between sound's instrumentality (its mobilization into the material or ontic presence of an aural "object") and its phenomenology (its embededness in a history and environment of sense perception) that is at stake in Dyson. Carter pointed out that all three readings addressed the question of what happens when sound is unhinged from the visual - and he opened up questions of politics of sound that emerge particularly clearly in Sterne's conclusion, where he is interested in moving away from a politics based on the singularity of the voice and developing a more sophisticated humanism.
We discussed some of the methodological implications of these readings for literary study - including how we come to deal with ideas or discourses of sound in written texts. Carter pointed out that a couple of terms and categories that emerge in Sterne might help to deal with the problem of sound's embededness in history - including what Sterne calls the "exteriorities" of sound, or the "efforts, expressions, and reactions" of the sonic world (19). Taking up Sterne's challenge to acknowledge the "malleability" of sound, furthermore, might help to reveal how cultural history, technological protocols, and social contexts are themselves malleable, and allow us to trace more accurately how sound emerges and reemerges in larger cultural fields.
Our conversation took us many other places as well: we brought up how the kinds of instrumentalities and materialities that characterize sound studies relate to the ongoing conversation in new media studies about the "matter" of media; we nodded to Philip Auslander's work of the problems of "liveness" and performance in new media culture; we discussed the nostalgia that characterizes Schafer's engaging but also (as Sterne points out) oddly class-specific historical imagination; we honed in on the problems involved in representing and reproducing sound (are all recordings representations? why is it so difficult to describe how sound represents, or is represented?); we even discussed the "singing controversy" in early American psalmody (that amazing disaster of recording technology, in which singers came to have absolutely no idea how musical notation related to pitch or rhythm).
All in all, a lively and productive afternoon!
