Dong Xia: THE SOUNDSCAPE OF MAN IN THE HOLOCENE: An Exercise in Sensitization (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sounding the Anthropocene: Rethinking soundscapes and nature
This paper traces dominant ideologies of nature, starting with Aristotle's inclusive formulation, which incorporated all things, biotic or abiotic. This view was lost with the Roman division of society into the domestic (domus) and savage (silva). Abrahamic religions proposed an originary paradise, an Eden corrupted by humans, who nonetheless are granted superiority over nature. The providential ideology holds that nature is a resource without value, until tamed and managed. In the 18th century, the Romantics valorised nature as moral good, a wellspring of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. This paper will explore how these ideologies are expressed in R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape, using sources from anthropology and human geography (Jedediah Purdy, Philippe Descola). The goal is to understand how Schafer relies on a dichotomy between nature and humanity that is inherently problematic in the Anthropocene. A clear understanding of the limitations of the soundscape will enable the development of sustainable sound practices.
Anthropocene Out Loud: Sound as a Tool to Study Modern Nature
Published online at Agosto Foundation, 2020
Praha: Academia, 2020, 344-360.] "There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example-where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh." (Carson 1962, s. 2) Since biologist Rachel Carson warned of the possibility of a "silent spring" in 1962, not only environmentalists, but also the common people in the countriside started to listen to the sounds of birds more attentively and anxiously than before. The prospect of spring not heralded by the sounds of bird singing became of the most powerful symbols of the environmental concerns of the second half of the 20th century, because it was able to express what most people had already observed in their surroundings and link seemingly ordinary moments of daily experience as morning singing of robins or jays with a complex and organically changing world of global trade, agriculture, transport infrastructure and the use of agrochemicals and pesticides. The image of silent nature which Carson so suggestively evoked, not only signaled a decline in species diversity due to different types of human activity, but also heralded a new era in the relationship of man to nature, which was increasingly perceived as a fragile entity, closely linked to the anthropogenic sphere. Anthropocene is still a predominantly academic term, but one that expresses a more general concern about the global consequences of local human actions that enters public consciousness and imagination thought images such as the one about the "silent spring". Indeed, Carson did not yet talk about the Anthropocene, and her work belongs in the history of the environmental movement that calls for the protection of nature from human activity, but it serves as a good point of departure for this paper as it introduces sound as a means of studying the changing notion of the boundaries between man and nature, as well as a tool for determining what nature is, what it should be, and how it is to be presented and reproduced. The Anthropocene discourse is far from homogeneous, and what we find today under the rubric of "Anthropocene" in science, art, and popular culture contains a number of conflicting visions and approaches, some of which will be apparent in what follows. The Anthropocene is not only a new epoch, but also its specific reflection. The study of sensory perception along with strategies of representation and media communication is essential for revisiting the interconnectedness of modern binary categories such as nature/culture or object/subject and their relationship to the scientific descriptions of the world. Noise of Modernity "But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive-the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business."
Soundscapes in the Past: Towards a Phenomenology of Sound at the Landscape Level
During the past few decades, researchers have developed methodologies for understanding how past people have experienced their wider world. The majority of these reconstructions focused upon viewsheds and movement, illustrating how individuals visually observed their environment and navigated through it. However, these reconstructions have tended to ignore another sense which played a major role in how people experienced the wider, physical world: that of sound. While the topic of sound has been discussed within phenomenology at the theoretical level, and has been approached at the site level through the growing study of “acoustic archaeology,” it has not seen much practical application at the landscape level. This multimedia presentation illustrates how GIS technology can be utilized to develop soundscapes, exploring how people heard their wider surroundings, as well as saw them.
Murmuring Matter, Sonic Attunement, Rhythmic Relationalities: Exercises in listening to the cosmos.
Kunstlicht vol.45 n.a1/2- Reverberant Ecologies: On the Relational Impact of Sonic Practices, 2024
This paper delves into the transformative potential of sound and sonic practices as tools for attuning to and comprehending the agency and murmurings of various material, viral, vegetal, animal, and atmospheric entities. Departing from Isabelle Stengers' cosmopolitical proposal, this essay advocates for a re-evaluation of power dynamics in political arenas by engaging with the diverse murmurings of what Stengers defines as the "cosmos" — the unknown constituted by multiple, divergent worlds. The paper is grounded on the analysis of artistic contributions to the event Murmuring Matter: On the Cosmopolitics of Materials, held at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 2023. The event proposed a collective exploration of the materials, bodies, river, forest, and cityscapes of Maastricht and beyond, through sound experiments, listening exercises, and sonic immersions. The paper explores the potential of such sonic practices as effective responses to Stengers' proposal by attuning to and illuminating positions that often go unnoticed, thus prompting a reconsideration of humanity's connections with the environment. Illustrated with concrete examples, this paper demonstrates how sonic practices within the event fostered conditions for pre-cognitive attunement to the environment and unveiled new relationalities between humans and ecosystems at various scales.
Resonance, 2021
Taking the new materialist and climate change themes of Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: an Opera for Objects as a departure point, this article examines sound studies’ recent invocations of new materialist philosophy alongside its foundational concern toward the Anthropocene ecological crisis. I argue that new materialist sonic thought retraces new materialism’s dubious ethical program by deriving equivalencies of moral standing from logically prior ontological equivalencies of material entities and social actors rooted in their shared capacities to vibrate. Some sonic thought thus amplifies what scholars in Black and Indigenous decolonial critique have exposed as the homogenizing, assimilative character of new materialism’s superficially inclusional and optimistic ontological imaginary, which includes tendencies to obscure the ongoingness of racial inequality and settler-colonial exploitation in favor of theorizing difference as a superfice or illusion. As I argue in a sonic reading of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, some of new materialism’s favored analytical and ecological terms such as objecthood, vibrationality, and connection to the Earth are also terms through which anti-Blackness, colonial desire, and the universalization of Whiteness have historically been routed. This historical amnesia in new materialism enables its powerfully obfuscating premises. As a result, I argue that new materialist sound studies and philosophy risk amplifying the Anthropocene’s similarly homogenizing rhetorics, which often propound a mythic planetary oneness while concealing racial and colonial climate inequities. If sound studies and the sonic arts are to have illuminating perspectives on the Anthropocene, they must oppose rather than affirm its homogenizing logics.
Sound at the Edge of Perception: The Aural Minutiae of Sand and other Worldly Murmurings
2018
This book is about the interrelationships between hearing and listening, looking and seeing. In both cases, one does not presuppose the other; we are perfectly capable of hearing without listening, just as seeing takes us beyond the utility of simply looking. Likewise, it is the hope behind this book that by awakening the faculty of seeing, we may enhance our ability to listen-and vice versa. Hence, there is quite a lot of visual art in this book, but I hope the reader will join me in the galleries I visit on the way, because it is not as an art critic but as a seeker after sound that I make these excursions. In my other writings, radio-in all its changing times and formats-has been a key element, and it is a thread here too, for after all, does not radio contain the most memorable pictures of all? It is also, as I never tire of discussing, a poetic medium in essence, and the argument of the book utilises some of the word/sound images and pictures that poetry provides in its gallery of the imagination. There is then, here a kind of tapestry of art, poetry and a sense and awareness of Place, triggering sound by association, memory and empathy with our surroundings, our circumstances and our fellow inhabitants of the planet, heard and unheard. It is about the murmurs of voice and locality, the whispers in the air, the water and the landscape, the brush of sand over rock, the faint single notes that build from a fragile hint of a presence to become part of the symphony of sounds with which we are surrounded, the sonic context of life. These are the component parts of our sound kaleidoscope, and my preoccupation here is with deconstructing processes culminating in the x PREFACE homogenised end-product of a choir of voices that sometimes makes music, sometimes noise. It all begins as an instant of sound, whole and complete in itself, as a single drop of rain makes its mark on stone, before the deluge drowns it and it becomes engulfed in the flood. As before, particularly in my last work for Palgrave, Sound Poetics: Interaction and Personal Identity (2017), the narrative will be told from the perspective of a poet and a radio practitioner; the book is based principally on my own reflections drawn from a life of gathering and listening to and for sound, and attempting to translate the world into words in my poetry, a life I've been privileged to share with gifted friends and colleagues from the world of sound and literature, some of whom have been kind enough to share their insights here. This is an exploration of the significance that lies in the often-missed sounds of life and an attempt to champion attentiveness to them. It is about deconstructing the world's orchestra and hearing the subtleties that lie almost concealed in the sound work of which we are a part. To return to the analogy of fine art, I would have us consider the journey upon which we are about to embark as an examination of the act of making. The pointeliste technique of artists such as Seurat may be a clue to uncover meaning, purpose and intent within this context: tiny dots of light and colour that go to make up, through their presence and company, the whole picture. We will begin then with what we might well call 'talking pictures.' Sometimes these pictures are on walls, sometimes they are moving around us and sometimes they are within us, but always they speak, and what they have to say is key to our understanding of the world, if we have eyes to hear and ears to see.
The Sonic Anthropocene: Dark Ecological Soundscapes in Chris Watson’s ‘Vatnajökull’
2017
As acoustic ecology and soundscape studies have developed alongside an ever -evident climate crisis, it has become imperative to reclaim the environmental aspects of soundscape recording and to use acoustic ecology as a way of confronting our current ecolog ical condition. Ecological thinking challenges acoustic ecology to contend with the idea that sounds are critically connected to broader questions about environmental matters and urges soundscape artists to move beyond reflective or ecomimetic recordings towards active and exploratory ones. Soundscape researchers and artists, including Chris Watson, have been key to investigating the environment through sound and documenting ecological degradation and the concurrent silencing of the natural world. This a rticle synthesizes work done in acoustic ecology and contemporary thinking about the Anthropocene to elaborate a “dark acoustic ecology” that listens in on the sonic conditions and effects of accelerated climate change. I examine...
Social Semiotics, Vol.17, No.1, 87-110, 2007
Anna Kassabian writes in Hearing Film that ‘‘classical Hollywood film music is a semiotic code, and that it can and should be subjected to various semiotic and cultural studies methods, such as discourse analysis and ideology critique’’ (p.36). This paper examines the sound of a particular Hollywood film - the B-Grade1950 science fiction ‘‘classic’’ The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) - in order to perform the kind of analysis Kassabian demands; but also to argue that the analysis needs to encompass not only music, but all sonic elements of the film. Furthermore, the paper argues for development of a cultural auracy that will complement studies of verbal and visual literacies in multimodal and multimedia texts.