This year, the rains have been slow to come. Yields are in doubt amid talk of a sustained drought that may not only affect the rice – of which Thailand is the world’s leading exporter – but basic water reserves as well. The government is making price guarantees etc.

Since there aren’t many farms left in Bangkok, the issue can feel a little distant in daily life, even though the drought is a problem here, too. Downpours definitely happen, but most of them are very brief. An hour at 3:00 in the morning one night, another twenty minutes the next afternoon. The temperature briefly drops, which is nice, but the storms are so heavy that they can also leave side streets severely flooded for a little while while drainage systems creak beneath the load. These aren’t monsoon rains, but they are angry.

On Thursday, WV took cover in a Skytrain station during a heavy mini-storm. A freight train passed east to west.

The (long-delayed; sorry) second episode of “Bangkok is Ringing,” a podcast series about the politics of sound in Bangkok, is now up here at the excellent Triple Canopy. Future episodes will air ~monthly.

Enjoy!

This recording was made walking counterclockwise around the grounds of Wat Phrathat Hariphunchai, a Thai Buddhist temple built in the late 9th century. The temple is in the city of Lamphun, not too far from Chiang Mai. Its highlights are a giant golden umbrella and a purported relic of the Buddha’s hair. (One strand.)

From the beginning of the piece, a man speaks into a microphone. He repeats a short script with an insistent cadence that becomes musical after a while.

Around 1:10, I reach some candles burning at the rear of the chedi, placed in a trough and lit by worshippers. The candles must have been made out of some kind of fat; they sizzled loudly for a long time.

No sentiment describes spring training better than optimism; everyone imagines their team could be competitive, or at least not depressing to follow.

In Arizona, players mingle with fans in 70 degree weather, batting practice balls rain on concession stands, and everyone engages in idle speculation and gossip about the coming season. Sonically, the CKK!! of ash smacking leather is a constant punctuation. As game time approaches, MOR pop hits give way to the billowy timbre of roster announcements. The game itself is often the quietest time, especially in the late innings after more marginal players come in, and after the sun and beer have taken their respective tolls on fan awakeness.

The sections of the montage:

I. Pregame ambiance 0:00 – 3:05
II. Fans chat with a player they don’t recognize 3:10 – 3:30
III. Fans chat with second baseman Luis Valbuena 3:32 – 3:45
IV. Fans chat with catcher Lou Marson 3:45 – 4:25
V. Fans chat about a scandal 4:25 – 4:37
VI. The sound of catch 4:38 – 5:00
VII. Fans chat with third baseman Wes Hodges 5:04 – 5:42
VIII. More on the scandal 5:43 – 6:15
IX. “We met every Indian” 6:15 – 6:44
X. Fans chat with pitcher Justin Masterson 6:45 – 7:52
XI. Fans chat with pitcher Chris Perez 7:53 – 8:27
XII. Fans chat about a baseball player who quit to become a priest 8:28 – 9:02
XIII. A moment of tension 9:03 – 9:20
XIV. “Here we go, kid” (Tension relieved) 9:21 – 10:20

Image by Seth Denizen

Episode One is the pilot. Its purpose is to explain sound studies in a nutshell (less than 15 minutes), and then to set the table for the project to come. Each future episode will aim at specific, aurally rich situations in Bangkok: street sound, protest, musical performance, noise, commerce. Perhaps you’ve read about what’s happening in Bangkok now – there should be plenty to talk about. I’ll post whenever new episodes go up on Triple Canopy.

By the way, back in 1997, Steven Connor created a five-part series for the BBC called Noise that you can hear here. In addition to being a good academic writer, Connor has an almost Dr. Seussian gift for language, when he wants to turn it on. For the pilot of BiR, it was useful to hear Connor’s work, although I expect to move in a different direction with future episodes, since the content will be field recordings rather than general discussion. Keep tuning in.

Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon
Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder, editors
Dia Art Foundation, 2009
140 pps., $35 ($21.75 on Abe Books)

As an art critic, it must be an awkward assignment to memorialize the work of an artist who rejected memorials. Sound installation pioneer Max Neuhaus, who died in 2009, productively confronted the limits of artistic form throughout his long career, but at no moment was this challenge more powerful than in death. A recent book by the Dia Art Foundation, one of Neuhaus’s key patrons, engages just this paradox.

Neuhaus was among the first modern composers (if that title even applies) to work with sound in a deliberately non-musical idiom. Breaking from predecessors and contemporaries in the field of sonic art, Neuhaus was never interested in how to bring concrete sound into composition, let alone the concert hall. To whatever extent possible, his work was publicly situated – on streets or in subway stations, for example. His authorial presence was supposed to be as invisible as his art. The idea was to engage audiences without ever signaling to them that they’d entered an artistic space. Working in the mid- to late-20th century, Neuhaus shared a number of insights and goals with contemporary Modernists in the visual arts, but his use of sound as a primary material gave his work a distinct status.

Neuhaus’s most famous piece is Times Square, an ambient drone that issues from beneath a grate on 7th Avenue between 45th and 46th streets in Manhattan:

Times Square is unmarked, and essentially unrecognizable as art. Passersby notice it all the time, and may even stop to listen, but generally in the assumption that the sound, however unusual, has something to do with the subway or Con Ed. In this respect, it can induce a kind of self-discovery for those who come upon it. Neuhaus hoped that such moments would be a gateway to more attuned listening down the line.

This piece, like much of Neuhaus’s output, was initially temporary. The Dia Art Foundation, however, has funded its continued installment since 2002. The quasi-permanence of Times Square, its objecthood, stands in ironic contrast to its intention – to project an artistic intervention without, at least as far as the listener realizes, marking itself off from the rest of the world.

The individual contributors to Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon (namely: Lynne Cooke, Alex Potts, Branden Joseph, Peter Pakesch and Ulrich Loock, Liz Kotz, and Christopher Cox) seem not to have read each others’ essays – their discussions are at times redundant – but this is actually a good thing. Perspectives shoot off like branches, parallel in some places, jutting sharply in others. The same quotes and chestnuts about Neuhaus are deployed repeatedly, but each interpretive treatment has its own gloss.

The question most consistently addressed in the catalogue is that of the migration from time to space. Neuhaus, by rejecting music, was also rejecting the proscribed duration of artwork. Rather than asking an audience to sit still and listen for a particular span of time, he wanted to alter the mood or character of public environments – of spaces. Alex Potts quotes Neuhaus: “Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time.”

This concept seems to have been initiated as a means of transformation, in which sound would decorate an already-installed architecture and make it feel different, to one where sound was itself treated as an autonomous spatial reality. This distinction is critical, recognizing as it does that sound is a material form rather than an ethereal engima. Sound, like any other space (including conventional architecture), requires both labor and maintenance.

Nevertheless, there was a register to Neuhaus’s politics that rejected the temporal structures of a capitalist society, and thereby its logic as well. So, even though his sound installations drew attention to the potent reality of sound, they also promoted a form of community predicated on phenomenological non-differentiation. Sound thus was used as a form of bodily envelopment that could envelop everyone at once. The question here, as Potts writes, was “How [ ] to make public art for a society that is intensely individualistic and whose public spaces, while shared by and open to a multitude of people, atomize the perceptual and mental world of those passing through it?” In other words, Neuhaus hoped people would hear his work as part of a massive flow of time rather than as a single, discrete signal. The last essay in the catalog, Christopher Cox’s Installing Duration, situates Neuhaus’s philosophy within broader mid-century debates about the nature of time – though politically radical in some sense, he was mostly in the mainstream among artists.

On a practical level, Neuhaus’s ethos of how to manage urban space was laid out most clearly in an Op-Ed published in the New York Times in 1974. In brief, aesthetics, joy, and discovery should trump the rationalization of space. The piece is reprinted in its entirety here:

“BANG, BOOooom; ThumP, EEEK, tinkle” by Max Neuhaus

The popular concept of ‘noise pollution’ is a dangerously misleading one. In reality, dangers to hearing do exist in prolonged, excessively loud sound levels. However, the residue of the idea that has ended up in the mind of the public because of misleading publicity is that sound in general is harmful to people.

A brief examination of a pamphlet Noise Makes You Sick published by the Department of Air Resources of the city’s Environmental Protection Agency is typical of the literature and clearly illustrates the problem.

The first sentence, ‘Sound is instantly transmitted from your ears to your brain and then to your nerves, glands and organs’, is of course literally true. Actually the reaction doesn’t normally go as far as the glands and internal organs.

However, we are left with the impression that we have absolutely no defense against unwanted sound. This is untrue. The body has automatic reflex barriers, both physical and psychological, to deal with sounds it does not wish to react to.

The pamphlet goes on, ‘Any loud or unexpected sounds put your body on alert’. This is true with a newborn child or in primitive societies, both of which need this reaction to survive. But certainly the modern urban dweller is not put into a state of fright (except of course when there is actual danger) very often by the sounds around him.

A human being conditions himself fairly quickly to what is ‘loud or unexpected’ in his particular environment.

Once having ‘established’ the impression that we are constantly in a state of ‘fright’, though, the brochure goes on to extrapolate in august pseudo-medical terms: ‘Adrenalin, an energy-producing hormone, is released into your blood stream. Your heart beats faster, your muscles tense, and your blood pressure rises. Sudden spasms occur in your stomach and intestines’. This finally gives the impression that every honking horn brings us a little bit closer to death.

The law defines noise as ‘any unwanted sound’. Surely several hundred years of musical history can be of value. At the very least they can show us that our response to sound is subjective, that no sound is intrinsically bad. How we hear it depends a great deal on how we have been conditioned to hear it.

Through extreme exaggeration of the effects of sound on the human mind and body, this propaganda has so frightened people that it has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before and in effect robbed us of the ability to listen to our environment.

Admittedly it may be necessary to oversimplify an idea to bring enough public pressure to bear on the producers of ear-damaging sounds in our environment to stop this victimization of the public. This degree of misrepresentation is not only unnecessary, but irresponsible and ultimately negative.

This present concept of noise pollution condemns all sounds by leaving, in the public mind, the impression that sound itself is physiologically and psychologically harmful.

It is this exaggerated and oversimplified concept that is doing most of the damage, not sound, damage that can and should be rectified by curtailing misleading propaganda and showing people other ways to listen to their surroundings.

Obviously we need to be able to rest from sound just as we do from visual stimulation; we need aural as well as visual privacy. But silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black. Certainly just as our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing.

Max Neuhaus is a composer

New York Times Op-Ed by Max Neuhaus, December 6, 1974

Undoubtedly, the most difficult claim here is that anti-noise legislation “has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before,” that the problem of noise is a consequence of a particular political reality that refuses listening as an art form. Neuhaus, tellingly, retreats from pure relativism, but remains adamant: we benefit by being receptive, and suffer by being too defensive.

Such a celebration of listening, because it locates artistic agency not in singular geniuses but in everyone, leads logically to the kind of anti-elitist stance that Neuhaus ultimately took. Thus, despite his explicit rejection of capitalism, Neuhaus was actually a proponent of installations and even mass-market gadgets that could bring avant-garde sonic experiences to the common man. Branden Joseph’s essay, An Implication of an Implication, discusses a couple of these fascinating ideas. One was a “silent alarm clock” that slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in volume; the after-image caused by the cessation of sound would be the effect that woke its user, rather than the typical series of jarring beeps.

Another, called “Max-Feed,” was a machine that users could place next to their stereos, causing a wall of feedback noise.

These devices, though fascinating, were arguably the weakest ideas of Neuhaus’s career. They were attempts to objectify and lend semi-permanence to sound installation. On the contrary, the strength of Times Square is precisely its resistance to objecthood. That piece appeals to listeners without revealing itself as emanating from anywhere – and indeed, maybe it doesn’t. The fact that this catalog doesn’t even attempt to contain the artwork that is its main focus is really the highest compliment to an artist who, at his best and for all the right reasons, didn’t want to be pinned down.

Journalist/critic Virginia Heffernan wrote a thoughtful summary essay in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the 2010 Academy Award nominees for best sound-design.

Sound-design is, of course, one of those categories for which the award is presented long before George Clooney ever steps out of his limo. Awards for technical production are a funny contrast to the glitz that comes later in the night – most sound designers, however talented, won’t be mistaken for having personal trainers. But I suppose it’s only apt that an award for sound isn’t the most telegenic moment at the Oscars.

Nevertheless, the convincing consensus – and of course our position here – is that a movie’s aurality has a great deal to do with how audiences receive and understand it, as we’ve explored in the past. These days, sound design is attached to every second of a film. Only a fragment of what the viewer hears was recorded while the scene was being acted out – most were added after the fact, in the studio, from crowds murmuring to doors slamming, from feet shuffling to guns firing. But the aim of the sound designer is higher than realism. Characters are tagged with “sonic signatures” to deepen their personalities. Weapons are made fearsome, encounters tense, exotic locations present, fictional things real, and drama obvious. Sound is crucial to making us feel.

Ms. Heffernan generously agreed to an interview with Weird Vibrations, in which she elaborates on her article, and fleshes out her thoughts on sound and violence – this year’s crop of nominees, as it happens, are almost all war pictures. Excerpts from the five nominated films are interwoven.

Weird Vibrations: How did you do the research for this article?

Virginia Heffernan: All I did was watch and listen to the films, very slowing and haltingly, with lots of pausing. (With the exception of Avatar, which I saw in the theater; I don’t envy movie critics who attend screenings and can’t pause!) I also read the articles and watched the videos in which the sound editors discussed each film. I did not speak to any of the nominated sound editors until after the piece ran, and then only because one emailed me. I always want to be entirely audience-side, a reader who doesn’t know or speak to authors, though I realize that by pausing and making notes I corrupt the experience somewhat, and I may miss the forest for the trees sometimes. In some cases (Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker) I listened again straight through, to get the full effect.

WV: Sound designers often claim that their work operates at something like a subconscious level – at least compared to cinematography, screen-writing, etc. Why don’t viewers notice sound? Is this quasi-hidden status a burden or an opportunity for sound-design?

VH: It may be that the critical vocabulary for sound is just displaced. Good acting, for example, seems to me to be largely tonality of voice. So people talk about “acting” instead of talking about tone and pitch and sound design. There’s an ethical dimension, too, especially where violence is concerned. NFL Films mikes uniforms to make these robot-looking players seem “human” and raise the stakes. UFC fighting doesn’t use body mikes to downplay, I think, the scary squish of soft tissue and crack of bones in half-dressed men who look all-too-human as they fight hand-to-hand. A person watching might conclude that X pro football player is “a good guy” meaning he makes human sounds, while X mixed-martial arts fighter is “a machine” because he doesn’t. They think they’re reflecting on personality and goodness and effectiveness; in fact, they’re reflecting on sound.

The fact that viewers don’t notice sound qua sound–that they call it “performance,” say–makes life more interesting for critics, who like to disaggregate these things. It may be a burden for sound designers who have a rock-star side, and an opportunity for sound designers who have a stealth/spy side.

WV: Does the ethical dimension of sound in sports coverage also extend to fiction? There are longstanding debates over the ethics of visual depiction (violence, sex, smoking – these seem to be the basis of film ratings). Beyond curse words, should we be thinking about sonic rights and wrongs as well? Can the treatment of sound in fiction make us numb to injustice or violence?

VH: I don’t really know about those things. As a viewer, listener, reader, user, I tend to want more art, and not think about the consequences. I also don’t draw much distinction between fiction and other kinds of spectacles–sports, documentary, etc.

Put it this way: I do think that UFC fighting might be unwatchable if the fighters were miked. Very interestingly, to my mind, a contestant on a VH1 reality show called “Tough Love” recently went on a date with a big, burly MMA fighter to a sparring match. The fighter was put in a choke hold and briefly passed out in front of her. To me, the fighter-suitor seemed pretty cool and attractive the whole way through–at least as cool as the men in pay-per-view UFC fighting. But to her, after he passed out, he became horrifying and actual hateful. Having been hugely attracted to him, she decided he was “passive” and could hardly look at him. I wonder if she might have heard, live in the cage, a whimper or choking sound that I couldn’t hear at home, and that made him seem the opposite of heroic. Probably if we heard the vulnerability in fighters’ bodies, we’d find them unbearable. Maybe we’d move to outlaw UFC fighting, and maybe that would be a good thing.

Should we hear the crackle and singe of cigarette smoke on lung tissue, to remind us that smoking causes cancer? I can imagine, in a fiction film, that that could deepen characterization and ambiance in a fascinating way–you could hear a character killing himself, you could tune in to his vulnerability and deathwish. But does fiction have a public-health *obligation* to play up this effect? That’s not the role of fiction.

WV: It’s interesting to consider that four of the five sound-design nominees are war films. Meanwhile, the management of sound also plays an enormous role in real warfare today. iPods and noise-canceling headphones, to name just a couple of technologies, are ubiquitous on the battlefield – for communication, mood-enhancement, personal space, nostalgia, safety, you name it. The military is invested, for all intents and purposes, in sound-design for its soldiers. What are your thoughts about a theater of war in which real fighting has become something of a cinematic experience?

VH: Public consciousness of sound design seems to have been exponentially heightened with Braveheart, don’t you think? Maybe war sound is the only sound we now routinely call “sound.”

Possibly the reason I keep turning to sports, fighting and war in thinking about sound is not just because martial arenas have sound attached to them (Star Trek keeps up a marching-band volume, I think I wrote; the sort of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory” major-chords/anthem/trudge sound) but because you can do broader characterizations with sound–as in the Nazi “click”–when there’s an us-and-them context. Since WWII, in movies, and now in semi-satire like Tarantino, bad people often click, snap, rap and are brisk. The feminist-earth-heroes of Avatar make that wing-flap-whoosh sound. Giovanni Ribisi had some wonderfully unctuous/officious sounds associated with him in Avatar too; I think I call that his “performance.” ;) But I’ll have to see those scenes again to see if there were effects apart from his voice. What I mean is that Hollywood movies with good and bad guys (reality TV works this way too) gives good opportunities for playful and even sophisticated sound design (the right “click,” the deconstructed “click”), even though the ethical universe of a Hollywood film or a reality show may be childish and even stupid. I love it when the sound (or palette, etc) is smarter than the movie, or the script, or even serves to undermine it. . .You can get fascinating, if sometimes bewildering, effects.

Clearly Kathryn Bigelow was interested in “embedded” as a vantage on war. She also was interested in the cameraphone and the possibility of YouTube uploaders (who take crude sound, even; one character mentions YouTube in the film) as witnesses to war. These figures obviously watch and listen from a different place than did the consumers and producers of newsreels, whose aesthetic probably determined the look and feel of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” etc. And I have no doubt–though I should admit it’s merely an article of faith with me–that these representations, and ways of producing and consuming war, affect how wars are actually fought.

The piece is titled “This is Sound,” and it is an 11-minute lecture/journey about the effects of sound on the human body. It was produced, loosely, in the style of NOVA.

You can enjoy the installation yourself at home, if you have a closet and some pillows to lay your head on. Here are the instructions: “This is a didactic piece about sound for two or three listeners. Each person should lie on the floor in a comfortable position, with some part of their clothing or body touching the adjacent listener(s). Press play, and lie down.” You can obviously also listen to the piece without following the instructions, but the impact will be much less. The purpose of listening in a closed space, next to other people, is to accentuate resonance and materiality.

You can download the file directly here, or stream it:

A couple summers ago, we went to a water park in Saigon, Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City). The bus ride home featured: honking, talking, air brakes, and a cover of Patsy Cline’s biggest single.

This is an installation called “Sonolevitation” by the artists Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch. Objects – here, little triangles of gold leaf – are trapped in negative pressure zones created by standing waves of sound. The symmetry of the leaves as they rotate is lovely.

Gelfand and Domnitch are neo-Mr. Wizards, exploiting simple-strange physical phenomena in artwork that is, essentially, about how weird and vast the universe is. (Be sure to check out some of their other stuff as well.)

G+D describe Sonolevitation as a research project about the behavior of objects in microgravity, where motion is frictionless. But what Sonolevitation most effectively exploits (and demonstrates) are our biases about matter here on Earth. If the piece used the airflow from two fans to hold the objects in place, it would be much less striking. We’re used to the idea that streams of ventilated air exert physical pressure. Not so with sound. Sonolevitation “wows” us because we imagine sound as propagating in an autonomous and indescribable channel – a channel that isn’t quite physical. There is, then, a cognitive dissonance in watching it exert a visible force.

Sonolevitation will be at festivals in Great Britain and France this March.