The same sounds, repeated again and again, compel us to hear melodies and rhythms we usually ignore. Say the same word the same way fifteen times out loud – cookiecookicookiecookiecookiecookiecookicookiecookiecookiecookiecookicookiecookiecookie – and you’ll begin to hear it in new ways. It will seem both more and less familiar, more and less strange. You’ll notice pitch and texture irrespective of meaning.

A visit to the Bangkok Metropolitan Electricity Authority reminded me of this effect two weeks ago. You can usually pay your electric bill at the nearest 7-11, but if you’re delinquent like I was this month, you have to brave the buses on busy Rama IV Road and haul it over to the central office.

When I went, there were at least one hundred people chatting and killing time in the waiting room. I took a number. The process was so efficient that the automated voice was calling numbers in direct, almost uninterrupted succession for minutes at a time. I made this recording while waiting for my number:

For each announcement, the automated female voice began by saying Maai Laehk, which means “number.” Maai has a rising tone; you say it by starting from a low pitch and ending on a higher one. Laehk has a falling pitch; you start with a high pitch and end on a low one. Next, the voice announces the number, and since different Thai numbers have different tones, this introduces some variation. Then she says Deern Tawng, which means (roughly) “walk to.” Deern has a middle tone; you say it without any special inflection. Tawng has a falling tone. Finally, the voice announces the number of the desk that’s just opened up. Then back to the beginning.

The sameness/predictability of the announcement brings out the music in the automated voice, especially if you listen for it. In the middle of a tremendously boring situation, this kind of hearing can be a defense mechanism, a way of stepping away mentally for a moment.

Fashioning political analogies out of allusions to local religion, cycle and repetition have become a trope in recent reports from Bangkok. The reporters ask: is any of this really new? Is this place trapped in a cycle of suffering?

I’ll ask a different question: Are people hearing music here now? And answer it: yes, but music is not always beautiful.

The UFO-like Chedi (inner memorial hall)

Dhammakaya is a very new movement within Buddhism, and breaks from many of its classical precepts. As a philosophy, it has roots in the early 20th century, with a revered monk named Luang Phor Sodh who purportedly rediscovered a long-lost method of attaining enlightenment. In fact, the current sect is a posthumous interpretation of Luang Phor’s teachings that wasn’t founded until the 1970s, and its leaders are at least as successful as entrepreneurs as they are as philosophers. Their brand of Buddhism could be justly compared to any number of religious movements around the world that seek to make worship relevant to the moods and mores of modern life.

This includes, for example, an overt and intimate connection between material wealth and spirituality. Pictured below is a bag, distributed by the temple for carrying shoes while indoors, adorned with Dhammakaya’s official slogan: “Quickly Rich/Powerfully Rich/Thoroughly Rich”

Relevance also means heaps of technology. And size. The central building of the wat looks a lot like an airplane hangar (note the people at the bottom of the photo for scale), complete with a logo that evokes a disc-shaped aircraft set to launch.

From the inside, see the tall ceilings, open spacing, and minimal design. The woman blurred at the front is on her cell phone.

There didn’t seem to be a single point in the entire complex where one was out of view of a television, or out of earshot of a mounted Bose speaker. Between the morning and afternoon meditation sessions, a panel of young men and women chatted and laughed at a long table, talk show-style, their faces and voices amplifying throughout the vast terminal. Though there must have been hundreds of small televisions, the two largest screens, standing some fifteen feet tall, flanked the main stage, on which a group of novice monks sat in a geometrical array on top of a dais shaped exactly like the other building, the aircraft/Chedi. During the talk show, the presenters appeared on the screens as gigantic talking heads; when formal meditation began, they were replaced by blue orb graphics and fiery orange Buddhas. Whoever orchestrated the program most certainly understood color theory.

My companion described all of this as a great example of the Thai concept of Riyap Raawy, or perfect orderliness. Every element of the space, from load-bearing poles to floor mats to the seating arrangement of worshippers, was made absolutely uniform. And thanks to the even distribution of media, every person in the wat could see and hear clearly from anywhere – this is critical, since the space is touted as being able to accommodate a stunning one million devotees at a time.

There are certainly examples from throughout history of religious structures that, like Wat Dhammakaya, were built to be huge and awesome (in the biblical sense), and to thus give everyone the sense that they were encountering transcendence. This experience is often audible. For example, in the whispering gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the acoustics allow you to hear another person with perfect clarity, even if they’re fifty feet away and whispering. The inner dome of the Taj Mahal has a similar effect. In both cases, the echoes suggest a sublime unity between the speaker, the space, and the cosmos – even the slightest utterance resonates everywhere. Upon speaking, you get the feeling that all things are connected.

However, the technological space of Wat Dhammakaya, although relentlessly amplified, works differently.

Around thirty seconds into the recording, we start to hear two speakers go out of phase, just a few milliseconds off from each other. The slight delay makes the voices (these are the talk show hosts again) sound warbly. Here, we become aware that this isn’t actually a space of unity, but of total atomization. For each area in the temple, there is a separate set of speakers – in accord with the mandate of mass media, each person is addressed in his own world. Although everyone hears the same thing, they never actually hear together, from the same source. In certain moments, such as when the speakers go out of phase, we overhear that others are also hearing, but the possibilities for joining them are limited. The only way to get the message is through your own private equipment. For a sect so focused on personal development, becoming thoroughly rich, and so on, this seems poetic.

One of the most perplexing examples is the cell phone conversation. To wit: if we’re sitting in front of two people on a bus, and they’re talking in a reasonable tone of voice, it’s very unlikely we’ll care at all. But if it’s only one person, and he’s talking at the same hypothetical volume on the phone, we might think bad thoughts about him, or have trouble concentrating. Why are we bothered by the latter and not the former?

We develop and adjust auditory filters throughout our lives. Our annoyance with overhearing cell phone chatter suggests that we’ve become accustomed to telephone conversations – however innocuous – being private. And so the sound of them in public space registers as a breach of etiquette, even if it’s no different in pitch, volume, or timbre than an old-fashioned, in-person conversation. This may change over time, perhaps after we’ve spent years and years confronted with the practice. For now, the memory of landline custom still obtains.

The following recording is a good example of this phenomenon, starring one of those much-despised Motorola walkie-talkies. As the F train went above ground during a snowstorm that had severely delayed train traffic, a man got a page (presaged by the famous tone) from a friend, and commenced telling him where he was, how long he expected to be there, and so on. There was a whole lot of eye-rolling on the busy car. The tones kept coming, and the voice of the man on the other end came through covered by a harsh, almost mean-sounding distortion. This mixed with the sound of train announcements which, as you might expect, were filtered into the normal bin.

People kill other people distressingly often over noise.

Plenty of evidence implies that the planet is noisier than at any other time in human history. What now?

Before attempting to answer that practically – and we will, here, over time – we can begin by ruling out a few well-worn, fatally flawed approaches. Today’s approach is both the most common (by far) and one of the easiest to take down. It is the fantasy of silence.

The Times of London recently gave writer Helen Rumbelow one of those tedious assignments where the journalist is supposed to go out and search for an oasis of true quiet amidst the ubiquitous din of modern urbanity. Conventionally, the journalist either finds a single tranquil place or doesn’t; either way, the moral of the story is that we’ve forgotten the value of silence, and by extension neighborliness, peaceful contemplation, relaxation, and so forth.

In her piece, titled “Silent Night … Is There Peace Anywhere in Britain?,” Rumbelow takes the high road considering that her assignment was essentially a straw man. After moving through the usual tropes of noise control, she makes some great points.

To paraphrase the article, Britain is noisier. People have become exasperated. Noise-reduction experts agree that the problem stems in large part from overpopulation. But too much regulation on behavior (i.e., no peeing standing up in apartments after midnight) can be overkill. Besides, noise is also caused by more and louder technology – including things that can’t easily be limited, like motor vehicles. Such noise is not only annoying, it’s physically damaging to our bodies. Ultimately, since we can’t achieve total silence, perhaps we can overlay nicer sounds – like waterfalls. Finally, it is worth considering that people seem to tolerate mechanical noise better in developing countries. Is sensitivity to noise a disease of affluence?

Rumbelow offers, provocatively, that part of what makes certain sounds tolerable is not only, generically, that they’re subjectively pleasing, but that they signify things beyond human control. Some of the loudest sounds we hear – waves crashing, thunderstorms, forest animals – are usually pleasing in spite of their volume, and even their irregularity. Conversely, the animal sounds that do tend to bother urban-dwellers, like the aforementioned barking, are those that come from domesticated beasts, which people are ostensibly responsible for controlling.

On this, Rumbelow writes:

I have come to think that our relationship with noise is like our relationship with God, or with universal forces beyond our control. We crave natural sounds, such as that of the ocean, that are beyond our power. We long for the incorporeal, and our longing intensifies the more the noises of other people press in on us.

So, then, is sensitivity to noise actually a disease of the triumph of classical liberalism, in which people understand themselves as free actors with the right to control their environments? If we run with this thesis momentarily, we might conclude that nostalgia for silence is really a displaced lust for dominance – in particular, dominance over the actions of other people, which is one hell of a paradox for a philosophy of political freedom.

Whether or not this thesis is true, its mere possibility is one of many strikes against the open-ended idea of noise control animated by the fantasy of silence. This is because every time we choose a target for noise abatement, our choice is not only about volume, but about our own hearing. This doesn’t mean, at all, that the definition of noise is totally subjective and thus impossible to do anything about. It simply means that too few quests for greater quiet have considered the politics of listening in sufficient depth.

Next: The amazing noise map of the entire nation of England

“Sound Studies,” while increasingly common in the academy, still lacks basic definitions. This post is part of an ongoing effort to provide clear, descriptive expositions of what the study of sound encompasses – as an art form, as a humanistic science, and as a general philosophy.

The piece is 54 minutes in total, but the interview is only the first 45 minutes or so. Follow along with the annotations below as you listen, for further comment on some of the issues that might be extracted from the conversation.

0:00 – 1:40 Introduction, bio

1:40 – 2:40 Discussion of a silent moment in The Beach Boys’ “The Little Girl I once Knew”

Music is one of the most important areas where “Sound Studies” makes its interventions. This discussion is a nice example off the bat of how attention to sound can connect with other topics. DeLaurenti aptly identifies that radio often functions like a friend, a companion on long drives, for example. And that, “like a good friend, you want to make sure that that good friend doesn’t go away.” For this reason, dead air is the scourge of radio, the thing to avoid above all else – even babbling is far better than making the listener feel abandoned. This accounts for the failure of an otherwise marketable pop song.

2:40 – 3:45 Discussion of places where radio transmitters overlap

We all know what this sounds like. DeLaurenti regrets not having recorded some instances of it on a recent drive in the western U.S. Moments like this, where sound is disconnected from intentional meaning (i.e., where it strikes most ears as noise) is exactly what the Phonographers Union is most interested in treating as art.

3:45 – 8:15 How the Phonographers Union performs live

As a process, the Union takes concrete sounds and organizes them into improvised compositions. Shades of musique concrète. The host plays an example of one of the Union’s improvisations. Japanese temple bells, water, accelerating in pace, birds. Compiled from multiple sources. DeLaurenti quotes Stravinsky in suggesting that this improvisation should be heard as a composition, since it’s “frozen.”

7:50 On not relying on visual cues onstage

“We are incredibly boring to look at, and that’s deliberate … we have to react only with our ears.” There is no way for the members of the group to know who is doing what. In Sound Studies, there is a tendency to rely on a supposed binary between sound and vision. Proponents of this binary will argue in broad generalizations, that western culture is visualistic, that it relies on fixed images, but is meanwhile inept at coping with the ephemeral relationality immanent to sound. This position has a point, even if it is extremely overdetermined. DeLaurenti, however, is too good at what he does to engage in this kind of polemic.

His goal in withholding visual cues is to facilitate heightened attention. If the listener leaves a performance more aware of the world, the performance was successful. “The world is continually trying to give us gifts through our ears.”

9:30 – 10:45 The host will play some listener recordings

10:45 – 13:10 First sound sent in by a listener – boat passing under a drawbridge

Colossal metal scrapes, pulleys. The big, soft reverb of wide-open spaces. Melancholy, if you feel like reading it in emotional terms. Followed by an excerpt from that Beach Boys song.

15:10 – 16:50 Second sound sent in by a listener – hummingbird’s wing

Jim Culp, a former city-dweller now living in the country, one day heard a hummingbird at his feeder, and liked the sound. “It was kind of like listening to a didgeridoo played by an Australian aboriginal, but there was a little hint of helicopter in there.” References to aboriginal/native/primitive people are quite common in descriptions of sound, especially abstract ones. In classes I’ve taught, when playing unfamiliar sounds for students and asking them to note their impressions, the notion of “tribal people” (usually of unspecified ethnicity) is often invoked to account for wild strangeness. Many scholars of sound have suggested that imagistic descriptions serve to domesticate aural mystery.

16:50 – 18:50 Awareness of the microphone’s presence
Listening to the recording, DeLaurenti picks up the gentle friction of Mr. Culp’s sleeve against the feeder, as well as the proximity effect of the microphone as it moves around. DeLaurenti explains how the proximity effect works – in both mics and ears. “Microphones are themselves instruments.” This is a wise, if surprisingly rare, point. As with cameras, listeners tend to assume that what a microphone picks up is immediate – that is to say, not mediated – and that it is therefore true. In fact, microphones are very idiosyncratic, and what they pick up depends heavily on both their design and on how we use them. Being aware of the microphone as a form of mediation that affects sound is a key part of being a good sound artist/scholar.

18:50 – 20:50 Fidelity

DeLaurentis says that high-fidelity is a fine goal, but that the aura of imperfection becomes “part of the music” on many recordings. “Fidelity is wonderful, however, you can walk to my CD shelf and you’ll still see Robert Johnson there.” Microphones lie, but it’s a noble lie.

The host mentions the phenomenon of cleaned-up, remastered recordings, on which old pieces are “rescued from the way they were recorded.” Sound is more manipulable now.

20:50 – 21:20 Third sound sent in by a listener – an old tugboat engine from the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle

Hydraulic, clanking, exhausted-sounding. The host calls it “forlorn,” and it reminds DeLaurenti of the fact that Stravinsky used to notate environmental sounds, especially mechanical ones.

22:10 – 24:25 Fourth sound sent in by a listener – tree branches rustling in Riverfront Park, recorded with a contact mic

Rubbery, internal. Again on the subject of how microphones mediate what we hear and thus experience, contact microphones (which are super cheap and easy to build) respond to sound in a very different way from mics that respond to disturbances in the air.

For those who haven’t gotten to it, the physics of sound is a great read. Once you understand that air is a medium through which sound travels, but that other materials (including walls, bodies, etc.) also conduct sound, you can understand the fundamental difference between normal mics and contact mics.

24:25 – 26:30 A listener calls in to talk about a mysterious sound – he confused Beluga whales for horses

“Whale recordings have been proliferating for the last forty years.” Water is also a medium for sound; marine animals have rich aural communication systems that we understand only in part. Don Ihde has written about whether what whales do is singing. But no conversation about whale sound is complete without consulting the work of Roger Payne.

The device of choice for recording underwater is called a hydrophone.

26:40 – 28:55 Fifth recording sent in by a listener – bats (slowed down)

Chirping, mild. Bats use a technique called echolocation to assess their surroundings. They send out chirps, and then interpret the resonance created by them to figure out their spatial position. Their ears are sensitive enough that they can immediately tell where they are, and what’s nearby. In familiar terms, this is akin to “seeing” with the ears. By listening to echoes, bats can tell the precise shape of nearby walls, whether there are bugs (food) in range, and even how those bugs might be moving.

The first thing the hosts notice is the variety of sound in the recording. “Our ears are not only receptacles, but they’re also filters.” At noisy, polyphonic cocktail parties, for example, we can focus on the sounds that matter to us, but a microphone could not reproduce that kind of filtering.

DeLaurenti suggests that we are “trained” to focus on specific, clearly relevant things, and to filter out noise. He says he’s spent years trying to untrain himself, to listen more broadly.

28:55 – 30:55 On listening polyphonically

DeLaurenti made an album of “surreptitiously recorded intermissions” at concerts. Other phonographers and composers have also specifically tuned in to crowds as a source of sonic interest.

Different people, even recording the same event or same type of event (which happens often), will inevitably come up with different recordings. This effort is predicated on deep listening and environmental awareness.

31:00 – 33:00 Sixth sound sent in by a listener – irrigation pipe

Round, small glissandos, fluid. The piece was made by Gordon Hempton, who DeLaurenti has written on. GH evokes place, depth. Master field recorder.

One more piece by Hempton. Dropping pieces of wood into a well. Fuzzy lasers, neurotic ghouls.

34:15 – 35:40 Station identification, ads, weather

35:40 – 37:30 Phonographers Union will perform in Seattle a few times in the coming days

DeLaurenti compares the Union to Yes and Deep Purple.

37:30 – 39:25 Seventh sound sent in by a listener – wasp in bedroom

High, pleading, slippery, human. Leads to a discussion of recording eerie things. DeLaurenti did this recently, only to figure out it was I-5 being repaved.

39:25 – 40:30 Eighth sound sent in by a listener – kitten in heat

Unnerving, piercing, moist. “Sound helps us see through walls … compresses the distance.” Sound is a source of information about the otherwise unaccessible. I would add that sound-without-vision is also, frequently, a major source of consternation. People dislike being aware of things whose identity they can’t confirm. Sound, then, can be an invasion of privacy, a way of asking for our attention (maybe repeatedly) without saying why. Neighbors, at least those I’ve spoken to, usually hate hearing each other. One of the great things about the Union is that they invert this relationship into one of fascination.

40:30 – 41:35 Ninth sound sent in by a listener – walking over a wooden floor with microphones attached to feet

Doom and leather. There are multiple labels devoted to releasing albums of field recordings.

41:35 – 43:05 Tinnitus

The host has tinnitus (my wife the doctor says TINN – it – tus, but apparently pronunciation varies), and puts an electronic “masking sound” in his ears to quell its effects. DeLaurenti adds that the ears actually emit sound. I’ve heard this physiological phenomenon described as akin to warming up a gong before hitting it, so that it will react with more sensitivity when struck. The eardrum is covered with little hairs that move constantly, keeping the drum “warm.” Their movement creates a sound of its own. Hearing is also sonorous.

43:05 – 44:25 Tenth sound sent in by a listener – walking down a muddy stream at midnight

How might this sound different if you hadn’t heard it was recorded at midnight? Part of a movement of “improvising with natural sound in natural spaces.” As a field recorded, it is sometimes necessary to provoke reactions in order to make a recording. A muddy creek bed on its own may not be recognizable, but once you walk through it you’ve got something clear to record. This is also true for, often, interview subjects.

45:00 – 46:05 Email from listener

Banal sounds can become musical. We hear with our entire bodies, in a sense. I would add that they also connect very powerfully to space – this particular listener hears wind and boat sound as “quintessential western Washington.” Our aural experiences are a huge part of the way we define and remember the areas we inhabit. Usually, cities are represented by their skylines, but cities also have sonic identities.

46:05 – 47:00 Eleventh sound sent in by a listener – drumming busker in San Francisco

Street performers improvise with objects at hand. Public performances have a particular immediacy.

A quick walk through any store targeted to people twenty or younger – in other words, almost any store – reveals the importance of emphatic sensory appeal to product value, especially for toys and games. The best-selling holiday items are often outfitted with literal bells and whistles, or the 21st century equivalent.

This has perpetrated something of an arms race among toy manufacturers. It’s not unheard of, according to some reports, for holiday toys aimed at children younger than three to reach 115 decibels or higher. The risk of hearing loss is made worse, many note, because children have short arms, and generally play with their toys at a very close distance. For accuracy, decibel measurements thus must be taken from just a few inches away. Children also have smaller ear canals, which make them more susceptible to auditory damage even after a few seconds of listening.

Here is the Sight and Hearing Association’s top offender from 2008, the Shake ‘N Go, a toy car that reaches 120.8 db, in action.

The United States issues recommendations for toy volume, but compliance is voluntary. Canada has stricter regulations, but many toys surge past the limits anyway. A number of independent tests quoted in news stories found that well over half of popular holiday toys significantly exceeded guidelines or recommendations.

–

The research in audiology is conclusive: children experience real risk by playing with loud toys. Hearing loss, especially at a young age, is not only inconvenient, but a demonstrable impediment to learning. There is a definite need for regulation that would limit these harmful effects.

Toys are loud because it’s profitable, and so in a sense necessary, to make them that way. We’ve discussed in this space a certain general trend toward greater silence in product manufacture, as a way to signify modern and especially “green” technology. But such a shift has hardly taken effect among children’s toys. One can see the stirrings, however, of a kind of elite response, underwritten by boutiqueish nostalgia, for playthings that would never blare out music or canned phrases. When I (b. 1980) was little, interactive educational toys were de rigueur among concerned parents; adjusted for the volume demands of the contemporary marketplace, would these still even qualify as safe?

With respect to noise, toys are in the same ironic position as most consumer goods. Even once sound became too loud for political comfort, industry couldn’t turn down the volume on consumer taste. Niche markets, ostensibly healthier for our ears, began to develop, but these are an incomplete solution, because they stigmatize noise rather than diminishing it. Meanwhile, those who consume “mass market” goods (i.e. the most affordable offerings), through no fault of their own, put their children in a disadvantaged position.

There is a clear burden on government to introduce significant regulation. But we should also recognize that the origin of the problem is deep-seated.

Visual technology can be inserted strategically into situations of injustice, standing witness to very real problems, triggering necessary responses. It can, as the The Organization for Visual Progression (OVP) puts it, “amplify voices.”

But it takes work to make visuality work for you. The politics of any sense-mode run deep, so any sense-material will naturally be volatile. I spoke with OVP’s Ben Foley and Iben Trino-Molenkamp about how they utilize and handle film and video in the name of projects dedicated to social justice. (d/l here.) (read more about OVP here.)

Gallery:

The Rumbler is a response to new vehicle models with better aural insulation, louder car stereos, and the increased prevalence of iPod and cell phone use among drivers. In this environment, high-pitched sirens are decreasingly effective at alerting drivers to the presence of emergency vehicles. However the Rumbler, while no louder than a conventional siren, physically disturbs the interior space of cars in its path. With the move from treble to bass, drivers’ bodies vibrate, and their rear windows tremble.

Tom Morgan, vice president for sales and marketing for the company that makes the Rumbler, is quoted in the Washington Post:

Morgan said the Rumbler was developed after police departments complained that, increasingly, motorists weren’t responding to traditional lights and sirens.

“The basic idea is we become more insulated in our vehicles with stereos, iPods and telephones,” Morgan said. “We thought it would be helpful if there was something else along with the traditional siren that would reach a different level of awareness.”

Sonic technologies, again and again, are implicated in arms races. During arms races, as we learned during the Cold War, defensive maneuvers (like shields and headphones) only seem passive – in fact, they provide the impetus for more aggressive modes of penetration, extending a vicious cycle. Our reliance on simple technological solutions to complex problems like noise invites exactly this kind of frustration.

Thanks to Connor for the original link.

Even my fancy new tea kettle (a wedding gift), which naturally has to whistle, features a lovely, train-emulating, duotone Hohner harmonica for a mouth.

As Karin Bijsterveld, Emily Thompson, and others have suggested, quieter technologies were a class-conscious response to an industrial-era love affair with noise. Whereas in the pre-Model T era the elite announced their status by being among the few who could move around town in engine-powered vehicles, by the early-20th century the roads were saturated. Traffic noise thus became uncouth, a marker of inefficient engineering and middle-class aesthetics, and the rich retreated to quieter alternatives. (Including the luxury car, with its hermetic interiority.)

Class-inflected desire for silent machinery has continued more or less unabated for the last century. So it was surprising to read, in an article from the New York Times published earlier this month, that some hybrid car companies are designing artificial sounds for next year’s models. Apparently, these companies have received complaints that their near-silent engines are a safety hazard, particularly for those less able to gauge traffic visually, such as children and the blind. As the article says about these vehicles, “they aren’t noisy enough.” A video from the British car company Lotus explains (and dramatizes) how the problem of silence is being addressed by its own engineers.

Fake speakers under the hood, with hyperbolic vroom-vroom noises designed by Hollywood sound engineers, join artificial shutter sounds on digital cameras in the category of sounds that had to be designed anew after their antecedents became obsolete. Only after engineering away the mechanical necessity of the source noises did we realize that those noises had also come to serve other critical functions in public space. For instance, warning us that two-ton motor vehicles were hurtling our way. The artificial camera click was created, in case you don’t remember the story, to thwart surreptitious picture-taking in locker rooms and the like. There are apparently certain dangers, to oneself and others, to being excessively unobtrusive.

Meanwhile, the silenced sounds of engines almost certainly promise to return, like ringtones, as customizations. That could get strange; look for future posts in this space on that subject.

There are, today, somewhere on the order of 1.67 billion internet users in the world. Staggeringly, about 1.65 billion of these are new since the mid-90s. Today nearly a quarter of the world’s population has a degree of internet access. Just over a decade ago, that figure was a fraction of a percent.

A certain debate raged in the fraction-of-a-percent years, especially among people who predicted (or at least fantasized about) the coming expansion. A vast, valuable-looking tract spread across the horizon. Silicon-era von Bismarcks sitting in chat room Berlin Conferences began to wonder and clamor about who should control it and how. On one side, those of a more libertarian bent argued that “cyberspace” was fundamentally ungovernable, owing to its transnational infrastructure, and that in any case regulation would be overreaching, ineffective, and potentially a colossal buzzkill. On the other, proponents of internet governance countered that traditional regulations could and must be adapted to new contexts. If libel, theft, harassment, fraud, and other crimes were possible online – and they all were, demonstrably – then states were obliged to protect users thus exposed, and to prosecute the responsible parties.

The problem at the root of this debate was about spatiality, and the debate itself was often conducted in the language of territorial expansion and settlement. The libertarians believed that “real” and “virtual” space were distinct realms, structurally foreign to one another, and that the virtual was properly anarchic. John Perry Barlow, in a statement that typified this position, wrote in 1991 that “the old concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context, based as they are on physical manifestation, do not apply succinctly in a world where there can be none.” For Barlow, cyberspace was a world apart, at most a neighbor to the material universe of the real. But “coming into the country” (the title of one of his essays) inevitably meant making choices about how to live on the wild digital frontier. Would our new-world settlements facilitate personal privacy or corporate control? Barlow offered the analogical figures of frontier anarchists and corporate fur traders, respectively, to represent the advocates of these outcomes, and pushed hard for the greater legitimacy of the first. (An ironic position, as it happens – who benefits from decreased regulation more than corporations?)

Regulation proponents responded that the so-called “virtual” world was actually just a new aspect of a current reality, an overlay of communications that allowed faster and more flexible exchanges, but that did not by any means unsettle jurisdiction or legal doctrine, even if it might necessitate certain adjustments. Jack Goldsmith wrote, in 1998, that “the skeptics are in the grip of a nineteenth century territorialist conception of how ‘real space’ is regulated and how ‘real-space’ conflicts of law are resolved. This conception was repudiated in the middle of this century.” Goldsmith suggested that the activation of hardware or software amounted to real-world checkpoints where users automatically became subject to the legal restrictions of specific territories. With the stakes of digital communication rising by the nanosecond, accountability at the level of existing sovereign entities was not only practical but imperative.

In technological time, that was then. But one-and-a-half billion users later, the debate hasn’t budged much. On October 5th, 2009, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for full disclosure of paid endorsements, with particular regard to bloggers. The guidelines are not themselves laws, but are an interpretation of the 1980 Federal Trade Commission Act in terms of how that act applies to new media. With the transposition of old regulations to contemporary modes of communication, the FTC is doing precisely what Jack Goldsmith argued for in the late 1990s; that is, adapting existing structures of accountability to modern environments.

And there certainly seem to be good reasons for doing so. PayPerPost, a deliberately opaque provider of sponsored online advertising, has become a multi-billion dollar operation within three years, and has inspired many clones. The company has also, predictably, recently developed a “Sponsored Tweets” concept. It is an ingenious system that matches posters with advertisers, allowing the former to shill for the latter in mutually profitable ways. PayPerPost’s transparency requirements (naturally, in the absence of any legal impetus otherwise) have been described as laughably weak.

Meanwhile, popular blogs and celebrity Twitter accounts might have millions of eyes on them in a day. The temptation for advertisers to arrange to transform these platforms into paid advertorials, all the more valuable because there is no mandate of transparency, is bound to be a powerful one. Consumers presumably lose in this scenario, having no way to know whether Claritin-D is a miracle cure for Miley’s allergies, or whether Schering-Plough is in fact writing her a check. Common sense suggests that the FTC, with limited money and personnel (just 1200 employees, in a nation with uncountable millions of blogs, not to mention social networking accounts) would concern itself precisely with high-profile, high-yield cases like this.

The outcry against the guidelines from bloggers, however, has echoed John Perry Barlow’s earlier objections with surprising fidelity. First, some bloggers assert, the internet is simply not a medium like television or radio. It is empty space, like air, and the communications that take place within it should be sacrosanct like any other constitutionally-protected form of individual free speech. As Jeff Jarvis puts it:

the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk … for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

Second, and relatedly, many bloggers see the guidelines as a tremendous overreach that puts ordinary citizens who discuss any product online – including in a Twitter post or an Amazon review – at risk of committing unwitting criminal action. About this, they point to the clause in the FTC’s interpretation which states that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” Hypothetically, if a publisher sent a free copy of a book to be reviewed by a website, the site would have to include a disclaimer about the freebie along with its post. In the view of the dissenters, this gives the government the right to intrude unfairly on private affairs.

Third, many bloggers feel that the guidelines are ham-handedly ignorant about the specificities of blogging and social media, and that as a consequence any online communication may be compromised. Jack Schafer at Slate shudders that “the vagueness of [the] guidelines doth make suspects of you all.” The vagueness problem has also been cited as a reason why the guidelines will inevitably fail – the internet simply cannot be regulated by dead-tree-pushing bureaucrats. Several commentators have called the FTC’s actions a “power grab,” and others have even called for the commission’s outright abolishment.

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A new sound studies book (of all things) makes a convincing case against the ontological assertions made by the anti-regulatory bloggers. Frances Dyson’s Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture is not about the legal particulars of online endorsements, but it is very much about our flawed and at times troubling perceptions of new media. Her book also provides a sober historical and philosophical perspective that fills in some of the most glaring gaps in debates about the internet as a place.

The thesis of Sounding New Media is, in brief, that our most ingrained assumptions about digital environments closely parallel similarly ingrained assumptions about sound. “The ‘new’ of new media,” she writes, “depends on redefining embodiment, space, reality, and experience in ways remarkably similar to notions of immersion and transcendence associated with audiophony.” ^[1]
Considering some tried-and-true deep sonic thinkers (R. Murray Schafer, John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Schaeffer) and some fresher ones as well (Char Davies, Catherine Richards), Dyson identifies and critiques some predominant metaphysical tropes about sound. ^[2] These tropes, she argues, are often marked by romantic fantasies about the disappearance of mediation in environments so immersive, so full of feeling, that people look to them for psychic restoration.

We have all chased such a metaphysics or, at the very least, known others who have. Dyson briefly alludes, for example, to 90s rave culture, where the combination of sound loud enough to be felt on the skin, bodily co-presence, and chemical highs offered a wellspring of unity and pleasure among groups of people, as well as in one’s own consciousness. Sound was absolutely crucial here, since it seemed both inexhaustible and accessible to everyone at once. In an alienating modern world, sound promised to heal rifts both cultural and technological by bringing everyone together in a single sensual field.

Sound is conscripted in the production of this togetherness, according to Dyson, because in a society where the truest realities are the most empirically approachable (that is, visible), sound becomes an enigma, a thing which is not quite a thing because it cannot be grasped or observed. This effect is only exaggerated when we wear headphones, which encourages us to imagine music reaching our ears with nothing in between. In such a rationalist context, it is easy to miss the fact that sound is indeed and entirely real – that it is by nature a physical force with a material basis, and that it always travels through mediating channels. But being invisible, it draws anti-modern romantics like a spiderweb.

Fantasies about new media and virtual environments function in much the same way, snaring a specially credulous breed of romantics called technophiles. When our field of vision is encompassed by a screen, we tend to assume that we have entered whatever picture we might be observing. This assumption is motivated by an ontology so powerful as to be undisturbed by the utter lack of tactility, smell, taste, and dimensionality which, even with a quarter of the world online, remain stubbornly absolute. Focused in this way on seeing as being-in, we quickly jump to the conclusion that the internet must be a space. Furthermore, we imagine that once we enter that space, whatever conveyance brought us can be conveniently left behind, like a parked car. Our experiences once inside are thence regarded as untouched by technology. Recall Jarvis’ claim: “the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk.” Logic like this leads us to believe, not only rhetorically but all too often really, that technological advances will progressively allow richer and richer modes of being “inside” digital space. The culmination of these advances, were they not imaginary, would be a total move away from the physical realm of bodies and into one of pure, immaterial communication.

But believing this depends on an extreme form of tunnel vision. The actual net effect of our partial blindness – far from partitioning the universe into virtual and real spaces – is the inauguration of a single material world, our whole world, the same one as before, where all entities can be regarded as digital, reducible to code like the things we see on screens. We collectively come to understand our bodies as mechanical, our histories as unfolding scripts, and even our houses as bug’s nests of binary code:

Dyson is most explicit about this in the chapter titled “Embodying Technology,” asserting tersely that “computing …. renders the body a thing to be computed.” ^[3] This portion of the book argues against, or at the very least complicates, some of the most frequently-cited literature on posthumanity, including the work of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway.

Sounding New Media is in fact worthwhile for a number of reasons other than those discussed here. It is an original and astute analysis of perception, sense, and knowledge, and will be of interest to a variety of readers in different disciplines. But reading it when I did, it happened to resonate most powerfully as a well-crafted theorization of the source of some persistent prejudices about media. These prejudices, far from being obscure matters of ontological debate, have had a clear impact on the architecture of digital interfaces, which are very much a part of our world.

…

Footnotes