Posts archived in Senses
Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture
by Frances Dyson
University of California Press, 2009
262 pps., $24.95
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.
I recorded something last week. I don’t know what. First order of business: do you?
In the wake of the first domestic use of sound cannons, against protesters at the recent, sparsely-picketed G20 summit in Pittsburgh, which comes just a few weeks after the same technology was used to suppress protesters at a factory in Bangkok, I want to discuss sound as an absolute phenomenon – that is, at the point where a human listener experiences acute physical harm through exposure, where sound stops being musical or aesthetic and becomes quite literally indistinguishable from a blunt object or explosive device.
This is a montage of people reacting to the smell of the bagful of fresh basil I carried around all day yesterday.
Over the weekend, I was in Maine for S and O’s wedding reception. On Sunday, we went to S’s parent’s house, which has a large garden. Perhaps because I have a prominent tattoo of a basil leaf, or perhaps because I ate all of her pesto, S’s mother sent me home with a quantity of basil that easily exceeded the rest of my luggage. Being fresh-picked and uncovered, it had a powerful odor, particularly when jostled in the bag. Because airports usually smell like carpet and noxious cinnamon buns, the herb scent was not only strong but also out-of-place. Airports regulate sights, smells, and sounds very carefully for reasons of efficiency and security, so it’s unusual to experience anything aesthetically surprising while in them. Consequently, almost everyone nearby noticed the basil, from the security line to the gate to the plane to the taxi, in many cases enough to start up a conversation with an unshaven and hungover stranger.
This piece, although I didn’t deliberately set it up, is the most sculptural of the sonic artworks so far presented because it was such a specific provocation. It was also a productive exercise to excite one sense-mode as a means of eliciting recordable action in another.
An upcoming post will deal with food, a subject central to the politics of sensuality in the contemporary moment. This piece will hopefully make a useful lead-in.
Jason Logan has an interactive smell-map of New York City in the digital version of last Sunday’s NYX.
The author walked around eighteen neighborhoods in Manhattan in one day, noting pronounced or recurrent odors. Logan’s findings are presented in short, gonzo-poetic lists, which are linked to an illustrated map of the island on which his route is also overlaid.
The piece is evocative and funny. Certain smells are New York-centric, perhaps requiring some time spent here to really click, including “everything bagels” in Yorkville and “deep-dust-mineral smell of subway” in Tribeca. Others will be more universally resonant, such as “the pseudo-Irish-pub scent” (“bar cloth; last night’s party”) and “the smell of money” (“tangy; metallic-dusty; Play-Doh”).
Logan’s minimal, list-form narrative works well to give the reader a sense of his experiences. The combination of poetic and visual reference is enough to return one, mentally, to the environments under discussion, and for this reason “Scents and the City” is an effective artwork.
It also happens to raise some compelling issues about the politics of sensuality and space – great news!
Like hearing, smelling is a way of knowing a place that we develop quite powerfully as a compass in our ordinary routine without necessarily realizing that we’ve been developing it at all. Logan’s piece demonstrates how smelling makes us aware of people, territory, objects, physical danger, and activity both past and present. In an urban context, for example, we get a heads-up about things we might want to eat (“cheese Danish,” “deep-fried Oreos,” “delicious shrimp grilling”) or go out of our way not to ingest (“dog feces,” “touch of urine,” “garbage”); noxious chemicals in the air (“spilled gas,” “bus exhaust”); commercial activity (“fresh laundry,” “grocery scent,” “pet store”); and so on. Smell offers many such basic cues.
On another level, but often just as acutely, smelling also alerts us to abstract concepts like class and political difference. One of the most striking items comes from Harlem – “Aggressively (almost territorially) soapy cologne.” This hit me immediately. Similarly, from various other geographic areas, “freshly-shaved men,” “medicinal-smelling person,” “hard-to-place perfume,” “faux-leather fanny pack,” and “subtle-but-rank perfume” each announce the presence of categories of people with definite overtones of class, age, and ethnicity. In some cases, these announcements are deliberate emanations that serve to carve out space for the emanator. In others, they are incidental, though no less spatializing for being that way. (Conspicuously absent from Logan’s descriptions were subway scents – the often-thunderous odor of homelessness or spilled food can transform an entire train car into a private or empty cabin.) Smells can insinuate wealth, aggression, ethnic background, generation, religion, and a great deal more.
As with sound, it seems that one of the most acute olfactory markers of financial means and high-class sensibilities is no smell at all, or the smell of things being made not to smell. The “dark, earthy green” of Gramercy Park, the “clean sweat” of Chelsea, the “cleaning products” of Turtle Bay, the “woman purposely wearing no scent” of Midtown South and the “Gallery Smell” of “air conditioning and nothing else” all contrast quite sharply with the thick lists of pungent food oils, heavy-industrial chemicals, and unsubtle personal hygienic products in neighborhoods like Chinatown and Washington Heights.
This (see “about artworks” or “Artwork #1” for background) was recorded about a year ago.
One day in downtown Bangkok, I crossed paths with a blind man using a lead pipe to echolocate his way down the street. The resonance of the hollow pipe is especially well-suited to producing sonic images that can reveal large objects at a distance – walls or buildings or sets of steps, say. This is a useful supplement to the cane as a means of feeling objects directly. As the man walked, a gym in the ground level of a shopping center played a trancy jingle through loudspeakers mounted outdoors. The gym is called California WOW Xperience, and they’re all over the city, enticing natives and visitors alike with kitschy, oily body-building imagery that nevertheless gets its point across.
Music in advertisements, rather obviously, recruits consumers. Songs plug into associations between identity and sensuality that we often don’t even realize we carry around. The California WOW Xperience ad declares in sensual terms (i.e., without needing to use words) that the gym is high-tech and modern. The accelerated tempos of trance suggest not only the pace of exercise but of the modern more broadly. The use of this ad thus creates and maintains a space that might “feel” “right” enough to passersby to entice them into laying down good Baht for a personal trainer or a yoga class or whatever.
Any useful acoustic analysis has to account not only for primary sound sources as they come into contact with materials, but also for reflections and noise. Sounds interact with one another in complicated ways that can confound engineers attempting to manage sound environments. This recording gestures to another source of confusion, one that lies beyond echo or interference – listening. The taps happen to be audible acts of listening that disrupt or at least mingle with the advertisement, which is what makes this work as a piece (I think). But it should also remind us that listening is a kind of work we do every time we encounter a sound, even if it seems to be second nature.
The ad and the taps are also, finally, kind of amusingly indifferent to each other. I like this a lot, because it rightly insinuates (to my ear) that human encounters are only fleetingly cooperative and never truly systematic.
Voice is integral to many acts of protest.
Why? First, voice, in the low-tech sense, is a readily available public alert system. If one is unable to appear on broadcast media, or to start a blog or distribute printed material for fear of political reprisal, one can usually still walk out into the street and scream.
Second, the use of the voice has acute affective power for listeners. It carries not only explicit meaning but also a great deal of emotional content. If listeners feel the depth of a speaker’s resolve, they may be moved by it.
Third, the use of the voice in unison, as with singing or chanting, produces a sense of political singularity that can serve to inspire fellow protesters, and to recruit others.
Read the rest of this entry »
Thai language teacher and first-year students practice vocabulary. August, 2009.
Thai is a tonal language and English is not. Thai has five tones, and every syllable in every word in the language has one. Disconcertingly, often comically, there are many groups of words that have exactly the same phonemic sounds, and yet because of different tones express very different meanings. For example, call a man “laaw” (low tone) and you’ve told him he’s handsome. Call him “laaw” (rising tone – pronounced like a cartoonish imitation of an Italian chef saying “Come-a on-a in-a!) and you’ve insinuated that he has no teeth.
Spectrogram of tones in Thai
You can hear this difference in action in the sound clip at the top of the post. From the first word, the teacher gives deliberately exaggerated inflection to every syllable, to make the tone as clear as possible. The students, who in their native language speak flatly and inflect only for emphasis (rather than meaning), imitate her fledglingly.
The teacher, by turn, inflects English in ways that have no meaning – except, as it turns out, to mark her speech as that of a native Thai speaker. Tone is excessive once she switches to English and yet, out of habit, her speech is still full of it. Notice how, at :18, she pronounces “selLER” with a high tone on the second syllable. Thais tend to do this with borrowed words, for reasons I can’t explain. Around 1:48, she does it again with “buyER” and then once more with “how ‘BOUT.” I think that accent is not only an impediment to clarity, but also a way of continuing to “speak” one’s native language while speaking another language. The patterns of nonsensical excess produced by speaking in an accent immediately take on new meaning beyond the parameters of the languages themselves, since they mark their speaker in totally relative terms.
The valences of accent, however, work differently depending on which direction you’re traveling, i.e. an American in Thailand is not the same kind of foreigner as a Thai is in the United States. Thais are used to foreigners being inept with tone, and will often laugh at them openly. The monotone of the foreigner (say it to yourself: for-ay-NERRR) is partially confusing, but also an unmistakeable marker of alienness, probably at least as potent as skin tone.
Sound in Bangkok
