Apologies, incidentally, for the lack of updates over the past six days. (I got hitched.)

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Untitled Conference Paper, Originally “The Co-Motion of Bangkok”

by Benjamin Tausig
PhD Candidate
New York University

I. THE HOTEL (HAVING LEFT HOME)
The scene opens in a hotel room, luggage splayed on the bed, a copy of Time Out Bangkok folded over to a page of events listings on the night table.

A. This paper will be delivered as an imaginary travelogue. On a narrative level, we move from a hotel in Bangkok to a rock concert a few miles off. On a theoretical level, we move from a discussion of urban spatiality to the point where an empirical examination of contemporary musical practice in Bangkok can begin, searching as we move for connections and patterns of determination between spatial configurations and culture. The things we see and hear along the way will serve as catalysts for specific discussions about the production of space and its potential relationship to new methods in ethnomusicology.

B. What do we mean by the production of space? The term itself comes from Henri Lefebvre, who emphasized the political and historical richness of space – urban space, mental space, safe space, national space. Lefebvre sought the material basis of each of these metaphors, and in doing so challenged the idea that they were indeed metaphorical at all. Space is not an empty vessel into which humanity pours its actions, but is an object of labor, contest and transformation. Lefebvre’s approach has been influential for a number of Marxist geographers, including several prominent Thai ones, and has worked towards upending the idea that spatial containers such as cities, states, and cultural identities are fixed and pre-given containers, rather than political emergences.

My argument is that we can usefully refigure our analysis of discrete musical events by focusing on the production of their spaces. In Bangkok, like many modern urban areas, this means dealing with mobility in some historical and ideological detail. Subjectivity in capitalist space is largely defined by the way one moves around. Modes and timing of transportation are significant class markers, for example. And a spatial regime predicated on mobility, as we will see, has had all kinds of implications for musicality.

So, as a complement to the other papers on this panel, which consider technologies of mobile listening, I want to examine how technologies of mobility, broadly considered, have been brought to bear on listening, even the kinds that might appear, at a glance, situated.

C. Ethnomusicologists have tended to study Thai music locationally, much as ethnographers have tended to study culture of all sorts. At times they have had good reason to do so. Traditionally, which is to say in the years before bureaucracy and mechanical reproduction, musical knowledge in Thailand was transmitted from teacher to pupil firsthand in the teacher’s home. I quote Patricia Shehan Campbell, writing in the 1990s, at length – “for the serious musician, the piphat houses provide the intensive training that performance mastery requires – the frequent one-on-one lessons with a master musican-teacher, the uninterrupted periods of solo practice and ensemble rehearsals, the continuous stream of music and musical commentary that hangs in the air. The piphat houses provide an ambience unequalled in Thailand, and rarely found in other world contexts. That these houses remain at all is surely a testimony to the strength of the system, and to the realization that such training has produced Thailand’s greatest musicians.” For Shehan-Campbell, Pamela Moro, Terry Miller, and many others, home-based pedagogy proved more potent than the modern techniques that supplanted it, such as following along with a recording or learning from sheet music. These scholars argue that new methods privilege speed over mastery, sacrificing technique in the process. With regard to historical standards, they are correct.

D. Nevertheless, and perhaps regrettably, home-based musical education in Thailand has grown rarer through the decades, beginning with the fall of the absolute monarchy in 1932. In that year, court musicians stopped receiving patronage from the king, and the burden of support for musical training shifted wholesale to the federal government. Numerous scholars, including Wong and Miller, have written about this transformation in detail. Today, Thai classical music is organized, taught, and performed under the authority of the Department of Fine Arts. Ensemble music is housed almost exclusively within the public educational system, from elementary programs up to the universities, and, as Wong suggests, public performances are now calibrated to serve the specular goals of the state, including the appearance of enlightenment, historical cohesion, and modern nationhood.

E. Thai nationalism arguably reached its apotheosis at precisely the moment when ensemble training left home; that is, during the U.S. military engagement in Southeast Asia in the middle years of the 20th century. Thai political figureheads worked tirelessly to avoid colonization or direct occupation, and succeeded through a policy of strategic acquiescence to the American political agenda. This included making a convincing show of hunting communists as well as offering the northern provinces as bases from which to launch air strikes during the Vietnam War. In those same years, the transient presence of more than 1 million American G.I.’s throughout the course of the war fueled a booming tourist economy. Bangkok had around 40,000 tourist visitors annually in the late 1950s; by 1970 it had 600,000. And with economic growth came mobility outward as well; increasingly, Thai students as well as a number of senior officials spent significant time in educational programs in the United States. A catalogue from a recent exhibition at the Thailand Creative & Design Center claims that “Thai architecture of the late 60s was catalyzed by three main forces: the advent of modernizing urban lifestyles, new construction technologies, and the return of overseas-educated Thai architects influenced by Western modernist principles.”

The spaces of the city thus changed dramatically, as hotels and offices quite literally sprouted on top of rice paddies. Those years saw the development of a metropolitan infrastructure that could both entice and accommodate international visitors, laborers, ex-patriots, and business people.

F. As for musical practice, a military-sponsored globalization of the economy effectively recast the home as a single pulse in a quotidian rhythm that integrated Thai music elsewhere – pedagogically, as a part of the educational system, and performatively, on the highest international stages available. Traditional music, for the first time in Siamese history, became a category unto itself, distinct from a growing array of popular alternatives that operated according to their own spatial logics.

G. Anyway, here we are, in our hotel room, tourists about to leave to see a show.

II. SUKHUMVIT ROAD

We step outside, and are hailed immediately by everyone. A woman fries noodles on a wheeled griddle; a man hawks summer blockbusters from overseas; a tuk-tuk driver asks where we’re going; a taxi honks; a bar girl tells us we’re handsome.

A. Ross King and Cuttaleeya Noparatnaraporn argue that many Bangkokers are uneasy about the streets, or thanon, that serve as the city’s primary arteries. In the past, it was the canals, or khlong, that people traveled along. Many khlong are still used today, especially by poor Thais, for transportation, cooking, and bathing, but they are unspeakably filthy. For the authors, thanon exemplify the regime of empty surfaces that reigns over public life in the modern era, while khlong represent neighborliness and depth. The abject toxicity of the khlong today is powerful evidence that modernity disregards the values that flow through it. Using the physical characteristics of water and land as metaphors, King and Cuttaleeya describe a zero sum game between fluidity and segmentation. And their dichotomy maps comfortably onto the prevailing lament among many ethnomusicologists for a waning moment of immediate pedagogical interaction.

B. However, it is well to remember that the paved roads of Bangkok are not only vacant conduits between the rhythmic pulses of a modern social space. Lefebvre reminds us that rhythms can be both linear and cyclical, that certain operations return continually to prior points while others process indefinitely. As aural arteries, thanon sweat with the clamor of exchange. They are unplanned and unpredictable, sometimes contradictory, all of which is to say noisy. There is a whole lot more to say about this, but we have to keep moving.

III. SKYTRAIN

Next we board the elevated subway, the BTS SkyTrain. Opened in 1999, the SkyTrain was intended to ease Bangkok’s notorious urban gridlock. In an ethnography of civil unrest in the city, anthropologist Alan Klima tells the story of a mobile phone commercial, based on a true story, that aired in the early 1990s. A pregnant woman, stuck in traffic, goes into labor. Armed with a cellular phone, she calls the hospital, which sends a helicopter to fly her out of the morass. Less than a decade later, the SkyTrain appeared just as heroically, as a savior gliding unimpeded above the polluted, jam-packed thanon.

As with many cities’ public transit systems, mobile communication technologies are highly prevalent on the SkyTrain. Commuters use the downtime of transit as an opportunity to talk to friends on the phone; teenagers send SMS’s and play games; and televisions alternately show commercials and offer bilingual information about the next stop. Sonically, the SkyTrain reveals some of the city’s most advanced efforts at efficient organization. Cross the yellow line near the tracks on any platform, and one of two safety officers will blow a whistle with impressive haste. Listen for station details pronounced in exquisite central Thai, through pristine loudspeakers. Watch advertisements that help fund system maintenance. Recognize every digital ring and ping from someone’s device as a meaningful form of address. This is not the whole story of sound on the train, but our stop is coming up.

Lastly, the advent of the SkyTrain has had an important impact on musical space. Mass transit links far flung parts of the city, opening up scores of potential new venues that would have been impractical twenty years ago. Middle- and upper-class audiences in particular can be expected to travel quite far, and with round-trip fares on the SkyTrain as low as 50 cents U.S., the cost is not prohibitive. Some of Bangkok’s more creative indie promoters have taken advantage of this situation by scheduling shows in surprising, inexpensive venues, including the occasional illegal warehouse party in an industrial area or blue-collar neighborhood. These shows are explicitly non-local affairs. The mobility of the audience means that promoters can attempt to summon listeners without advance notice, to congregate in whatever location works for their purposes at that moment.

IV. ROT MOTOSAI

We reach our stop. As we walk down the steps from the SkyTrain platform, we notice that this area is altogether unlike Sukhumvit Road. The signs are almost exclusively in Thai, for one thing, and there is a lot less neon. Furthermore, we are no longer bombarded with the promise of infinite pleasure for just a few baht. In fact, the only human beings in view are four men wearing orange vests lounging on motorcycle taxis next to a 7-11, passing around a bottle of whiskey and cracking jokes about our weird farang clothing.

Since the show is almost a mile up the side road, it makes sense to hitch a quick ride.

Mototaxis are a cheap and common form of transportation, used mostly for short trips like this one. They are also far and away the most dangerous way to get around town, as the leadfooted drivers blatantly ignore red lights and even sidewalks while you cling to their vehicle, wearing a cracked helmet or none at all. Weaving through traffic is, in contrast to the SkyTrain, an inelegant form of mobility. You can do it, but it’s risky, not to mention somewhat vulgar.

Although precise occupational statistics are difficult to find, most mototaxi drivers arrive from Isaan, the impoverished, agrarian northeastern region of Thailand. Internal migration from Isaan has grown substantially as upcountry folk have come to Bangkok in search of higher wages to send back to their families. Many find employment in construction, day labor, transportation, or as sex workers. They speak a highly distinct regional dialect largely incomprehensible to central Thais-speakers, which is a frequent source of derisive humor.

Isaan’s most visible cultural contribution to contemporary Bangkok is, ironically, music. Morlam and lukthung styles, which originated in the northeast, have been seized upon by proponents of Thai nationalism (most of whom hail from Bangkok) as symbols of a shared national heritage. Whereas northeastern styles were once considered base among the metropolitan elite, they have slowly gained cache since the 1980s. Miller describes this sea-change of taste in his 2005 article, “From Country Hick to Rural Hip: A New Identity Through Music for Northeast Thailand.” And Pamela Moro suggests that many musicians now supplement their income playing Isaan music at tourist venues in Bangkok. Many of these performances, which take place in the same neighborhoods as western bars and clubs, also feature dancers in stylized regional costumes. Although the shows are pretty kitschy, both tourists and urban Bangkokers invest a great deal in their authenticity. Appropriation of regional music is a political and musical gold mine.

We attempt to haggle with the driver, but our accent betrays us. The three-minute trip costs an exorbitant 30 baht.

V. VENUE

We arrive, at last, at our musical object, a concert taking place in a venue called the Live House. For now, we can only hear the music obscurely, as a nebulous cloud pushing outward against the doors, the lower frequencies escaping into a cavernous, marbled courtyard. There are no names yet, no lyrics and no instruments. There will be plenty of time for those.

This clip is not offered in irony, as a symbolic turn away from music. By stopping at the doorway, before we reach “the music itself,” I hope it will be clear that a discussion of mobility has not been incidental to musical production. The process of pursuing a musical object is itself highly revelatory in a way that can and should be meaningful to ethnomusicologists. In the paper just presented, what we heard as we traveled, from street noise to accents, held out quite a bit of useful data about the production of the music that lay behind the door, still beyond our ears. I am not suggesting that we dispense with conventional musical analysis, but I hope that by isolating and listening closely to the journey, I have convinced you that attention to space can be a useful ethnographic method.

And if the trip was dizzying, if it left us with a nebulous cluster of conclusions rather than a concrete object to take home, perhaps we should let it be so. The phenomenological experience of moving through an urban area, through channels carved out according to a variety of logics, has a great deal to teach us about spatial contours and effects, which bear in no small way on the bundle of relationships called culture. Understanding the relationships between space and cultural practice will require enduring a little motion sickness.

Finally, too often the traditional and the modern are dichotomized and counterposed, eastern body and western infection. But modernity is not a viral condition. It is a diffuse ideological regimen with a long and complex history that demands new ways of thinking through identity, including some that are equipped to consider mobility more acutely than situation. For ethnomusicologists, it is crucial to recognize that music in a modern moment – be it received as traditional, popular, or classical – is necessarily routed through a modern infrastructure. Listening to space, we can begin to hear how.

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

^[1]
Dyson, p. 182

^[2]
Dyson commits the entire middle portion of the book to specific discussions of these figures and their ideas, as well as to the writing of Heidegger, Derrida, and other philosophers who have theorized sound or sonority. The present review focuses very narrowly on one of the author’s general theoretical assertions, for reasons of expediency largely bypassing these particular discussions.

^[3]
Dyson, p. 154

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/25/review-2-this-is-not-a-medium/feed/ 1 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/#comments Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:57:29 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=302 I recorded something last week. I don’t know what. First order of business: do you?

For context, G.F. and I moved last month to an apartment on the cusp of Kensington and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Our neighborhood is Hasidic/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Polish/Albanian/Mexican/Caribbean, among others. We have, in the course of our sensory adjustment to the new neighborhood, gotten acclimated to the muezzin issuing five calls to prayer every day over a loudspeaker, to lots of children running around the building, and to the daily delivery of goat carcasses by the truckful to the butcher down the block. But some things are still unclear, even if we have guesses. e.g., Why do so many men congregate outside the closed-looking dentist’s office across the street? What’s in the jungle that comprises our (inaccessible) backyard? What and why does a chorus of women sometimes chant, as above, around dinner time?

Our new neighborhood, 1903

I’ve been researching sonic conflict in urban space for a few years now, and Brooklyn is a great place to do it. As much time as Brooklynites spend around people of different habits, cultural variation is so dense and dynamic here that even longtime residents tend to find themselves perplexed by sounds they can’t quite place. For some, what can’t be identified is heard as evidence of a special diversity. For others, or for the same people under different circumstances, weird sounds are rude, inappropriate, extraneous, heretical, and/or invasive. (I’ve heard people mention each of these.) We seem to have something of an itch to locate sound, not only in terms of where it’s coming from but in terms of what it means. We want a reference, often desperately. Why?

So, the second order of business: why do you think unidentified sound is so disturbing?

And the third: what mysterious sounds (recordings or descriptions, from wherever) would you like to share?

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/10/07/ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah-ya-ah-indayah/feed/ 7 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/08/door-county-wisconsin-borders-and-non-borders/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/08/door-county-wisconsin-borders-and-non-borders/#comments Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:54:49 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=75 Me and S visited Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin last month for her birthday. It’s about three hours’ drive from Madison. We reserved a room in a bed & breakfast fifteen miles from the bay itself. When we called to make the reservation, we were really impressed by the owner’s thick upper Midwestern accent.

Conversation between Door County bed & breakfast hosts and guests, July, 2009

During our stay, we ended up talking to her and her husband for quite a long time. (In the recording, they talk about their next-door neighbor, a musician who’s planning to lift a piano to the top of his grain silo to play when he retires.) His family immigrated from Belgium and hers from Ireland, both in the mid 19th century. Both families have been in and around Door County ever since. The b&b house itself is about that old as well. It’s built on a farm where the couple used to raise cattle, and where they now grow corn, hay, and soy beans, They run their b&b, I think, mainly for company.

In the previous post, I took for granted that “Thai” and “American” ears were absolutely distinct, but our experience in Door County should cast at least some doubt on the assumption that national citizenship can be uncritically mobilized as an anthropological category. While we obviously spoke the same language, the couple’s accents were for us a pretty profound marker of difference. As soon as we first heard the hostess’ voice on the phone, we had the sense that our trip would take us pretty far out of our normal environment. And when we sat down and talked, our differences were a primary subject of conversation. America, like Thailand, and probably like any nation in the world, is a place of significant internal difference rather than homogeneity. It is also a place whose contours have been shaped by patterns of migration and exchange. Spend a couple hours in Bangkok, and you’ll hear embodied residues of the same sorts of migratory histories – Chinese immigrants, farang (foreign) ex-pats, migrant laborers from Isaan, etc.

In language classes, we might well notice that native Thais tend to speak English with particular intonations, or that Americans tend to do the same with Thai. But at least in anthropology, these surface-level observations can’t substitute for an awareness of the ways that nations – all nations – are internally fragmented. Accent can be a useful clue to this fragmentation, as it was for us when we made our reservations.

]]> http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/08/door-county-wisconsin-borders-and-non-borders/feed/ 2656 http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/05/tonal-language-atonal-speakers/ http://www.weirdvibrations.com/2009/08/05/tonal-language-atonal-speakers/#comments Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:09:35 +0000 Ben http://www.weirdvibrations.com/?p=45

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.

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