This was especially true for the networks of small-scale industrial/manufacturing labor situated on back streets, away from the main traffic arteries. These networks are vast and often informal, but they provide vital services for a big city and employ many people. Some businesses are run out of storefront machine shops, while others use little more than a patch of sidewalk. We’re talking small engine repair, recycling collection, welding, wire-stripping, and the like.

This montage includes five examples of the sounds of urban labor in a tense time. Each is about one minute; follow the annotations below as you listen.

0:00 – 1:07 A recycling facility on a large side street supports many young men in the neighborhood, who gather paper, cardboard, and plastic bottles from nearby buildings and bring them in for 2 baht per kilogram. Here, two men crush cans and stuff them into big clear bags, which they load onto a cart.

1:08 – 2:01 In the United States, ice cream trucks are just about the only mobile sonic advertisements we have. In Thailand, there’s a greater variety, including fruit trucks with speakers tied to the top, so the driver can call out that day’s price for mangosteens and lychees. In this recording, a mobile broom-and-bucket-shop plays its jingle again and again. Sonic ads for all kinds of businesses are more tolerated here, for whatever reason.

2:02 – 3:08 A welder fixes up a door. This neighborhood is a mixture of large, modern houses, international schools, and blue-collar family homes. Many of the blue-collar workers do construction work for their wealthier neighbors.

3:09 – 3:50 A pair of young men hammer thin metal poles into shape for use in construction.

3:51 – 5:45 Some of the more established shops supply parts for larger industries, including automobile manufacturing. Since most of the cars built in Thailand will be exported to other countries, these small shops are closely connected to global trade. As you can hear an example of from about five minutes onward, news reports were often the soundtrack to these shops in April and May.

Image by Seth Denizen

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

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

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:

For others, he’s the guy who, back in summer 2006, recorded himself playing the trumpet on his balcony in Beirut while Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on the city. This occurred during the brief but severe Israeli attack on Lebanon. Kerbaj was, like most people around, a citizen not a soldier. The munitions aimed at him were not aimed at him. Perhaps their sound was.

The piece is more complex, compositionally, than trumpets v. bombs. It begins with crickets and a pregnant silence that isn’t disturbed for a while. The trumpet is quiet for almost a minute, and the first bomb doesn’t hit until 1:09. The explosions each echo for a long time, through corridors of buildings, setting off choruses of car alarms and barking dogs. The crickets always return. The bombs shut them out again. The trumpet eventually reminds us of tens of thousands of ears in range – like the musician, impatiently interpreting.

The recording, titled “Starry Night,” is a few years old now, and has been plenty written about. Of all of Kerbaj’s work, it has gotten by far the most gushing praise for what is received almost across the board as an elegant critique of war. However, Rana El Kadi (U of Alberta) presented a paper on Kerbaj’s work last week at SEM that complicates the issue. She interviewed Kerbaj and, as it happens, he is lukewarm about the piece’s reception. It is, he apparently feels, a condescension for American and European critics to hear only metaphors of resistance in his work, while failing to evaluate it on the same aesthetic grounds as the output of a musician from someplace less war torn. He was not returning fire against the war planes, but simply expressing the weakness of his being in the shadow of a violence that threatened to overwhelm him.

My question (unasked) after El Kadi’s talk was about whether any of the Israeli fighter pilots involved in the bombing mission had ever heard Kerbaj’s recording, and if so, how had they reacted? What would their aesthetic criteria be? How would they be affected hearing someone hear them bomb Beirut, which is the gist of the piece? Kerbaj is right – his recording does not fight back. It makes his own audition audible, however, which is volatile in its own right.

There were, first, more panels than ever devoted to topics like technology, listening, and conflict. These redirect ethnomusicology toward problems of history and politics, which is the rationale for veering from music to sound. One great example was the music and violence panel chaired by JP. In it, Marié Abe gave a lovely paper on a peace music “festa” in (still) US military-occupied Okinawa. Rana El Kadi gave an equally lovely paper on problems of transnational aesthetics via the Beirut-born artist Mazen Kerbaj and his improvisations for trumpet and bombs recorded during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. (Look for a post on Kerbaj here soon.) In both cases, the question of music as resistance was rescued from mootness by an emphasis on sound and listening, including overhearing.

There was, second, a provocative President’s Roundtable focused on music scholarship in the wake of area studies.

This event made a few things clear. For one, area studies is widely acknowledged out loud as a relic, but ethnomusicology just can’t quit it. For two, the structure of the university is on the cusp of changes consonant with a cautiously optimistic neoliberal ethos – waiting at the gates for the recession to turn its back for one second, university administrators busy themselves tweaking business models in ways that will never be untweaked, expecting to rush through any minute with a renewed spirit of insatiable expansion. For three, the apparently undeniable quaintness of area studies might just be a way of cheerleading “for two” in ideological disguise. (Thanks to Dr. Cusick for insinuating as much. Read this, as well.) For four, this situation cries out not only for a sonic turn, but for very good Sound Studies work, the kind that arguably hasn’t even been done yet. We should know by now that music offers a genuinely unique avenue for thinking about interactions between culture, and interactions between culture (including disruption, violence, and transformation) are precisely at issue when considering the institutional changes that will inevitably trail the economic crisis. The aftermath of this crisis, like every crisis, will be a savage scramble.

There was, third, a Sound Studies special interest group meeting. We all hope this is the beginning of something significant. The membership includes some very impressive people. You are invited to join. The definition of Sound Studies remains opaque, perhaps necessarily so.

There was, fourth, a keynote address by the most prominent Ethnomusicologist in the business. Being a structural linguist, the speaker described
sound as a way of mapping culture onto environment. This approach, even as it foregrounds aurality, is mildly at odds with work that deals with interpretation and contest rather than ritual. With the keynote address, Sound Studies seemed newly imprecise, even standing at center stage.

There was, fifth, an announcement that one of next year’s conference themes would be sound. This was a significant step for Sound Studies, and revealed a recognition of an important new direction in the field. There were four subheadings to the sound theme, which LG recalls as 1) Music, displacement, and disaster; 2) music and social activism; 3) music, copyright, and human rights; and 4) film music. Good ideas, although none have to do with listening or audition, which is disappointing.

The winner of the 2008 contest, who laughed for more than 12 minutes and reached 110 decibels

Contestants are judged on “loudness, length, content, style, and infectious quality.” Loudness is gauged by a decibel-level reader, while all the others (save length) are assessed by human judges.

The laughing contest fits the profile of your average provincial diversion – colorful, good-natured, and inexplicable to outsiders. The difference in this case is that Pattaya is a pretty rough town, with high rates of gang-related violent crime, prostitution, and drugs. It was also the site of the 2009 red-shirt protests against prime minister Abhisit, which forced the cancellation of ASEAN. And it remains a pretty bizarre place in more minor ways as well.

For the benefit of American readers, I was going to say that holding a laughing contest in Pattaya would be like holding a laughing contest in Newark. Then I thought Las Vegas – or Reno – would be a better choice. But Miami in the 1970s is probably more perfect. Both are formerly sleepy resort towns transformed in a short period by tidal waves of narcotics and commercial sex, and both have gone to great lengths to make themselves livable and (more crucially) visitable. In doing so, both cities also spin a narrative about winning a war against criminals, negating the impression that ill-gotten profits built the skyline in the first place.

The Thai Ministry of Tourism and Sports funds the laughing contest, along with its organizers, Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Much like the facile nickname, “The Land of Smiles,” the contest – whether it began with such an intention or not – becomes a kind of top-down viral tactic by the government for disseminating happy narratives. Laughter is an especially astute choice because of its “infectious quality,” which is to say its tendency to spread involuntarily to all those within earshot. This is in (metaphorically rich) contrast to the kind of infectious epidemiology that generally characterizes a major sex trade outpost.

Thanks to B.B. and immanent discursivity for the link.

First, for the uninitiated, sound cannons (or LRADs) are a new type of crowd control device that riot control officers can shoot at people like a gun. Rather than discrete projectiles, it sends waves of howlingly loud noise, potentially including shrill, siren-like tones or direct verbal messages (“move back” and the like). This video gives a sense of how it works, and especially how loud it can be (fair warning: cover your ears!):

Like teargas, the sound cannon is attractive for use in crowd control because it is non-lethal but immediately effective. Governments can manage discontented people in an absolute fashion without creating martyrs or accruing liability. This is something of a loophole in the ethical treatment of protesters – the human body cannot tolerate sound in excess, but exposure leaves no (visible) scars. Perhaps in a wiser moment, we’ll take stock of the emotional distress such conditions can produce, of the long-term hearing loss that can occur with misuse of the machines, of potentially dangerous levels of stress, and of the disturbing political asymmetry such technology facilitates between a government and its citizens. But for now, sound cannons are perfectly legal.

LRADs operate in the threshold between normal listening, where vibration is mild enough that we experience sound as essentially immaterial, and where we can readily pay attention to communicative and aesthetic content (music, language, texture), and extreme sonic exposure, where vibration is felt as a force throughout the body. The sound cannon is far enough along this spectrum that we react involuntarily to its painful volume, but not so far along that we lose life or limb. It’s pretty brilliant, in a mad scientist kind of way.

In any case, it’s fascinating/macabre to consider what various sound levels can do to us physically. The hardware manufacturer makeitlouder.com has a whole chart.

(Decibels measure the intensity of a sound wave. They do not measure frequency, so for example knowing that a conversation occurs around 50 dbs does not tell us whether the voices are high or low.)

Here are some choice selections:

13 – Ordinary light bulb hum
30 – Totally quiet nighttime in desert – impossible near city
40 – A whisper
60 – Normal conversation
100 – House or car stereo at maximum volume
116 – Human body begins to perceive vibration at low frequencies (imagine standing in front of a speaker at a concert, for example)
125 – Drum at the moment of being hit
127 – Tinnitus sets in
128 – Human hair will begin to vibrate perceptibly
132 – Eardrum flex becomes noticeable
133 – Gunshot at ear level
135 – The air begins to cool from expansion
137 – The entire human body vibrates
140 – Extreme damage to hearing no matter how short the exposure (this, by the way, is how loud the LRAD can be set)
141 – The human body experiences nausea
142 – Chest pounding is intense
143 – Human body feels as if “someone just football tackled your chest”
145 – Human vision begins to vibrate
153 – Human throat vibrates so hard it is almost impossible to swallow
163 – Minimum glassbreaking level
172 – Fog is created
175 – Equivalent to a quarter stick of dynamite
180 – Damage to structures is catastrophic
186.1 – Equivalent to a pound of TNT at a distance of 10 feet
202 – Immediate human death
220 – Equivalent to the largest bomb used in WWII
257 – Equivalent to 1 megaton nuclear bomb

etc.

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.

It is because of these characteristics that we so often experience protest as a series of shouts disrupting an otherwise repetitive sonic field – a street, a campaign speech, a public hearing.

As a caveat, things are rarely so straightforward. Precisely because of its power, voice is always policed. In the United States, the First Amendment includes an honesty clause: you can shout as loudly as you want about anything, except as it might be dishonest or dangerous. (i.e. a nonexistent fire in a crowded theater). Furthermore, locally, you need a permit to use your voice above a certain volume. I cannot go out on the street leading 10,000 people down Broadway in a chant, nor hook up loudspeakers through which to yell, without getting permission, which can of course be denied. The question of who gets permission to shout above a certain threshold introduces, obviously, inequalities based on political influence.

If we listen more closely, we will realize that there are even subtler ideological impediments to the use of the voice in protest – local norms about the propriety of public discussion of politics, the receptivity of listeners, both hard and soft discouragements of public gatherings, and even the specific shape and arrangement of built spaces can police the voice as an instrument of protest.

A June exchange on the Sound Studies listserv reminded me of this fascinating play between the voice in protest and the instruments that work to restrict it. Dr. D.W. posted a June 20 article from the Los Angeles Times about the impromptu rooftop shouting sessions that occurred nightly after the divisive and disputed reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

DISPATCH FROM TEHRAN
Iran rooftop chorus swells in the night

Calls of ‘God is great!’ from losing opposition presidential candidate
Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s backers ricochet around a city block despite
warnings against further protest.
By Borzou Daragahi
June 20, 2009
Los Angeles Times

It starts with two young female voices, quietly at first, almost
gently piercing the quiet of the night.

“Allahu akbar!” they cry out a few minutes after 10 p.m. “God is
great!”

Then another voice joins in from the other side of the block. This one
belongs to an older woman. “God is great!” she responds in a rasp that
suggests decades of hardship and swallowed rage. “Allahu akbar!”

After a minute or two, a male voice joins in. It’s as if he needed a
little time to put on his slippers and clamber to the rooftop.

“Allaaaaahu akbar,” he moans.

Within a few minutes a choir of voices erupts.

“Ya, Hossein!” a man with a sturdy baritone announces across the lush
trees. “O Hossein!”

“Mir-Hossein!” a group of women shrieks back, every ounce of energy
straining through petite voices.

“Marg bar dictator!” a voice erupts. “Death to the dictator!” And then
more voices, a cacophony of anonymous anger. “Marg bar dictator. Marg
bar dictator.”

I have never thought of the quiet, leafy neighborhood where I stay
when I’m in Tehran as particularly political. During the daytime, the
only sounds are of water streaming through the canal.

My greatest concern has been to skip out of the way of the young guy
speeding down the narrow street in his SUV, pop music blaring out his
windows.

Until now, the most momentous events have been the rollicking parties
some of the neighbors have thrown, which filled the street with cars
of merrymakers.

But my opinion started to change after Iran’s June 12 presidential
election. Supporters of losing candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi called
for Iranians who had voted for him to climb to their rooftops between
9 and 11 p.m. and shout “God is great!” to voice their discontent over
alleged vote-rigging.

The gesture harks back 30 years to the months before the Islamic
Revolution. It was a way to reassure others that they weren’t alone in
feeling wronged and enraged.

Today it motivates people to attend the peaceful marches that have
become the largest acts of civil disobedience in three decades.

On Friday, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s highest
spiritual and political authority, laid down the law: There would be
no reconsideration of the vote count. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s
reelection would stand. No amount of pressure, even the hundreds of
thousands marching through the streets, would make him bend.
Protesters would continue at their own risk.

As Friday night approaches, I wonder whether Khamenei’s prayer sermon
will quell the voices.

When 10 p.m. arrives, there is nary a sound except for the wind
brushing against the drapes. But then the silhouettes begin to emerge,
lithe teens and potbellied men.

“Allahu akbar!” the two young women cry out across the rooftops.

Another voice joins in, and then another, and then another, building
to a crescendo.

“Allaaaaahu akbar!” a deep male voice crests.

The voice is beautiful, and easily recognizable as the muezzin from
the local mosque.

“Allaaaaahu akbar!” his rich voice echoes through the neighborhood.
“Allaaaaahu akbar!”

After reading the piece, I emailed the author to see if he had any recordings of the shouting. He did, and was gracious enough to share them.

Bill B. forwarded a video of the same event, different night, called “Poem for the Rooftops of Iran”
The narrator calls rooftop shouting:

“One of the most simple and effective ways to call people to come together. They can take away our text messaging. They can take away our internet. They can even take away our phones. But with our cries of Allah-o-Akbar we will show them we can still come together.”

Voice here is useful not only for the reasons listed above (convenience, emotional impact, solidarity) but because it confers visual anonymity. With protesters now standing trial in Tehran, and with executions being a very real threat, the protesters were clearly not wrong to avoid letting their faces be associated with their words.

Of course, not every protest is the same, and not all protesters are “right” (though I happen to sympathize pretty strongly with the dissenting voices in Tehran). I am not exploring voice in order to blindly join the cause of everyone in the world who is politically unsatisfied, or who identifies, however vaguely, with “the left” or whatever. The compelling question here, for me, is how our senses are utilized, controlled, and contested in fields of ideological difference.