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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Above: Thomas Ashcraft’s recording of the invasion of Baghdad, 2003. From Soundtransit.nl

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This is a follow-up to the previous post, which was a general typology of sound maps. Many readers wrote in with more maps that, in one way or another, extend the format. Ten of them are listed here.

1) The London Sound Survey

The London Sound Survey map is both assiduous and lovely. Many sound maps treat geography in two-dimensions – the LSS adds graphical elements that go further. It uses “recordings of background atmospheres and incidental noises from all over London” to comprise “a sound grid series recorded at evenly-spaced points across the city.” The recordings can also be represented graphically, so that a musical note represents a musical recording, and so on. Some other sound maps do this, too, but LSS is unique in that the boldness of each icon represents that element’s volume. This is much easier to see than to explain.

2) Madrid Soundscape
Madrid Soundscapes is a Spanish-language, collaborative documentary map of Madrin and environs, with recordings marked by color-coded pins indicating categories such as “social interactions,” “events,” “mechanical sound,” and “silence.” The site includes a Derridean manifesto about the divide between the visual and the oral.

3) Free Sound Barcelona
Free Sound Barcelona is another Spanish-language site that features not only a map, but a blog and other specific projects, such as the documentation of personal “audioways.” The map uses a satellite view, with larger pins representing clusters of sounds which can be accessed by zooming in and clicking directly. Although this map is structurally very similar to many other city-based collaborative efforts, it has a rather unique voice.

4) Noisetube

Noisetube, in its own words, is “is a research project about a new participative approach for monitoring noise pollution involving the general public. Our goal is to extend the current usage of mobile phones by turning them into noise sensors enabling each citizen to measure his own exposure in his everyday environment.” The project monitors more than 35 cities in total, using a sophisticated system to analyze raw loudness. Recordings can also be tagged with “social annotations,” weather, time, location, and more. The number of measurements per city ranges from less than 10 to more than 10,000.

Noisetube seems to be the most advanced effort at noise pollution control through environmental engineering. While the project leaves itself open to a number of methodological and theoretical questions, its approach to sound mapping is worth a look:

5) Soundcities
Soundcities was created by the British artist Stanza. It is effectively global in scope, although clustered in Europe (and to a lesser degree east Asia and the Americas), with Google Earth-based maps of forty cities in total. Rio de Janairo has one recording, Chicago four, and London perhaps a hundred.

Soundcities is described as “An online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks.” The sounds are meant to evoke a sense of place, but also to become available for composition.

6) Locus Sonus
Locus Sonus is a world map with pins representing active microphones streaming ambient sound in real-time. Microphones are operated by volunteers in many cities, some of whom also provide photo galleries of their locations. The intention is to “provide a permanent (and somewhat emblematic) resource to tap into as raw materiel for our artistic experimentation.” The streams can be mixed or heard individually.

The site is essentially an ongoing art project, which also serves as fodder for further projects. It is essentially generative rather than documentary in nature.

7) Hypercities

Hyercities is “a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.” Sound is just one among many elements in a “digital curation project” that collects data about a time and place – say, Tehran in 2009 – and then gives visitors access to that material through an interactive map. With the Tehran example in particular, Hypercities is advertised as a tool for political transparency.

8 ) SOINU MAPA

SOINU MAPA is a collaborative sound map documentary of Basque country.

9) Sound Transit

Sound Transit is a well-designed site with a robust database of phonographic recordings. The home page offers three options: “search for sounds,” “book a transit,” and “localisms.”

“Search for sounds” is a simple database, searchable by keyword or location. A search for Thailand, for example, led to a submenu of four cities, from which I chose Bangkok. Seven recordings by five different sound hunters came up. Searching by keyword worldwide, queries for unlikely terms such as “golf,” “hospital,” “spider,” and “tomato” all turned up positive, suggesting
the database is deep indeed. More likely words such as “birds” and “street” each returned more than 100 results.

“Book a transit” – my favorite sound mapping instrument anywhere to date – allows you to “plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world,” with an interface that imitates online travel booking. My itinerary looked like this:

The site also outputs sounds from each location in your itinerary into a single, playable string, with slow fades between each part. No other sound map I’ve seen evokes so emphatically the transformations of space, including sonic space, that take place in a mobile modernity. Although this suggests the possibility of even more commentary and critique ready at hand, it is an exceptionally thoughtful presentation.

10) Radio Aporee
Radio Aporee is a global map that can be viewed through Google Maps or as a bewildering network of lines and tags. The map does not reveal political divisions. The recordings, of which there are thousands, are user-contributed, and include not only environmental sound, but voicemail “tags” of a location that can be added by anyone with a cell phone. Visitors can access sounds directly, at random, or as mixes.

According to the site’s proprietor, Udo Noll, “there are some other “interfaces” to listen, e.g. the permanent stream of (randomly or intentionally grouped) recordings at http://radio.aporee.org/ , the experiments in public spaces, with hybrid/mixed realities (superpositions of “real” spaces and the geolocated sound archives, explored by GPS-walks etc. http://aporee.org/maps/mobile/), and last but not least the user’s, artist’s, contributor’s projects within radio aporee, e.g.”

These include

- The Global Bridge Symphony

- Allah Bul Kheer – Of street vendors and displaced people in damascus

- The Montreal Sound Map

- The The Stuttering Stroll

- Resonanzen

In many cases, reducing sound to a visual field is a bit awkward – do we really hear better while looking at a two-dimensional picture on a screen than we would if we were actually in the space being represented? Maybe not, but the general desire to control sound is very strong, and what better way to control something than to pinpoint it? In this way, for example, compositional maps bring the urban din into a realm of aesthetic order, policy maps subject it to regulation, archival maps protect it against decay, and application maps help us navigate it. There are obvious appeals (and complexities) in each.

Below is a typology of the most common kinds of sound maps, with examples. Many of these come from recent discussions on the Sound Studies listserv, and from an item on Wayneandwax. Have I missed any important categories? Do you know of other examples?

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Collaborative Documentary
This is probably the most straightforward category, and the most logical outgrowth of available technologies.

Open Sound New Orleans is a simple map of the city that allows users to upload self-recorded sounds in the categories of “voice,” “music,” and “ambient,” and to plot them where they were made. The site functions as a local forum, with an emphasis (based on the most frequently used tags) on post-Katrina revitalization, business, neighborhoods, and community. Many of the recordings are interviews. Like many sound maps in this category, Open Sound New Orleans uses sound (as opposed to text) to better emulate “being there.”

In a similar vein, SoundSeeker.org overlays user-submitted field recordings on a map of New York City.

A sound map of Montreal.

Soundwalks in San Francisco, Lisbon, Istanbul, Basel, and more.

Composition/Artwork
This is actually a very diverse category, and one that relies comparatively less often on mapping in the standard visual sense. For example, GPS Beatmap: Planet as Control Surface is a piece of software that uses GPS to assign musical snippets to small circles of land all over the planet. As users walk or drive around, they traverse different circles, creating a beat-matched mix as they move:

There is also a lot of politically oriented work in this category. Heidi Boisvert’s sonicWarfare hands listeners a map of midtown Manhattan, overlaid by a semi-transparent map of the section of Baghdad where U.S. troops invaded in 2002. You follow a route on the map while listening to a recording of an imaginary war – the intended effect is to make conflict seem real, even personal: “Protest in Vietnam was mobilized by images, but today images of war barbarity do not pose the same disgust, disquiet. We have become inured by the spectacle of violence paraded on TV and in movies. Why though when you see war reportage on the news are we not forced to endure the sounds of war? Is it harder to bear the pain of others through our ears … ? ”

Consumer Empowerment
There is something mildly unsettling to me about this category, even though I recognize its utility.

Soundaroundyou.com is a project under development at the Audio and Acoustic Engineering Research Centre at the University of Salford, for which people are asked to add their own recordings to a large data pool for professional analysis. Sounds are also tagged by users with their own qualitative opinions. According to the site, the project “could have far reaching implications for professions and social groups ranging from urban planners to house buyers.”

As you can see at the end of the clip below, sound clips are rated from 1 to 10 in several areas, such as tranquility, activity, soundscape quality, etc. It is implied that the research could ultimately identify areas of sonic pollution, allowing them to be cleaned up through various strategies. But a rating system like this invites much subjective disagreement, since sound is notoriously prone to differences of interpretation. And subjectivity, especially in metropolitan cities, is always bound up with issues like class and ethnicity. The (very difficult) question not asked here is how we can manage sound in a way that is also socially just?

Meanwhile, GeoGraffiti is a cell phone application that allows you to “tag” any place with a voice recording. You might leave a restaurant review, an event announcement, or a funny comment. Other GeoGraffiti users passing by that same spot could then call in and hear your message.

Preservation
This category essentially has two subsections: historical and natural sound. Both of these are animated by an impulse that ethnomusicology knows very well, that is, the need to save “endangered” sounds through archival preservation.

The most prominent historical effort is the BBC’s global Save Our Sounds audio map. Save Our Sounds is built on an engine much like the collaborative documentaries above; however, its purpose is explicitly ecological: “Precious sounds are dying while new ones enter our lives … So here at the BBC we want to build a sound map of the world – and save endangered sounds from extinction.”

Another site, Sydney Sidetracks, offers historical material, including sound and video, tagged to a map of Australia’s largest city. The site encourages you to “download a version to your mobile or load up your player and take the stories with you. When you next visit the city, you can listen to the crowds at Martin Place celebrating the end of WWII or watch George St., 1906, from a moving train.” Sydney Sidetracks combines documentary and artistic approaches to produce a heightened sense of verisimilitude about the past.

Preservation of natural sound has a slightly different flavor. This type of work often vilifies man-made noise, and calls for a greater appreciation of natural or environmental sound. Groups like the Right to Quiet Society call for outright abatement, while artist-researchers like Gordon Hempton (whose recordings are fantastic) pursue sonic purity and plot it geographically. Not silence, per se, but spaces where human sound is totally absent. Such a pursuit is, clearly, about more than volume. However, it is increasingly clear that the preservation of sonically “natural” space requires lots of work – campaigning for awareness, lobbying for changes in flight patterns, hiring park rangers to enforce sound restrictions in wooded areas – all of which, ironically, produces noise.

Policy Data
This is by necessity the most reductive category of sound mapping. Cities pursuing noise control need clear data that can be translated directly to enforcement. Unfortunately, this usually means maps not linked to actual sonic events, that estimate decibels based on things like infrastructure and traffic level.

San Francisco Department of Public Health, noise pollution map

Noise map of Central London

These maps are meant to help city planners be more aware of the impact of sound when making choices about zoning and construction, which is a good goal. However, acoustics (especially theoretical acoustics) can only predict so much about aural imposition.

A spectrogram is a three-dimensional picture of sound – any sound. The three dimensions are time, frequency, and amplitude. Spectrograms usually look abstract, like successions of clumsy paint strokes or stills from Tron. They’re useful for sound engineers, but not all that good to look at. However, some software can also conduct spectral analysis in reverse, translating images into sound. In this case, the images are clear and the audio typically abstract.

The sound clip above, for example, was created from the picture(s) of me, moving from left to right and reading discrete clusters of color and texture as frequencies. The line of my thumb moves diagonally upward from finger to nail, causing its attendant sound to rise in pitch.

Photosounder.com, home of Photosounder, has a great demo video of how their program works with various images:

This kind of graphic sound creation has actually been around for several years (though newer programs are increasingly sophisticated), and musicians and sound artists have toyed with it extensively as a way to create strange noises that don’t otherwise exist.

I bring it up today not only because it’s fun, but because of the rhetoric of truth and discovery it inspires. People encountering this software for the first time quickly figure out that it can be used to encode information. As an experiment, you could take a screen shot of an email, turn it into “abstract” spectrographic sound, and then send it as an .MP3 to a friend. If your friend knew how you’d created the sound, she could then translate it back into an image, and read your original message. Likewise, you could embed translations of any image or text in a song or movie soundtrack as an ambient layer. The mind races at the probability that this has already been done many times, as a prank, an easter egg, a subtle political gesture, or even a means of legitimately covert communication.

Says one blogger about Photosounder:

I can see people … maybe hid[ing] messages in photographs or art work.

The hermeneutic exercise can, of course, encompass not only human communication, but universal structures as well. Several posters on Photosounder’s Youtube page imagine the applications of spectral analysis for science or pseudo-science:

The potential in this concept is far more than many people realize.

You could, for example, create hidden coded messages insides pictures/fractals, and/or DECODE incredible secrets of the Universe with very little modification. ;)

It would be interesting to hear whether electronic voice phenomena (EVP) could be detected in these complex sounds.

These posters understand implicitly that visualization is the standard best mode of reading data, that sound as we hear it fares poorly against image in revealing patterns and broad trends. Thus, they assume that phenomena in the world (say, ghosts) may exist under our noses, present but undetectable until we invent a light that can shine on them.

For both the spiritual and science-minded, this suggests that natural sound could be worth divining spectrographically in search of patterns we haven’t been able to pick up with our ears. Sonic images that appear orderly invite claims of design, intelligent or incidental.

A recent photoessay of whale and dolphin sounds, rendered with a program similar to Photosounder and published in the London Telegraph, is a great example:

These images may look like just pretty patterns, but they are visual representations of songs sung by whales and dolphins

The sounds were recorded by American engineer Mark Fischer and transformed into visuals using a mathematical tool called wavelets

Mark used to work on US Navy sonar and software for defence and aerospace companies but he now records the underwater conversations between whales and dolphins and transforms the waves into art

Mark then uses a branch of maths called wavelets which creates these intricate structures

"To look at a spectrogram you will see a simple, boring blur with a few harmonics," he said....

"With wavelets, however, there was an image that displayed extraordinary structure. Something was going on with this sound, even if we are not quite sure what"

The effect is even more apparent when colour is applied and the graph transformed from rectangular to polar coordinates, forming a circular graph

Atlantic spotted dolphin, wavelet graph

Recent research shows that humpback whale songs differ in local dialects and contain complex grammatical rules, showing a higher level of communication than first thought

The risk of this approach, of course, is in romantically imagining that the software has no bearing on the data represented. The complex beauty of the pictures may lead us to forget that the computational processes used to render them were designed by people who probably share many of our own standards of beauty – formal symmetry, clear coloration, sharp lines, etc. Faced with images like these, we’re inclined to imagine that god, or evolution, or some other force, created a perfectly-patterned world, one that can ultimately be “read” and understood. But no matter who or what is in charge, that isn’t the case.

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

The officer in the case, Ken Roth, was unable to make a reliable radar reading, but he claimed that he could tell simply by listening that Freitag’s vehicle was speeding.

According to the decision:

Ptl. Roth testified at trial that he was parked in his patrol car along the side of U.S. 42 at 9:16 p.m. on October 8, 2007, when he heard a vehicle he could not yet see. He testified that, based on the sound of the vehicle, he believed it was traveling in excess of the 35 m.p.h. posted speed limit. The officer testified that he “audibly heard the speeding, not the speed of the vehicle.” Ptl. Roth clarified: “As it approached I could hear the vehicle on the roadway which based on my training and experience it is consistent with a vehicle that was in excess of the posted speed limit.”

Fascinatingly, Roth distinguishes between the sound of speeding and the sound of moving at any specific speed. The sound of speeding is marked, presumably, by aggressive engine noise. We’ve all heard vehicles that sound like this. Often enough, it’s a jock move.

But, by hearing alone, what would distinguish a normal engine working hard enough to speed from an inefficient engine working just hard enough to drive the limit? Or an engine in a car with a broken muffler?

Nothing could distinguish them. Or, rather, doing so would require an ear trained to identify engine types, and to be able to hear precisely how these engines were operating. The officer’s claim, that he’d heard lots of speeding cars before, did not convince the judge that he was qualified to make such an assessment.

From her opinion:

It is simply incredible, in the absence of reliable scientific, technical, or other specialized information, to believe that one could hear an unidentified vehicle “speeding” without being able to determine the actual speed of the vehicle. The officer offered no testimony regarding how he might have been trained to audibly distinguish various speeds, let alone to distinguish the speeds of various makes and models of vehicles.

What’s intriguing about this ruling is that, thinking beyond conventional empirical evidence (namely, the radar gun), the judge alludes to the possibility of a hypothetical listener skilled enough to be able to do exactly what Officer Roth only imagined he could – to listen as well as the radar sees. This would, admittedly, be a type of listening disciplined by visualism inasmuch as it would be burdened with the task of identification, which is a visual metaphor. But it would still be an impressive technique.

“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.

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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.)

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