The UFO-like Chedi (inner memorial hall)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The practice continues today. A BBC piece from last week describes how the readings, the content of which includes the newspaper, self-help books, modern novels, and classics, “help[s] workers pass away the day.” The repetition of the job makes it easy to concentrate on other information and, in turn, alleviates boredom with the original task. (Which, as you might imagine, can be immense.)

The factory owner is arguably the main beneficiary of the reader’s work, since he’ll end up with more cigars to sell. For their part, the workers are – for both better and worse – mentally shielded from their shitty jobs.

But the segment also suggests an educational benefit. Cigar factory employees often have little or no contact with literature elsewhere in their lives, so the readings offer them access to useful information about the world. What the report doesn’t mention is that reading to laborers was an idea originally organized in prisons. The modern tradition of factory reading stems directly from that history. From the Cuban Heritage Collection:

In 1861 activist and intellectual Nicolás Azcárate proposed reading to prisoners in jail as part of their rehabilitation. His idea was implemented and, since many prisoners rolled cigars to earn wages, a direct link to the cigar industry was established. The wages, received by prisoners at the end of their terms, were managed in the meantime by the prison administrators and used in part to replenish the book fund.

This is liberalism in a classic sense. But education had effects beyond rehabilitation:

Factory readings became popular, attracting passersby who stopped to listen outside. Several newspapers dedicated articles to the subject and published reading lists. But the custom also had detractors who claimed it encouraged revolutionary ideas. They were not entirely wrong: tobacco workers became the best informed working sector and vital in the fight for independence, both inside Cuba and in Tampa, where they organized in support of the Independence movement.

What other stories about sound and labor are you aware of?

Thanks to ST for the original link.

I made some recordings during and after one of the last screenings of the movie at the Bridge cinema de lux in Philadelphia. And Amina Robinson, who played Jermaine (pictured above), was kind enough to answer a few questions as well.

To first offer some minimal background for those who haven’t seen or otherwise heard much about the movie, Precious is an adaptation of a 1996 novel chronicling the harrowing difficulties of a 16-year-old girl growing up in deep poverty in Harlem. We see Precious, the title character, abused in just about every way imaginable, and the story piles her troubles on thick. The ending is hopeful, if not quite happy. Stylistically, extended sequences of grim realism are broken up by vignettes of playful, ironic fantasy, as well as some fleeting moments that border on normal adolescence. (More detailed plot summaries are widely available elsewhere.)

Critics were knocked backwards and sideways by this movie, to its immense credit. I’m not sure I read a single great review, but I certainly read plenty of painful ones. Somehow, Precious brought many critics to an irresponsibly simplistic conception of how race operates. Although the movie never claimed to speak for “black experience,” and in fact alluded to the fiction of any such singular experience (black characters spanned the socioeconomic spectrum), many writers missed this point entirely, and built entire arguments around a premise that existed only in their own nervous imaginations. And this was the case equally for those who loved and hated it.

Reading the reviews in aggregate offers a breathtaking picture of how inadequate our vocabulary for discussing race can be. The archaic presumptions left unquestioned by critics include, but are not limited to: that definitions of race are rigidly fixed; that race is only about black people and white people; that all black people are poor; that all black people see the world the same way; and that all white people are plagued by guilt. And not at all unconnected to the desperate poverty of wise commentary about race among film critics has been a persistent emphasis on race as an exclusively visual concept.

Listening to audiences watch Precious speaks to race and racial anxiety in ways that vision cannot. Unfortunately, almost all ethical questions raised about the movie in print so far have been about watching the main character. Is it therapeutic? Pornographic? How does the way YOU look affect your right to see her? But in truth, audiences do a lot more than watch during films. They listen, to the characters and to each other, and respond to both. In doing so, they open gaps that suggest nothing if not race’s perplexing contours.

At Precious, a culture of audience participation met awkwardly with a story whose villains and laugh lines were often ambiguous. On one hand (0 – :29 seconds), the movie had a wry sense of humor, even at serious moments. On the other hand (:29 – :58), the mother character, played by Mo’ Nique, was obviously a villain. But viewers disagreed as to whether her villainy was dead serious, a target for verbal outrage, or even a source of comic relief. I spoke to a young couple (:58 – 1:41) who had watched in a theater with an older woman who was so enraged by Mo’ Nique’s character that she yelled at the screen. Meanwhile, the couple found some moments, including a self-deprecating line about Precious’ weight (1:43 – 1:54), funny. Finally, a woman about my age outside the theater (1:55 – 2:55) was “appalled” by laughter at moments that she felt were inappropriate. She attributed such laughter to people being nervous about confronting the seriousness of the content.

I asked Amina Robinson about these kinds of reactions:

I actually had this conversation with one of my White co-workers. He asked why the African-Americans in the theater were laughing while it seemed the White people were appalled. I certainly have noticed that as well. When I’ve seen Precious with a lot of Black folks in the audience it is actually more funny throughout, just as when there has been mostly White people there is a lot of silence.

I find both very interesting. I can’t speak for all African-Americans, but some of us know the characters in this movie. When we see them and are confronted with this particular brand of pathology we identify with it and laugh. It feels good to know that you are not alone in what you’ve experienced. There is a certain justification. While other African-Americans see it, identify with it, and feel the strong push to deal with and heal it.

In reverse, many White people watching this movie seem to be being introduced to a part of life that they were ignorant to. So they get sucked into the world and are captivated and speechless. That is not to say that White people don’t deal with the issues in the film, because they do, but Precious is simply the Black version. It takes place in a world they may be unfamiliar with.

Personally, I laughed some and cried some. And I find any reaction to the film valid and worthy of discussion.

The disparity in reactions, ostensibly along racial lines, has led some viewers to extreme conclusions. A viewer in a forum on Oprah.com, writes:

I tried to talk about the film, process the themes and examine the extraordinary performances. I tried, but I could not escape the whole of the experience. I walked in a white woman and walked out a racist. Disgust with the audience became disgust in my heart, disappointment with myself and fear that my work as a teacher in the inner city was tainted by unclaimed/unacknowledged racism. I can escape neither my disgust with the audience nor my own sense of shame and loss. Is this the power of “Precious”, I wonder?

But, to put it bluntly, not every African-American laughed, and not every white person didn’t. However, for those unaccustomed to hearing interpretations vocalized during the movie, half of the audience, or even a handful of people, could easily stand in for everyone, or at least be a pesky distraction. Robinson describes the importance of responding authentically, regardless of one’s reasons:

We are human beings. We all have different experiences of life that affect how we view the world. We are as different as we are the same, and I think it does humanity and art an injustice to try to dictate how someone should respond to an artistic work.

I say laugh if you must, cry if you must. I do draw a line at talking in the theater though, because then you are ruining the movie for others. Other than that let the movie affect you as it does.

For Robinson, all viewers may relate to dramatic material differently. In an environment where loud response is normal, such relationships are not necessarily more fractured, just more public. This has benefits as well as drawbacks:

I can only speak from my experience when I say that I feel African-Americans like to connect to art in a very visceral way. We like to live our art, feel it, and breathe it. So when we are moved by something we become a part of it and enjoy communicating with it and adding our input. We do come from a tradition of call and response and I think that it can be a beautiful thing.

Aside from possibly that, I don’t think it is a racial issue. I think it is one of experience and identification. We as people connect in different ways to different things based on what they mean to us. Precious is a universal story of triumph over the odds, but it is still about a Black girl.

Clearly, listening to audiences watch Precious does not signal the end of racial difference. What it suggests, rather, is the danger of taking race at face value. Critics have been so quick to divide white and black viewers that they’ve missed the enormous interpretive divisions that the film has created among viewers of all racial self-identifications. This fact is much more audible than it is visible. But our audition has to be thorough. Just because we hear someone in a theater – or experience their silence – doesn’t mean we understand them, or even know what their reaction means.

Most of the interview snippets concern race, obliquely or head-on. If you ask New Yorkers open-ended questions about anything, the conversation will almost always end up there sooner or later. The movie anthropomorphizes common New York objects in a generally random fashion (with the exception of the Italian luggage, I didn’t read any associations between thing and identity), but the matter of race remains, both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly, when the red emergency services box speaks about her pride as a black woman, when the big and little newspaper boxes discuss their Cherokee ancestry, etc., and implicitly when accents and other vocal details suggest individual histories – the smoker’s cough of the Bronx-born free-used-car-info box seemed, to me, particularly suggestive. Also notable was the Asian (?) pay phone’s awkward reference to “some black people” blasting music from their car, although the remark was obviously well-meaning.

Thanks to TM for the original link.

Next week: the ethics of recording involuntary outbursts, and the sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia.

The recordings here come from a 3-disc collection called “Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik: Recordings Of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007″ compiled by the German label Supposé.

Recording technologies have, since their inception, invited speculation about spiritual presences. We discussed recently in this space how music copied onto x-rays in Soviet Russia have served as a powerful metaphor for, and instantiation of, the association between technology and death.

In the realm of visual representation, spirit photography was something of a cottage industry in the 20th century. At one time, you could hire a photographer to capture hard visual evidence of a deceased love one in a space they were suspected of haunting. The camera, as they say, doesn’t lie. Of course, once people began to understand film technology a little better, and could identify light leaks, smudges, processing imperfections, and double exposures, photography’s spiritual intrigue was rapidly deflated.

The recordings on “Okkulte Stimmen,” however, are eerie in a very different, and perhaps more enduring sense. Even once we “get” them, they remain scary:

Though we may have theories about the actual nature of possession (delusion, disease) that differ from the exorcist’s, there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of this particular item. The exorcism, as an event, certainly occurred, and Anneliese Michel has a tragic story. Hers was the last exorcism sanctioned by the Catholic Church, and she died just a few months after the priest finished, presumably of malnutrition.

Regardless of its true explanation, there is something uncanny about hearing a possessed voice. In the conventional sense of uncanninness, this is a matter of cognitive dissonance caused by an auditory short circuit, of hearing an unexpected emanation from a source we thought we knew well. There are also technological, geographic, and linguistic short circuits – so much about this recording feels alien – that further distance us from any place where explication of the event might be possible. Even if we don’t believe in spirits, this recording confronts us with the fact that someone once did, and quite powerfully at that. Now an unsettling, material remainder of their belief has landed in our laps.

John Lydon sings the last line of PiL’s “Annelisa,” based on Annaliese’s life, in an imitation of her voice.

One more great piece from the compilation:

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.

The membranes of the syrinx are controlled by muscles with a degree of nuance that humans cannot match. Furthermore, the lower anatomical position of the vocal organ – at the base of the bronchi – allows all kinds of neat tricks, including the ability to make two totally different sounds at once. This is employed in birdsong to neat effect.

Thus, whereas humans mimic environmental sounds with relatively low fidelity (a few outstanding exceptions aside), certain birds (passerines, or songbirds, in particular) can instantly produce dead-on impressions of anything they hear, from the calls of their relatives to the voices of other species to man-made machines in operation. Evolutionarily, this seems to be a means of demonstrating physical health for mating and combat, as well as communications. The birds with the loudest and most complex voices are obviously the fittest.

This is a famous video from David Attenborough’s BBC Wildlife series showing the superb lyrebird in action. It starts cool and then gets unbelievable, but you can believe it now because you understand a little about how it works:

Many questions open up after watching this bird imitate cameras, chainsaws, and car alarms. One of these is cognitive – how do birds process and store environmental information in order to reproduce it themselves? Another is philosophical – if humans, like birds, are material beings that respond throughout their lives to external stimuli, then where can we locate such precious concepts as agency, creativity, and inspiration? Are these really only human things, or do birds have them, too? Or are they suspect?

A third question, perhaps most germane to sound studies, is about the role of vocal mimicry in environments and ecosystems. The superb lyrebird’s speech not only suggests certain behaviors that evolution made inherent, but also makes clear just how closely the nonhuman world listens to our every action. The environmental movement has gotten us used to thinking about the consequences of our garbage, but we have only just begun to investigate how less tangible phenomena like sound can also affect living things. There is a small but growing body of work about how human and mechanical sound affect migratory patterns and stress levels in birds, particularly in urban areas.

Birds not only have more flexible vocal apparatuses than humans, but they also hear both above and below our range. As a result, much of what affects them will not be immediately obvious to us – we simply lack the anatomical means to be sensually sympathetic without further intellectual effort. The fact is that other beings, with different sensory equipment, inhabit sensory worlds that we do not. These sensory overlays, however inaccessible they may be to us, are nevertheless a critical part of ecosystems. In issuing sounds that we perceive as irrelevant, minimally intrusive, or simply necessary to development, we may well be wielding little bird LRADs, intruding on sensual territory in ways that can induce significant behavioral and environmental change. This is a process that we’ve only begun to study with any specificity, but the lyrebird’s imitations should alert us to its depth.

This recording sounds absurd, abstract, and probably doctored. In truth, it is only the first of these three.

President Lyndon Johnson and Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas were on a phone call discussing the international situation, when all of a sudden (at :20 seconds), their connection was inadvertently crossed with a casual call between a couple in Denver and their friend Jim in Washington, D.C. (Because of the manual nature of the switchboard system in the 1960s, crossed lines were a relatively common occurrence.)

President Johnson patiently waits for the other conversation to run its course, but Justice Fortas interrupts with increasing annoyance (:45-:50 seconds) before eventually shouting “Get off the goddamn line!” (1:14)

At this point, Jim and Walter hear Fortas’ shouting and become confused about what’s happening. President Johnson explains to Walter and Jim that the lines are crossed (1:40) and tells them to go ahead and finish. Of course, Jim and Walter have no idea who they’re speaking to.

Walter then hands the phone back to his wife (2:27), so that she can finish talking to Jim. But LBJ mistakes here for the operator. At this point things get very confusing, because no one knows who anyone is or why they’re talking to them. Fortas does not help matters by once again telling the woman to “get the hell off the line.” (2:55.)

Now LBJ begins to get annoyed as well, and asks the woman to “get out of our way, honey.” (3:19). The woman acquiesces, but just before she tries to hang up, Johnson realizes that she is in fact trying to place a call herself. The woman says she’ll hang up and try her call again.

Johnson and Fortas then resume their normal business.

This recording, which is a true gem from among thousands of hours of taped White House conversations during the Johnson years, is remarkable for a number of reasons. The idea that security barriers to classified communications were low enough that an ordinary citizen could accidentally (and unwittingly) find themselves talking to the President and a Supreme Court Justice is mostly unfathomable today. Although politicians make a spectacle of interacting with the masses, these engagements are carefully staged. The closest recent analogous scenario I can think of was the hacking of Sarah Palin’s email account, although that was no accident, but a rare combination of effort and stupidity, and it didn’t permit the hacker to communicate with Palin in any case, only to embarrass her.

As well, the Johnson-Fortas-Jim-Walter-Woman recording is both aesthetically engaging and politically rich. Some key details include the rhythmic thump of the tape recorder, the dull clicking of the line plugging in and out, the generational accents that no longer exist, along with equally extinct gendered inflections (hers in particular), and the highly particular fidelity of telephonic voices at that technological moment. The experience of hearing old voices through old technologies can make us uncannily aware of bygone social arrangements, as well as our own distance from them.

For listeners in 2009, this snippet also offers a powerful dramatic irony. All of the people in the recording are dead. It is likely that none of them ever knew what was happening during the call, nor that they ever bothered to reflect on it. But for us it telescopes into a rare vantage.

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Bonus telephony tale:

When I was 15 years old, I enjoyed calling 1-800 numbers. It was relatively easy to predict some of them based on what they spelled on the keypad, and I was bored in general. During the 1994-1995 Super Bowl, in which “Neon” Deion Sanders starred as a member of the winning San Francisco 49ers, I tried the number that spelled 1-800-SANDERS. A mechanical voice prompted me for a 2-digit special access code to complete the call. I diligently tried all of the numbers, in order, until I happened on the right code, which was 77. An older man answered, and I asked for Deion. “This is Deion’s father. We’re in Cincinnati. Deion is in Florida playing in the Super Bowl!” Mr. Sanders hung up, and when I tried the number again a week later the access code had been changed to a less guessable four digits.

Bureaucratic departments – the DMV, the career services agency, the post office – are places of infinite, futile drama. Although they are designed to move customers with mechanical efficiency from the entrance to the exit, they are usually tense and messy.

Their drama, ironically, results from trying to maintain rigid structures in a liquid universe. On paper, in the abstract, less flexibility means a more streamlined service process. Take a number, proceed to the desk when you’re called, hand over the necessary forms, and wait for the thud of the stamp. In Plato’s post office, it’s that easy.

Outside the world of forms, however, there are always delays, because there is always serendipity, confusion, and disagreement, sometimes all at once. The man at the front of the line has a complicated question. He doesn’t speak English very well. The clerk can’t find his package. Now he’s arguing with her, although she legislates nothing and therefore can only argue back at him, all the more cruelly because she recognizes her own impotence. (Mutual impotence is the infinite loop that renders bureaucratic drama futile.)

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Sound is a useful tool in bureaucratic settings because, under the right conditions, listening can synchronize tightly with action. We can hear ourselves called faster than we can see our number appear on the stern little LED board. No matter what we’re doing – reading, staring, resting – we can mostly be responsible for hearing “68!” and then standing at attention and proceeding. In the post office/DMV/career center, we willingly reduce ourselves to veritable automatons – obedient listening machines – in order to finish our business quickly and get out. We submit to the authority of the system for our own ultimate benefit. Sound, which we don’t have to face to receive, is a great convenience to this end. With it, we can orchestrate a nearly immediate dynamic of command and obedience.

But noise is dangerous. In a bureaucratic utopia, a listener would hear only numbers, perfectly repetitive instructions, and the shuffling of feet. In actual offices, we hear much more. Dramas, futile as they may be for the actors involved, crash the noiseless utopia of efficient repetition, for better or worse. Noise is not only evidence of these dramas, but also a frequent cause of them.

If sound is expedient for an efficient bureaucracy, then we have an opportunity to hear the failure of bureaucracy in noise – sensation, metaphor, and disruption all rolled into one. (We will continue to listen to both the operations and failures of bureaucracy in this space.)