Ep. 24: Voice of Yoko (Amy Skjerseth on Yoko Ono)
Mar 09, 2021
Phantom Power‘s Amy Skjerseth brings us the story of perhaps the most famous vocal performance artist and avant-garde musician whose actual work doesn’t get the attention it deserves: Yoko Ono. Collaborator with the Fluxus group in the early 60s, creator of performances such as Cut Piece and her Bed In with John Lennon in the late 1960s, director of experimental films such as 1970’s Fly, and recording artist of experimental pop albums such as that Fly’s soundtrack… Despite this large body of work, her most famous role was that of wife to that guy in that band—a performance that made her the target of misogynous and racist criticism that persists to this day.
As Amy points out, much of this criticism centered on the sound of Yoko Ono’s voice. Of course, as we’ve explored on this show before, listening to the other with a racist or sexist ear is nothing new. But in Ono’s case, this prejudicial listening is compounded by the fact that, years before the emergence of punk rock, she was pushing the boundaries of what was considered acceptable vocal expression for anyone, let alone a woman—moaning, wailing, chortling, and screaming.
The vast majority of listeners immediately dismissed these sounds as a punchline. On today’s show, we’re going to actually listen. What is the purpose and meaning and effect of Ono’s vocal artistry? We’re exploring it in her recorded work, in her feminist and pacifist political agenda, and most of all, in her film Fly, in which she uses her voice to destroy boundaries between sound and touch, human and animal, self and other.
This episode includes elements from an audio essay Amy published at [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.
Music by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, John Cage, Tanya Tagaq, and Graeme Gibson, as well as “Crickets, Birds, Summer Ambient” by Nikodemus Christian.
Yoko Ono’s film Fly is available on MUBI. The soundtrack has been reissued by Secretly Canadian.
You can hear Yoko Ono’s Twitter response to Trump (November 11, 2016) here.
Ep. 23: Forest Listening Rooms (Brian Harnetty)
Feb 09, 2021
What would happen if you took red state rural voters on a walk into the woods with left-wing environmental activists and experimental music fans? Our guest this episode knows the answer.
BRIAN HARNETTY is a composer and an interdisciplinary artist using sound and listening to foster social change.
While Brian studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, one of his teachers, Michael Finnissy, suggested he look for musical inspiration in his home state of Ohio. Brian took that advice and the result has been eight internationally acclaimed albums. Brian’s music combines archival recordings of interviews and singing—often from the Berea CollegeAppalachian Sound Archives—with his original compositions.
For the past decade, Brian has focused on the myth, history, ecology, and economy of Shawnee, a small Appalachian town in Ohio. His 2019 album Shawnee, Ohio was praised by the BBC, the Wire, and named 2019 Underground Album of the Year by MOJO. The album engages with the social and environmental impacts felt by the town and nearby Wayne National Forest in their long history with extractive industries from timber to coal mining to fracking.
But Brian doesn’t just document Shawnee’s narrative—he intervenes in it. He’s an environmental activist of a gentle kind, one who gets area residents of different political stripes to walk in the woods together to listen—to one another and to the forest. All in service of protecting and healing the land. In this episode, we are thrilled to present an audio documentary that Brian Harnetty has produced for Phantom Power about this quietly radical experiment, called Forest Listening Rooms. And afterwards I’ll speak to Brian about his project.
Today, we’re playing with voice assistants and thinking about the role of voices in gaming with our guest, game designer and NYU professorFrank Lantz.
Over the past nightmare year of the coronavirus, many of us have been hunkered down, trying to figure out how to pass the time with our families. Board game sales on Amazon were up 4,000% percent in March, when Americans began sheltering in place. And, of course, we’ve also spent way more time interacting with digital technology. These two things have come together in a weird and delightful way in Lantz’s game Hey Robot.
Created by Lantz’s family-owned company Everybody House Games, Hey Robot is a guessing game you play with a group of friends—including your voice assistant or smart speaker. The premise is simple: Make Google Home or Alexa utter the words written in a deck of cards. The questions it raises are complex: What are these digital entities that many of us interact with daily? How have web searches and voice-based computing changed the way we talk? And what does this reveal about language itself?
Hey Robot is available in a free online Quarantine Edition that you can play remotely with your friends. The board game edition is available on Amazon.
Today’s show was written and edited by Mack Hagood.
Ep. 21: A Life Based on an Experiment (Siavash Amini)
Sep 03, 2020
Episode 21 presents a portrait of Iranian experimental composer Siavash Amini. His music, which moves seamlessly between contemplative ambience, menacing dissonance, and spacious melodicism, has been released on experimental imprints such as Umor Rex and Room40. His latest, A Mimesis of Nothingness, just came out on the Swiss label Hallow Ground.
Siavash tells host Mack Hagood that his entire life is based on an experiment and he doesn’t yet know what its outcome will be. This episode traces the contours of that story, from his boyhood as a metalhead in a small Iranian port town to his role in the development of Tehran’s lauded experimental music scene. Along the way, we drill down on the international and internal politics that add danger and difficulty to the life of this outspoken leftest composer.
Amini is forced to navigate not only the authoritarianism of Iranian government censorship, but also the authoritarianism of western tastemakers, who sometimes want him to make the “Middle Eastern music” they hear in their own heads. Steadfast in his individuality, Siavash makes sounds that resist these authorities–the defiant anthems of an imaginary land, population: one.
Ep. 20: What is Radio Art (Colin Black)
Mar 13, 2020
What is radio art? It’s a rather unfamiliar term in the United States, but in other countries, it’s a something of an artistic tradition. Today’s guest, Dr. Colin Black is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning radio artist and composer. He speaks to us about his practice as a radio artist and the influence the Australian radio program The Listening Room had on Australia’s sonic avant garde. We then listen to his piece Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1, which both explores and exemplifies the possibilities of radio art. It’s both informative and a total treat for the ears!
The piece was originally commissioned by the Dreamlands commissions for Radio Arts, funded by the Arts Council England and Kent County Council.
Out Of Thin Air: Radio Art Essay #1 is a meta-referencing poetic reflection and meditation on radio art underpinned by an artistic treatment of dislocation, transmission, reception and place as a thematic underscore. The work is in the form of an abstract song cycle that chiefly oscillates between “songs” originating from High Frequency (HR) radio static/broadcasts between 3 and 30 MHz and those from interviewees replying to questions relating to radio art. Location recordings, sound effect and musical composition weave this originating material together to form a sonic confluence and juxtaposition of elements to stimulate the listener’s imagination while offering an insight into the work’s subject matter.
Interviewees (in order of appearance): Armeno Alberts, Tom Roe, Jean-Philippe Renoult, Gregory Whitehead, Götz Naleppa, Andrew McLennan, Elisabeth Zimmermann, Heidi Grundmann, Andreas Hagelüken, Teri Rueb and Kaye Mortley
Producer and Composer: Colin Black High Frequency (HR) radio receiver operator: Dimitri Papagianakis
It’s been a minute, so in this short episode, we update you on what’s happening with Phantom Power and what’s coming in 2020.
The big (and sad) news is that co-host cris cheek is departing. After two years of lending his unique voice, ideas, and turns of phrase to the show–not to mention producing fantastic episodes like his interview with This Heat’s Charles Hayward–cris has decided to refocus on his many other creative endeavors.
We will miss cris, but the show will go on. And he’s been kind enough to let us continue using his golden intro! Check out the pod to hear about some of our upcoming 2020 episodes, with guests including Colin Black, Harriet Ottenheimer, Jonathan Sterne, and Siavash Amini.
Strange tones echoing through my Cincinnati neighborhood
[birds chirping with soft tones in background]
bubbling up from underground.
[tones go from low to high]
[WATER SERVICE WORKER]
Alright..
[MACK, laughs]
That is crazy.
[background talking of construction workers with tones playing and birds chirping]
Wow.
Standing in front of my house is this guy from the Cincinnati water department. He’s in front of an open manhole cover. And he’s got a microphone lowered down into the manhole.
[tones and birds chirping playing in background]
And about a block down the street. There’s another open manhole cover. And the tone generator is making the sounds that we hear this upward sweep of tones. It’s called acoustic emission testing, I think. And it’s a sonic way of figuring out if the the water pipes are in good repair. I rather enjoyed the acoustic testing. But unfortunately, it was a harbinger of [laughs] less pleasant sounds that were soon to come.
[loud jackhammers, machines stoping and going]
All the water lines in my early 1900s neighborhood are being torn out and replaced, which, of course, means that all of the streets are being torn out and replaced. And it’s a it’s been a loud experience. Jackhammers. Yeah, this is what it sounds like inside the house.
[machine sounds.]
Idling trucks.
[idling truck noise]
Those are probably the worst, the constant idling machines everywhere. And so hey, it seemed like a perfect time to go ahead and get the roof replaced.
[laughing]
Just throw that into the ongoing cacophony.
[Hammering and footsteps coming through the ceiling]
This is the sound of my roof being torn off, right above my head as I sit in my office where I record this podcast.
[Hammering and tearing]
So yeah, it’s been a little louder around here, a little bit difficult to produce a podcast under these circumstances.
[truck idling]
And it’s fitting because Phantom Power is a little bit under construction, you might say, we’re going through some changes. And so I just want to fill you in on them. The big thing is that cris cheek, my good friend, and partner in this podcast for the past couple of years, is leaving. When we originally set out to make this podcast, we planned on it lasting a year, maybe two years. And it’s become an ongoing concern. And it’s been a lot of fun to do. It’s also very challenging to do. It’s quite time consuming, putting together the show the way we want to put it together. And cris just really felt that this was taking away time from his his poetry and his performance and his visual art and all the amazing things that cris does. So, it’s just gonna be me solo now. And I’m gonna miss having cris, his unique voice, his unique turns of phrase, his oblique angles of analysis. You know, he’s what he’s a one of a kind. And so the show goes on.
[Music playing]
And we’ve got some fascinating episodes coming your way in the next few months, we’re going to drop the episodes as we get them done. In the next week or two, I’m going to have a show on radio art that features the Australian sound artist Colin Black, who does really fantastic work.
[background talking] [machine beeping]
That’s gonna be great. I’m gonna have a series of podcasts,
[soft tapping]
at least two on voice. And that’s going to feature the linguist Harriet Oppenheimer,
[opening desktop sound]
and I’ve already done an interview for this series
[opening desktop sound]
with the sound studies scholar, Jonathan Sterne.
[recording of Jonathan Stern]
My voice, and the voice, whatever that is can never be one thing.
Not to a subject, not to an auditor,not to a system of meaning.
[upbeat ending music]
[Mack Hagood]
I also have an interview coming up with the Iranian sound artist and musician, Siavash Amini–something I’ve been really wanting to do for quite some time.
[music playing]
So there’s a lot of good stuff coming up. And I just wanted to sort of drop a really mini episode here into your feed, let you know what was going on. And let you know that there’s more to come. And it was very nice of cris. He’s letting us keep the intro. So you’ll still get to hear cris’s golden pipes at the start of every episode. All right, take care. Talk to you soon.
[music ends]
Ep. 18: Screwed and Chopped (Re-cast)
Dec 20, 2019
Slab trunks feature sound systems and visual displays.
Today we re-cast one of our favorite episodes, an interview with folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins, who studies “slab” culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack.
Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.
Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.
Parental discretion is advised. Welcome to Phantom Power. I’m cris cheek. Today on the seventh and final episode of our first season, my co-host Mack Hagood converses with Langston Collin Wilkins. Langston is a folklorist an ethnomusicologist active in both academia and the public sector. Working as a traditional art specialist at the Tennessee Arts Commission. Mack spoke with Langston recently about his research into Houston’s unique slab, car culture. The city’s relationship to hip hop and hip hop’s to community. Enjoy.
[Different hip hop music plays]
[MACK HAGOOD]
So before we get into the research of Langston Collin Wilkins, maybe we should get one question out of the way. Why would a folklorist be studying hip hop? Don’t they study things like folk tales or traditional music or quilting? Well, in fact the folklorist I know study things like bodybuilding and fashion and internet memes. Folklorists study everyday creativity. One contemporary definition of folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” As Langston shows, it’s the way a town like Houston gets a look and a sound all its own, but folklore didn’t lead Langston to hip hop. In fact, it was quite the other way around.
[Hip hop music cuts out]
[LANGSTON COLLINS WILKINS]
Back when I was a kid, around 12 years old, I received my first hip hop record, which was the “Ghetto Boys Resurrection Album” in 1996.
[A song from the album plays]
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, the south side, where Scarface is from that same area. The Ghetto Boys in my hometown heroes as they are for everyone growing up in Houston in those communities. I just became obsessed with hip hop, and not just the music, but just the larger culture and community surrounding it. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about hip hop, I was watching everything, just studying the culture and that kind of continued through college. When I got the grad school, I went hoping to study hip hop in some form or fashion. It was through hip hop that I learned about folklore and became interested in it. I spent a year doing ethnographic research in Houston amongst the hip hop community there. I focus mostly on I guess the more street oriented or gangsta rappers, and we’re studying the artists and producers connection to place. I was looking at how and why these artists was so deeply connected to the city itself, apartment buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and how these attachments and connection to place have been reproduced in their musical output.
[Different hip hop song plays]
Why do Houston Raptors always shout out, call out, give dedications to places that they are familiar and intimately connected with?
[Several places are listed through hip hop songs]
Washington, Armstrong, Mainwelles and St. Williams. Robinson, Thomas Hopes, we all be chillin but when a sucka starts illin’, the chillin gets rough, and like (inaudible) we tie an ass up.
[song continues, then ends]
[LANGSTON]
That’s what I studied and as I was doing that research I realized that this car culture slab, which originated in Houston Texas, was a part of this place identity that these artists were projecting.
[Street sounds with cars, motors running, and people talking]
It originated amongst working class African Americans in the early 1980s. It’s hard to offer a concrete definition of slabs, but mostly they’re older modeled cars, older model American luxury cars. So we’re talking Cadillacs, Lincolns,old mobiles, if you can find those, and they’re modified in various ways. Some of the core components include the rims or wheels which are in the community call swingers or elbows depending on who you talk to. These are 30 spoked home like wheels made of chrome. That’s a core fundamental aspect to slap culture. Then you have the paint, which is typically called candy paint, really shiny, glossy, paint with bold colors, and beyond that you have the stereo systems which are also important components of the culture. These stereo systems feature multiple speakers, subwoofers that feature incredible bass sounds. They’re typically powered by multiple batteries. Essentially, slab is a modified, customized car and the components are unique to Houston because there are various car cultures, modified car cultures around the country, but I think the combination of the candy paint, the swingers, the elbows, and the stereo systems make slab unique to Houston.
[Street sounds fade out]
[MACK]
Was there anything from your training in folklore that made you see this phenomenon and maybe even hear it in a different way?
[Hip hop music plays in the background]
[LANGSTON]
I had seen these cars going up, but I’d never really appreciated them. They were just how people got from A to B. That’s how they traveled. My uncle who I’m close to, he had not a slab, but he had a modified car, but that was just his car. Going through the program and learning about how cars and other forms of material culture are results of both individual and communal creativity, I began to look at the cars more deeply.
[MACK]
It’s interesting what you’re saying there, that these material objects we come up with, almost as these reasons we create spaces to come together and generate a sense of community, but also promote this arena for individuals to show off their distinct abilities at the same time. It’s funny, because the automobile has formed that space for a lot of different subcultures. Those old codgers who have their vintage car things like in the parking lot of the Cracker Barrel, or whatever.
[LANGSTON]
Right, absolutely.
[MACK]
Maybe not that different in some ways.
[LANGSTON]
I don’t think it is. Beyond that, as I was taking the music, the cars were constantly referred to in these rappers’ verbal output. So, that’s what turned my attention for staying in the cars because I figured out that they were both an interesting form of creative culture in themselves, but also a fundamental part of Houston rappers, creative output.
[Another rap song fades in, then fades out]
People who own slabs aren’t going to your local car audio store to get their systems put together, they go to the audio guy in their neighborhood, who knows the culture, knows the community, and knows the aesthetic to put these sounds together. We were just talking about multiple speakers, heavy bass, and the base, you have to be able to feel the bass that’s part of the aesthetic. Actually, you’re able to see the music. That’s another part of this, that your slab is supposed to rattle, and the truck is supposed to rattle and kind of bump when you’re listening to your music which is typically local hip hop.
[Hip hop plays from what sounds like a car stereo. You can hear the base.]
At least in slab culture, in the music it’s meant to be felt and heard and seen. I think that’s why you get these terms like bang or bump, to refer to the sound systems.
[The bass has completely taken over. Hip hop music slowly fades back in to show how the bass fits. Both sounds fade out]
[MACK]
You mentioned that it’s local music. Can you talk about the kind of music that’s associated with this culture?
[LANGSTON]
There was a major economic downturn recession in Houston in the early 1980s that resulted in a lot of people being out of work, a lot of black people being out of work, I’ll say. At the same time in the early 1980s, you saw the rise of crack cocaine and that offered a kind of an economic pathway for many of those guys in those communities. So that’s kind of the context. There’s this community of dope dealers in the south side who wanted to flaunt their wealth and wanted their names, and their presence to be as big as possible in the cars and the music, the local hip hop sound. Scared, Screwed and Chopped, kind of allowed them to do that.
[Another hip hop song plays]
Essentially, screwed means to slow a record down. Screwed records typically are between 60 and 70 beats per minute. It kind of creates a muddy, slow and somewhat psychedelic sound for hip hop. The pioneer of the sound is DJ Screw who passed away in 2000. He was from the south side of Houston, Texas, again, from these working class communities.
[A song from DJ Screw plays. It sounds like a hip hop sound that has been slowed down.]
[MACK]
Anybody who’s familiar with dance music or hip hop production will know that 60 to 70 beats per minute is really slow.
[LANGSTON]
I think the slowness of the music is heavily influenced by the car culture, because these cars kind of originated out of the street culture in the mid 1980s. Pioneered by local drug dealers who kind of used modified cars to flaunt their wealth. They would put together these cars and they would drive them slowly, to parade them to the streets of Houston. Very slowly so people could pay attention to him and focus on him.
[Hip hop song continues]
DJ Screws first mixtapes were being purchased by these local drug dealers. They would play them in their cars as they were traversing the streets. You had this slow experience, these slow parades going on through the streets of Houston. You also have the drug culture the lean, the Serb culture, which just makes you move extra slow, and that was certainly a part of the screwed and chopped culture and certainly a part of the slap culture as well.
[Different hip hop song plays, this one with with a faster tempo]
Lean, also called syrup. There’s other names for depending on who you talk to. It’s essentially prescription strength, cough syrup, mix with some sort of sweetener. I could be soda, or people put candy in the cough syrup. When you drink it, it slows your faculties down. You move slower, you you lose your sense of balance, which is why it’s sometimes called lean because people on the drug kind of lean over so, and again, kind of like slab, it became a marker of local hip hop identity.
[Hip hop song continues]
So you have this slow, muddy kind of psychedelic sound, that’s the screwed part. Chopping is a fundamental part of the hip hop DJ aesthetic, but what DJ Screw would do was that he would take two copies of the same record, put them on two different turntables, but he would play one record a little behind the other record. When he would mix back and forth, he would repeat phrases.
[An example of DJ Screw’s mixing]
That became the chopping part of screwed and chopped. Repeating phrases and sometimes repeating percussive sounds, so that the mix between the slowness and these repeated phrases. That’s essentially screwed and chopped music.
[An example of screwed and chopped music plays]
I think if you get down into DJ Screw’s mixtapes which they were maybe 250 plus of, if you haven’t been part of the culture, it’s hard to really understand what’s going on there, what he’s doing, and how complex it is.
[MACK]
When you say it’s hard to know how complex what he’s doing is, is it because someone who isn’t familiar with the original songs that he’s mixing can’t tell how he’s chopping them?
[LANGSTON]
Yeah, I think so. I think because he’s mixing at any given time, maybe five or six records together, and he’s manipulating them in real time and then he’s going back and slowing it all down. It’s just these record,s these songs are hard to navigate.
[Upbeat, childlike music plays]
[CRIS]
People, people, help us out just a little bit here. Go to iTunes, give us a rating. It’ll take under five seconds. If you have more time, a small review helps us bring this to you. Give us some feedback on Facebook. Hit us up on Twitter. You know the score.
[Upbeat music fades out and slow hip hop music fades in]
[MACK]
So far, Langston has shown us how some of south side Houston’s African American residents customize cars, and customize the sound of hip hop. The slab swerved a slow path through the city streets, banging out music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods. In the process, individuals made names for themselves as makers of money or cars or sound systems or music while at the same time, the community made a name and an image and a sound for itself. This is the everyday artistic communication folklorists look for. It’s also the way of space, a collection of buildings and streets, becomes a place that is known, respected, and loved. All of this is taking place on the consumption side of the music, but as Langston explained to me, a similar social process was taking place on the production side. When DJ Screw and screwed up click rappers like Little Kiki, Fat Pat, ESG, and Big Hawk made tapes at house parties.
[Hip hop music winds down and ends]
[LANGSTON]
the screwed and chopped mixtapes. Essentially, he would invite rappers over to his house, maybe 3, 4, 5. They would have a big party, and in the midst of this party, he would begin playing music and recording a mixtape. What you’re getting on these mixtapes are a social experience.
[A mixtape is played. We hear music with rappers talking and laughing over it.]
This whole culture was rooted in the drug game, and so you had a lot of early deaths in these communities in the late 1980s early 1990s. You had a lot of memorial mixtapes, mixtapes that were created in dedication to someone who had just lost their life. You also had mixed tapes that were for someone’s graduation celebration. You had mixtapes to celebrate someone in community who had given birth. All of these tapes has some sort of social function to them.
[Mixtape continues. We hear a rapper come up with a wrap.]
[MACK]
So in that context then, DJ Screw is basically DJing and a party and then people are free styling.
[LANGSTON]
Yeah he’s DJing a party, people are drinking, eating, having fun, talking crap to each other, and then he would hit record and he would do his mixes. If you’re a rapper in the space, you can come up and you can freestyle. Then they go back to partying for a couple hours. Then he would start recording again, and some other rappers could come up. If you talk to different members of screwed up click they’ll tell you that some of these quote unquote recording sessions will last all night. You would go over to Screw’s house around 7pm and you’d leave at maybe 9 o’clock the next day, the next morning. These are just kind of social events organically captured on tape. That’s what happening.
[MACK]
While it’s happening in real time, the beat is actually faster, it’s the original.
[LANGSTON]
Yeah, they’re recording it regular speed.
[Mixtape continues, then fades out]
The DJ Screw would take the recordings, put them into his four track, and use the piss control knob to slow the speed down.
[An example of this slowed down track plays]
[MACK]
Wow.
[Track continues]
[LANGSTON]
In my eyes, makes especially their rap performances much more interesting because most of those freestyles were done completely off the top of the head, and they were completely extemporaneous and performed in real time. These rappers don’t get the credit that they deserve for being incredible freestylers.
[MACK]
So maybe we should talk a bit about what that does to the voice.
[LANGSTON]
Just a darker, almost otherworldly tone to the voice. I think again, that goes hand in hand with the drugs that were being consumed, to drug market based environment that they’re coming from, and also the slab culture. It just kind of produces an almost ghostly vocal sound.
[Mixtape continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
I don’t know if you’ll agree with this, but I almost feel like to me, this music sounds more like west coast hip hop from the 1990s then the sort of, at least the stereotype of Southern hip hop.
[Different hip hop track plays, this one with a slightly faster tempo]
I was wondering if there’s some kind of connection there between,, like that car culture you’re talking about? Where there’s just something about this, that it sounds like riding music to me.
[LANGSTON]
I think there’s a deep connection. I think you’re correct for multiple reasons. One, DJ Screw, the pioneer of this whole culture, his favorite artists were from the west coast. We’re talking, Ice Cube and CBOE from Sacramento, California. Much of the music on those early screw tapes and even towards the end of his life were comprised, most of the music was West Coast based, hip hop, gangster rap.
[MACK
Just that endless, ribbon freeway.
[LANGSTON]
Right, there you go. I mean, you have to have a car to get anywhere in Houston. Our public transit system wasn’t great. You have to have a car to get around. Therefore, people spend a lot of time in their cars. The culture seems similar. It seems like you have to have some sort wheels to get around in Los Angeles. I think just the sheer geographic sizes of these two hip hop centers creates a relationship between the two. I think that manifests in the similarities between Houston and west coast based hip hop.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
In the 2000s, both slabs and the chopped and screwed sound spread beyond Houston south side, and eventually beyond Houston itself.
[LANGSTON]
Between 2004 and 2007, local hip hop culture for the second time, because the first time was with the ghetto boys in the early 1990s, rose to national and maybe international prominence through music that was created on the northside of Houston, through this label called Swish a House. Rappers like Paul Wall, Mike Jones, and Slim Thug.
[One of these artist’s songs plays]
It was through them that screwed and chopped music rose to the mainstream, and they did it I think, by using car culture, because the first few songs that came out in that era from local hip hop artists were songs that were dedications to car cultures. Still Tippin was about SAP culture. Come Millionaires, Riding Dirty was about local car culture and the criminalisation of it.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
It’s fascinating to me, because growing up in New Orleans, Houston and New Orleans are pretty close, as close as any place in Texas can be to anywhere, because Texas so big. It’s around that same time DJ Screw was creating his innovations, in New Orleans there was just really fast hip hop that was happening. With producers like Mannie Fresh, Hot Boys, Little Wayne, juvenile in this kind of bounce music sound with the trigger man beat.
[Another hip hop song plays, very fast tempoed, then fades out]
It just seems kind of interesting that these cities are so close together and yet their music couldn’t be more opposite, at least to my ears.
[LANSTON]
It is fascinating, and I will say that bounce and all of that New Orleans music had a strong presence in Houston as well, and we did also see it end up on DJ Screw’s mixtapes and such. I think the special thing about hip hop when I was growing up, and I hate to sound like old man, at least to me was the fact that hip hop in New York didn’t sound like hip hop in Houston and hip hop in Houston didn’t sound like hip hop in New Orleans even.
[Another hip hop song plays, more moderately tempoed]
Each region has its own unique sound. I thought that was a beautiful and incredible thing. The internet kind of has broken down those regional barriers and has made different regional sounds readily accessible to everyone around the country. In some respects, that’s awesome. I’m glad that sounds have changed. I’m glad that hip hop has grown and is continually reorienting itself, but I wish there was some sense of regional or local uniqueness because I just think that’s virtually disappeared in the culture and in the industry.
[MACK]
It’s almost like the regions are the different regions of the internet now. Like, you have SoundCloud rap, that’s a neighborhood in internet land.
[LANGSTON]
Exactly. I think connection to place is a fundamental aspect of hip hop culture. It exposes an intimate relationship between the person and their place. Place in itself is something very different now.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out. Another hip hop song fades in]
[CRIS]
That’s it for this episode, and this season of Phantom Power. Thank you again to Langston Collin Wilkins, and we’ll be back in the fall with season two. We hope to connect with you then. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve heard and talked about a phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’d love it if you’d rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook, give us a shout on twitter @PhantomPod. Today’s show featured music by DJ Screw and the Screwed Up Clique. Our interns are Natalie Cooper and Adam Whitmer. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[Hip hop song fades out]
Ep. 17: The Sounds of Silents
Nov 01, 2019
What did going to the movies sound like back in the “silent film” era? The answer takes us on a strange journey through Vaudeville, roaming Chautauqua lectures, penny arcades, nickelodeons, and grand movie palaces. As our guest In today’s episode, pioneering scholar of film sound, Rick Altman, tells us, the silent era has a lot to teach us about why sound works the way it does at the movies today. And as our other guest, sound and film historian Eric Dienstfrey tells us, “What we think of today as standard practice is far from inevitable.” In fact, some of the practices we’ll hear about are downright wacky.
Audiences today give little thought to the relationship between sound and images at the movies. When we hear a character’s footsteps or inner thoughts or hear a rousing orchestral score that the character can’t hear, it all seems natural. Yet these are all conventions that had to be developed by filmmakers and accepted by audiences. And as Altman and Dienstfrey show us, the use of sound at the movies could have developed very differently.
Film sound scholar Rick Altman and Mack after their interview at the University of Iowa.
Dr. Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus of Cinema and Comparative Literature in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa. Altman is known for his work on genre theory, the musical, media sound, and video pedagogy. He is the author of Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Film/Genre (Bloomsbury, 1999), and A Theory of Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Dr. Eric Dienstfrey is Postdoctoral Fellow in American Music at the University of Texas at Austin. Eric is a historian of sound, cinema, and media technology. His paper “The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History” won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award for best article of the year in 2016.
We think of going to movies as going to the movies but for a lot of audiences, they were going to hear a live concert that was accompanied by motion pictures. And there’s this great anecdote that Anna Windisch uncovered in their scholarship in Viennese practices from the turn of the century. And they found a series of films, I believe, where you had the motion picture printed on film, but you also had a visual recording of the conductor, conducting a score that was meant to go along with that film. So I believe it was sort of like a superimposed image. So when you screen the film, you’ll see the conductor on screen conducting. And then the orchestra that was live in the theater playing would take its cues from the conductor that was on screen.
[conductor taps baton, and orchestra plays]
[MACK]
It’s Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek. So what are we listening to here, Mack?
[MACK]
This is Eric Deinstfry. He’s a historian of sound technology and sound media working at the University of Texas, Austin. And he knows a lot about the history of sound in motion pictures.
[CRIS]
So what’s he talking about?
[MACK]
It’s this crazy story told me about the silent film era in Vienna. You know, back in the early days of film, people had to figure out how to combine music and film. And as you can imagine in Vienna they had this illustrious classical music today. With fame conductors, and it seemed like a good idea to just put the conductor in the film and let the local orchestras where the film was being shown just sort of follow his conducting.
[CRIS]
Yeah, but I’m imagining this didn’t go so well.
[MACK]
No, it didn’t.
[orchestra music continues]
[ERIC]
And, like a lot of these practices, they’re fine. They’re enjoyable, but they don’t always work. like nothing ever really works the way that it’s supposed to. In this case, it definitely didn’t work. Because as films were distributed over time, with real changes and as pieces of the film are cut out, you lose seconds, or fractions of a second of the conductor moving his baton, which means you might actually you may lose the downbeat, you may lose various other cues or whatnot. So becomes very different to play as a symphony. When watching a conductor that’s missing frames.
[orchestra continues with occasional stops, as if parts have been cut out]
[CRIS]
So this is that sense that we all experience sometimes of the sound and the image being out of sync, right?
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah. Like if this film is kind of beat up and it’s missing some frames, then Suddenly the whole orchestra is off of the beat.
[CRIS]
Which is comedic.
[MACK]
It must have been hilarious. And that’s really what our show is about today. Where does the relationship between sound and images at the movies come from? I mean, it might sound like a weird question because it seems completely natural to us, right? You take a film class at college, you learn about diabetic sound.
[CRIS]
That’s the sound,am I right, that comes from the world being represented in the images like a horn blowing in the street, or a clinking teacup in a Victorian palace?
[MACK]
Yeah, you the characters hear it, and the audience hears it. It comes from the world of the film. And then there’s what they call non diabetic sound.
[CRIS]
the sound that the characters don’t hear, like the orchestral score or pop soundtrack or the narrator the film talking to the audience.
[MACK]
Exactly. And this seems entirely natural to us that there’s music playing that the characters can’t hear. Right. But all of this is just a set of conventions. And these conventions are habitual to us. But someone had to invent them, right? Someone had to figure all of this stuff out and kind of the audience’s needed to buy into it.
[CRIS]
It’s a lot of trial and error.
[MACK]
Yeah, exactly.
[ERIC]
What we think of today is just sort of standard practices is far from inevitable. And there were a lot of experiments going on ways to try and think of the merge of motion pictures and music as much more of a multimedia experience and So we’re we arrived at if anything is far more conservative in conventional than what was actually being practiced in that early era. And I think that’s why this early era attracts so many people, because you just see of just this. So many creative practices that, you know, have since been lost but that you know, there are records out for when you uncover them. It’s just really funny to see like, this is what cinema could have been maybe in an alternative universe.
[slow menacing music plays]
[CRIS]
I really liked that idea. And I hear it in many different kinds of disciplines. The sense that we’ve lost potential things that could have been really great to pursue have been put in put into the disciplined track.
[MACK]
Yeah. And so if you really want to understand the film soundtrack as we know it today, you need to go back to its prehistory in the so called silent era. Luckily, I got to talk with one of the OG scholars of the silent film era.
[CRIS]
I ask you what’s an OG scholar? It feels like it’s missing the M.
[MACK]
Original gangster. He’s an original gangster of silent film sound scholarship.
[RICK ALTMAN]
Hi, my name is Rick Altman, I used to teach at the University of Iowa. Now I am an emeritus faculty member, still teaching a graduate seminar on film sound.
[MACK]
Rick is the author of a lot of things. But most importantly for our purposes, he wrote this book Silent Film Sound that came out in 2004 and Columbia University Press. It’s this multiple award winning book full of archival finds and insights and really great pictures. It’s kind of a large format book. And in one poll, it was voted one of the top five books on film of its decade.
[CRIS]
He doesn’t sound like a gangster at all.
[MACK]
No, he doesn’t. Sounds like a nice man who lives in Iowa. But when Rick got started in his research, silent film sound was not exactly a hot topic.
[RICK]
People seemed to think that everything that needed to be said about silent film, and silent film sound in particular, had already been said. I came along and thought to myself, this is going to make it very easy for me to write the first chapter of my general history of film sound.
[MACK]
So, you know, Rick thought that he was just going to be able to, like summarize all of this work that had already been done on silent film and silent film sound. And that was just going to be a chapter in this longer Opus about the history of sound and film. There was just one problem.
[RICK]
Unfortunately, when I went to the library, I found that the whole area was un-interegated.
[MACK]
Basically, Rick was gonna have to do this research himself. So he starts digging into historical materials, newspapers, trade magazines, technical documents ephemera from the silent film era. But as he did it,
[RICK]
I kept running into confusion about what I was dealing with what I was reading about, I would be reading about sound effects. And they would be called, somehow music. Well, I didn’t understand how that was possible. But every time I would find this confusion of terminology, it sent me to a new domain and made me realize I was dealing with a much more complex situation than had been presented in my professional press.
[MACK]
So what Rick altman discovered is that the story of silent film sound was multiple. It was really the story of a whole bunch of other forms of 19th century entertainment.
[vaudeville music plays]
[RICK]
I worked a lot on vaudeville. I worked a lot on the history of magic lanterns. I dealt with the architecture of concert halls, I found that photography was absolutely central to the work that I wanted to do.
[CRIS]
So, some of this history goes way back. Right? I mean, the magic lanterns develop out of the camera obscura in the middle of the 17th century. The camera obscura goes right back to Leonardo. Those kinds of people were playing around a lot of painters were playing around with the camera obscura.
[MACK]
So the camera obscura was like the pinhole camera that went,
[CRIS]
You could see what was going on outside projected into the wall. And the Magic Lantern introduces gradually a lens by which you can focus that image. So you know, you can write on glass, you can paint on glass, you can see those kinds of shadows moving around inside your house. I love to do that. I spend my days doing that kind of thing. And in the kind of late 17th, early 18th century, they began to adapt this technology for all sorts of purposes. Some of it was for storytelling, but also people began to use the magic lantern for lecture circuits, they began to use it scientific teaching and so forth.
[MACK]
And do you know what they use to create the light to illuminate the the slide and projected onto the wall?
[CRIS]
It became Limelight, right? Before then it was candle lights.
[MACK]
A burning piece of line. Which is where we get the term limelight from.
[CRIS]
Right, right. That’s right. That’s a really good connection to make. And, we actually don’t know the full history of the development of the magic lantern. Some of them are coming out of China size of complex history of the development of a technology. And I really like that, too, that it’s being used in various different contexts by various different people to diverse purposes.
[MACK]
Yeah, and I mean, I think what this shows us is that motion pictures weren’t born in a vacuum, right? There were already these technologies and different kinds of traveling shows and entertainment. And they all use sound in different ways. So people had already been projecting still images and telling stories. And of course, the song and dance and light poetry of vaudeville was a really dominant entertainment at the time, right. So when the motion pictures arrived, all of these different players see film as an extension of what they were already doing. They all have different conceptions of what this technology is and what it’s for, and what it’s even called. So Altman is looking at all of this and he realizes that he has to avoid This pitfall of thinking about the past that we so often fall into, it’s the way that we think that the present arrangement of things, the way we use sound in films today is the foregone conclusion. And he says, no, this really could have gone a different way. This was this crisis moment in the history of film. And so he says, what he has to do is something he calls crisis historiography.
[CRIS]
And that’s great.
[different vaudeville music plays]
[RICK]
Crisis historiography is something that I came up with, in order to explain to myself what I was doing. Most historical accounts are really aiming to explain a single phenomenon. I found constantly that I couldn’t deal with my materials as a single phenomena. There were Many different phenomena. When film is called advanced vaudeville. You realize, wait a minute, we’re not even sure what the topic is that we’re studying. So that it’s not film as we see it today, as we understand it today and trying to understand how film as we see it is existent today. Instead, it was a competition among various approaches to sound. So, we’re dealing with Wurlitzer organs.
[organ music plays]
We’re giving a song sides, we’re dealing with lecturers and lecturers. We’re dealing with projectors, we’re dealing with ballyhoo outside the Nickelodeon. Come on, ladies, come down and check out our show. We’ve got a show that is really more important than anybody else’s. Only a nickel lady. Come on, come right in, come right in if you put your nickel right there.
[sound of a coin going into a slot]
Think about this. Where were the first accompaniments to film? Well, they weren’t in the theater. They were outside the theater because the film was being accompanied by the ballyhoo sound. This is a technique borrowed from the carnival, you want to let everybody know on the Midway, that you’ve got a show that they want to see. And so it was only after having ballyhoo for your music, that you begin to realize, Oh, I guess we could use this same sound inside in the theater. So film sound, you gotta deal with the whole business.
[music ends]
[MACK]
So it sounds like a moment not that dissimilar from our own where we have all of these different digital fans that crop up, or certain apps that become a craze and then maybe disappear not long after, or, you know, one sort of social media website dies off and another takes over and seems to establish itself. And that, just like we’re still coming to terms with how to conceptualize all of these new digital media that we’ve had over the past decade or so, at that moment, there was this same similar kind of crisis or excitement, but also people not sure what to make of it, how to monetize it, and so on.
[RICK]
Let me tell you just how similar it is these crises. They, they don’t last forever, but they always get replaced by another crisis. Eventually, for example, what’s a computer? Well, computer something that computes, isn’t it? When’s the last time you use your computer to compute anything? No, no, we don’t do that. Because we are borrowing the identity from a previously existing system. But yes, we used to have computers that actually computed now we have computers that do different things. And we have iPods, we have iPads, we have iPhones, we have all kinds of things that are constantly in confrontation, one to the other.
[digital music plays then fades out]
[MACK]
So in his book, Silent Film Sound, Rick altman tells us that new media technologies aren’t simply born and given a name. They begin nameless in a crisis of identity. And there are three components to this identity crisis.
[RICK]
One is multiple identity.
[MACK]
The second one is jurisdictional conflict.
[RICK]
Constant competition among the various approaches to sound And then eventually,
[MACK]
An overdetermined solution arises.
[RICK]
There is an agreement among these systems that makes it possible for everybody to come out doing well.
[MACK]
So let’s talk about this multiple identity concept.
[older upbeat music plays]
The movies are said to have been invented in 1895. In 1896, no less than six different film projection technologies all made their debut in the market at once, each one at a different name.
[different names are listed off in an over the top manner]
It wasn’t just these technologies that were competing. with each other, this is where this concept of jurisdictional conflict comes in.
[CRIS]
This is like Betamax and VHS.
[MACK]
Yeah. And but they were also like, totally different visions of what the technologies were even for. Like, is this a visual aid that you’re going to use on those lecture circuits you were talking about? Is that a prop for vaudevillians to us? Is it a replacement for vaudeville itself? Some people call it views. Some people call it advanced vaudeville. In the first couple of decades of their existence, no one was even calling these things motion pictures.
[CRIS]
And I bet as things getting mixed and remixed and scrambled and confused. You get some really peculiar arrangements and practices in those situations.
[MACK]
Yeah, definitely. And the Chautauqua is a perfect example of that.
[RICK]
Chautauquas were organizations usually rural. They started out in upstate New York that were dedicated to the lecture circuit.
[My Country Tis of Thee played by a band plays]
And the lecture circuit started in the mid 19th century in Boston, but before too long it took over the entire country. Sometimes these lectures were illustrated, they were often illustrated by magic lanterns. But then the makers of these magic lantern slides decided that during the summer, they would travel to Europe, to Fiji Islands, to the new national parks in the United States. This would give them every year product differentiation, they would have stuff that nobody else had because they had spent the summer taking pictures. It may seem strange to think, well wait a minute. You’re studying lectures. Why are you studying lectures if you’re talking about film? Well, because lectures and film were part of the same routine, they can’t be thought of as entirely separate as we would normally think of them today.
[MACK]
So in this sort of practice, then there would be documentary film being shown. And someone would literally be narrating the film lecturing over it about the locations that we’re looking at.
[older narration is heard]
[RICK]
Absolutely, and they were really good at that. And they had been well practiced in it.
[MACK]
But the way the film was used in Chautauqua was completely different from the way it was used in say the Nickelodeon.
[CRIS]
So, as we move into the early 20th century, kind of somewhere around 1905 ish, we get post the peep show and into the Nickelodeon era.
[MACK]
Well, I think maybe we should explain peep shows because you might have just scandalized people.
[CRIS]
There were kind of they were Penny Arcade peep shows.
[MACK]
I thought those were those the kinetic scopes. Are the ones that can fit inside the machine to see the film.
[CRIS]
You’re right. It wasn’t a whole bunch of people. And what made the kinetic scope specific is that it was one person.
[MACK]
One at a time. And so yeah, the motion picture or what would come to become the motion picture was,
[CRIS]
The Nickelodeon’s was a whole bunch of people at a time, often in a kind of storefront or a converted storefront. With hard seats, a varying repertoire of material in predominantly working class or kind of emergent middle class locations and neighborhoods. You paid a nickel right? You paid a nickel to go into the Nickelodeon. And the odean bit is from the Greek meaning that it’s a kind of a roof in theater.
[MACK]
Yeah. And the Nickelodeon was the site for one of these kind of strange technological arrangements that didn’t really survive to our day.
[RICK]
Almost every Nickelodeon had a magic lantern as part of its system. But starting around 1898 something new happened and it was very important that they figured out a way to add what was called a motion head in front of the magic lantern. The motion head had the system for introducing a film. And the same sound source could be used for both the Magic Lantern and the motion head. So in the same theater, you would actually have slides showing alternately with films, the films would go through the motion head, the slides would be in the slide transport for the magic lantern. And there you see the beginning of a way in which these two very different systems, film and slides, were able to share the same space. And that’s the kind of thing that happens in a crisis is two things that are entirely competitive, will eventually find a way to live together, maybe not the way they had originally expected. But eventually in a way that satisfies both sides.
[more older music plays]
[MACK]
So in these spaces like vaudeville houses and the Nickelodeon, we have practices that would seem pretty unrecognizable to us today as going to the movies, those Magic Lantern slides that you were talking about. They were often used for something called illustrated songs. So you’d have a good singer belting out the latest pop tunes, while different painted images inspired by the songs were projected behind them.
[music fades out]
[RICK]
These illustrated song slides were glass slides, which were based on photographs, which slides were then colored by teams of women. In vaudeville, there were hand colored slides, and sheet music that served the purpose of illustrated songs. But they were props that were used by individual vaudeville performers. So there was only one copy of them just as well. Let’s say if you had a dog show in vaudeville, you’d have to bring in the dogs, you’d have to bring in the hoops you’d have to bring in the stands. Well, this was a little bit different. You had to have the magic lantern. And in the Magic Lantern, you put these hand covered slides. They weren’t mass produced at that point. They were simply a vaudeville prop.
[CRIS]
So I’m interested in this whole thing of the hand colored slides and the teams of people doing the hand coloring because it begins to sound like an animation studio.
[MACK]
Yeah, but what you’re saying about like, these slides being like part of something like a big animation house today actually comes into fruition after the advent of the Nickelodeon, because then the role of the slides and the illustrated songs really changes.
[different older music plays]
[RICK]
Starting after the turn of the century, and particularly after 1905. There were companies who decided there was money to be made by making their slides because they knew that if the slide was made to accompany a recent song, then Tin Pan Alley would be happy to pay them for the slides because it became a good way to advertise their sheet music and sheet music was a big deal in those days. Virtually everybody had a panel and the sheet music sold not just thousands and in some cases, hundreds of thousands and even in one case or to multiple millions. So we’re talking big money. The slides were eventually distributed through exchanges, as were the films. So what we have here is a situation where you have Laville performers. You have slide makers, you have the distributors, you have the exhibitors who use these illustrated song slides to attract an audience.
[MACK]
Yeah, I just love this story because it reminds me of like, radio or MTV and what that used to do for record sales.
[CRIS]
Absolutely. Yeah. And I’m thinking about the explosion of video, pop integrations.
[MACK]
Yeah, this kind of synergy or, you know, cross platform synergy was a thing even back in the early 1900s.
[CRIS]
I mean, it’s part of the generation of effect, right in terms of bringing people towards the music and making them feel excited about it is that they associate that listening experience with seeing that sequence of images.
[MACK]
Yeah, and you’ve got like, all of these little, like you said, these little middle class, Nickelodeon’s that are hungry for content. The motion picture industry really hadn’t been quite created as we know it yet. You know, it was just on the cusp of being there. And so these Nickelodeon’s were just hungry for content and the illustrated songs really filled that gap.
[RICK]
At the beginning, Nickelodeon’s didn’t have enough product there might be four Nickelodeons on the block, or relatively smaller, like mom and pop shops. But the problem was that all four of these Nickelodeons were playing the same films, because there was not enough production. So the theaters really went for the illustrated songs, because that made up for the time that they might have been showing the films.
[CRIS]
I’m thinking the proliferation of the video store in the 1980s.
[MACK]
I could see the parallel today. So you would plunk down your nickel at the Nickelodeon. And you might hear an illustrated song, and then they would play a silent film. And then while they were getting the next film ready to go, you could hear another illustrated song. And I think, when we picture this in our minds were picturing like, an old timey piano blinking along. But Rick said it wasn’t always like that. In fact, sometimes there was
[RICK]
No sound at all.
[crickets chirping]
Now come on, that can’t be. Where did you get that idea? Well, I got that idea by reading a whole lot of biographies and reading a whole lot of reviews that made it clear that there was a period when films were shown without any sound whatsoever. So what was the piano doing there? Well, the piano was doing what it had to do to solve the needs of the theater. The theater had illustrated song slides. So when the slides were being projected, it was absolutely necessary for the pianist to be playing. But when the pianist had finished playing for the illustrated song, the pianist was told that this is the time when he can go and spend a little time to have a cigarette and he’ll be called back later for the next illustrated song slot. So what we find out is that the fact that these were Multi Purpose theaters that they had films as well as illustrated songs, suggests that we’re dealing with a situation where constantly the theater changes from one face to another. It’s a film theater, or its illustrated song theater.
[CRIS]
Yeah, I’m people would be making sound they would be talking. They would be expressing in relation to what they were seeing.
[MACK]
Laughing shouting at the screen.
[CRIS]
Absolutely, yeah, exactly.
[MACK]
So at this time, you know, it probably felt like the crisis was resolved, right. Like, you knew what, what these films were. They were they were something that you went and saw at the Nickelodeon and, you knew what to expect for your nickel.
[CRIS]
It was cheap. You got a half hour, you had fun.
[Mack]
Yeah, half hour of some illustrated songs and some silent films.
[CRIS]
And maybe it kind of collect a strange, collective, responsive interactive environment.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah, a little, you know, lowbrow fun.
[RICK]
But little by little, the makers films started providing more product. And when they started providing more product, well guess what the filmmakers were wanting more and more to take over the portion of the program that was being run by the illustrated song slides. So we get rid of the illustrated song slides in 1913. Literally, they just dropped off the map entirely in 1913 because the film producers wanted to take back a portion of the program and they were able to do that, in part because they now had enough product from an increasingly large park of film producers, so there’s a situation where the illustrated song it lives about two decades. It serves the vaudeville purpose to begin with. It serves the Magic Lantern purpose. After that, it eventually has to be pushed out in order to serve the purpose of the film producers. And it really isn’t until that point that film starts being called moving picture and having a very clear existence, no longer called us no longer called Advanced vaudeville.
[CRIS]
So the entertainment industry applause a vacuum. I mean,I could have said capitalism, but that’s a little too strong. When are we going to be able to say with some certainty, though, that what we’re seeing resembles the movies that we know today.
[MACK]
Well, by this period, when the Nickelodeon starts to wane, and the big movie palaces start to rise, so we’re talking about, by 1915 or so, the movie theaters are getting bigger and the motion pictures are getting longer. And this is when the term feature film is coined. And we get these incredible movie palaces. And in the smaller and mid sized theaters, pianos and tiny orchestras are still common, but in these grander venues, we might find Wurlitzer Oregon’s or 50 piece orchestras. But you know, even at this point, that we’re still practices that might seem quirky from our perspective today. So here’s another story that film scholar Eric Deinstfry told me. [ERIC]
There’s another interesting practice that I read about in William Paul’s book When Movies Were Theater, and there’s a theater in Detroit, he writes about where I believe it was like a duplex, and you had two theaters that shared the same wall and that’s where the screen was. And what that allowed for was allowed for the same Symphony. Orchestra, it wasn’t full Symphony to move back and forth in the same pit space.
[sound of people walking, then an orchestra playing, then walking, then music]
Basically, the orchestra would walk under the wall and play for one movie then move back under the wall and play for another movie was kind of like this weird watching the symphony orchestra move and sort of do their work was also part of the attraction of going to the movies there.
[music continues, then applause]
[CRIS]
I love this sense of an interrupted watching and listening experience where all sorts of other kinds of people who are on the sidelines maybe even the woman selling ice cream, and the person taking the tickets and so forth are all part. They’re all indicated into that experience.
[MACK]
Yeah, you know, it reminds me a little bit of, what I read about opera and the way it functioned early on where it was an entertainment where there would be a lot of stuff going on. Prostitutes plying their trade in the balcony, people drinking, carousing, having a good time. And then after the Romantic period, the way people started to treat classical music, in a period where religion had kind of started to wane, and we get this more humanist version of spirituality, where you go to the classical music concert hall, and sit in silence, and meditated on the music and have this kind of inner rich experience. And I feel like we’re learning that a similar transition happened with film where it used to be this fun, interactive entertainment that wasn’t taken that seriously and then it became high heart.
[CRIS]
That’s right. And maybe now. I don’t know. You go to the movies now and there’s people getting up and going to the bathroom, they’re eating their popcorn in the middle of the kind of the, the most dramatic moment in the narrative, they’re looking at their cell phones as the opening and the closing of the light in the door from the lobby. So it sounds like by the 1920s or so the crisis had been resolved and some kind of not necessarily solutions, but onward developments have been found and settled on.
[MACK]
Silent film, as we think of it today has finally evolved and film kind of enters this golden era until the talkies emerged. It’s a crisis all over again. By the late 1920s, relatively reliable technologies like the Vita phone, which was a sound on Disk System start to appear, and then we get this entirely new crisis.
[RICK]
So you’ve got a silent film theater, and you want to turn it into a sound theater. Okay. Let’s dismiss the musicians. We don’t need them anymore.
[music is suddenly cut off]
We can use the sound on disk.
[music from a disk plays]
Now, wait a minute. What about my projectionist?
[sound of film reeling]
He says he wants to be in charge of everything, including the screen and the sound system and the electrical system but the electricians want to do that. Oh, wait a minute. It’s not just the electricians and the projectionist, it’s the stage hands and the IATSE Union. What we find is that all kinds of conflicts are operating in such a way as to each be counter posed to the others. And it’s only after a strong and interesting period of competition, that we settle into a situation where the various unions, the various specialties, the various companies all get their own way.
[MACK]
I don’t know if they all got their own way to me.
[CRIS]
I think I think quite a lot of people got stuffed.
[MACK]
Yeah. Not sure about that happy ending.
[CRIS]
You know, the studio’s made a lot of money. And then there were an enormous number of technicians who didn’t get paid so well.
[MACK]
Yeah. And you’re paying one orchestra to play the score one time instead of orchestras FROM the country.
[CRIS]
Yeah, it’s putting a huge number of live musicians out of business.
[MACK]
Well, be that as it may, what I really like about Rick Altman’s work is just This focus on the crisis and this sort of indeterminate nature of these things that they really could be different.
[CRIS]
I like it and to wonder whether we are in another crisis moment, and we don’t even yet know the constituent parts of it.
[MACK]
I think that’s definitely happening right now.
[CRIS]
Well, viewing habits and cinema going habits and what’s going on with the movies and the fact that everyone’s watching series, and what can be played out through a bunch of episodes on TV that’s totally different from how you could structure a film, and how domestic viewing habits and listening habits have changed because of the mobility of technology around the domestic sphere and so forth.
[MACK]
I think for our time period, the question is, will the crises ever be resolved? Or are we just in a period of endless crises I mean, I guess that’s what Rick’s work really tells us is that it has always been us.
[vaudeville music plays]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thank you to Rick Altman and Eric Deinstfry for being on the show. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we talked about at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you would rate and review us on Apple podcasts, pretty please. or tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook or give us a shout out on Twitter at Phantom Pod. Today’s show was edited by Craig Ellie and me, Mack Hagood. Our intern is Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is made possible through the generosity of the Miami University Humanities Center, the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney, endowment and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 16: Soar and Chill (Robin James)
Sep 27, 2019
Why do certain musical sounds move us while others leave us cold? Are musical trends simply that—or do they contain insights into the culture at large? Our guest is a musicologist who studies pop and electronic dance music. She’s fascinated by the way EDM privileges timbral and rhythmic complexity over the chord changes and harmonic complexities of the blues-based rock and pop music of yore. However, Robin James is also a philosopher and she connects these musical structures to social and economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism.
Robin James
In this episode, cris and Mack have a lengthy, freeform interview and listening session with Robin in which she breaks down the sounds of EDM, pop, hip hop, “chill” playlists, and industrial techno, conceiving them as varied responses to neoliberalism’s intensification of capitalism. Her analysis includes lyrical content, but her main focus is the soars, stutters, breaks, and drops that mimic the socio-economic environment of the 21st century. It’s an environment that demands resilience from all of us—and especially from women and people of color.
Hey, I’m Mack Hagood, and yes, you are hearing Calvin Harris on Phantom Power, the podcast on the sonic arts and humanities. Why you might ask? Well, our guest today spends a lot of time listening to Calvin Harris and David Guetta. She calls them the Coke and Pepsi of pop, electronic dance music or EDM. As a musicologist, she’s fascinated by how EDM pushes beyond tonality. That is the harmonies and chord progressions that are the focus of blues based rock and pop music. EDM cares more about Tambor, and rhythmic complexity, ear catching sounds and intense Sonic experiences. moments when the vocal stutters for the beat drops moments like this one, where the entire song begins to soar.
[music continues]
But Robin James isn’t just a musicologist. She’s also a philosopher. She really wants to know what these songs can tell us about society. And while many cultural analyses of pop songs focus on song lyrics, with a few vague gestures towards sound, Robin James brings her musical logical experience to bear connecting musical structures to economic structures, not to mention structural racism and sexism. To my mind, the strength of her work is that she makes admirably bold and clear claims about why certain kinds of popular music are popular in a given moment. And whether or not you decide you agree with those claims by the end of the show, you may never hear an EDM sore quite the same way again. In today’s episode, my co host cris cheek and I have a lengthy freeform conversation and listening session with Robin, in which she breaks down EDM pop songs featured in her book “ Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism Neoliberalism.” We also get into a bit of hip hop, as well as songs from her current research into chill music in the streaming era. Robin James is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UNC Charlotte, and co editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. For the 2019-2020 academic year. She is also visiting Associate Professor of Music at Northeastern University. And by the way, she got her started musicology and philosophy as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio, where cris and I teach.
[music fades out]
[ROBIN JAMES]
So I started college as an oboe major back in the 90s. Yeah.
[CRIS]
You were playing oboe at Miami?
[ROBIN]
Yes.
[CRIS]
Okay.
[ROBIN]
I played Piccolo in the marching band. I thought I wanted to be a conductor. I was taking philosophy classes. And I realized that sort of the questions that music theorists ask sometimes are similar to the questions that philosophers asked and that the questions that I was interested in about music were like,why do people think this sounds good, right? For it to music to go this way, as opposed to some other way? Why does music sound certain ways in particular socio historical moments? And those are really philosophical questions about music.So then when I was deciding what kind of graduate program do I want to go into? Do I want to go into, like a musicology program, you want to go into a gender studies program? Do I want to go to a philosophy program? I said, Well, in philosophy, I can do all of that stuff.
[CRIS]
So in terms of good,is it that it makes you feel good? Or is it that it’s good in relation to aesthetic standards that one has had brought down to you when you’re thinking about music?
[ROBIN]
Both. And often, I think the interesting things to think about when those two are in conflict, yes. So Khalifa San is optimism article came out in 2004. And that’s when I was writing my dissertation. I finished it in 2005. And poptimism, is the idea that pop music or music traditionally devalued, because its associated with like, team girls, is just as worthy of critical and intellectual attention as music that’s traditionally received that attention, such as jazz, or rock or music or something like that. So I was writing my dissertation at that time. And part of what I was trying to think about was sort of the conflict between, you know, the elite aesthetic standards and what people like, right? So for example, one of the things I did in the dissertation was show how, in some ways, Nico was the first poptimist. With his arguments, that Italian opera because they make you feel good, and they’re kind of not sensical, and just fun, is better than German.I was kind of thinking about the instances where what makes people feel good is in conflict with what the elite say is good, capital G.
[CRIS]
So kind of, I don’t know, low art versus high art will be another way of putting this.
[ROBIN]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
The kind of the things that you feel that you ought to develop an appreciation for. Because they’re held to be culturally iconic as as distinct from the thing that you just like.
[ROBIN]
Right. And for me, as a scholar of gender and race, that’s interesting, because there’s those two factors are often deeply deeply behind The conflict between the sort of critical standards and,
quote, unquote, guilty pleasures, right?
[MACK]
Yeah. It seems like a lot of your work is asking what is it about the social environment that makes certain musical sounds? Like you said, feel good, or feel pertinent, become popular? But then we could also flip that and say, what can the rise of certain musical sounds tell us about our society? Is there a way that musical sounds can tell us what’s actually going on?
[ROBIN]
Yeah, and that’s a great way to sort of describe what I try to do, because I think, in a lot of ways, what I’m interested in is understanding society and relations among people, so we can be better at it. And society is obviously vast and complicated, but pop songs are three minutes long. So they’re much easier to study in their completeness. We understand songs, because they contain structures that make sense to us as a structure. And those structures that we hear in songs also structure things in the world. So gender would be one example. We use gender to organize everything from like, what kind of bag what we call the kind of bag someone carries to bathrooms to all sorts of things, right. But we also use gender to organize relationships among songs, right? And I love Susan McLaren’s famous example about you know, the cadence, or the song that ends on a strong beat is called masculine. And the song that ends on a weak beat is called feminine because we associate masculinity with strength and femininity with weakness, right? So I try to find these structures in songs as sort of analogs or microscopic versions of the structures or logics or relationships that we experience macroscopically in our relations with each other with the world out in society.
[MACK]
Yeah. Is this a different question from what we might call like a hermeneutics of music?
[ROBIN]
Um, this is maybe where I get all nitpicky philosopher. So I would understand hermeneutics to be something where you’re interpreting a hidden meaning, right? You’re revealing something underneath the surface? And that’s one way of understanding meaning, like a hidden content, but I don’t know that I’m necessarily doing that. I’m not finding the, the expressed or hidden meaning so much as trying to figure out how it works. And why does it work this way? If that makes sense, right. And in that way, I think I’m thinking kind of like a music theorist.
[CRIS]
Can we have a look at some of the ways in which you break these pop songs down to show how they’re working? And what kind of effect they’re producing?
[ROBIN]
Sure.
[MACK]
Yeah. Yeah, maybe we could start with one musical feature that you have studied, which is the sore?
[ROBIN]
Yeah. So the sore is a device that I identify as sort of coming from early 21st century dubstep.
[dubstep plays]
Then sort of filtering up into the early 2010s, top 40, right? Remember this sort of EDM boom?
[EDM music plays]
It’s been around for a while, but it kind of rose to the top of the pop charts and became kind of a common language in pop songwriting around 2009 2010. And what it does is, it’s a way to build and release tension in a song, right, to build a climax is what it does. So what the sore does is it uses rhythmic intensification to build the song up to a climax and then release that tensions. You guys have probably heard of Zeno’s paradox, right? That’s the thing where you go half the distance, and then half of that again, and then half of them half again, down to infinity. So that’s what the sore kind of does with rhythmic events, right? Take like a hand clap from like, quarter notes to eighth notes, 16th notes. And oftentimes, it’ll try to approach the sort of limit of human hearing.
[music continues]
Things are going so fast, you can’t hear distinct event. So that’s kind of what the story trying to do. And that’s how it creates tension. It’s acting like it’s trying to break the limit of your hearing.
[music continues]
So this is an example of a sore in an early ish dubstep song. This is Scream’s sort of, most well known breakout single. So if we’re talking kind of the origins of dubstep, this would be recognized as a significant song. Listen to the hand claps. See how it just doubled. Then there’s the drop and the downbeat.
[CRIS]
And, so maybe this will go nowhere as a question. But if you’re on the dance floor, what happens?
[ROBIN]
Usually, that’s the moment where there’s like, everybody sort of takes a breath. And then sort of when I would be dancing, like you emphasize that downbeat. Like it makes the next downbeat. feel like it’s falling harder. Because that’s kind of like the big moment sometimes like at festivals, people will scream, right during the drop.
[CRIS]
Right, right. Right, right, right.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, so this is LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem. This is kind of the quintessence of big, dumb, EDM pop. I love this song. It’s just fun, and loud and off the chain is what I’d say. Okay, it’s gonna start now.
[song continues]
So it’s sort of building up to this climactic moment, and then releasing the tension on the downbeat.
[MACK]
Yeah, totally.
[ROBIN]
So in some senses, what the sore is doing is it’s replacing dissonance, like harmonic dissonance. So like a blues song or a rock song would build that tension with chord changes, but pop chord changes have never been sort of especially central to pop. And this, the source sort of lets them fall entirely, sort of to secondary status, right? Because they’re not the thing driving the building of tension and release. It’s really sort of rhythmic and tangible instead of harmonic.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah. I think those two examples really show it quite clearly. And your explanation is super clear. So maybe we can get you to sort of take off your musicologists hat now and put on your philosopher hat. Because, I mean, what you do in your book “Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music Feminism Neoliberalism” is you note how this musical feature of the sore gets deployed in millennial pop music? It seems like it gets paired with certain kinds of lyrical content and certain kinds of identities. And so you sort of unpack that for the reader, and then you have a critique of it. So could you get into that for us?
[ROBIN]
Sure. So you remember how I said the sore is like, implying the transgression of the limits of human hearing? So what I do in the book, so the titular word, resilience is a word you hear a lot. So this idea of overcoming limitations or damage or harm, to be, you know, stronger than you were before, or turning a crisis into a resource. So whatever given the book is that the sore is sort of a sonic representation of this logical resilience, right, it sort of creates this tension, and then implies this Sonic transgression or damage, that then becomes the sort of right, it’s not actually harmful. But aesthetically, what it gives you is a sort of an increased or augmented pleasure on the experience of the next downbeat. So that’s the, it’s representing in music, the sort of experience that resilience is supposedly are in theory, supposed to be right, you turn harmed things that damage you into advantages, right. So in the book, what I do is I note that a lot of the discussion of resilience just sort of in general, tends to take women and women’s experiences of the harms of patriarchy as sort of Central examples of resilience. So and you can see this in a lot of what Sarah Bennet wiser calls popular feminist discourse, right, this idea that women are capable of sort of individually overcoming the limits or the harms that patriarchy does them. So, you know, you experience sexual harassment at work, but you overcome it and you become an entrepreneur and now, a successful business person. Or, you know, like, perhaps you are a poor girl of color, but you study really hard and get into Harvard or something. So this narrative of resilience is really pervasive. And it’s often used as a sort of foe solution for the harms of oppression.
[CRIS]
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of there’s nothing you can’t do. Yeah. Weird juxtaposition to. And not quite. But what doesn’t kill you makes you dance.
[ROBIN]
Well, yeah. Or I think in the book, I call it something like Nisha, and Kanye’s, what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
[MACK]
Can we listen to some examples of this pairing of the sore of this intensification with, you know, lyrical content about resilience?
[ROBIN]
Sure. Um, do you want to do the ludicrous song? You kind of have to hear the lyrics. Because they’re all about taking risks, right risks, that could be overwhelming. But doing it anyway, and winning, right? So there’s this logic of sort of, I’m going to expose myself to all this potential harm. But that’s necessary in order for me to live my best life.
[Ludicrous plays]
If you live for something, you’re not alone my friend. So fill up your cup and get a lighter, a toast to life.They say what don’t kill me, makes you stronger.
[ROBIN]
Right, so he’s talking about all these kinds of transgressions. A fast life.
[song continues]
Here comes the sore. There’s this really interesting, sort of like the American flag and David Guetta appear, right at the, at the climax of the source. So there’s this weird sort of gesture towards American nationalism and whiteness, as though those are the two things that allow black men talking about risk taking to succeed rather than succumb to those risks, right? Because we all know that, like, black men are one of the most criminalized populations in the States, and, you know, even doing law abiding things, they get arrested and beaten up and stuff like that, right? So risk taking is even more risky for them, right. But here we have this sort of song about risk taking is good, I’m going to expose myself to all this damage. But the thing that insulates me from the negative consequences of that, oh, the American flag and David Guetta.
[MACK]
Maybe this would be a good time to dive a little more deeply into your critique here of neoliberalism. Because I want to draw out why it would be advantageous to sort of represent people of color and women as taking these chances and overcoming things like that, that I think, you know, people might be surprised to hear that a feminist philosopher is actually rather critical of these kinds of representations that it might seem like that would be something that you would celebrate. So could you talk a little bit about that?
[ROBIN]
Sure. So overcoming the harms of oppression is something that oppressed people have had to do for centuries. But what’s different now and what’s different with with resilience discourse? Is that it like all aspects of neoliberalism it privatizes it right, it makes individuals responsible for fixing systemic issues. But it also sort of takes the fixing or healing that one might need to do in response to the harms of oppression and basically co ops it for those mechanisms of oppression so that the healing process doesn’t actually fix anything, it just feeds the oppression and contributes to it. If that makes sense.
[MACK]
So if old school capitalism was, you know, you work for the same employer your whole lifetime, and you’re a company, man, man intended there, right? Like, it was definitely hierarchical and patriarchal and racist. But it did also have its kind of a certain kind of safety to it. Which, you know, there’s a lot of nostalgia for it now. Among people like Donald Trump, neoliberal capitalism, offers a whole lot more under the guise of freedom, it takes away this social safety net, it says anybody can come in women are invited, minorities are invited. In fact, you’re required to come in and work because the social safety net has been removed. Lifetime employment is gone. Because, you know, life has become liquid, and corporations are allowed to fire you whenever they want. We enter the gig economy. And so you are required to be resilient, no matter who you are, you need to overcome, right, all of these things that this intensification of capitalism, and this deregulation of markets have thrown our way. Is that a fair way to sort of characterize what you’re talking about here?
[ROBIN]
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, of course, the sort of lower social status you have, or the lower you are on the privilege hierarchy, the more stuff you have overcome.
[MACK]
Yes, yes. Yeah. And so maybe one thing that I really like about what you do in your book, you really integrate, because there are a lot of critiques of neoliberalism out there. But not all of them focus on the roles of race and gender the way you do.
[ROBIN]
Neoliberalism is all about efficiency, right? It tries to achieve the goals of old school capitalism and classical liberalism, with less of a cost, right? So you could police the purity of identity categories. And that’s sort of what you know, the one drop rule would be an example of right, you were policing the purity of whiteness. But that takes a lot of resources to do, right, you have to work very hard at that, be vigilant about it. So one of the ways that neoliberalism upgrades, old school forms of sexism and racism, and all the other isms is by basically deregulating those boundaries, right, so we’re not going to police the boundaries of purity, we are going to instead demand mixing, right. But we’re going to do this in a field where the background conditions are rigged. So that even though we’re sort of not policing boundaries, it will be more or less impossible for the individuals that have been traditionally excluded to succeed.
[CRIS]
My God, so I’m reminded of a lyric from the early hip hop days from last night a DJ saved my life, there ain’t a thing that I can’t fix, because I can put it in the mix.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, yeah. And Lester Spence, actually has a couple of books that talk about sort of hip hop cultures, adoption of the rhetoric of neoliberalism. Right. So, you know, he talks about how the, you know, that we’ve got the figure of the hustler is sort of a black version of the Neo liberal entrepreneur.
[MACK]
And so the sore is kind of an example of how this resistance and resilience get co opted, or this kind of message of resistance, right, like, this would have been a transgressive message at some point in time. And yet, it’s able to get sort of sort of appropriated by the system that it was resisting. And yet, for the individual who’s enjoying this music, it’s still sort of like equipment for living, so to speak, right? Like that experience of listening to that music, dancing to the sore, feeling that intensification. To my mind, and maybe this is my chance to nitpick, but it goes beyond representation, right? It’s not just representing this kind of neoliberal capitalism, but it’s but it’s doing it to the body, right, your body, your nervous system, is, is experiencing this, and then coming out of the other side of it feeling invigorated and feeling stronger. And in that way, it’s like the kind of thing that helps people move through their lives, right. So I feel like there’s something really interesting happening here, where, from the subjective position of the individual, this music is helping people get through their day or get through their week, they can’t wait for the weekend to come and dance to this music. And yet, it can still be supportive of the system that’s making their life such a trivial to begin with.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, and I think that’s just popular music in the 20th and 21st century. You know, commercial music is inherently part of this exploitative system. And I think you could even go all the way back and say things like, well, racism and sexism have been baked into our aesthetic norms, since we’ve had the idea of race or gender. So there’s never going to be this sort of problematic artwork that we can experience. So the fact that there’s this dynamic where, on the one hand, these songs are literally sort of, you could either say they’re kind of training us in the experience of resilience, or they make sense to us. And we like them because we’ve already been so inculcated in this ideology, that, that we want our leisure time activities to also take the same shape that we have to form our lives into in our in sort of work in work. Right. But I think we I mean, I like those songs. I think they’re fun songs. And I think the thing about art, and it’s sort of interpretive, and I think, more importantly, and it’s sort of social context, it can be more than what it is as a commodity, or just as an object. Right. That’s, that’s the awesome thing about art, right, by listening to this music or dancing to it together, or by talking about it, we’re sort of participating in social relations that have the potential to not be as messed up or oppressive as the sorts of logics perhaps encoded in some of the if that makes any sense at all. Right. Like, yeah, it’s the making and sharing and being together that the artworks foster that, I think, is really that’s the work of freedom, right? If you want to put it that way. Right. Like, that’s the cool thing about art that I think lets it work for social justice.
[MACK]
What Victor Turner called communitous.And, there are some examples that you give of types of musical forms that may be provide that sort of being together yet also, maybe throw a little sand into the gears of neoliberal capitalism instead of greasing the wheels? Could you maybe talk about an example of that?
[ROBIN]
Sure. So this will be the sort of other word of the title melancholy. So what got me thinking this was people’s reaction to Rihanna’s response to Chris Brown after he assaulted her, right? So her unapologetic album came out, and she did a duet with him. And people were furious, because that was not the proper sort of, quote, unquote, feminist response. She didn’t disavow him, she didn’t perform the overcoming right? Like, oh, I was, I was assaulted. I reject myself, the person who assaulted me I have overcome the damage. I’m a quote unquote, feminist now. So initially, I saw the sort of rejection of resilience in just in Rihanna’s own behavior. But then I listened to the album. And what you can hear on the album are structures that gesture towards the sore, but don’t do the work that they do. Right. They don’t sort of build this climax. So in the same way that Rianna didn’t sort of perform resilience for the pleasure of her fans. The songs don’t perform sours for aesthetic pleasure, if that makes sense.
[MACK]
Yeah, maybe you can we listen to an example of that?
[ROBIN]
Sure. Did you want to do diamonds?
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let’s listen to diamonds by Rihanna.
[Diamonds begins to play]
[ROBIN]
I think it’s important to note that the lyrics are all about shining like diamonds, right? So this is, on the one hand about sort of celebrating strength, and beauty and things but it doesn’t sound like a celebratory song.
[Diamond continues]
We’re coming up to the where the sore should be…this is where the sore should be. You’ve got the, the repetitions in the lyrics, but it doesn’t go anywhere. So we’re back at another verse.
[CRIS]
In some ways, it was happening in the keyboards and the strings. The keyboards went from being these more statuesque chords that we’re hearing right now, and to doubling. And then we had strings doing staccato intervals built off the doubling of the keyboards.
[ROBIN]
It’s sort of gesture there. There wasn’t the right there was some doubling, but then it didn’t,quadruple. So yeah, that’s what I mean, it’s gesturing towards this, but not completing it.
[CRIS]
But also, we’ve got this, this other thing that you’ve talked about a lot, which is the stuttering or the sampling of the voice to repeat. And I’m thinking about a really old fashioned term, like delayed gratification.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, yeah. So I’m part of pop songwriting. Now, and this is in part due to streaming. Right. So you have to get people to, to listen for more than 30 minutes. But part of it just due to other aesthetic factors, but delayed gratification is something that you don’t just if it’s not important, right, because that structure of the discipline in order that you need in order to sort of wait and delay runs against the kind of risk taking and imperative to transgress that you heard about, for example, from ludicrous. So it’s not like it’s trying to delay gratification. It’s almost more just like, saying something like, I know what you expect me to do enough to sort of gesture out it, but I’m refusing to do the work that you want from me. I’m not gonna give you I’m not going to do the work of performing pleasure for you or generating that energy for you.
[CRIS]
So it’s not just resilience, its resistance.
[ROBIN]
But it reads as failure. It’s refusal, but it reads as failure. And the reason why I called it melancholy was because traditionally, melancholy is the inability to get over something. Right. So Freud distinguishes between morning, which is sort of, you know, getting some resolution after a loss of something. And then melancholy would be the failure of mourning, right? Like you never actually come to terms with a loss. So that’s a melancholy traditionally means then you can sort of think of it as the refusal of resilience, right? It’s the failure to overcome sufficiently.
[CRIS]
or I’m thinking about the JIRA, the classic JIRA image of melancholy, melancholia, that that sense of dwelling in a refusal to overcome.
[ROBIN]
So from the perspective of resilience, dust discourse, that’s what the refusal to overcome looks like now, from the perspective of the person doing that refusal, it might feel fine.. It just appears to be a failure and sort of this, I don’t know what you call a misery or a total downer from the perspective of resilience.
[CRIS]
So there’s a certain satisfaction, or even arguably a pleasure in dwelling in the resistance to the dwelling in the refusal to overcome.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, and it may actually be a healthy response to trauma. Because what I’m arguing is that resilience discourse masks itself as a sort of helpful response to trauma, but what might actually be helpful for individual people in various social locations might look entirely different. So doing what you actually need to recuperate from the trauma will appear pathological from the perspective of resilience discourse, but at the sort of level of individual subjects. It’ll feel maybe not fine, but at least it will feel something like some kind of healing or resolution or moving on or something.
[CRIS]
That’s great. So that’s kind of like a different version of what Mack was talking about earlier, from a very different direction in terms of equipment for living.
[ROBIN]
And one of the things I also thought was important to, to mention in the book is that oftentimes, people in oppressed groups will perform what could otherwise be considered resilience or overcoming or whatever, but because of their identities, they will be judged as failing at it, right? So in the same way that like criminalisation works, such that, you know, you know, Lisa Cashow and the introduction to her book on criminalization and social deaths contrasts the way victims of Katrina and black victims of Katrina were described when they went out looking for food. One was people were looking for food and the other was looting. Right? So there’s a similar dynamic at work with resilience or melancholy, right? The same behavior is going to be differently evaluated or described, from that perspective, depending upon the identities of who’s doing it, and how we perceive those. Those identities, if that makes sense.
[MACK]
Yeah, that’s fascinating. And I mean iit gives us a way to think about the sort of dark, melancholy sound that has crept into hip hop over the last decade, you know, and, and Kanye Heartbreak was kind of considered like a bit of a failure of an album at the time, but gosh, it was like, it was a real harbinger of what was to come. And also, there seems to be a sort of kind of refusal with sort of so called mumble rappers, to really perform
[Kanye begins to play]
It’s kind of similar refusal that I see and Rihanna’s work where she’s like, this is for me, this isn’t necessarily for you at all.
[ROBIN]
So what’s interesting is that those rappers are almost entirely men. And there might be a way to sort of read this as a sort of refusal of resilience as gendered feminine. That sort of this idea of resilience has become gendered and racialized as a feature of low status groups. So in order to be able to be the most resilient, you have to start at the bottom. So I think, back in 2015, when the book came out, this sort of maximalism was gendered masculine, right, so if you think about what ludicrous was talking about, I think, the next verse that we didn’t listen to, he talks about, basically something like if I lose my balance, in case I fall, just know, it’ll be from women, weed and alcohol, right. So it’s this sort of macho transgression?
[MACK]
I mean, we could even go further back because I remember when, when I was first teaching university students dubstep was the province of like, nerds, you know, a certain kind of music nerd. Yeah. And then it became like, you know, so called bro step. And it was all the fraternity dudes with a much more hegemonic vision of masculinity dancing through their heads. It was really interesting to see that transformation take place. So it’s interesting for me to hear that this idea that this kind of intensification has become gendered female.
[ROBIN]
In these past four years, right, it’s happened like that. But what you see now, you know, the sad rappers but you also even the EDM inflected top 40 stuff is much less maximalist. We might even call it chill. So there’s been the sort of pivot away from remember YOLO? You only live once?
[MACK]
Sadly, yes.
[ROBIN]
Yeah. Yeah, there’s been a sort of pendulum swing away from that maximalism. And towards a more sort of chill tone down, right. I mean, Taylor Swift even has a song telling people to calm down in the title.
[Taylor Swift plays]
And it’s just happened so rapidly, but I think it definitely has happened to the point that we might even be moving on to something else.
[CRIS]
Yeah, in some senses that’s already that’s that’s what you’re mapping is beginning to imitate a night out with kind of people getting into this kind of sort of, you know, raging ecstatic moments around midnight, one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning, and then and then chill out the ambien space.
[MACK]
We’re at the after after party. It’s almost time to go to the diner for breakfast. So maybe let’s talk about chill. I’m trying to think about if there’s a musical form an analog to the sore that we could talk about, because I like how concrete the sore is.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, so it’s really present today in just talk tones down sores, sores are still there. But they’re at like, two rather than 11. So the build is much more subtle. So you’ll have that same sort of structure, like, there’s a little bit of a build, and a drop, and then the downbeat. So do you want to talk about Thank You Next?
[Ariana Grande plays]
The sore is so miniscule, it’s like an ariana size sore. And there is was, you just have that little sort of smooth, or cymbal roll. And then there is the downbeat, and it’s over.
[MACK]
Your work lately, you’ve moved from identifying soars into identifying this kind of more chill form that is dominating pop music right now. Do you want to talk about like, any analogous changes that you going on socially, that are making this feel like it makes sense? And sounds good, as you put it?
[ROBIN]
Sure. Yeah. So um, I think Thank you Next is a really good example of it, because it’s about Grande sort of overcoming a breakup and learning to love herself. And that’s literally the narrative of the lyrics. So it’s something we might frame as a kind of resilience. But the way it’s expressed or represented, is totally different than what we got five or 10 years ago, right. It’s all about sort of her expressing her capacity to, I like to put it as sort of maintain productivity amid outrageous circumstances. So Chris Richards, The Washington Post, music critic, talked a few years ago, he had a piece about this guy. Anyway, he had a piece on the sort of the popularity of people talking about Xanax and pop music. So anti anxiety medicine is really common now for probably good reason, right? Like, you know, the world seems to be falling apart around us, both in literal and figurative ways. So this idea of, sort of taking anti anxiety medicine or listening to a chill playlist, or being mindful is a way to sort of maintain your productivity, and keep on going amid all of this stuff, right, so it’s a way to sort of keep people working, and distract them and keep them sort of doing what they otherwise should be doing, when in fact, we should be outraged. Right?
[MARK]
Yeah, this is what, you know, my recent book is all about using sound technologies to be able to concentrate when you need to concentrate and sleep when you need to sleep. So sort of manage your own affect. And, and it’s interesting to look at sort of like the ads for noise cancelling headphones, and the beats, noise cancelling headphones, are really aimed at women and people of color and marketed through experiences of racism and sexism. But the message, as you said earlier about music, it’s really about individualizing seeing these problems and giving someone a technology to tune it out. The way you rise above is to not hear the haters.
[ROBIN]
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Be resilient, overcome it. Tune it out. Yeah. So the effect of this and you see this in Taylor Swift’s new single, right, is that outrage becomes seen as something belonging to people of either low social status or odious political beliefs? Right, rather than something that like, yeah, we should we should be. We should be outraged at the destruction of the environment. We should be outraged at concentration camps full of children.
[MARK]
And so this move to chill. I mean, we see this in the very technology of the streaming platforms, right, where the streaming platforms are built more around desired moods, affects, type of activity that you’re going to do to the music, productivity, working out, then they are organized around genres, the way that music stores, were, you know, still are those that exist.
Could you maybe talk about that a little bit?
[ROBIN]
Sure. Um, lyst Peli gave a really good talk about this at pop con last year. And I think it was published in the Baffler a few months ago. But she did, she took a deep dive into Spotify as she did that, That’s her thing. And she tried listening to sad playlist, right playlist about grief playlist about feeling bad. And she noticed that she was almost immediately redirected to feel good stuff. And so she looked into the way that Spotify represented itself to advertisers, you know, sort of how it talked about itself to advertisers. And she argues that Spotify wants people to feel good when it’s listening to Spotify, because advertisers want listeners to feel good about the brands advertised on Spotify.
[CRIS]
I love this.
[ROBIN]
Yeah. So Spotify doesn’t want you to feel bad, because its advertisers don’t want you to associate negative emotions with their brand. Right? So Spotify has this own sort of business interest in mood management, user management.
[MACK]
So if you buy Spotify Premium, are you allowed to listen to sad music?
[ROBIN]
Who knows?
[MACK]
It’s ad free.
Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know.
[CRIS]
Maybe that’s why YouTube keeps trying to get me to take out one of their ad free subscriptions because I never listened to anything uplifting.
[MACK]
You just listen. Yeah, dense walls of noise cris.
[CRIS]
I’m interested in listening to steam trains and things like that, cars on the freeway.
[ROBIN]Well, that’s interesting, because I think one of the sorts of places in the pop music world that is definitely until these days and it is tied to a progressive politics is industrial techno.
[CRIS]
Absolutely.
[industrial techno music plays]
[ROBIN]
Not all the artists are totally sort of politically engaged. But people like Paula Temple in particular and Perk also, they’re both queer artists, who have released explicitly political music from a progressive perspective. And that I think does express. Some people like to call it hard or angry music. But interestingly, both of them have said in various ways, I don’t think my music is angry. I think it’s joyous. But again, I think that’s an example of just strong emotion. Which chill like I said earlier codes as either pathological or politically regressive. So I think it’s interesting to look for places where sort of Sonic maximalism in a strong emotion it implies are explicitly associated with that. And I think that’s one place, I think you can find it and I’ve been calling it at one point I called it angry melancholy but then I found the interviews where the artists were like, it’s not angry. So I’m, I’m trying to find an adjective to describe what kind of melancholy it is, because it’s not this sort of melancholy that I talked about in the book, but it’s it’s melancholy and that it’s a similar for their failure to perform the required an effective attunement, right which in this case would be something like chill.
[MACK]
Cameron on a guillotine was that Yeah, was that inspired by the Black Mirror episode with the pig?
[ROBIN]
Yeah. So it’s definitely about Brexit. I actually first heard the song on a rinse FM show the day after the Brexit vote. So it’s sort of circulating as an anti Brexit song.
[music plays]
[MACK]
Sounds so retro to me. It makes me nostalgic.
[ROBIN]
But it’s kind of itchy and frenetic? Yeah, so to me that sort of represents like, when I’m tapping my toe, and I just know, I’m full of energy, and I can’t calm down and I’m nervous. It’s definitely not chill.
[MACK]
All right. This has been great. Do we have anything else that we should discuss? Like any things that we haven’t covered?
[CRIS]
So what’s the next book about?
[ROBIN]
It’s called the Sonic Esteem. And it’s about how theorists pop science writers use concepts of sound to create qualitative versions of the relationships that neoliberalism creates quantitatively. So like, one of the things I talk about is how pop science writers use the idea of resonance to translate the probabilistic math behind either some kinds of data science or some kinds of string theory into terms that people can understand.
[CRIS]
That sounds great, that sounds great.
[ROBIN]
So that’s out in December.
[CRIS]
Is that something that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t done?
[ROBIN]
No, I think we covered it, thank you all so much. It’s been a pleasure to chat.
[MACK]
Oh, it’s been so much fun. Thank you for for talking with us. This one will be it’ll be really interesting to edit.
[CRIS]
Mack’s gonna be spending the next four months making it into a two minute piece. Thank you so much.
[ROBIN]
Thank you guys. Bye.
[calm music fades in]
[CRIS]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Robin James for being on the show. You can learn more about Phantom Power, find transcripts and links to the things we talked about, and previous episodes of the show, all at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Today’s show was edited by Mack Hagood. Our intern is Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[calm music fades out]
Ep. 15: Goth Diss (Anna M. Williams)
Jul 01, 2019
WithMy Gothic Dissertation, University of Iowa PhD Anna M. Williams has transformed the dreary diss into a This American Life-style podcast. Williams’ witty writing and compelling audio production allow her the double move of making a critical intervention into the study of the gothic novel, while also making an entertaining and thought-provoking series for non-experts. Williams uses famed novels by authors such as Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelly as an entry point for a critique of graduate school itself—a Medieval institution of shadowy corners, arcane rituals, and a feudal power structure. The result is a first-of-its-kind work that serves as a model for doing literary scholarship in sound.
Anna M. Williams
This episode of Phantom Power offers you an exclusive preview of My Gothic Dissertation. First, Mack Hagood interviews Williams about creating the project, then we listen to a full chapter—a unique reading of Frankenstein that explores how the university tradition can restrict access to knowledge even as it tries to produce knowledge.
You can learn more about Anna M. Williams and her work at her website. This episode features music from Neil Parsons’ 8-Bit Bach Reloaded.
It’s May 4th 2017, and I’m in room 311 of the English philosophy building.
[jazzy music plays]
Room 311 is a windowless closet crowded with a conference table and rolling chairs that currently contain the five members of my dissertation committee. A radio scholar, A romanticist, an 18th century-ist education theorist and Victorianist.
[MALE VOICE]
So we’re here to talk prospectus and I welcome you with my colleagues. And we’re interested in raising constructive questions that will help you with clarifying focus, the scope, and the process because the process is so interesting.
[ANNA]
It’s the job of these five people to advise me over the next months, or more likely years as I write my dissertation, which is the only thing standing between me and my doctorate in English. What we’re here to discuss today, isn’t my dissertation per se, but rather my prospectus, a Microsoft Word document spanning anywhere from six to 20 pages that describes the dissertation, the one I haven’t written yet. In this way, think of the prospectus as a sort of dissertation permission slip, a sheet of paper that once signed allows me to climb on board the bus and head into the field of academic literary criticism. And if I don’t earn my committee signatures at the end of this meeting, then I guess I’m going to have to stay behind and eat my bag lunch all by myself.
[music fades out]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Hey, everyone, its Phantom Power. Sounds about sound, the podcast where we explore sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood. My partner, cris cheek is out vagabonding. It’s summer, I caught sight of him via social media on the Appalachian Trail. As you hear this, he may be in London or Rome. cris, if you’re listening, I hope you brought your recorder with you pick up some good sounds for us. And yeah, it’s summer. But there was something I wanted to share with you because it’s hot off the audio presses. One of the really nice and unexpected fringe benefits of doing this show is we’ve started to get invites to come and talk to folks about how to do academic work in sound, and what the potential of podcasting is in the world of sharing ideas. And so I was giving one of those talks at the University of Iowa. And people were telling me we have a PhD student who is doing her dissertation in podcast form. The author’s name is Anna M. Williams, and her project is called My Gothic Dissertation.
[carnival sounds and music play]
It’s a study of the Gothic novel, something that many literary critics, like Williams have studied in the past. But she does it in podcast form. And she uses the Gothic novel as a venue as an avenue into a critique of graduate school itself. So it’s sort of this narrative about being a graduate student about that the actual practice of writing a dissertation, and how that experience is, in itself, a very Gothic style experience. You totally do not have to be a literary scholar, to understand and to, in fact, enjoy this podcast. It’s a compelling project. It’s really nicely produced. And it’s a peek behind the curtain into what grad school is really like.
[sounds and music end, replaced with victorian music]
[ANNA]
It’s as if I’ve been lowered into a mind maze, or like the heroines of the literary genre that developed contemporaneously with the Enlightenment, the Gothic novel, maybe I’ve been lowered into a crumbling ancient castle.
[organ music plays]
What led me to this place is the prospect of a life devoted to literature of professing it as a career. But once I arrived, the prospect of a professorship began promptly to fade from view, like the Gothic ghost that it is. And now I’m trapped here in this Gothic castle known as grad school, with its intricate system of locked passageways, trap doors and dead ends, all lorded over by the mysterious Cult of the profession. The only way out for me, the intrepid heroine, trembling with trepidation, is to figure out the secrets of the ancient cult. To gain some knowledge that for the next 500 pages or so will continue to evade my grasp. I’ve got to show my mastery of the rules of literary criticism, but at the same time critique them. I’ve got to outsmart the Baroque villain of the grad school Gothic, the dissertation itself by doing it, while also simultaneously undoing it. And like those breastfeeding readers enraptured by the illicit world of the Gothic and the 18th and 19th centuries, you’re invited along to witness my own daring PhD adventure, because this is my Gothic dissertation.
[music ends, the sound of thunder is heard]
[MACK]
Like I said, this thing is hot off the presses so hot, in fact that the final episode has not yet been produced, because that’s the episode where Anna Williams defends her dissertation. So I don’t even know she defended it successfully. We’ll have to wait and see. But I want to share an interview that I just did with her this morning. And then I’m also going to share a chapter that she did on the novel Frankenstein, because I think it’s a really interesting reading that she does, and it’s a lot of fun to listen to.
[sound of thunder is heard again]
[ANNA]
So there were three primary things that I wanted to accomplish in this dissertation. And the first one was that it was my actual dissertation. And so I needed to make some kind of critical intervention. So what I ended up doing was highlighting some under recognized educational themes that run through the Gothic. The second thing that I wanted to accomplish was just to share the lived experience of what it’s like to be a grad student, in this particular historical moment in the humanities, because I think there are a lot of hidden obstacles, and a lot of them are emotional, and psychological. And those things don’t get talked about a lot. And so I was pointing out these like emotional factors, this kind of like emotional privilege that people have this, like a thick skin, or whatever you want to call it, that helps certain people succeed more easily than others in academic settings. And then the third thing that I wanted to do, because I didn’t want it to be purely critique, I wanted to offer some positive alternatives for how we might do better in graduate education to make things more accessible. And just a healthier environment for education overall, in general.
[MACK]
One of the really distinctive things that I think is happening here is that you’ve written the dissertation that is impart a critical reflection on the process of writing a dissertation. So this idea of this sort of reflective peek behind the curtain. And in fact, the podcast format itself, were those in the game plan from the beginning?
[ANNA]
They were, the podcast part especially because I had, I had kind of a real one day, this one day and the summer of 2016, I was out walking and listening to this American life. And it was an episode in which Ira Glass and Hannah Jaffe Walt, were talking about their work life balance in their 30s, which was like, exactly where I was, I had just turned 30, I was trying to figure out what to do with my professional life. And they were both talking about how much they love their job, they love making radio, and how difficult it was to balance that with raising children and, and having friends and that kind of thing. And I was thinking like, God, I, maybe this is an unusual response. But I was like, I would love to have a job that I loved that much that I didn’t want to stop doing it at the end of the day. And then all of a sudden, I think this idea had been brewing for a long time, because of the way that I was listening to this American life as like a budding literary scholar, it just occurred to me like what they do is tell stories, and then explain why those stories matter. And that’s what we are supposed to be doing as literary critics like at the very fundamental level. So it just occurred to me, I could totally make a career, doing literary criticism in the same kind of podcast format that has been so successfully pioneered by This American Life. And that very afternoon, when I got home from my walk, I went, you know, I’m gonna see if Iowa Public Radio has any job openings, just on a whim, they’re probably not even based in Iowa City where I live, but I’m just going to check. Long story short, I ended up interning there for a year, while I was writing my perspective. So that is a very long way of telling you that, yes, the podcasting aspect of this project was, that was first, the subject matter came second.
[MACK]
What a cool story. And that really like answers a question that I had, because, you know, this sort of self reflexive move that you make of dissertating about dissertating. I immediately heard that as being in the tradition of, you know, two decades of NPR, and podcast shows, since This American Life, right. I mean, like, show like Sarah Canucks Cereal, you know, that show is as much about the process of reporting the story as it is about the story itself.
[ANNA]
Yeah.
[MACK]
One of the things that I really liked about your project is you do what a dissertation is supposed to do, which is sort of like make a critical intervention into a specialized field, right? But at the same time, you also do what a dissertation almost never does, which is frame the work in a manner that is accessible to a wider audience. So being able to do that double move, I thought, like, showed a lot of sort of dexterity on your part, as a writer, and as a producer of audio.
[ANNA]
Thank you.
[MACK]
So in the spirit of that, I want to make sure that we define our terms, it’s something I always try to do on the podcast. So what is a gothic novel?
[ANNA]
Sure. So a lot of times people define what makes something a gothic novel based on like a certain set of characteristics that it has. So it’s often set in like a medieval, an imaginary medieval past. And so that’s where the term Gothic originally comes from. Like it’s referring to Gothic architecture, which was, the cathedrals and everything that were built throughout Europe, in the Middle Ages. That’s the style of architecture. So the type of novel in which these characters are living and having their stories played out in the medieval past. That’s why they call it Gothic. So other characteristics are, they often take place in castles or monasteries. So setting is really important. There will usually be some kind of supernatural element or as in the case of Ann Radcliffe, something that seems supernatural at first, but is actually later it has a totally rational explanation. It’s the typical movie made by Scooby Doo as well. You know, and in the Gothic too like Scooby Doo, there will be some kind of villain who is out for personal gain. And they’re trying to scare people away from discovering their plot, with these supernatural or fake supernatural elements anyway. So those are some of the main characteristics of a gothic novel. And the heyday of the Gothic people say, was from about, you know, Horace Walpole 1760s, up until about 1820, which is right after the publication of Frankenstein, which is one of the most famous examples of a gothic novel.
[MACK]
So early on, you talk about an influential approach to the Gothic novel among literature scholars, which sees the genre as a sort of critique of pre modern institutions and ways of thinking, right?
[ANNA]
Yeah, yeah. David Punter and Chris Baltic, and Jared Hogole, I think are three of the major critics who look at the Gothic that way.
[MACK]
And then you extend this critique to the university itself? So you point out that the university is in fact, a premium modern institution.
[ANNA]
In a lot of ways. The university as we know it, began in the Middle Ages and the public imagination, I think, conjures up images of like, Gothic style, gray stone buildings with arches and covered in ivy, when we think about unit, the term university or college. And, I mean, that just speaks to like the medieval roots of this institution. So another element of the Gothic that these critics have pointed out when the Gothic represents these medieval institutions, which typically are the Catholic Church and feudal aristocracy. What they say the Gothic is critiquing about those institutions is the power dynamics that have traditionally ruled those places.
[MACK]
So in the Gothic novel, we have these sort of sinister characters who have the shadowy institutions behind them. And in grad school, you have the PhD advisor, it’s a publish or perish situation for the student. And there’s a lot of sort of, perhaps arcane symbols and rituals that the student perhaps doesn’t entirely understand and yet needs to be initiated into, in order to gain the approval of this figure.
[ANNA]
Exactly. And, like, described in this way, I know that it sounds, I guess, melodramatic, and I’m totally aware of that. And the Gothic does have a lot of melodramatic elements to it. And so invoking the Gothic to describe the experience of the modern day graduate student is meant to be tongue in cheek, it’s meant to be like partly humorous, but it’s also meant to be partly serious, because that was kind of the tone that I think the Gothic successfully struck. Sorry, go ahead.
[MACK]
And I think you successfully strike that tone through audio production, particularly the way you use music. So sometimes you’re making this kind of argument, or you’re letting a character a graduate student character speak about their experience. And the music behind them is a sort of melodramatic soundtrack, you know?
[ANNA]
Yeah, yeah. And it’s not meant at all to like, undercut what they’re saying. It’s actually meant to evoke their psychological experience of what they’re talking about. Because it can feel very confusing, like you experienced these things as very emotionally painful sometimes and trying. But when you share these things with people, sometimes it can feel hard to be believed. And so you can start to really doubt yourself. And then it’s like this feeling like, you don’t have a right to feel the way that you’re feeling. It’s a complex emotional experience, which is another reason that I think the Gothic fits so well as a lens through which to view it because gaslighting is a phenomenon that often happens in the Gothic. And I think some form of that can happen in graduate school as well, even if it’s not intentional.
[MACK]
Let’s talk about that a little bit. The concept of gas lighting, in some of these Gothic novels, you point out that, there will be a character and there’s a, perhaps a secret passage that enters into her bedroom, and she finds evidence that someone has been opening this passage way into her bedroom. And she’s in this very insecure position. And then, you know, the master of the house is like, there’s no secret passageway into your bedroom. Like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. And you’re being emotional. Right?
[ANNA]
Exactly. Yeah.
[MACK]
So in what ways is, is the relationship with the grad school advisor like that this sort of emotionally invalidating relationship as you put it?
[ANNA]
Well, I think it’s hardly ever intentional. But I think that for that reason, there needs to be more intention around how PhD advisors interact with their advisors, because I think sometimes PhD advisors forget how much authority they have in the eyes of the people that they advise. In terms of the advisee being invalidated, I think it happens often in terms of just inconsistency from one interaction to the next with the advisor like, and it could just be the advisors busy and forgot that they told them last time, something totally different than what they’re telling them now. But for the advisee, it feels so confusing and distressing.
[MACK]
Yeah. I remember having that experience. And I’m so afraid that I’ve probably perpetuated the same thing. As a professor at this point, you know?
[ANNA]
Well, I think that I’m I am almost certain that I’ve done the exact same thing to my own students. I like I said, I don’t think that it’s intentional. Like just being invested and knowing what their experience of you is, and like seeking feedback, and not being afraid of their feedback is something that I think is really important for all of us to incorporate into our teaching practices, including myself.
[MACK]
So I’m, I guess, a Gen Xer. I don’t know how much stock we should put in these labels. But I think what your project really made me think a lot about this criticism that I hear from people of my generation about millennials, that they’re too thin skinned, or that the work environment has to change for them. And I’m always just like, confused by that, because I’m like, isn’t that a good thing? Like, the, the whole criticism seems to be like, well, why can’t they just suck it up? And just accept the same crappy things that we accepted? Do you have any thoughts about that?
[ANNA]
Sure. Um, so I just don’t personally, like put a whole lot of stock into the like lumping everybody born in between certain years into a category as being like, enough of the same to talk about. If I was going to accept the millennial category, as something worth talking about, I think, an entire group of like, generally young people who are pushing for things to be different, and for things to be better. Like, I don’t understand why people would think of that as a bad thing. Especially if these are academic humanists who are making this argument about millennials, that seems really ironic to me. Because so much of post-structuralist theory, has taught us to do the very thing that they’re telling us, we shouldn’t be doing. That very attitude that you’re describing of like, well, I went through this, and I survived, and I maybe am even better for having done it. So you have to do it too. And you should just suck it up. That is used as a rationale to cover like, all manner sense, if it’s young people, mainly, quote unquote, Millennials who are challenging these systems. Like, maybe it makes sense, maybe it’s because the times have changed, the economy has changed and the way that we train people needs to change to like to fit better.
[carnival music plays again]
[MACK]
That’s Anna Williams, PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa, and author of My Gothic Dissertation. And now without further ado, let’s listen to a chapter from Anna’s dissertation. It is chapter two, entitled Frankenstein, or the Modern Lift Master Part One.
[music fades out, eerie music replaces it]
[FEMALE VOICE]
Follow me, please.
[ANNA]
When Frederic Frankenstein inherits the estate of his grandfather, Victor in the 1974, Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein it’s not the infamous laboratory or equipment that interested him most.
[FEMALE VOICE]
This is your room. It was your grandfather Victor’s room.
[ANNA]
It’s the library.The books.
[MALE VOICE 2]
Well, seem to be quite a few books.
[FEMALE VOICE]
This was Victor’s. The barons Medical Library.
[MALE VOICE 2]
And where’s my grandfather’s private library?
[FEMALE VOICE]
I didn’t know what you mean, sir.
[MALE VOICE 2]
Well, these books are all very general, any doctor might have in this study.
[FEMALE VOICE]
This is the only library I know of Dr. Frankenstein.
[MALE VOICE 2]
Frankenstein. Well, we’ll see.
[ANNA]
After initially being deflected by Cloris Leachman as faur blooker, the housekeeper of the estate and in this retelling Victor Frankenstein’s former lover, Frankenstein played by Iowa’s own Gene Wilder eventually discovers a secret passageway that leads to what he desires.
[MALE VOICE 2]
What is this place? A music room?
[FEMALE VOICE]
But there’s nothing here but books and papers.
[MALE VOICE 2]
Books and papers? It is! This is my grandfather’s private library! I feel it. Look, look at this!
[ANNA]
laid out on his grandfather’s desk is a large volume with the comedic Mel Brooksian title, how I did it by Victor Frankenstein. The it of course, being how he created his infamous monster.
[thunder sound effect]
Frankenstein proceeds to read it from cover to cover. This is what he’s been looking for all along the precise knowledge of his grandfather’s notorious work. The instructional guide for making a monster, the very thing he’s been insisting he doesn’t care about, has distanced himself from with the revised pronunciation of his name. As it turns out, he did care a little bit after all.
Although the film Young Frankenstein purposely even gleefully re inscribes a lot of early Hollywood’s inaccuracies in depicting Mary Shelley’s work, things that were never actually in the novel like the hunchback assistant, the Gothic castle the bolt of lightning causing the monster to come to life. Frankenstein’s interest in his grandfather’s books is actually a pretty insightful moment that harkens back to the 1818 text.
[violin music plays]
Subtitled the modern prometheus, the original novel Frankenstein deals like so many stories in Western civilization with forbidden knowledge. It’s a reference to the Titan Prometheus, who in ancient Greek mythology, disobeyed the wishes of Zeus and stole fire from Mount Olympus to give to the humans. This fire is often interpreted as a metaphor for the divine spark of knowledge that once lit can continue being kindled to become evermore large and powerful.
And in the hands of the humans, it’s not only life giving but also potentially destructive in the literal sense that it like burns things, and also in the metaphorical sense that it challenges the omnipotence of the gods. The more the humans know, the less power the Olympians have over them. And this is why Zeus decreed that Prometheus would be chained to a rock and tortured forever. His liver being eaten out of him by Eagles every day, only ro regenerate overnight for the next round.
[orchestra music plays]
Subtitling her novel The Modern Prometheus casts Shelley’s protagonist Victor Frankenstein as a similar figure who filters knowledge from the divine realm. Only he does sell at the University of Engleshtops in the late 18th century. There after years of intense study in his rented student lodgings, he discovers the secret to creating human life. But here’s where the insightful moment by Mel Brooks comes in. Frankenstein’s years of intense study focused among other things, on three ancient philosophers that people in positions of authority didn’t want him reading. Old,forbidden books, the stuff of private libraries, and those who didn’t want this modern for me theist reading these things. The Zeuses of Marry Shelley’s story where Victor’s own father Alphonse Frankenstein, and one of his professors at the university, a crass old natural philosopher named Maziar Cremp. And the ancient philosophers they didn’t want Victor reading?
[CREMP]
Paris office, an arrogant foolish swift. Albertus Magnus, his nonsense with exploded 500 years ago. What’s your name?
[FRANKENSTEIN]
Victor Frankenstein, sir, of Geneva.
[ANNA]
This imagined first exchange between Victor and Cremp is from the 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And it isn’t far off from what Victor really says about his discouraging educational history in the novel, The occasion for which is often forgotten by modern readers. Shelley’s story begins with a frame narrative, in which an ambitious naval explorer named Robert Walton finds a hagard near death Victor drifting across the Arctic sea on an iceberg.
[ROBERT WALTON]
His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully Amai seated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition.
[ANNA]
His startling appearance, coupled with the fact that Walton ship is trapped motionless in a sea of ice gives Victor good reason to tell us tale. Beginning with the early years growing up in Geneva, and how one summer he made a chance discovery that would change the course of his life forever.
[FRANKENSTEIN]
When I was 13 years of age, we all went on a party of pleasure to the baths near Tronton. The clemency of the weather obliged us to remain a day confined to the inn. In this house, I chanced to find the volume of the works of Cornelius Agripo. A new light seemed to dawn upon my mind.
[ANNA]
Agrippo was a 16th century theologian, and scholars have generally assume the book Victor found was one of the three volumes of his day occult philosophy, or of a cult philosophy, a kind of compendium of both learned and folk ideas about magic. Victor recalls how dazzled he was by his discovery. But when he presented the book to his father, he quote, looked carelessly at the title page, recognized Agrippo’s name,
[VICTOR’S FATHER]
Ah, Cornelious Agrippo.
[ANNA]
And said,
[VICTOR’S FATHER]
My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this, it is sad trash.
[ANNA]
After recounting this memory, Victor pauses to tell Walton that on reflection, it’s this moment that set into motion the series of events that would lead him to create a monster and bring about his life’s ruin. And this is important because as far as I know, no other literary scholars have given this moment the credit it’s due. Frankenstein has widely, famously been read as a novel about hubris, overreaching ambition, and pride. People consider Victor’s conquering of human mortality, to be motivated by an impulse to challenge the power of God and achieve personal immortality through things. But in my reading, it’s not God that Victor’s challenging, it’s his teachers. Those who cast themselves as the mortal keepers of knowledge, who can dictate to Victor what is sad trash and what is not. And what he really wants isn’t fame. Rather, it’s to redeem the work that so captivated his imagination, to show his father and Crimp not only that they were wrong and trying to forbid him from reading those books. But also that the forbidding of any knowledge from interested students is just bad pedagogy.
[FRANKENSTEIN]
I cannot help remarking here the many opportunities instructors possess directing the attention of their pupils to useful knowledge, which they utterly neglect.
[ANNA]
In other words, when they say things like, do not waste your time upon this, it is sad trash.
This moment at the end with his father is the first in a series of intellectual confrontations, episodes of what Sherry traffic would call epistemic violence that caused Victor to rebel. As he tells Walton, had his father had a little more patience. Have you taken the time to explain that, quote, modern science had just proven Agrippo’s theories and therefore had, quote, much greater powers. Then Victor says he probably would have dropped it. But, like Prometheus is challenging Zeus. Victor was only made more defiant by his father’s cursory glance, the careless brushing off of his intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. He doubled down in his obsession with the occult, determined to demonstrate the worthiness of his interests, despite his father’s attempts to divert them to deem them unworthy of serious pursuit, to block has access with shame.
[FEMALE VOICE 2]
For now, please wait
[ANNA]
On a dreary morning and November, about six months after passing my prospectus, and then my 2800 accord, a slowly drifting iceberg straight into the sea of cars waiting to get into the parking lot of the EPB, the English philosophy building. We’re all just idling here and patiently waiting for people to exit the lot. So we can enter. It’s a one in one out situation you’d expect from some kind of nightclub. Only the spot we’re waiting to enter is actually four and a half floors of poorly lit brutalist architecture that was recently voted the ugliest building in the state of Iowa. Still, though, it’s a campus hotspot because it has is to underfunded general education courses that are every student is required to take rhetoric and the interpretation of literature, which is what I need to get into teach. Okay,I am in my car, hold on, gotta move up. Two people actually, three people just gave up in front of me, turned around and drove away. But I’m going to go try to talk to some of the other people who are sitting in line. On this day, it begins to dawn on me, this whole parking lot situation feels like a metaphor for the general feeling of blocked access that’s plagued me through this entire grad school experience. And since I have a kit of recording equipment from the radio essays class I’m taking, I work up the nerve to get out and interview the people in front of me. I want to know who they are, why they need to get into the lot. And if they find this situation, as frustrating as I do. The first car I approach is a blue Mercedes SUV, ask you a few questions. The driver seems startled, but agrees to talk to me. How long have you been waiting in this line?
[DRIVER 1]
I think it’s already 10 minute. Yeah.
[ANNA]
Do you have a class in there?
[DRIVER 1]
Oh, yeah. I have a class. It’s in the linguist center I think?
[ANNA]
The linguist center, probably the second ugliest building in the state of Iowa. It houses the education department. He tells me that he’s an undergrad, a sophomore. And he waits in this line three days a week like me.
[DRIVER 1]
So basically, my classes start at 12:30. So you know, I always come here at 11:40. You know, and maybe always with to the total as I can go in and.
[ANNA]
30 minutes to get it. pretty typical. That giant work was so by the way, is it the nearby power plant, and it signals that it’s now 12 o’clock. Meeting 30 minutes is also the amount of time I have before I should be calling roll in front of my classroom. Sorry, Did I scare you?
[DRIVER 2]
Yeah just a little bit.
[ANNA]
I’m doing a radio story on the HPV parking lot line. Would you be willing to answer a couple questions for me?
[DRIVER 2]
Sure.
[ANNA]
Okay, so what’s your name?
[DRIVER 2]
Paula.
[ANNA]
Okay. Hi, Paula. I’m Anna. So how long have you been waiting in this line today?
[DRIVER 2]
I’ve been waiting approximately one hour.
[ANNA]
One hour? I find out that Paula is another undergraduate student. And unlike most, she’s not actually waiting to get into a class. She’s been in this line for an hour, she tells me because she needs to pick up a computer from her friend.
[DRIVER 2]
So the person like can’t leave the building. And obviously, I can’t like park my car and go in. So I’ll just wait about which is fine. I currently don’t have anything to do. So it all works out.
[ANNA]
Unfortunately, I do have something to do. So for me, it doesn’t really all work out. But I thank Paula for her time anyway, and move on. I did this thing for three days, getting out of my car and interviewing the people in front of me. And each time every single person I talked to was an undergraduate student and one of them was one of my undergraduate students. Hi, Thomas. I’m Anna, you look familiar. Were you one of my students?
[THOMAS]
Yeah. First our rhetoric class.
[ANNA]
Yeah, you are my rhetoric student. Hey, how are you doing? As nice as it is to see them. It doesn’t feel quite right to be competing for resources with my own students. But what also doesn’t feel right is that while I was conducting all these interviews with the undergrads in front of me, there was something else happening to right beside us there was this other line that we were all restricted from entering. Or really, it’s kind of a non line because there’s never any one in it. It’s reserved for faculty members. And periodically as we were talking, they would zoom past us and enter the lot with their prepaid passes. No 30 minute wait, not even a one minute wait. They just pull up, swipe a card and go right in. And if that’s not frustrating enough, once they got through the there’s also be these large swaths of empty parking spaces on reserve for them just lying in wait to receive their Subarus and Volkswagens taunting all of us in the plebeian line. Every time a faculty member would zoom past, I’d asked the undergrad I was interviewing how they felt about it, including this Junior named Shana. At first, she said that no one should get special privileges. But then she made one important caveat.
[SHANA]
No, no, I don’t I don’t think so. Besides teachers, because I know there that’s important for them to be there on time, but they already have so they can go like they can go ahead and go in. So
well.
[ANNA]
Actually, I’m a teacher. Teachers already have a line she was saying. The one people were zooming past us and when I revealed to her that I’m a teacher, she seemed kind of shocked at first, but then she asked something pretty telling.
[SHANA]
Do you lead discussion? Or are you like a teacher like the?
[ANNA]
The question is whether I’m a real teacher or mearly a discussion leader, a graduate teaching assistant who does things like take attendance grade papers, and lead breakout discussion groups once a week for large lecture classes. Still a person for the record who does very important things and deserves reliable access to their workplace. And I did serve as a discussion leader for intro to the English major when I first came here back in 2013. But for the past four years, I’ve been independently teaching the same intro level courses as the faculty members in my department. Even though I’m still technically called an assistant. Unwittingly, Shana’s question revealed the divide she had many others seem to see between grad students and real teachers, the divide between me and the ones that can glide right past this gate.
[jazz music plays]
Just like the line for the EP parking lot, only so many make it through this gauntlet of PhD work in the United States. According to the Council of graduate schools, only about 50% of students who start doctoral programs in the humanities will finish, at least in their first 10 years. And while that may seem like a long time, according to a 2016 report by the Modern Language Association, the average number of years it takes to complete a PhD in the humanities is 9.2. To get an MD, that is to be a medical doctor, and trusted with other people’s lives, takes just eight years of grad school. Of course, that doesn’t include all the residences that follow but still, postdocs are a common path for humanities PhDs as well. Meaning that in the United States, the time it takes to be able to teach Shakespeare to college kids is not all that different from the time it takes to be able to perform surgery on them. Why? What could possibly be so important about teaching college lit courses that it takes this long for someone to prove they’re worthy of doing it? Who are what are the lift masters in that process? And what is the freaking hold up?
[music fades out]
For those of us trapped in the pursuit of our English PhDs, Lift masters come in many forms, and a lot of them are psychological.
[FEMALE VOICE 2]
Lot is for now. Please wait.
[ANNA]
Now back in the car, I’m stuck idling indignantly behind this lift master again, the master of lifting or not lifting the gates. And from here I can’t help it see its unwavering arm as reminiscent of another kind of barrier I’m stuck behind as well. My own feeling of intellectual subordination at this stage in my career. It says if the 12 foot reflective steel arm morphs before my eyes into the Alphonse is and Cramps of my own education story. The ones who, in their well intentioned and less blunt way have nevertheless told me my ideas are sad, trash, and not worth pursuing. Because every step so far, my comps exam, the perspectives meeting, it all feels like trying to prove that my ideas, my interests and powers of perception, are enough to grant me access to some kind of PhD Promised Land, my own personal spot in academia. Each time It feels like I’m being asked to produce some sort of pass that adheres to a set of English discipline rules I don’t completely understand. And I’ve managed to keep producing one up until this point that somehow, bafflingly turned out to be valid. But every time it seems to be just barely so
and it’s just barely ness makes my ability to produce it the next time even less surefooted. Because I’ve lost faith in its validity. In my validity. I feel ashamed that such important people seem to find my perspective, so flawed, but it’s the same time like with Victor, there’s this hard headed persistence to through all of this, it feels like the only thing keeping me from being one of those 50% that turn around and give up. Maybe driving to the nearest marketing firm or Starbucks drive through to submit a resume is my own sheer stubbornness. This conviction that I do deserve a spot in that lab. I’m more than just some undergrad who needs to pick up a computer from her friend. And in this process of getting my PhD, the more I feel like I’m being treated that way, like some frivolous underling on a mundane mission, easily brushed off and invalidated, the more hard headed I become. When Victor arrives at the University of English shot in some undisclosed year of the late 18th century, he’s immediately met with more disregard of his interests. Another unyielding gate standing between him and what he wants to study. Soon after arrival, he meets with Crimp. And although it occurs a bit differently in the novel than in the film version you heard earlier, the outcome is pretty much the same.
[FRANKENSTEIN]
He received me with politeness and asked me several questions concerning my progress and the different branches of science pertaining to natural philosophy. I mentioned it is true with fear and trembling The only authors I had ever read upon those subjects. The professor starRed.
[ANNA]
Sure enough, in response to Victor’s meek proposal of his academic interests, cramped assumes the familiar position of indifferent authority. scoffing Have you really spent your time in reading such nonsense?
[CRIMP]
Every minute? every instant that you have wasted on those books is utterly lost. An entirely lost your burden your memory with exploded systems and useless names? Good God. What does it land if you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fantasies which were so greedily imbibed, or 1000 years old, and is musty as they are ancient, I little expected in this enlightened and scientific age to find a disciple of Albertus Magnus and para Celsius, my dear sir, you must begin your studies entirely anew.
[ANNA]
although Victor claims he was, quote, not disappointed because he had long considered those authors useless. Thanks to his father. He still harbors an admiration for them and feels contempt for modern scientist. Because why is it exactly that Mr. Crump and Alphonse Frankenstein are so quick to disregard Victor’s interest? A lot of critics take the answer for granted. But really, why exactly are a group of parasitosis and Albertus Magnus sad trash and nonsense? This matters a lot in my reading of the novel, which I see as a sort of Tales, Victor’s one pree creature and one post. Pre creature Victor is the one with an interest in the occult, a curious student whose imagination has been kindled and he thinks he’s found something valuable that his teachers have overlooked. Despite their discouragement, he secretly pursues those interests in an effort to prove them wrong, which turns out to work. Combining occult knowledge with modern science, Victor discovers the method to reanimate dead matter, which is an astounding accomplishment in the realm of human knowledge. Victor was right about the potential of those forbidden books all along. The only thing that makes the creature into a monster was Victor’s abandonment of it, which I read as a moment in which he becomes a turncoat, a traitor to his own convictions, a sellout who gives in to his intellectual detractors. So again, I ask, what exactly were those detractors saying? What message about science and knowledge did Victor internalize from his father and Crimp that led to the making of a monster? What epistemic gate had been constructed in modern science, that Victor worked all those years to furtively tear down, only to end up abandoning it, and siding with the lift masters after all. To answer this question for myself, I reached out to Palma Muno, a history professor at Middlebury College and author of Solomon’s secret arts, a book about attitudes toward the occult during the Age of Enlightenment, Professor Muno was overseas in Oxford at the time, so our Skype connection here is a little less than optimal. But I asked him why someone like Victor’s father, a magistrate, for the government of Geneva and the late 18th century, would have called a group of sad trash.
[PALMA MUNO]
Well, it wasn’t taken very seriously by that time. It was it was regarded as a product of superstition and as something that had more to do with the period in which it was written, then, it had more to say to pre reformation society, even though Agrippo was a Protestant, probably were not certain of that. And the reputation of Geneva was for sort of Calvinist rationalism. So it’s, it’s not at all surprising that that would be the case. The image of Geneva is a very straight laced rationalist society. And so I think this is meant to bolster that image in the mind of the reader.
[ANNA]
I see. He’s referring, of course, to John Calvin, the puritanical theologian best known for his theory of predestination. 200 years before, Calvin had promoted the Protestant Reformation from Geneva, and his brand of rationalism or the belief that reason always trump’s emotion is reflected in his theory that all human wisdom consists of two parts, knowledge of God, and knowledge of oneself. knowledge of God and here’s the rational part, can only be attained through the reading of Scripture and the exercise of one’s reason in interpreting that scripture. Unlike this text and reason centric theory of knowledge, a cultist like Agrippo believes in the knowledge of God could be attained through secrets embedded in nature itself. Muno talked about this when I asked him about Albertus Magnus, who’s not actually in the book, Solomon secret hearts because, as it turns out, he was never really an occultist.
[PULMA]
And those who think that, you know, this, nature holds a cult secrets, hidden revelations, come to believe that Albertus was somehow privy to them in the same way King Solomon was pretty to them. I mean, this is but this is the myth of Solomon on which the title of the book is based. The idea that Solomon had this knowledge of all things in the world, and because he had that knowledge, he knew also the hidden things in the world. And the hidden things in the world were secrets that were put there by God that would, could raise you to a higher spiritual plane.
[ANNA]
So being thinkers of the occult tradition, a grip and parasitosis believes that nature helps secret divine knowledge that if humans could find it would bring them closer to God. Or according to their pious critics could usurp the divine knowledge of God that humans were never meant to wield. But for a Calvinist rationalist like Alphonse Frankenstein, the belief that knowledge could be attained this way, would have looked like superstition, naive, magical thinking that he didn’t want his son falling for. This debate surrounding the way we know things is also what crime seems to take up when he calls the work of a grip and the like, nonsense and exploded systems. But of course, Victor didn’t rely on mere superstition or magical thinking to gain his knowledge. He combined the old with the new. In my reading, it was never that he wanted to prove that the old way was the right one. Just that the rationalist distinction his father and crimp were making was too simplistic and closed minded. Sure, Victor came to Ingolstadt devoted to his medieval occult philosophers. But he did delve into the modern sciences with quote, an order that was the astonishment of his fellow students and a proficiency that all his teachers, including Crimp. Within two years, Victor tells Walton, he had maxed out his teachers abilities. by their own admission, he had nothing left to learn from them, and so he was considering leaving Ingolstadt and going home. What made him decide stay? Was the decision to set off on a kind of independent study, to answer this question that had continued to nip at his mind, a vestige of his still lingering admiration of occult philosophy.
[FRANKENSTEIN]
One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and indeed, any animal and dude with life wins, I often ask myself, did the principle of life proceed?
[ANNA]
In other words, what makes things alive?
[FRANKENSTEIN]
It was a bold question, and one which has ever been considered as a mystery. Yet with how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness to not restrain our inquiries?
[ANNA]
He decides to be brave and break through that careless restraint. Combining his advanced skills in the modern sciences, things like anatomy, chemistry, physics, biology, with the occult belief that such a question can be answered. Victor goes on to fulfill his quest. He proves that modern and occult science aren’t mutually exclusive, as his father in crime would have him believe. It’s alive. He guns it through that intellectual gate and earns himself a permanent spot in any academic lot he deserves. And then he gives it all up. But that’s next time in My Gothic Dissertation. Back to my own dreary morning, or now afternoon in November, it’s 12:21. I’m second in line, and someone’s leaving. Oh, no. There’s a faculty member creeping up in the other in the other lane. Thomas hasn’t pressed. Okay, Thomas is pressing the button but I think that when these faculty members go in, I won’t be able to go in. Let’s see what happens okay. Thomas is going here. I go to faculty members both press the button before me.
[FEMALE VOICE 2]
Please press the button then take the parking ticket.
[ANNA]
Sweet.
[FEMALE VOICE 2]
Please take the parking ticket. Please enter following the guide.
[ANNA]
Up goes the lift master and I drive to find a place to park after 36 minutes spent in the car behind my own former student. I now have nine more before the beginning of my class, which translates to just enough time to find a spot. gather my motley assortment of bags, get inside, drop the motley assortment of bags in my basement office and dash up to my second floor classroom. There will be 50 minutes of discussing Wuthering Heights that an hour back in the basement coaching students on their essays or alternately fielding grade complaints about their essays. Then another 50 minutes of discussing weathering heights with another set of students. Finally, I’ll gather my belongings and head home to keep working on my dissertation. And after two more days, I’ll be back to do it all again. Because I’m chained to this rock for as long as it takes me to finish writing this thing.
[birds cawing]
It’s kind of the inverse of Prometheus’ liver actually, after what feels like an eternity behind the gate. My past keeps materializing just in time, only to disappear for me to remake all over again the next round, like this chapter, now complete, but dissipating into the stark realization that after all of this, I have to write another one.
[rock music plays then fades out, electric pop plays]
[MACK]
That’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Anna Williams for being on the show. Her podcast does not have a home yet, but you can hear more excerpts at her website. The link is in the show notes for this podcast and on our website. Where as always, you can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to the things we talked about, as well as find previous episodes of the show. It’s all at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. And we’d love it if you would rate and review us in Apple podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. Today’s show was edited by me Mack Hagood with music from Neil Parsons Eight Bit Bach album. We’ll put a link to the band camp page for that in our show notes. And our intern is Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 14: Resonant Grains (Craig Eley on Carleen Hutchins)
May 24, 2019
In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Carleen Hutchins attempted a revolution in how concert violins are made. In this episode, Craig Eley of the Field Noise podcast tells us how this amateur outsider used 18th century science to disrupt the all-male guild tradition of violin luthiers. Would the myth of the never-equaled Stradivarius violin prove to be true or could a science teacher with a woodshop use an old idea to make new violins better than ever?
We also learn about the mysterious beauty of Chladni patterns, the 18th century technique of using tiny particles to reveal how sound moves through resonant objects–the key to Hutchins’ merger of art and science.
In this episode, we hear the voices of:
Quincy Whitney, Carleen Hutchins biographer and a former arts reporter for the Boston Globe.
Myles Jackson, a professor of the history of science at Princeton.
Joseph Curtin, a MacArthur-award winning violin maker.
Sam Zygmuntowicz, an extremely renowned violin maker and creator of Strad3D.
Carleen Hutchins herself.
You can subscribe to Craig Eley’s Field Noise podcast to hear the original version of this story.
[a whirring sound plays, then a string being plucked]
[CARLEEN HUTCHINS]
What I’m interested in now is to see what the waves that are traveling through the woods are like. And those are the things that I think are making a lot of difference in the way, energy and the waves of energy can go through the wood itself. And wood is all sorts of sort of discontinuity, if you will, that will make the energy have to slow down or go around something, it’s a little bit like a river flowing. And if you put some rocks on the edge of a river, you’ll change the whole flow of the river downstream. Think that’s what’s happening in violins. There are certain ways that those blockages, the discontinuity can be worked out. And that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for us to see what happens. Because some of the beautiful issues that I’ve been working with and testing show that there’s a good deal of this sort of thing going on.
[CRAIG ELEY]
Well, let’s just back up a little bit. There’s a line of thought, which is that every object vibrates according to its nature.
[A more persistent humming, then fades out]
[MACK]
Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
Today we have the pleasure to speak with one of our collaborators, Craig Eley. Craig is a producer on Phantom Power. And he’s also the producer of his own podcast, a podcast called Field Noise. Hi, Craig.
[CRAIG]
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.
[CRIS]
Yeah, thanks for being with us.
[MACK]
Alright, so Craig, we’re doing a little bit of a swap-a-roo this week. We’re going to hear basically an episode of your podcast Field Noise. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your show?
[CRAIG]
Yeah, you know, the idea has always revolved around my own research interests: sound studies, history of technology, environmental history, and just the sort of relationship between sound and technology in the environment. You know, when I finished graduate school, I actually did do a research postdoc for a year, but then I ended up working in public radio. And I’m trying to incorporate some of my own research, but also just do some original reporting and just kind of follow my ears as it were for some stories that I’m that I’m interested in trying to tell.
[MACK]
So today, you’re bringing us an episode of Field Noise that is about an outsider who revolutionized the field that she entered.
[CRAIG]
That’s absolutely right. This is a story about a woman named Carlene Hutchins. She wasn’t exactly self taught as a violin maker, but in some ways, she was an amateur who entered this field. She was a school teacher, she was very intellectually curious. And she drew on this old technique of vibrating plates. These are called Kauladney Patterns from this guy, Ernst Kauladney, and she applied that technique to violin making. This work starts in the 1940s and into the 1950s. And the results, frankly, turn the entire violin world upside down.
[CRIS]
So, let me just say up front, Mack said you can either listen to it in advance or it might be interesting if you don’t, I have no idea what you’ve done. So this is gonna so I’m kind of like you’re very weird listener.
[CRAIG]
Yeah, that’s great. Well, you know what, it’s the more I listened to it, I think it’s like a totally weird piece. So maybe between the three of us, we can try to make some sense.
[violin music plays]
[QUINCY WHITNEY]
She was at a point in her career where she had a chance to take on about five jobs. And this is the way she told it to me, that she could have had, but she realized that she couldn’t stay married in that time, in the late 1920s, 30s. She couldn’t have that domestic life too and do these jobs. So there was a frustration there was a tension always building in her.
[MACK]
So who are we hearing right now Craig?
[CRAIG]
Quincy Whitney. She became Carlin’s biographer and published a biography on Carlene and before that, she was an arts journalist for the Boston Globe. So she’s sort of our guide through this episode.
[QUINCY]
When she’s teaching at the school for the first time, she finds out that her colleagues like chamber music, and they’re all playing stringed instruments. And so they invite her to come to a session one night and she’s a trumpet player from college, right? She studies the trumpet and she brings her trumpet. And after one session, they of course, all turned to her and say, you know, the trumpets too loud for a Manhattan apartment, we really need a viola as every string ensemble always needs a viola. And so she goes out and buys a $75 viola, because she largely wants community, right. She’s tense about the fact that she can’t do what she wants to do. And so playing the viola with this chamber music group, and her friends, that becomes her community.
[string music continues]
Eventually, it sort of sits in her hand, and she’s been carving, which since she was five years old, she was a master woodcarver by the time she was in high school. So she keeps looking at this viola thinking, gee, maybe I can make one.
[CARLEEN]
I’ve been interested in wood and loved it ever since I can remember. I learned a lot about woodcraft, which has given me a feel for the trees and the woods and how they relate. This can be used for the half of the top of a violin. And the piece, the other piece we had is, well, this will be one half of it. Here’s the other half. And this will make the top of a viola when it’s put together. Now they’re a couple of knots in here. And the plan is to try to work around those knots so that they won’t make trouble.
[QUINCY]
And so she made this Viola and she’s showing it around to her chamber music friends, and they’re playing it. And Helen rice says, we really ought to go meet Frederick Saunders. He’s a retired Harvard physicist who lives out in western Massachusetts near my farm, we really ought to go and have him, just look at your instrument. So she does that. She hands him the instrument. Saunders takes it plays it, taps it, looks at it closely, and turns to her and says this is really a great first instrument. I’ll be fascinated to see your next one. And at that point, she had not planned to make another one. And so Saunders hands her a couple copies of his scientific articles that he’s done about violent acoustics, primarily in his retirement as a sort of a passion that he’s following, because he’s an avid string player. So he’s written up some papers. They’ve been published. And now he hands his reprints to Carlene. She’s a biologist, she’s reading these papers written by a physicist, and she’s thinking, you know, I didn’t really understand the jargon at that point. And so she said, but the one thing I do notice, Dr. Saunders, is that most of the experiments you’ve been doing, are putting the weight on the top of a bridge and testing it in a sound chamber. And he said, Well, yes, because I, as a passionate person who loves the instrument, I don’t want to ruin the instrument. And she said, Well, what would you do if if somebody could make you instruments that works expendable that could be used in experiments? And he said, Well, that sounds really rather crazy. Like what Luther would be crazy enough to make instruments that they’re going to be destroyed. And she says, I will.
[violin music stops]
She ends up doing her research by reading about Felix Var. And what he does, with suggesting about play tuning. And so she’s the first person who sort of puts together this idea of doing the cloudy patterns, or its cloud and he had developed this method of seeing sound bite, putting particles on a plate and vibrating and discovering that there were all these amazing geometric patterns at different frequencies.
[a consistent rumbling plays then fades out]
[CRIS]
This is great, Craig. I’m really enjoying just listening. And fascinated by the idea of making instruments to effectively damage or destroy, but in the cause of experimentation.
[CRAIG]
Yeah, I mean, this is sort of the beginning of the sense we get, of really just how radical her approach to this is going to be she I mean, she’s, she’s a woodworker first, right? Right. And so she doesn’t really have a sort of reverence for the violin, as a violin, right? To her this is a wood carving project. And then, when she meets this this guy Saunders, it becomes a science project. And, you know, she went to Cornell, I think, got a little taste of acoustics, but also sort of a taste of the scientific method. And that really, really influenced her approach to violins.
[MACK]
Yeah, she’s an intermediary. She’s got one foot in each of two different worlds. She’s got a foot in the world of music, and she’s got a foot in the world of the scientific method. It actually reminds me of someone that I’ve done research on, which is Amar Bose, the inventor of the noise cancelling headphones and a lot of familiar Bose products. He was an amateur violinist, a passionate amateur violinist, and also an engineer. And it was having a foot in each one of those worlds that allowed him to be such an innovator.
[CRAIG]
Yeah. What’s great about Carlene too is that kind of depending on who you ask, it’s like, she had a foot in both worlds. But more like she actually had like a toe in them. She really was enthusiastic more than anything. I mean, her experiences as a violent builder and a player were very minimal. Her experiences as a scientist were undergraduate. You know, that was her terminal degree. And so, not only is she just very interested in both of these fields, but she’s approaching them with like, almost like none of the hang ups of being a professional in them.
[CRIS]
You know, there’s something interesting here about somebody who is investing in the sound of the material itself, not necessarily how the construction of the material produces other sounds.
[CRAIG]
Yes, a violin plate is very lively to touch it. This guy’s described it to me, it’s almost like you’re holding a little tiny xylophone. Like, you can touch it and all these little places and hear it resonate. And so there is, you know, she didn’t totally invent this notion of oh, let’s let’s think about how the plate sound. I mean, there is a history of violin makers doing this sort of tapping and being interested in its own sound as a sort of, you know, what little secrets can those taps reveal to them?
[CRIS]
Yeah, sure.
[CRAIG]
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she has a real keen. I feel like this is sort of a sound studies phrase that that is popular right now. But she has a real keen sense of the materiality of sound.
[MACK]
I love that this connects to those fascinating vibrational patterns in sand invented by Kladney. Mr. Kladney?
[CRAIG]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, that’s a great segue, because the next section here that we’re about to listen to, goes back in time to tell us a little bit about Kladney. I did a Skype interview with a really great historian of science named Miles Jackson, who has a book about this stuff called Harmonious Triads.
[ethereal music plays]
Can you just take a minute or two for someone who’s a total layperson and describe what he was doing in his experiments?
[MILES JACKSON]
Right, so the experiments that Kladney is interested in and he gets the the idea of doing this by reading the work of a rather famous physicist of the time experimental natural philosopher called (inaudible). And what he did was literally to render the invisible visible, but in this case, electric sparks. So he was interested in looking at kind of the characteristic patterns. So you can see sparks, but you don’t see the patterns that they leave behind. So that if a spark jumps over a non conductive material, and if you sprinkle powder in that area, the non conductive material, if it’s from a positively charged conductor, you’ll see like a really beautiful star tree pattern, and if it’s a negatively charged conductor, the powder will form actually, cloud formation and Klaudney was fascinated by this, and recommend, and it turns out correctly, that, you know, maybe vibrations in the form of sound would leave similar patterns. So what he’s interested in doing is to render these vibrations visible, as well as audible at the same time. So he takes the metallic square plate, puts it on a stand, sprinkles grains of sand on the plate, and then he takes a bow and then he bows the plate perpendicular to one of the edges. And he also places his fingers on various portions of the plate. He takes though he bows with his right hand and touches the plate with his left in order to influence the way in which the plate vibrates.
[plate vibration sounds]
So what he does is he generates these amazing figures, quite aesthetically pleasing figures. But he’s interested, really, in seeing what the actual patterns are, and how that corresponds to pitch, because he’s first and foremost interested in inventing musical instruments, which he does. And his argument is where the where the dust settles, where you have those Klaudney lines, that’s where there are no vibrations, that’s where the plate is at zero, the vibrations of the play cancel each other out. Kaludney’s interest in the bits of a metal plate that’s not vibrating with the view of locating that bit so that you could put a piece of metal or piece of glass or piece of wood, and he wouldn’t change the volume or the pitch of the instrument.
[string music plays again]
[MACK]
Okay, so these cloudy patterns there, these beautiful, sort of geometric shapes that are made in sand when a plate vibrates beneath the sand, right?
[CRAIG]
Yep.
[MACK]
And they’re kind of hard to describe some of them, it looks sort of like a kind of Mandela or a kind of some kind of cryptic symbol. Yeah, they look kind of like that.
[CRAIG]
Yeah, they’re they’re kind of like haunting. I mean, and actually, people talk about this when they were first sort of revealed people there was this, late 1700s. Well, is it a language from beyond the grave, you know, and so it’s like this sound and the dead thing again. But yeah, I mean, what what’s happening there is that as the plate vibrates as they sort of explain, the the sand settles in the areas of the plate that aren’t vibrating.
[MACK]
And this is so fascinating, because we think of the sound wave as the natural representation of sound, the natural visual representation of sound today, right? Like, anytime you look on the internet, you know, whether it’s SoundCloud or if you’re working in an audio editor, we always get this waveform. And if you ask somebody, what is that this thing on the on the screen, they’ll just say, Oh, well, that sound. But that is not the only, you know, visual manifestation of sound. And in fact, Klaudney came first. Soundwave comes from the experiments of another German Hermann von Helmholtz. And he was the one who took a tuning fork, and hooked up the tuning fork to a stylus and put a kind of piece of paper beneath it and move the paper and those vibrations of the tuning fork were sort of traced in this linear left to right manner that we think of as the sound wave today. And so we just think of that as being sound. And yet, I kind of like to imagine a world in which these beautiful Klaudney patterns would be our way of interacting with sound and conceiving of it, it’s radically different.
[CRAIG]
Yeah. And it’s, yeah, I mean, I think that’s the thing is like, then as now, you can’t help but be drawn to them. They feel artful. And they feel kind of organic. They feel true to I think, what we know about sound, which is that it’s this really kind of complex thing that’s just vibrating all around us. Yeah, you like me, just, it just gives you this cool feeling. It tells you something that the waveform doesn’t quite tell you.
[MACK]
All right, somebody make me a Klaudney pattern audio editor. Alright, but let’s get back to Carleen Hutchins, how she applied cloud nice technique.
[CARLENE]
So then she thought, Well, what what happens if we, if we try that on a violin plate. So now she’s looking at this really unusual shape, which is the shape of a violin plate. Already, you got an hourglass shape with a waist and in the top and the bottom, and it’s all curved and serpentine. And then she says, what happens if you put the glitter on the plate and then vibrate it, what happens? So she starts to by focusing on particular modes, particular sound patterns, at a certain frequency, she starts to see patterns that basically help her figure out where the plate is too thick, you know, she’s got 10 plates she’s working on there’s this plates not got that perfect shape with the glitter. So I guess I need to, you know, carve it more in that spot. So she starts to use them, to tune them in the sense that she’s really having a visual aid to see about the arching of the plate, how to make her uniform arching at the plate and make it work. It becomes a visual tool for the Lucier to see what he’s doing.
[violin music plays]
That kind of innovation is what she discovers that the Luthiers hate her, because she’s asking them to bring science into the workshop. You know, and even though music has been assigned since the beginning of time, they have basically done things intuitively with their hands, and they’re not in interested in science.
[CRAIG]
The next section includes interviews with two really renowned violin makers. One of them is Joseph Curtain, and the other is a guy named Sam Zygmuntowicz
[JOSEPH CURTAIN]
Initially, I was pretty skeptical about science, you know, sort of butting into violin making. But when I met Carlene, I was very impressed by her energy and enthusiasm. And I think I heard her give a talk at a conference. And that was what led to me inviting her to give this this workshop. What play tuning was intended to solve, I think, from her point of view was given a vast variety of wood that you find, as violin would, how do you how do you optimize it for a given instrument, and, you know, there’s a notion that you can tune it to some ideal frequency, and that should do the trick. Typically, violin makers, you know, feel the stiffness of the wood, they bend in various ways and use normal workshop practice to arrive at graduations, there’s no evidence that the old Italians or anyone else really had done plate tuning or not nonscientists anyway. But she was proposing a practical system for use in the workshop. And as such, it was very appealing.
[SAM ZYGMUNTOWICZ]
There was a famous cover of Scientific American in the 80s, which showed a number of photographs of violin tops and backs with the the vibration patterns revealed through there was little bits of glitter or tea leaves. And the violins had been vibrated in the the tea leaves bounced off the areas where it was vibrating and settled in the areas where it wasn’t vibrating. And Carlene had done demonstrations of that on a few different frequencies. And there was this very striking cover. And I think that that was the first time that many people had that view of the instrument. And it was like, Whoa, this is more like, you know, it’s Mr. science project. It’s not a renaissance artist project. So the fact that you could see these vibration patterns, and you could tune them meant that that’s what people were focusing on.
[violin music and tapping]
[JOSEPH]
The thing is, she left out how heavy the plates were. And if you don’t know how dense the wood is, then tuning the plates to get some ideal frequency, it can lead to counter intuitive results. She also had got caught up with this notion of tuning and octaves, which is sort of a seductive notion that the proportion of an octave, you know, goes back to the sort of the music of the spears type of thinking, but there is really no scientific basis in that. So I think she got a little off, a little astray with that. She claimed to have measured up the plates of a violin and found that it was in octaves, at least two octaves. And I don’t doubt that that exists, that it happens, they tend to arrive naturally with normal graduations in the area of an octave. But there’s two problems. One is if it isn’t octaves that make any difference to the final sound. And the second, why would it? I mean, you know, look, you’ve got to actually establish a causal connection before you try and convince violin makers to use it. But she kind of skip that step. As far as I can tell.
[violin music continues]
[SAM]
You know, as soon as people could see the pattern on the top and back with the tea leaves, they thought, Okay, well, you know, look at a few good violins, and we think the top should be tuned to 360. And then should be half of that for mode two, and then mode one should be half of that again. And if all three are lined up, that was an idea, try tone tuning, which meant there was all in octaves. And people really worked to get that and you can get it. Turns out that the good violins in general are not tunes and try tones, but it was a very satisfying idea. So a lot of people spent a lot of time doing tri tone tuning. And I’m sure a lot of them got very nice results too. However, if you do a broad study of old violins is not what you see. In fact, there’s the tuning of the top and the back, it’s just one of 100 factors, and not necessarily the most important one. You know, the project that I was involved with, strat 3d, was the first attempt to capture the vibration patterns of strategy and coronaries in 3d. So you could see how much it was moving forward and backwards side to side. And then to create animations that you could see for any given note or any given frequency, you could see in what way the violin was vibrating. And one of the things about the violin, which is when you actually see all these patterns, which is totally unexpected, it is the violin is not vibrating in one way, it is vibrating in 100 different ways, all simultaneously or many of them simultaneously. So it’s like a horse galloping, and on the horse is the saddle. And on the saddle is a person and on the person is a fly, and they’re all doing things at the same time. And we’re all moving and the Earth is spinning, and it’s all moving through the universe. It’s almost that level of complexity for violent, everything’s happening at the same time. So it’s quite difficult to tease out single motions. But you know, the implication is clear that the very tantalizing promise for a maker is that if you could see the structure, then you’d have a shot at changing the structure. And if you could change the structure, you could change the sound. So that was a real switch, that the romance of the violin is sort of built around the idea that there’s this object, it’s been designed by man, but almost with divine intervention. And it works in ways that we don’t understand and we can’t even do it nowadays, sort of the mythology involved some lost knowledge. And then it is a very romantic vision and one that I enjoy as well. However, if you are a composer, you don’t want to hear that Beethoven’s the only guy that can compose. And if your violin maker, you don’t want to hear that Stradivarius the only guy who can make violins. To move from that to a vision of the violin is a thing, an object made out of real materials very much like they had back in the old days, behaving in the same way and obeying the same physical laws. It’s very empowering. I think the ability to use the scientific findings is still a work in progress. But just the knowledge that it is a potentially knowable phenomena was a huge one.
[soft violin music plays]
[JOSEPH]
There’s this notion wildly popular around the world that science somehow is not up to discovering the mystery of Stradivari. There’s sort of an archetypal announcer saying, you know, for centuries, scientists have struggled in vain to discover the secrets of Stradivari. Really? In vain? Why in vain? Have you read the papers is actually fantastic work done, what was never done and could have been done is to do blind tests and see if there really was a difference between Stradivarius and any other instruments sound. So before you want to invent a theory about why a certain phenomena is the case, you want to make sure that it exists and no one really bothered to do that until the last few years when we started doing double blind tests. We got first in Indianapolis and in Paris, we got in Paris, we had 10 violin soloists and six old Italian violins, five of them strands and six new instruments and had the soloist blind test them. And it turned out that the soloist, the most preferred violin easily was a new violent, the least preferred was a Strad. And we did the same thing with audience, audiences found the new one projected better. And the subsequent test from New York showed that they also preferred new, they preferred what projected better. So there was absolutely no evidence that the strands had any qualities that even first rate players could detect. None of them could tell the difference between new and old that better than chance. So it was a big, kind of a big anticlimax, and we got a lot of publicity, and there’s probably people who still don’t believe it. But that’s it’s pretty hard science. I didn’t know. But what else can we learn? That’s a very iconic plastic finding. Either violin making has got a lot better in recent decades, and or there was never such a big differences to the public imagination as supposed. I think there’s been a big advance because a there’s a market, there’s a you know, huge number of violinists, and very few old violins left and not any of those are very good. So as soon as you have a market, then you can actually earn a living making a violin now, you couldn’t really, in past decades. You had to do repairs and restoration. So there’s that then there’s the crucial thing, which I think Carlene Hutchins helped with, which was sharing of information. The traditional European guild system held things very private. So as soon as you get sharing, and a bunch of people doing things, things are going to get better. I mean, violin makers, professional violin makers will look at her and say, Wow, she’s really a scientist. And I think some scientists would look at and say, Well, she’s really a violin maker. But I think everyone, certainly the scientists I’ve talked to who know, would absolutely creditor with in a major way with you know, getting the field going in America at the time.
[music fades out]
[CRIS]
So there goes the antique file in market.
[CRAIG]
Exactly.
[MACK]
Or does it, because this is the thing, it was all about the mystique apparently.
[CRIS]
Right, the object, it has value regardless of how it sounds.
[CRAIG]
I think that’s the question that these new makers are asking is, do these violins actually sound better? Or is it just the mythology of them that has become so deeply ingrained in violin playing culture and in violin making culture.
[MACK]
And styles and tastes change, and a certain kind of sonic palette is going to be preferred in one moment, compared to the next. I mean, there could even be the influence that recording technology, digital recording, technology feels a lot more high frequencies that people have gotten used to hearing. And people might start to want a violin that can repeat reproduce those frequencies, more or less.
[CRAIG]
There’s this other interesting question that people raise, and like, the obvious way is like, what is a new instrument today going to sound like in 300 years?
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
One of the things that I really liked was talking about this cloud knee technique. And because it revealed a certain propensity of the instrument, or a certain dimension of the instrument. People really zeroed in on that and thought that that was the key to making an instrument sound good. And then what one of your experts shares with us is like, well, no, that’s just one of 100 things that the instrument is doing in any moment.
[CRAIG]
Totally, you know, you can kind of read between the lines when when these Lucier say things like, well, that idea was appealing, or that idea was seductive. And what they’re sort of getting at here and in some cases, say explicitly is what that idea was, is for a lot of people, it felt like a shortcut. And so for people who are invested for example, in what Joe Curtain calls normal workshop practice at one point, that’s also a little bit of a code there, right as saying, like, well, you know, those of us who have studied this and have apprenticed and sort of come up and the traditional way, you know, we weren’t as willing to take the shortcut. Or we were skeptical about it from the beginning.
[MACK]
Yeah, because on the one hand, you have people saying that, look, science will cut through the mystique, and reveal the true essence of what’s going on with an instrument. And yet, science has its own mystique, right? We have a way of grabbing onto something, precisely because the aura of science is around it.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
And I’m not belittling the scientific method, I think it’s amazing. But whatever we zero in on where that means that we’re leaving something else in the periphery of our vision,
[CRAIG]
I think, yeah, that’s exactly right.
[violin music starts again]
I mean, I think this was a moment where the old myth of the Strad, right, like, well, it’s unlocked, you know, it’s solved now. And we have science. And that idea took a little bit of hold in the 1980s. But I think what Joe Curtain and Sam Zygmuntowicz are kind of telling us is that the science, the science moved on. And that is actually the important part of Carleen’s work. It’s not that the science was perfect, but it’s that she published her work, it’s that she published her findings, she did experiments, she got violin makers in a room, talking to each other. And so whether or not the science was right, is actually not the important part of her contribution to violin making. And I think that the fact that you and I can have this conversation and that Luther years are willing to talk to me publicly about their craft. That’s a radically new concept from the guild method, right? I mean, these guys would study in their workshops for untold years on end and guard their work, the seat like the secret that it was. And so the fact that we’re now running double blind tests on violinists and audiences, that’s Carleen’s work. It’s not the plate tuning.
[violin music continues then ends]
[MACK]
So Craig, we’re coming to the conclusion of our story here, but we really haven’t addressed the theme that’s sort of been lurking in the background this entire time, which is, Hutchins was a woman, a school teacher, back in the 1950s and 60s, when she revolutionizes violin making in America. I mean, gender must come into play here, right?
[CRAIG]
I mean, it’s critical to the story, it’s fundamental to how this whole thing unfolded, how her ideas developed, because it’s not just that she was an outsider, as a violin maker or an outsider, as a scientist. She was also outside both of those fields on a sort of deeper, more fundamental level as a woman. You know, there’s this notion that the violin makers don’t want science kind of butting into their workshop practices. But I think that underlying all of that is this often unspoken thing, which is like, well, who is this woman? And why does she think she can tell us what to do?
[MACK]
Yeah.
[CRAIG]
You know, the other important role of gender and Carlin’s life is that she makes this decision early on to be a school teacher, as opposed to being more of a career woman. She makes her violins in the context of basically staying at home for large portions of her life. She has the summers off as a teacher, she raises several kids at home. And her home is also where her workshop is they’re one in the same thing. So her practice from the very beginning is a practice that is sort of prescribed by her gender roles in the 1950s and 1960s. And so, her embrace of this sort of open violin culture, from the very beginning is I also think about a woman seeking out community in a professional and intellectual space, where she doesn’t often get to experience that in her everyday life.
[violin music starts again]
[QUINCY]
Her legacy is nothing short of overturning the violin world in several different ways. I think if Carleen had been a man, she would have been coronated for field. Carleen open the door and started a dialogue. Suddenly, there was not the secrecy of centuries, and people guarding their work. Well, I don’t know if a man had come along with he have had the same inclusive paradigm, I don’t know. And whether it was gender only, her paradigm was to be open, and to share. And I have to say that there wasn’t that paradigm before. She would want the science to move on. She was open to the dialogue. You know, she did it. She did everything she wore every hat you could possibly wear in her field. You know, author, catalyst, editor, she did it all, and transformed the whole climate.
[upbeat, hip hop violin music plays]
[CRIS]
And that’s it for this episode, and this season of Phantom Power. A quick programming note then, after doing two seven episode seasons, we’re going to switch to dropping episodes as soon as they’re done. Look for the first one in your feed this summer. Thanks to Craig Eley for being on the show. You can hear the original version of Craig’s piece by subscribing to the Field Noise podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And you can learn more at fieldnoise.com. As always, you can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to the things we talked about, including those beautiful plagne patterns. It’s all at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. And please, we’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. That does make a big difference. Find us on Facebook and Twitter. Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood. Music was by Blue Dots Sessions, except for the piece you’re hearing now which is courtesy of Mark Bianchi. The archival interview clips of Carleen Hutchins were provided by filmmaker James Schneider. The Interview with Quincy Whitney was recorded by Andrew Perella at New Hampshire Public
Radio. Thanks to our season two intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[violin music fades out]
[MACK]
Being a Luthier of violins.
[CRIS]
Derived from the word loot, originally a loot maker.
[MACK]
Oh, really? That’s where the word comes from?
[CRIS]
That’s right.
[MACK]
Wow, that’s that’s so Renaissance Festival.
[CRIS]
Oh, yeah. I got my little furry tale already.
[MACK]
That is another whole topic like how did cosplay become something that you see at the Renaissance Festival? I totally don’t get it.
[CRAIG]
Season Three phantom power.
[MACK]
I’d even seen Furies at the Renaissance Faire. I mean, people are jousting. And there’s like a giant mascot sitting next to me.
[CRIS]
We’re not going there.
Ep 13: Jams Bond (cris cheek)
May 03, 2019
In an unusual episode, we listen back to field recordings that co-host cris cheek made in 1987 and 1993 on the island of Madagascar. It’s a rich sonic travelogue, with incredible musicians appearing at seemingly every stop along the way. Mack interviews cris, who discusses the strangeness and surprises of listening back to the sounds of that other time and place–and listening to the voice of an earlier version of himself. The BBC broadcast some of this material on Radio 3 as ‘The Music of Madagascar,” produced by John Thornley. It won the Sony gold radio award for ‘specialist music program of the year in 1995. A longer version aired as “Mountain, River, Rail and Reef,” produced by Phil England and Tom Wallace for Resonance FM, the world’s first radio art station as part of 1998’s Meltdown Festival at the South Bank Centre, curated by John Peel. This episode takes its name from a boat cris traveled on in Madagascar. Transcript
[ominous music plays]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[sound of glass being smashed]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 13.
[CRIS]
James Bond.
[MACK]
Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, the podcast about sound in the arts and humanities.
[CRIS]
Who are you?
[MACK]
*laughs* I’m Mac Hagood.
[CRIS]
I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
And today we have a very unusual episode because I get to interview cris.
[CRIS]
Yay!
[MACK]
cris has brought in a program that he produced for the legendary community radio station in London, Resonance FM. Based on your travels in Madagascar, actually two trips you took right?
[CRIS]
That’s right 1987, 1993, yeah.
[MACK]
cris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this show?
[CRIS]
It was originally broadcast on the BBC. And there was some format things that got in the way of it being a longer show on the BBC. And I wanted to let some of the recordings play a little bit more than they could do in the original.
[MACK]
In resonance, it was much more of a sort of freeform kind of space where you could let something like that stretch out right?
[CRIS]
It was pretty emergent as a station at that point, but also yeah, the BBC wanted to cut me distinctly to just under half an hour.
[MACK]
And why Madagascar? Maybe we should start off with where is Madagascar?
[CRIS]
Madagascar is off the east coast of Africa. It’s in the Indian Ocean. Fourth largest island on the planet. 90% unique in flora and fauna. Really extraordinary mixtures of people who came from
From Polynesia, down the Amoni Arab coast from particularly Southwest India, pirates. Did I mentioned pirates yet?
[MACK]
No, you didn’t.
[CRIS]
There were several pirate bases in Madagascar.
[MACK]
Yeah, and the musical traditions that resulted from that mix are really, really incredible.
[CRIS]
They are, and the people are really incredible.
[MACK]
So what we’re going to hear, I’ve heard a little bit of it already. It’s gorgeous music and really some delicious sounds recorded, just delectively. I just really love these recordings and sort of what interests me beyond this sonic travel log that you’re presenting to us, is just the fact that I’m going to hear the you that I didn’t know from 20 years ago, and then you’re also going to sort of hear yourself, the person that you used to be back then.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s why I brought this. I mean, I brought it because we’ve been talking in so many different ways about listening about paying attention to the sounds that are around you, the things that are at the edges of our attention, and really concentrating on those. It felt like it was in conversation with so many of the other programs that we’ve made.
[MACK]
Great well, so maybe what we should do is just let it roll, check in, and debrief?
[CRIS]
We’ll stop.
[MACK]
Okay. This is Mountain, River, Rail and Reef by cris cheek.
[upbeat, almost latin style music plays]
[CRIS]
Mountain, River, Rail and Reef. A field sound narrative.
[music continues then fades out, a low drumroll plays]
Monday, March the 13th, 1993. It’s so hard to see out of those distortionary plastic Lawson shaped windows. We’re flying in land over the north western coast of Madagascar now. An island of ancestors, ghost voices. And below the countryside is veined and rotted by streams and rivers. Each Delta stained red by silver deposits bleeding out into the Mozambique channel. Outcrops of rock and tiny villages of no more than a half dozen buildings rise into focus.
Longhorn cattle, zebu, being driven along dirt tracks turned on to otherwise empty stretches of tarmacked road. Further inland, more and more carts and then cars become visible. A hustle and bustle of people activities, thickening towards the capital and tender leave. On the trip into the city center, I’m told by my mirror shaded taxi driver that the rainy season has already been and gone. Red brick houses with pierced wooden balconies are baking in the golden late afternoon sun. Groups of children. One chases a metal hoop with a stick or running home from school through crowded narrow streets. They dance in pungent clouds of steam from blackened parts where rice is coated roadside stalls.
[street sounds are heard]
Tana as it’s cold is high up on the central plateau of this, the fourth largest island in the world. It combines a huge Central Market Square or Soma, facing onto the train station, a couple of lakes, ones colonial hillside suburbs, and a spreading girth of makeshift encampments.
[music and people talking fade in. Flutes and drums are primarily heard]
Most weekends somewhere in these mountains you’ll find the hero gosh or songs of the Malagasy taking place. It’s like a friendly match or flighting between local singers, dancers and musicians, and the visiting troupe from out of town. In the round roller coaster of folk performance, from chaos to pathos, including prototypical rap, improvisational cabaret, martial dances and a somewhat rough band.
[People singing and chanting is heard, they are keeping a beat]
Each group performs twice and a typical performance lasts about a half an hour.
[singing and chanting continues]
Towards the end of each round of the hero gash, a near riot of fanfares, featuring those highly
overenthusiastic drummers breaks down. Everybody keeping themselves going with delicious fish samosas dipped in berry sauce.
[sound of a fast car speeding by]
Monday, March 22nd. I’m leaving the capital and heading for the southwest of Madagascar, where the music the people and their ways are still far less well known.
[sound of a train going by is heard]
The train rumbles it’s sleepers through cornfields dotted with pink perrywinkles and scalloped rice paddies fitting snugly into the mountainside.
[A horn is blown]
Every station as a throng of gesticulating people selling fruit and sausages through open windows to the passengers inside. I got out of the place of big salt, walked up to a Highland Lake nearby. Jade water edged by steep white cliffs, then cut directly West in a taxi Bruce, that’s an open back pickup truck with a canopy, nearly always holding more passengers that is really comfortable. In a bar along the way, for a welcome stretch. I heard the dancing sound of a cobalt. It is a box mandolin, stronger than flexible reed. The Cabalist incorporates the striking of a bass string into his playing, whilst the young boy uses a recycled can holding rice as a shaker.
[The two playing is heard, then street sounds are heard]
The end of this road or certainly as far as the bus goes. The onward road was washed out weeks ago by torrential rain. It’s one of the hottest and most humid places on the island. It translates to waiting for a wife. Well, I’m here hoping for a boat. Pouring down the surrounding mountains, a giant river runs zigzag towards the sea. As I walk along its banks under the mango trees. The evening air cools and heavy rain on the corrugated roofs begins.
[Fast paced music plays, then a crowd claps]
[Street and outdoor sounds are heard once again. A dog barks, and metal is clanging against itself.]
In the half hour or so of dawn light, I’m sitting on a balcony, listening to this small town waking up. Men are hollowing out trees to fashion boats. Goats and sheep hold a rally at the podium in the town square.
[animal noises are heard]
There’s a large insect trying to make passionate overtures, or kill itself against my microphone. One of the endearing features of this lodging house is when I empty the washbasin by some freak of the plumbing system, an airlock perhaps, creates a phantom drummer rising from the black hole.
[the sound of pouring water, then the phantom drumming is heard, starting slow then gaining speed]
All day we followed the River City Venus currents in a small dugout canoe. Storks and herons perched out on those flows fishing from nest of twisted weed and each night we camped out on the riverbank and makeshift tenants made from cut bamboos.
Sometimes we’d simply drift.
[sound of rushing water]
gliding down through rain forest in silence, having been warned not to speak if I saw anything unusual. To do so would be taboo.
[guitar like music plays, children cheering, then fading out]
[MACK]
This is just incredible stuff. You know, I did a lot of backpacking in the 1990s myself around East and Southeast Asia. the scenarios that you’re painting are so familiar, right you got to get in the back of the pickup truck to go somewhere, and then wait for the boat, and maybe the boat’s going to come this evening or maybe it’s going to come tomorrow or whatever. But the thing that I did not experience is you keep making these little pit stops at these places where you have to wait. But they’re these killer musicians are just making the most incredible music in these places. And that’s something that I wish I had experienced in my travels. I definitely heard a lot of great music but not just sort of at these rest stops.
[CRIS]
There seem to be musicians everywhere. And it was it was what you do while you’re waiting.
But a lot of people who were in the traveling party if you like, weren’t particularly interested. They were kind of impromptu rest, stop cafes, just like you’re describing, and now I’m remembering almost certainly most of this was on a Sony Walkman pro cassette recorder with a tiny little microphone. And and I would say to people, do you mind if I put my recorder out? And they would be yeah, sure, don’t worry about it. But because I put my recorder out, everybody else would suddenly get interested. So they would be then listening to what this traveler this vasar, as they say this stranger was finding interesting about this music that they were taking for granted.
[MACK]
Yes, yes. I’ve had that exact same experience with my own field recordings and you pull out the recording and people are like, wait a minute, is there something I should be listening to here? Why is this strange guy from far away so interested in this?
[CRIS]
It was very, very, very interesting and the musicians would also say thank you afterwards as if they were suddenly being taken seriously as somebody who had something to bring to the situation rather than just being used as background. Everyone would as they say in contemporary departments, lean in. Sometimes there was a bit of applause and it was like, it’s like I’d staged an impromptu concert by putting my tape recorder down, which I found incredibly difficult to fathom. It was full of so many paradoxes.
[MACK]
Well, speaking of things that are difficult to fathom and paradoxical when it comes to recording, one other thing I was thinking about is, we’re both sitting here next to each other listening to this. And I’m imagining everything that’s going on, while you’re remembering everything that’s going on. So I’m just kind of wondering what it’s like for you to be sitting here and listening to something you made 20 years ago.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s a super interesting question. It’s as if sound and particularly recorded sound can act as a time portal. It’s very odd for me to listen to my own voice too. Because although you might not hear it, my voice has changed a lot, partly by being here in the US for such a long while. So I’m listening to a very different kind of performance of British masculinity, from a very different moment in time, from a different moment in my life, but also a different a different post colonial context.
[MACK]
So you raised that question of the post colonial context. So, I know that since I was backpacking, and making field recordings, I’ve been exposed to a lot of things and read a lot of things that have made me look back on those activities in the early 90s in a different way. Thinking about the fact that I was following in the footsteps of colonialists who probably gave me the privilege to be able to be so mobile and to visit these places. And then just as they extracted certain things of value, I with my recorder was extracting aspects of their culture and taking them out of context and bringing them back with me. Right. And so I have a sort of feeling of discomfort around some of that.
[CRIS]
Me too.
[MACK]
That I never had before. So yeah, I was wondering what you thought about that.
[CRIS]
Well I’m really glad to hear you raise it because those discomforts register for me really powerfully, they’re registered at the time. And they register even more strangely now because I’m listening to the sound that I produced from those discomforts, a two decade distance.
[MACK]
Yeah. It’s a complex issue because you also had the experience of bringing cassette recordings that were made by earlier Western travelers and playing those for people there. You want to talk about that?
[CRIS]
Well, yeah, French missionaries. Actually the recordings released on the Acorah label are beautiful recordings from this French label Acora. And I literally would arrive in a small village and people would come and talk to me, you know, where are you coming from? What are you up to? What are you interested in? And I was, particularly in the second time I visited on a mission not a missionary, but I was on a mission to because I was particularly interested in recordings that I’d heard of forms of poetry, song poetry that were used for healing purposes in the
southwest of the island. So my whole journey was to go there to try to hear some of this. And I would, people would come, I would play them a little bit of this recording and they put on the headphones, because there was no speaker on a Sony Walkman Pro. And their faces would light up. And then they’d start to laugh. Oh my god. I remember this stuff. Some of them would say, huh, you know, it was a little bit along the lines of having people at the road stop, get interested in the music, the local music. This was also a moment at which people registered that somebody from outside was really interested in a cultural aspect of their culture. So I’m with this malagasy couple traveling down a river. And one night we stop. We make benders out of the bendable branches at the riverside and malcash guy walks up past and walks past holding a crocodiles jaws shut in one hand and doing a breath rhythm, like *sound of breathing* and I copied him. As he went past I just did exactly the same thing back. And the next morning this couple were alive with questions like Where did you learn that stuff? And I said, What stuff? And they said, you know, this, this rhythmic stuff? And I said, I don’t know, I do strange things with my voice. So we arrived at a village The following night, and they disappeared. I sat and looked after the boat and brought the entire village with them and asked me to do a performance. So I had to do this kind of really weird impromptu sort of sound, poetic voice rhythm, performance. And then the villagers all went away and they came back down with their cassette machine and played me examples of what you’re about to hear. And we went on down the river, and we got to this place and all these people showed up, because word had gone out in the forest, from village to village, that there was this guy who was particularly an expert in or interested in this kind of interlocking voice performance. And that’s what happened.
[MACK]
That’s amazing.
[music plays, are back to cris’ recordings]
[CRIS]
After four and a half intense days on this river we arrived at Billow. There in a moonlit courtyard, I witnessed nine young men perform a vocal music that I’d never heard before.
[Male vocals are heard, sound like onenote fluctuating]
They referred to it as cognac key, rapid interlocking rhythms made with a voice. It’s hard work keeping it going for long. And they produce this extraordinary style by kind of whiplash pecking movement of the upper body to project their open breath.
[singing continues]
They’d fall apart into weeps of laughter. Have a cigarette and a drink strictly lemonade for all of them except the chorus master preferred rum, and then start again.
[sounds of bugs humming]
I journeyed on down the south coast for several days. Firstly in a break out of modern dawn, than a dugout canoe with a single patchwork sale or lacken, mostly the village is only accessible by boat. *names of villages* The fishing villages of the veighs.
[sound of water running]
It was ravishingly come surfing over the coral, listening to what the Malagasy called
the colors of the sea. Or simply rowing when the wind stayed put. You can get some inkling of the philosophy of these parts of the island if you know what their place names mean. Take Chepotra. When you walk through it barefoot on the red Earth, you might as well be strolling through a firing kelm. The name means not hot. Typical Malagasy sense of humor.
[town sounds are heard]
I brought a little tape record
with me and a copy of some of the recordings made along this coastline in the 1960s whenever I could if it seemed appropriate. I played this tape to someone in a village and asked if there were any people still singing such songs. More often than not, they got quite excited. They’d call their friends over and ask if I could make a copy and send it to them for the archive or their local school, for example. Listen to this, they’d say it’s that old song poetry from the 1960s.
[A song poetry song is played, with a man and woman singing]
[town sounds are heard]
Impatie is almost as close as Madagascar gets to a resort. Onne of the tourist villages around which the developments are gathering is called Mora Mora, slowly, slowly or take it easy. I stayed in Mangeelie. It’s a small place set back from the beach, sea foam and plush running squid like Creole bungalows with strangers like me are expected to rest. Not that I was any less of a stranger for all that. In the evenings, there’s a huge roughly fenced open air bar where local people gather to drink and dance the minusk. This might sound like a bit of a low fidelity recording. In fact, my microphone is placed directly on the bar, picked exactly what it sounded like.
[distorted fast paced music is heard]
[electric guitar is heard]
Just a few hundred yards away. There are groups of young musicians promenading in the villages, playing acoustic versions. They sling large box like mandolins around their shoulders. The instruments come in several different sizes roughly small, medium and large. And this passionate quirky music is led by exuberant singers accompanied by some virtuoso football whistling. It can go on for hours.
[this type of music is heard, with people talking in the background, then becomes the forefront. People sing and whistle, then fade out]
[a low rumbling is heard in the background]
[MACK]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. All the recordings you heard today are by cris cheek, with the exception of that extract from Possession and Poetry in Madagascar, recorded by Bernard Coachland in 1969. Today’s episode was produced by cris cheek and Mack Hagood. Mountain River Rail and Reef was produced by Phil England and Tom Wallace for Resonance FM, the world’s first radio art station as part of 1998’s meltdown festival at the Southbank Centre curated by John Peel. The BBC broadcast some of this material on radio three as the music of Madagascar, produced by John Thorn Lee. And by the way, it one the Sony gold radio award for Specialist Music Program of the year back in 1995. You can subscribe to our show at Phantompod.org or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at Phantompod. Thanks to our intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 12: A Book Unbound (Jacob Smith)
Mar 28, 2019
What would it be like if scholars presented their research in sound rather than in print? Better yet, what if we could hear them in the act of their research and analysis, pulling different historical sounds from the archives and rubbing them against one another in an audio editor?
In today’s episode, we get to find out what such an innovative scholarly audiobook would sound like–because our guest has created the first one! Jacob Smith‘s ESC (University of Michigan Press) is a fascinating sonic exploration of postwar radio drama and contemporary sound art, as well as a meditation on how humans have reshaped the ecological fate of the planet. Before we listen to an excerpt of ESC, Mack interviews Jake about how his skills as a former musician came in handy for his work as an audio academic.
You can also watch Jake’s 90s band The Mysteries of Life perform in the “bad music video” Jake mentions or on Conan O’Brien.
Jacob Smith is founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries, and professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is the author of three print-based books on sound: Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media (University of California Press 2008); Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures(University of California Press 2011); and Eco-Sonic Media (University of California Press, 2015). He writes and teaches about the cultural history of media, with a focus on sound and performance.
Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley and featured music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our intern is Gina Moravec.
Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you escape. Escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today. For a half hour of high adventure.
[old, dramatic music plays. In between are people listing off natural disasters.]
[MACK]
Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode. This is Mack Hagood. My partner chris cheek is out, so you just got me today. What you just heard is an excerpt from ESC. A fascinating project that’s one part podcast, one part audiobook. And it’s produced by my guest today, Jacob Smith. Jake is the founder and director of the Master of Arts in Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University, where he’s also a professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film. So, for those of you who are regular listeners to the show, you know that I work in this disciplinary space that gets called sound studies. So we have all these folks working in this space of sound studies. And yet, how do we publish all of this research that we generate? We publish it in print, or in pixels on the screen, right? We do it via the written word. And that’s why I was so excited about having Jake Smith on today because he is challenging that paradigm, working in sound, and doing something that really could only be done in sound. His new project ESC is an audio native audiobook.
[guitar music plays]
So what do I mean by that? So basically, this is a book length critical reading of a CBS radio drama from the 1940s and 50s called Escape. But instead of just reading about the radio drama, we actually hear the radio drama itself. And through Jake’s excellent production techniques, we also hear his criticism, and we hear these sounds sort of matched up against the work of contemporary sound artists. The through line argument of the the piece is that this moment in the 40s and 50s, after World War Two, when this radio drama was being produced, is also the moment that was sort of a tipping point in the Earth’s geological history. It’s the moment when human beings start having a larger impact on the Earth’s ecology than any other natural force does.
[guitar music fades out]
So it’s an adventurous project. It required an adventurous editor, which Jake was able to find in Mary Francis at the University of Michigan press. So we’re going to listen to this interview with Jake about the production. We’re also going to listen to excerpts of the production and then at the end of this podcast we’ll listen to a nice long chunk of the first episode of ESC. But first, we started off by talking about the iconic theme song for the show.
[theme song plays, which is Night on Bald Mountain]
[JACOB SMITH]
So first of all, I can’t take credit for writing the theme song. That’s Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.
[MACK]
Oh, right. Okay.
[JACOB]
It’s the theme song to the show escape. When I was doing the proof of concept. I’d had these conversations with Mary like, maybe it could just be audio. Maybe I could just make this argument in sound. Instead of just having a few clips, maybe I could really weave my discussion
into actually listening to the episode and to the story. It would be kind of like a DVD commentary, but with my commentary just kind of woven into the audio itself and bring in work by these other amazing sound artists, etc. So Mary was like, well, let’s just just try it, do a proof of concept, do one episode, and see if it works. And at that point, I totally panicked. This could not work at all, you know, conceptually, this might work. And so one of the first things I decided to do was make a theme song. And so maybe I could make my own version of the escape theme. But again, this is the very early stages, and I’m thinking, this might not work at all that maybe this is a terrible idea. I sat down with my guitar Okay, I’ll learn the song, let’s see if this will work. I have no idea if this will translate into something that I could make. But I had this great Omen, which is I sat down and played the opening theme from escape. And it was in A minor. If you’re a guitar player, you know this was not E flat minor or you know, C sharp It was a flat so I could just pick up my guitar and just strum this big open cord and I was like, this is gonna work because I can play this. It’s an A minor. So that was the first moment where I felt like oh, maybe my embodied skills as a musician intersect here with my scholarly work because I can play in A minor and I can play version of this theme song. So that was kind of the beginning of the proof of concept working for me. I was a musician and recorded music for many years playing in bands and touring around in a van and making records, making some really bad music videos.
[Jacob’s music plays, which is mainly vocals and guitar. Song fades out.]
That it ended up being something that was kind of disconnected from my academic work. I still wrote about music and sound and voice. But any recording or musical performance that I did was something kind of separate and different. It had its own little separate section on my CV at the end of my CV there’s something like additional professional work and would list all the musical things I did, but it didn’t really live with the other stuff it wasn’t, didn’t count as a publication. It ended up being really exciting for me to try to recombine those. To think about how working with sound sound editing, my own vocal performance might be woven back into the spectrum of my academic work.
[low, ethereal music plays]
The radio drama series escape, ran on the CBS Radio Network between 1947 and 1954. Escape was an anthology drama, which meant there was a new original story for each episode. It’s earned a place among the pantheon of shows that are considered to be classics of the Golden Age of American Radio. When it came time to do a new project, what I decided I really want
wanted to do was to bring ego criticism into sound studies or to explore how might those things live together? What might sound studies bring to ego criticism, what my ego criticism bring to sound studies? And one way that I found that those two things met was around the concept of the Anthropocene. Scientists and environmental critics differ about when the Anthropocene begins, but many see a decisive shift occurring immediately following World War Two.
[explosion sound effect plays]
At that time, fallout from nuclear explosions left a mark in the planet’s geological strata, and a great acceleration in resource extraction, population growth and energy consumption, meant that the world’s ecosystems began to change more rapidly and extensively than in any other comparable period in human history. I was really compelled by the fact that that’s also the end of the Golden Age of American Radio Drama, when radio was such a vibrant way of telling stories and a powerful narrative media form in American cultural life. I started to get really interested in how might I hear the birth of the Anthropocene in this era of Golden Age Radio.
[older radio show plays]
[MALE ANNOUNCER]
The Columbia Network takes pleasure in bringing you “Suspence.”
[omminous music plays]
“Suspense.” Colombia’s parade about standing thrillers. Produced and directed by
William Sphere and scored by Bernard Herrmann. The notable melodramas from stage and screen, fiction and radio presented each week to bring you to the edge of your chair to keep you in suspence.
[JACOB]
So I’m listening to lots and lots of Golden Age radio partly inspired by my colleague Neil Varmus work, partly inspired by this sense that it’s a time that’s coinciding with the birth of the Anthropocene. At the same time, I’m listening to all this wonderful work by contemporary sound artists working in the area of field recording, using digital tools to go out into the world, allowing us to listen to the natural world in a really dramatic new way.
[nature sounds play]
I found myself wanting to create a mashup of those two things. It felt like two very different Golden Ages of sound work. On the one hand this. studio based radio drama of the late 40s and early 50s.
[MALE ANNOUNCER]
We offer you “Escape.”
[JACOB]
And then this beautiful new flowering of field Recording by people at Chris Watson, Yana winter, Sally Mcintyre, Christina Cooper, Peter Cosack, really inspiring work that was opening my ears to the non human world. I wanted to bring these two things together. I find myself listening to these incredible cinematic field recordings, but then wanting it to turn into a narrative. Like the Golden Age radio shows I was listening to.
[MALE VOICE]
I awoke late in the afternoon, a sharp hunger picking at me.
[JACOB]
Then while I was listening to these Golden Age radio shows, I kept on wanting it to stop for a minute and just immerse me in a space, the way the field recordings would.
[animal and nature sound play]
So in each episode, I tried to leave a lot of space for sound to let the work of sound artists speak for itself, or to let that kind of interesting mashup of post war, adventure storytelling collide with field recordings. To create a very different kind of emotional experience. So I found myself
reimagining the argument in all kinds of ways in the process of doing it in sound. I also found that the emotional element of the argument would come out in all kinds of different ways. It starts to become much more of a musical experience. And for me, at least, that meant a more emotional kind of experience. It just really changed the process of writing for me.
[Sad, slow music plays]
[MACK]
Yes, the use of sound to actually open up an idea. And I think it’s particularly important, as you said, because it provides that emotional level but also because it provides time for people to process what they’ve just heard. Because when you’re reading a book, you can look up and God knows I do this all the time. I swear, when I read, I think I spend more time looking at the ceiling then at the book, which is why I’m such a slow reader. I just get interested in an idea that I just want to sit there and think about it. The podcast, if you’re just talking the whole time, you’re not providing anyone time to do that. To make their own contribution to the conversation in their head.
[JACOB]
Yeah, I think that was one of the biggest things I learned in the process of working on ESC was that kind of temporality. Very different from writing, where it’s just kind of one idea after the other. I really started to feel the places where I needed to slow down and leave some space, or bring in sound to give the listener room to digest or think about an idea. And that was one thing that, for me was really beautiful about engaging so closely with these Golden Age radio narratives. Because those guys really knew what they were doing. You know, they’re really tight 30 minute narratives. And at just the moment where you need to catch a breath, they’ll be this little beautiful little three second musical riff.
[More of the audio drama plays. A man speaks, followed by a music interlude.]
I ended up using those all the time throughout ESC, because it would be at that point in my analysis where it was like we need to break, we need to catch our breath. So just the rhythm and the temporality of making an argument in sound, felt different and could move more into music or into umbeyonce. And I really loved those transitions.
[MACK]
Yeah, and that’s something I really like about your podcast is that those little musical breaks or Sonic breaks, sometimes you made them. Sometimes a sound artists made them in the past decade. Sometimes they come from decades in the past. And so they’re all these different textures of those pauses, which I find is super rich in sonically just stimulating.
[JACOB]
That’s one thing I’ve really learned from Neil Verma. He’s really showed me how one of the exciting things about sound studies now is starting to think across sounds, and get a broader sense of the history of audio work. It’s kind of only now in some ways that we’re able to line up these different traditions of sound art and sound work in a way that say filmmakers have been doing for a long time. I think about New Hollywood directors who are constantly making references to classical Hollywood in the 30s, 50s culture in 70s films. We’re kind of used to that interesting polyphonic dialogue in film culture. And that’s one of the things that I wanted to bring to ESC. That it’s not just about this podcasting moment, but how can we line up this podcasting moment with exciting things going on and field recording and sound art but also with this earlier era of sound work that has its own kind of wonderful nuance all these things might live together in new kinds of ways. And I think that’s one of the things that the emergence of sound studies is helping us to hear.
[MACK]
And now, here’s more from Jacob Smith’s ESC Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene.
[JACOB]
Let’s get started with one of the most popular stories told on escape, which begins like this.
[Epic music plays]
[MALE NARRATOR]
Tonight, we escaped to a lonely Lighthouse of the steaming jungle coast of French Guiana and the nightmare world of terror and violence as we bring you again in response to hundreds of requests, Three skeleton Key starring Vincent Price.
[theme song plays]
[JACOB]
This is the opening of the Escape adaptation of George Gustaf’s short story, Three Skeleton Key. As you can hear from that reference to hundreds of requests. This was a popular story and Escape broadcasted on three different occasions in 1949, 1950, and 1953. Not only was Three Skeleton Key one of the most popular episodes of escape, but it features some prominent themes that cut across the entire run of the show. In particular, it’s one of 70 episodes of Escape that take place along the network of global shipping. This means that more than one third of Escape stories took place in the mid century network of ocean going ships, ports, and in this case, lighthouses. So, Three Skeleton Key is a representative episode of escape, because the theme of ties is a global news network of travel and trade, but it also depicts the infrastructure of that network in a state of disruption and collapse. In this and the next two episodes of my podcast, we’ll be listening to some of Escapes infrastructural adventures. This means I’ll be paying attention to the infrastructure in the narrative, and to the narrative of the infrastructure, to how sites like lighthouses can be the fictional settings for adventure, as well as features of the environment with their own history. We’ll see that this kind of infrastructural disposition is a useful way to help us bring an environmental awareness to these shows. Infrastructure sites can be contact zones between human networks and non human creatures, and they require that we think about multiple levels of scale from the personal to the global. We’re listening to a recording that was made by the sound artist Alan lamb. These are sounds made by an abandoned telegraph wire in the Australian outback. By bringing those wires to life, lambs work is a great example of how sound art can have an infrastructural disposition.
[the sound plays]
At the start of Three Skeleton Key, we meet Jean played by Vincent Price. Jean’s a member of a three person crew that maintains the lonely lighthouse described in the opening announcement. Jean sets the scene.
[JEAN]
Picture this place, a gray tapering cylinder welded by iron rods and concrete to the key itself. A bear Black Rock 150 feet long, maybe 40 wide. That’s at low tide. At high tide, just the lighthouse rising 110 feet straight up out of the ocean. Set in the base of the light was a watertight bronze door, and in you went, and up. Yes, up and up and round and round past the tanks of oil in the coils of rope casks of wicks, racks of lantern, sax of spots, and cartons and cans and up and up and up around and around. Over the light store room was the food store room and over the food store room was the bunk room where the three of us slept. And over the bunk room…
[JACOB]
This opening sequence establishes the broadcast as what Nicole Starosielski calls a nodal narrative. That’s a story that takes place within the node of an infrastructural network like this lighthouse. The lighthouse was an essential node in the network of international shipping and Jean explains that his lighthouse exists to warn ships away from dangerous submerged reefs.
Lighthouses like Jean’s proliferated in the second half of the 19th century, with the rise of steam powered shipping and increased calls for coastal aids to navigation. We’re listening to the sound of foghorns, a sonic component in this ship to shore technological infrastructure. The construction of lighthouses on the bare rock of an exposed coast required sophisticated tools and new engineering techniques, and they were recognized as a stunning technological achievement comparable to the great suspension bridges, railways and early skyscrapers of the era. Francis coastal light technology was considered to be the gold standard at this time, which makes it fitting that Three Skeleton Key is set in a French lighthouse. Moreover, French Diana had a reputation as an outpost at the edge of the civilized world, and was widely considered to be uncolonisable by Europeans due in part to it’s dangerous harbors and malarial swamps. That reputation was reinforced when it became a French penal colony in the 1850s. That history is referenced in the story. When we learned that the name Three Skeleton Key refers to three convicts who escaped from the penal colony, only to die of hunger on the rocks. When they were discovered, all that remained of them was their bones picked clean by the birds. It’s here that we should note that escape had preferred sites of adventure, and it’s episodes tended to cluster in particular geographical areas, like the South Sea Islands, South America, Africa, India and the Caribbean. This is a reminder that the years when escape was on the air coincide not only with the golden age of radio and the dawn of the Anthropocene, but with the period of decolonization and whatever else it might be. The show is an archive of sensibilities shaped by Western imperialism, colonial and corporate exploitation, racism, and white male heterosexual fantasy.
So listening adventurously to Escape will require a post colonial as well as an eco critical ear.
The French Diana setting also amplifies the sense that the lighthouse is a network node that situated precariously within its surrounding environment.
[JEAN]
And all about it the churning water, great greens scum dappled warm like soup and sweet
warming with gigantic back like devil fish, great violet schools of Portuguese men of war and yes, sharks, the big ones, the 15 footers. If this weren’t enough, there was a hot, dank rotten smelling wind that came at us day and night off the jungle swamps at the mainland, a wind that smelled like death.
[JACOB]
So from the perspective of an infrastructural disposition, the opening minutes of Three Skeleton Key signal that this will be a nodal narrative in which strategies of installation will play a central role. In other words, this is going to be a drama about a struggle to keep the lighthouse separate from its surrounding environment. To stabilize the steady flow of traffic through the global shipping network.
[sound of water]
That dramatic tension is enacted on the level of the show’s sound design. Jean ends his tour of the lighthouse in the gallery, where his description of the light is accompanied by shimmering orchestra stabs.
[JEAN]
She was a beauty. big steel and bronze baby with a son gleaming through the glass wall. All about bouncing blinding little beams of the big shining reflectors, delivering and refracting through her lenses. The whole gigantic bulk of our balance like a ballerina on the glistening steel axle have a rotary mechanism. She was a sweetheart of a light.
[sound of a clicking light]
[JACOB]
I want to think more about this sound, the clicking of the lights mechanism. So I’ve looped this section of the broadcast. This is another strategy that I’ll be using throughout the podcast to reboot Escape for an era of digital audio. Now that Escape’s episodes exist as digital files available online. Not only can I match them up with contemporary sound art, but I can manipulate them. Zooming into details that were left in the background of the original broadcast.
The sound of the steady regular clicking of the light in operation is what Roland Barton might call a Russell, the sound of the good functioning of a machine. It’s happy machines that Russell Bart writes. Like the PR have a well tuned engine. The clicking of the light provides a reassuring sign of multiple parts in coordinated motion, the smooth working of a complex integrated mechanical system. The sonic contrast to the light’s reassuring Russell arrives in spectacular form. When Jean and his co workers notice a derelict ship heading directly towards the reef.
[dramatic music plays]
[JEAN]
A green master a big one about a half mile off and coming down out of the north northwest coming straight for us. You must understand our light was what it was for a very good reason. Dangerous submerged reef surrounded us and ships kept clear, but this one, this sailing vessel was coming straight on.
[JACOB]
Once the ship gets close enough to observe with binoculars, the men are horrified at what they discover.
[JEAN]
I had to focus and then my breath froze in my throat. The decks were swarming with a dark brown carpet that looked like a gigantic fungus but undulating and on the mass and yards the guys and all were hundreds no thousands no mil- I don’t know. An endless number of enormous rats.
[JACOB]
The ship crashes against the reef and the mass of hungry rats and circle and ingolf the lighthouse.
[MAN]
Look, see them?
[JEAN]
No. Oh yes, I do. up at the other end of the rock. Millions.
[MAN]
They smell us. Here they come. Close the door.
[sound of rats scurrying and a door struggling to get closed]
[JACOB]
This non human multitude is a showcase for stunning sound effects. The squealing rats were created in the studio by rubbing wet corks on a sheet of glass. The sound effects of the show were admired by radio professionals as well as audiences as indicated by this announcement at the end of the episode.
[MALE ANNOUNCER]
sound effects on Three Skeleton Key created by Cliff Thorsness and executed today by Mr. Thorsness, Gus Bays, and Jack Smith had been awarded the best of the Year by Radio and Television Life magazine.
[JACOB]
Later in the show, the chaotic sound of the rats is contrasted with the soothing Russell of the machine. During a scene in which the animals cover the gallery windows and admit pained screeches when the beam from the rotating light touches them.
[JEAN]
The light drove them mad as it swung slowly and smoothly she blinded them with a fierce, stabbing bar of light moving continually about. Moving around and around and they twitching and shuttering eyes flaming when they were struck by the light. The bright light moving and behind on the dark side of the room so close so close. I did not turn my back but you cannot help turning your back when you’re in a room made of glass and the dark side of the room you could not see them only their eyes, thousands of black, lights blinking and twinkling lights like the czars of hell.
[JACOB]
The dissonant harmony of Russell and squeak is the sonic representation of the tension between infrastructure and environment that structures the story. Remember that one of my goals is to concretize the abstract spaces of escapes adventures. I’ve already added some concrete details about the lighthouse to ground it in a history of French colonialism and modern engineering. What might happen if we learn some more concrete details about the rats? Ships rats, like the ones in this story are often the example of a worst case scenario of an invasive species.
[mellow music plays]
One famous account of the devastating impact that ships rats can have on a fragile Island ecosystem concerns a small volcanic island northeast of Australia. In June of 1918, a ship called the SS Mocambo struck a reef off of Lord Howe Island and rats from the ship scurry to shore, causing an immediate and drastic reduction in birdlife on the island. Within three years of the rat’s arrival, five species of endemic forest birds had become extinct. In 1921, a resident of the island wrote that just two years earlier, the forests of Lord Howe Island where joyous with the notes of myriad birds, large and small, and of many kinds. Two years later, the ravages of the rats had made the call of a bird a rarity, such that the quietness of death reigns were all was melody.
Sally-anne McIntyre is a sound artist whose work addresses the issue of extinction.
[SALLY-ANNE MCINTYRE]
ThIS IS THE hollow type of the Lord Howl Swamp Hen. Extinct. There are two skins of this bird in existence. One here at the Natural History Museum. And one in Liverpool at the World Museum. There are also several paintings and some fossil bones.
[JACOB]
McIntyre goes to museums and makes recordings of specimens of extinct birds, like this Lord Howe Island swamp Hen. The eerie silence of these stuffed birds, is a powerful way to draw our attention to the irrevocable loss of extinction.
[silence]
McIntyre is the kind of ecologically minded sound artist whose field recordings I want to put in conversation with Escape’s studio based adventures. In another work, McIntyre transcribed written accounts of the call of the extinct Hooya bird to be played on music boxes.
[the bird call is played]
She then playback he’s ghostly sounds in the birds original habitat. We call Baquteen’s example of the abstract spaces of adventure. For a shipwreck one must have a sea, but which particular sea, makes no difference at all. When we listen to Adventure this might be true. It doesn’t make much difference at the lighthouse is off the coast of French Diana, or Africa or India or New Zealand. But if we listen adventurously from the perspective of island ecosystems like Lord Howe Island, then concrete geographical and ecological details about the history of ships rats, for example, start to make a great deal of difference. And Three Skeleton Key begins to sound in a different way. By telling the story of an isolated island community under siege by a horde of ships rats, Three Skeleton Key facilitates a mode of adventurous listening from a non human perspective, placing us in the position of lard, how islands extinct fan tales, fly eaters and starlings.
[ethereal music plays]
[MACK]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. To hear ESC in its entirety, head over to the University of Michigan website. The link is in the show notes for this podcast and on our website where as always, you can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to the things we talked about. And also find previous episodes of our show. It’s at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. And you can also find out about us on Facebook and Twitter. Today’s show was edited by Craig Eley with music by Jake Smith Span, the Mysteries of Life and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to our intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney Endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities
Ep. 11: Breathing Together (Caroline Bergvall)
Mar 14, 2019
Working across and among languages, media, and art forms, Caroline Bergvall’s writing takes form as published poetic works and performance, frequently of sound-driven projects. Her interests include multilingual poetics, queer feminist politics and issues of cultural belonging, commissioned and shown by such institutions as MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp, and won numerous awards.
Ragadawn is a multimedia performance that explores ideas of multi-lingualism, migration, lost or disappearing languages, and how language and place intersect. Ragadawn is performed with two live voices and recorded elements, outdoors, at dawn, which means the start and end times are location specific. It features song composed by Gavin Bryars, sung by Peyee Chen. Ragadawn premiered at the Festival de la Bâtie (Geneva) and at the Estuary Festival (Southend) in 2016.
How does one keep one’s body as one’s own? What does this mean about the relative safety of boundaries. Could I make sure that what I called my body would remain in the transit from other languages, that it would hold this progression into English, and because I didn’t know and wasn’t sure, and since for a great number of people, for an overwhelming number of persons, for an overwhelming a large number of persons for all always growing number of persons. This is far from self evidence. This is not self evidence. This does not apply, this doesn’t even begin to figure, I never knew for sure. Some never had a body to call their own before it was taken away. Somehow the [speaks in norwegian.] Some never had a chance to feel it body as their own before it was taken away. Some never had a chance to know their body before it was taken away. [speaks in norwegian]. Some were never free to speak that body before it was taken up and taken away. [speaks in norwegian]. Some tried their body on to pleasure in it before it was taken up beaten violated taken away [speaks in norwegian] Some had their body for a time that was taken away or parts of it somehow [speaks in norwegian] Some thought they had their body safely then were asked to leave it behind the door or parts of it some little dirty trick how the [speaks in norwegian]. Some hoped they had one safely only to find it had to be left across the border or parts of it [speaks in norwegian]. Some wanted to leave their body behind and couldn’t [speaks in french]. Some could neither take it or leave it behind [speaks in norwegian]. Some are loved at, some are spat out some are dragged into the crowd [speaks in norwegian]. Some bodies are forgotten in the language compounds. Some immense pressure is applied on to the forgetting of the ecosystem some escape from. Some bodies, like languages, simply disappear. [speaks in french]. Some or many are being disappeared [speaks in norwegian]. Some or many disappear. [speaks in norwegian]. Some are many that disappeared arise and some are many of us. [speaks in norwegian]. Some arise in some of us. [speaks in norwegian]. Some arise in some of us, arise in many of us. [speaks in norwegian]. Some arise in some of us, arise in each of us. [speaks in norwegian].
[MACK HAGOOD]
It’s Phantom Power. I’m Mack Hagood here with cris cheek. Cris, that was amazing.
[CRIS]
Unusual to hear more than one language inside a poem.
[MACK]
Yeah, and there was something almost liturgical about it. The repetition of certain phrases, the cadences of it reminded me of my childhood in the Catholic Church and given the subject matter really appropriately solemn. Who’s the poet?
[CRIS]
Caroline Bergvall. That poem was called “Crop” from her book “Meddle English.” Bervall writes borderlands among languages, materials stories and creative communities into a plural lingual poetics. Translation written into it. So much about the politics of language and the kind of damage that is done to the human, particularly women, in so many different situations disappearing, silencing. We will hear her introduce a piece called “Shake” from her most recent book “Drift out from Night Boat” books. Finally and most extensively, we talk with Caroline Bergvall about an extraordinary new project “Ragadawn.”
[MACK]
I heard in that piece, she was kind of switching between English and another language that I just was completely not familiar with.
[CRIS]
Norwegian, and you can claim connections between these languages.
[MACK]
Yeah I could tell sometimes that she was repeating the English line in that language.
[CRIS]
She is repeating it as much as one can ever truly repeat in a different language. So you hear spat and then you hear spoot.
[CAROLINE]
Some are loved at, some are spat at, some are dragged into the crowd. [speaks in norwegian].
[CRIS]
You hear those kinds of kinships between languages. It’s like a making strange, right? You recognize it. And then what happened? What was that? Did she just make that up?
[MACK]
She’s using, I don’t know, I sort of distortion sound in the background.
[the sound fades in]
[CRIS]
It’s like a wash. Which is great thinking about this business of the migration of languages from one place to another, but it’s also injecting noise and that’s very interesting and important too. That sense of signal to noise ratio that we have between and then among languages and among voices.
[the sound continues to play]
Caroline, there’s a deep kind of meditation going on here. Right?
[CAROLINE]
Yeah. It’s funny because if we are not talked about us 20 years ago, I would never ever have used that, because so much of the work might have had a very strong as, you know, embodied sense about it and physicality. So much of it also had to do with sexual identity and much more singular eyes bodies, and that the idea of the wounding, it’s not something that I was talking about in relation to healing. I was much more perhaps interested in the wounding, you know, in the in the wounds that we all have to go through in order to come to an understanding and an acceptance of the way we can build ourselves in the world. Whereas now there’s especially in [inaudible] that perhaps also in the final piece in “Drift” the rise of melody at the end of “Shake.”
[music and sounds play, very peaceful]
[CAROLINE]
*speaks in norwegian*
[sounds and music fade out]
[MACK]
I really liked her delivery.
[CRIS]
I liked that too.
[MACK]
Highly performative and it doesn’t have that detached you maybe call it poet voice? I get the sense that this is a poet that might appeal to poetry novices like myself.
[CRIS]
That would be great. She would like that a lot. It’s not an arcane world, Mack, we’ve had the Black Arts Movement, poetry and jazz. We have the spoken word scene, which is massive. I think many people are exposed to more poetry than they realize, maybe more poetry then. they would like.
[MACK]
Well, I certainly listen to a lot of hip hop.
[CRIS]
Right, exactly.
[MACK]
All right, cris, let’s talk about Ragadon. What’s the experience that the audience has?
[CRIS]
The audience needs to be facing the rising sun. The performance occurs the hour of dawn.
Sitting outside, not in a theater space in a conventional sense. The darkest hour is just before the dawn as Bob Dylan said. They are watching the light appear in the sky and the day beginning in that sense of dawn. At the same time as they are listening to a combination of speech and song and the places in between.
[CAROLINE]
The poetry that had come from the Middle East across the sea to Spain and also Sicily and that much later on became this troubadour, this first macular love poetry and then since then, has become all these other traditions. That travel, that love poetry did is what I’m thinking about. Also, when I’m thinking about community connection, how do we speak love today? How would we want to do that? And then how do we face the day together? So, I’m using the love poetry as part of the historic ,trans historic, geographical trajectory that I want to do that, that the work is also taking. So it’s that poetic heritage of singing the poem and of playing it or being musicians and of traveling across all these different languages and cultures across all these centuries also has created the absolute logic that holds this project together.
[CRIS]
What conditions are you looking forward to be able to stage your performance of Regadon?
[CAROLINE]
Well, east facing for the audience. That’s the early absolute condition and ironically, living in cities or even elsewhere. That’s not always easy to find, because the second is not a condition that is a strong sort of claim that I like to make is the fact of the type of space that it is. So that the way this where we are when the sun rises, basically is an important aspect of the work as well. In Geneva, what happened is that we could have died on the lake, which we’ve done as a very first performance of it in 2015, because there’s a tradition of morning song and morning concerts dawn concerts they call them actually in Geneva on the lake and it’s, it’s stunning. It’s so beautiful, you know, the light is pink is just fantastic.
[CRIS]
That beautiful cafe where it says “poet.”
[CAROLINE]
Exactly, it’s exactly where that is, so what we did then is that we’re really thinking where to go, for quite a while. Then in the end, we did it at the Museum of the Red Cross, which overlooks the UN building, and then further away you’ve got the mountains and the more blind you know, and it’s the stunning aspect of Switzerland. The power is there. The still and solid power of many sites and many sounds. And at the same time, the very strong international, institutional politics that you have in Geneva. So these are the conditions that it is facing and then aside that carries a type of history that will make people also feel that they can and want to come you know that is not sort of a locked in space where the ritual takes place to just a few sort of art lovers that actually that it’s open it in the type of venue and advertise in such a way that they want to come there as part of that morning basically. [speaks in norwegian].One of the aspects when it comes to the to the morning song is also the fact of me thinking about community, the disappearance of shared rituals as we know and shared secular rituals as well. So that apart from going to music concerts or festivals or there’s a lot of sort of ancient rituals that are manifested through still these these wider, bigger festivals that I was thinking very much about something that’s more intimate and was longing for this type of temporary community that can be created out of that. I was thinking a lot about isolation and the sort of suicide hour which is at the breaking points, in the early morning. I was thinking about all that in relation to traditions of morning song and dawn rituals.
[opera singing and light breeze is heard]
[CRIS]
I asked Caroline Bergvall if she could talk a little bit about working on this project with a composer Gavin Bryars.
[CAROLINE]
Well, he accepted my invitation because all I wanted from him was vocal work. I only wanted him to write one song and he got very interested in that idea that he would be invited into this type of work and that he would literally only write a song and of course, I sent him my text and when we met the first time he showed me his schools and he’d written songs for everywhere put a question mark a song, he’d written a song. What has been amazing since then I have to say is that he has let me do with it exactly what I wanted. I’ve been very very very careful to always ask him to always seek out what do you think how is a bit actually have also come to realize that he is very happy to trust the work and I told him I don’t think I want to use that bit of song and he said oh, that’s totally fine. Then he’s saying we don’t need to sing it like that, that we can do it in that way. Then we look at that together. So he’s been the most generous I have to say, person to work with because he’s given me very beautiful work which is extremely lyrical in the sense of song, allowing me to to build my performance. Then just to play his song at the heart of it. He’s very generous collaborator and what we’re doing now is that we are planning an evening song an evening work together, and that’s wonderful.
[the evening piece is played, then fades out.]
[MACK]
Your description of of what this performance is like. I mean, I really am once again, getting that sense of a ritual.
[CRIS]
She’s talking about secular ritual. I think that’s an important aspect to emphasize here. ritual in relation to the structure of the day has been a hugely important aspect of people’s lives.
[MACK]
Yeah, And it’s one that has been completely restructured and detached by capitalism and modernity, from our by our rhythms. We have electric light at the night and we have all kinds of sleep problems to to show for it. That sense of ritualistic connection to the world is really lacking. Even for those of us who aren’t religious, don’t want to be religious, but are maybe, particularly for those of us. So I really like this idea that she’s trying to create some kind of secular religious space. I even think about music and the way that these huge festivals have replaced seeing bands on a more regular basis. These bands aren’t even allowed to come to your local town, because they’ve played a major festival 200 miles away within the last six months. So contractually, they can’t come play the small club at your town. You have to sort of gorge yourself on music once or twice a year. Then it’s kind of not around so much depending on where you live.
[CAROLINE]
When I was looking for some of the other realities of the work and it took me a long time to find it. When I finally hit on it, it just cut all the way back into this idea of setting up shared space with strangers and thinking about ancient rituals and sort of the the idea of the temporary community in relation to that. This idea of languages’ presence in our localities, but that we might not be for many different reasons that our communities or that communities are sort of always exercising or silencing and number of languages. And then of course, we know why. I mean, there’s a lot of prejudice as we know and racism towards a lot of immigrant communities for a long time, the degrading of ancient local languages, you know, Welsh and local dialects that also had been sort of slowly disappearing. So, there was also that sense then a reclaiming the sights of languages. Suddenly you have the different sides piling on your have the geographical political side you have there is going to have some kind of a direction, the time of year and a direction for the rising sun is going to have a time in the morning where people will come. There is the soil, the ground or the sounding or the non sounding of languages around wherever we are that I wanted to bring out.
[another calm piece is played. A woman softly sings then chants]
When you are standing outside and you know about the windrush.
[CRIS]
The MV Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks, in Essex, the 22nd of June 1948, bringing workers from Commonwealth countries, effectively, British colonies as a response to post war, labor shortages.
[another piece is heard with running water in the background]
[CAROLINE]
You also know that it’s one of the biggest sort of sea communities in the countries are located there. And then you suddenly hear some Punjabi and the work and you have that he stays some taking place in the sort of fairly deprived areas where you have a lot of conditions that are already in place before the work has even started. Before the work is even being performed it has already set up so many different conditions that people are aware of a lot of aspects. That more people that are less expected as audiences can find their way to the work.
[another piece plays. A man’s chanting is echoing and a woman is speaking.]
Recordings are extremely different, very very different. One was sort of an open scape in Geneva. Very open with forests around and hard buildings and a glass building behind us. Quite a hard sound and then the one in England in South San which was literally on the water and along platform so very very different sound.
[people discussing something, hard to make out any words in the conversation. Chanting underneath.]
That is the nature of site specific work and it’s especially when you have so much language in there like not even my language, but the language of all these languages that I’m currently recording, that I want to find some sense that it’s not just all good. That sounds great hey you know I don’t understand a word of it. That for somebody who speaks Romaje, who speaks Punjabi. They can say there’s something to grasp as much as the way we might have handled it sonically. So absolutely it will create a weird jigsaw of iterations of language. Languages place in more dominance than in other sites perhaps, and then the size themselves.
[woman whispering words]
So a lot of what I’m telling you is embedded in the project of the word and the trajectory of the word. Honestly what makes it to the surface of its texts is not from my voice. It could be that it gets much more on earth by the voices of the conversations and the other languages because we can hear the tonalities of spoken languages, so that creates that other jigsaw of traveling languages basically. For my part, I felt that what is it that I would like to hear in the early morning and when you talked about the word healing, where there was something about this idea of self care and this idea of meeting the day. In the shape that we have, which is this physical energetic shape of body and mind etc. I was really thinking about this this very strong ritual performative language which is the language of mantras.
[a mantra is heard, repeating sounds and voices.]
[CRIS]
There’s a lot of use inside of what I’ve heard of Ramadan breath. Closely, mic breath, breath rhythm, that sense of breathing space. The quote that I wrote down was by what degree of awareness do I appear to appear.
[a woman is heard singing, a poem is read]
Which I think is wonderful both in terms of language and in terms of sound and light.
[CAROLINE]
Thank you. That is one of the few texts of the work actually and he is part of this section called Awake. The song around that, there’s a lot of breath obviously because of thinking about mantras early morning, waking up, getting the body in action and then also for me. I’ve been pursuing an interest in breathing as a connector in private practice since a few years now and there was this one piece called Together which was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Geneva for Art’s birthday in a mid January every year. That was going to be broadcast again, in a non English context, although being an English based writer or writing in English. So I think a lot about what are the connectors in language that we have, apart from articulate sounds that might be differential? Well, of course, breathing, which marks the syntax as much as it marks the fact that we breathe all the time while we listen, while we’re speaking. The speaking is often based in slow exhalation. These together are based on that where breathing is an explicit part of the work. When I read those live, I’ve taught myself how to read it now, and I can read it for about 10 minutes. But what is extraordinary about that is that I start reading it when, I can see where the breath goes in the crowd. Now some people get very agitated. Overall, people get really like, you can see the breathing gets tight, starts to take over the listening. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s basically I can hear and feel everybody’s breathing. When I can feel it, then that’s when the rhythm of the other piece changes completely, because it really moves into that sense of a breathing that becomes this thing we all share, which is the space of breathing. So that was a very important piece for me, because I found myself for the first time speaking, I mean with no voice sound, and literally just breathing the piece with people.
[CRIS]
So listen to where Caroline puts the breath in the shaping of this phrase and hum or sing along with her. She plays us out.
[the breathing piece is played]
One step at a time, one kiss at a time, one action at a time, one and one and one and one, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together, doing it together. doing it together doing it together, doing it together doing it together, together, together, together, doing it together, doing it together (repeats this several times).
[a low hum is heard, in time with the chanting, then fades]
[surreal music fades in]
[MACK]
And that’s it for another episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Caroline Bergvall for coming on the show. This episode made use of work in progress on site recordings in Geneva and London, from the song poem: Ragadon. Concept text and performance by Caroline Bergvall. Songs by Gavin Bryars, sung by P E Chen with live sound compositions from Nick Rothwell and sound engineer Sam Grant. We also heard Up We Get created with David Scrifary for the introductory section of the solstice performance love song in 2015. We also heard Together Doing It: Breath and Voice piece in three parts, and Gio on bass clarinet commissioned by the Mamcode Museum in Geneva, and Aspouse Two: National Swiss Radio, produced by Ann Gio. We also heard AOSIS, first created for the city and the city at Wood Street Galleries Pittsburgh, to accompany a wall of broadsides from middling English, recorded at All Saints Chapel, Blackheath. We also heard Shake, texts by Caroline Bergvall, sound and live percussion by Enger Zach. You can find a link to Caroline Bergvall’s website, learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and previous episodes of the show all at phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts and we’d love it if you’d rate review us on apple podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter @Phantompod. Thanks to our intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[song fades out]
Ep. 10: Animal Control (Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Robbie Judkins, Colleen Plumb)
Mar 01, 2019
This week, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction monograph that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. We’ll hear works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb, interwoven with Wong’s unflinchingly reflective prose. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-human ears.
Links to works by the artists heard in this episode:
If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here.
[sounds fade out]
[MACK]
Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power, where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
Hi, cris.
[CRIS]
Hi Mack. How you doing?
[MACK]
I’m okay. We’ve got an interesting episode in store today I think.
[CRIS]
Good.
[MACK]
I spoke with an author of fiction and nonfiction work. Her name is Mandy Suzanne Wong. She hails from Bermuda. She’s got a PhD from the University of California in Los Angeles. You may have heard of the place.
[CRIS]
I have. she’s very interdisciplinary right?
[MACK]
Yeah, she’s another person that I met through that crazy conference for science literature and the arts. Like the other person that we met.
[CRIS]
Brian House.
[MACK]
Brian House, yeah. The other person we met at that conference, Brian House. She has a concern with animals and the sounds of animals and sound art about animals.
[CRIS]
Right, it seems like she is a creative writer in short fiction and also has a novel coming out this year. It seems like she is also an essayist about sound almost a creative nonfiction thinking about sound is that right?
[MACK]
Yeah, and she’s got this manuscript that she recently finished and it’s called “Listen, We All Bleed.” It’s her critical response to a number of sound art pieces that focus on the human animal relationship through sound. So, on today’s show we’re going to listen to four pieces of audio that Mandy Suzanne Wong has written about in “Listen, We All Bleed.” We’re going to listen to those pieces and we’re also going to listen to her words about those pieces. So, the first piece we’re going to listen to is by Robbie Judkins. It’s called “Desired Place” and it’s on his album “Homo Tyrannicus.”
[low, ominous music plays, sounds like an orchestra]
[MANDY]
What is empathy? There are at least two definitions of empathy out there on philosophers of animal ethics. One is basically if I empathize with you, I feel something similar to what you feel. Another is when I empathize with you, I am deeply affected by your situation, but in my own way/ I think Robbie Jenkins desired place could be about either or both. I think empathy is a kind of resonance.
[music continues]
The final track on his album “Homo Tyrannicus: Desired Place” opens with a beautiful electronic chord. Long and rolling in slow motion through the tones of some major triad with a bit of fuss. Two minutes. Most people would say that’s very long for a chord and it keeps going. And then little bells start ringing. Wind bothering a microphone, splash or stumble in the grass. The bells are somehow holler and then sheep and cattle mowing. The bells are full of footsteps in the grass.
[sounds mentioned above play out]
One interview recall this piece a collage of simultaneous curiosities. First, this long chord. I’m a fan of drone and ambient music. I know long cords. There are long chords I can sleep in, chords I can fly in, chords that hold my breath or gouge me or transforming into carpet or warm water. They assert their independence, which is why Robbie says they are humbling. This long cord is dusty velvet, maybe even musty, with velvet cushions on the sides. It’s also electric with dust motes and wintry light. It coils the tones of the Triad around and around. This motion is internal, quills of rope are still one route. This is a binding chord and the hollow little bells creeping up on it, and the footsteps in the grass.
[sounds continue]
Farm animals, says the album’s website, and English winter weather. I hear cattle and sheep moving through wide grasslands under heavy ash grey skies. I’ve read that northern shepherds keep track of the herded and attuned to their tempers by listening to the bells around their necks. I think this piece is about captivity and liberation and friction between what feels like liberation but is also captivity. There are at least two ways to hear the animals lowing, tinkling and swishing through the open field. Here’s one way, nature. Tranquility, pastoral simplicity, peace, and the wide open. Where everyone walks and tinkles instead of shoving and cursing, breathing the perfume of fresh grass instead of smoke. This feeling is genuine and legitimate, desired place is beautiful and calming. Here’s another way to hear the combination of “Homo Tyrannicus.” The sheep and cattle tinkle because there’s some human’s property. They fare better on the range than they do extensions, but the clang of captivity has them by the throat. Appended to their bodies at the neck bills are their prosthetic voices as though captivity were some defining part of them. Just as the human Robbie Judkins who comes to their wide open to escape himself is imprisoned in himself, even in the great wide open, to the point that he’s turned to mirtazapine and anti depressant of last resort, which gives its name to the previous track.
[sounds continue]
Empathy means coming to share a relevantly similar effective state with another. It happens here in the simple juxtaposition of sounds and words. Captive non human animals do suffer depression. We don’t often think of it as complicated, all consuming anguish worthy of drugs and psychiatrists, but it is. Horrifying, though it is. Captive fishes have been treated with Prozac and responded. I think desired place is that imprisoned human heart crying out to prisoner cattle. I feel what you feel. It’s so complex and knotted, it never let’ me go.
[sound of clanging cans]
Desired place isn’t just about the artist. Judkins makes his own field recordings, but he’s not the one who baws. He says playing with animal sounds and animals to the another humbling experience, for it’s about not feeling that you are a master of them. It’s about feeling with them. So desired place is neither a tranquil place nor a bear walled cell, but a place where words about human tyranny and anguish coincide with captive animal sounds to give us an opportunity to appreciate that they suffer tyranny and anguish of the same complexity but differently. Desired place is a resonance, sounding out the irony in humans have to use idea of freedom, echoing the complexity of non humans emotional experience of captivity. Empathy is a liminal place full of echoes and reflections, changing color as they fly.
[sounds continue, then fade out]
[MACK]
Thoughts?
[CRIS]
I have a lot of thoughts about that. I actually like it as a piece into relating her writing with the sound, although I know the sound exists in its own right. So, for people who want to hear the sound without the voices, we’ve put the links up on our website. I’m drawn to thinking about cowbells and sheep bells and goat bells and what that does to the sheep or the cow or the goat. They are forced into hearing this clanging every time they move their head. That must be, to say the least, incredibly annoying let alone intrusive, uncomfortable, maybe deafening.
[MACK]
Yeah, maybe literally deafening. You can certainly see this as a form of torture, yet I think from our anthropocentric perspective, this is the sound of the bucolic good life. This gentle clinking and clanging.
[CRIS]
We do. We think about it as kind of like a rural evil. Oh, the sound of the cattle coming across the hillside, or the clanking of the clinking, clanking of the goats in the valley.
[MACK]
I love it as this meeting place, this space for conjuring the kind of empathy that Mandy Suzanne long is talking about here. Trying to hear from the perspective of these animals and hear how this sound that’s beloved to us maybe torture to them.
[CRIS]
Absolutely. Let’s hear another one.
[MACK]
So the next piece is also by sound artist Robbie Judkins and this one is a live performance that he did in London in 2017. It’s called “Pest.”
[Pest begins to play. Starts as an annoying ringing]
[MANDY]
You’re fast asleep in your cookie cutter house on a decent suburban night. A stinking feral cat slinks onto your property bent on wreaking havoc among your flower beds and spreading cat
disease to little Junior. Never fear, you’ve got an ultrasonic animal repeller. The infiltrator trips the motion sensor and your faithful military green box on a stick start shooting powerful ultrasounds and blinding lights. The intruder, cat, bat, hedgehog, fox, raccoon, squirrel, skunk mole, or dog feels deafening sound spearing it’s brain. Scared out of its wits, the enemy turns and runs. Meanwhile, you continue snoozing in your bed, dreaming perhaps of football, having noticed not a thing. Humane and guaranteed. If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here. Robbie Judkins tells me the sounds of ultrasonic animal repellers give him ear pain even though he can’t hear them. Imagine hearing them with hypersensitive dog ears. Now dream back to London 2017 where Robbie’s made a sonic arsenal into a 22 minute artwork. He calls it “Pest.” With him on stage is the powered solar ultrasonic animal repeller, two of them actually. Robbie stands between them with his laptop on a table in real time, he translates their ultrasounds to audible sounds and layers them with field recordings of other sonic repellents. Sometimes Robbie leaves the table. He walks back and forth across the stage pacing as if on patrol or imprisoned in a bear cell. He keeps having to hop or duck the wires strung across the stage at chest level and ankle height. They’re high tension wires, the kind farmers used to keep birds out of their crops. When the wires move in the wind, Robbie says, they make a droning, humming noise, really noisy and really loud. So he layers that noise with solar ultrasonic javelins, stretched into law and loud lansing wailes.
[the wailes are played]
Every time he leaves or returns to his laptop. He must wiggle between wires stepping up and ducking under. He hits his head once, and then bending or crouching over the computer having nothing to sit on Later, he admits it somewhat painful to perform. That’s the point. The artists literally ensnares himself, he doesn’t spare himself as he blasts the only species on this planet that would purchase ultrasonic animal repellers with the noises of those very things. as the outcasts might hear them. Ortification as subversion. The whole thing is physically awkward for all humans present. Even for a fan of drone music, “Pest” is discomfitingly piercing. Drones are sonicwalls, as if magnifications of ultrasonic fortresses. “Pest” is an invisible fortress that makes my body feel like liquid. It sounds out the ambiguity of resistance, resistance as rigidity, refusal to give ground even to a squirrel. Resistance as critical, effrontery. Revolt the very force of change. Now there are no mice and moles and “Pest.” No non human animal sounds at all. What does their absence tell you about the kind of threat they are and where are the pests? What are they? Which species is trapped in emptiness here with nothing but itself and the traps it has invented and wildness trembling inside it?
[the piece ends]
[MACK]
What I like about listening to these pieces, I think what’s starting to emerge is all of these different methodologies that we have for controlling our relationship to animals. Controlling the animals themselves, and how much sound plays into these things. You want to keep tabs on the animals, so you put a bell around its neck.
[CRIS]
You want to know where it is.
[MACK]
Then you always know where it is, and where you want to keep the animal away. Some animals we want to keep them. We use sound to do that. Some we want to repel them, so we use sound to do that. Sometimes, the things that we’re doing to animals, as we’ll see in a moment, cause the animals to make inconveniently loud and unhappy sounds. So, maybe we’ll mask that with some sound. It’s all of these ways of asserting our dominance over animals.
[CRIS]
Dominance and privilege. A sense of the non human animal interactions that we favor, that we want to have. We want the cuddly, when we want the cuddly, we want the cuddly. Where and how we want the cuddly, we want the cuddly.
[MACK]
Cuddles on demand.
[CRIS]
Cuddles on demand. That sense of policing our own spaces to eviscerate them of any other animal presences.
[MACK]
Ok cris, so this next piece, I wouldn’t say it’s sound art per say, but it’s a field recording made surreptitiously by a guy named Claude Matthews.
[sounds of animals barking and crying]
Once you’ve heard a big cry, you won’t forget it, or hundreds of dogs. Big and small. Black and brown, and dappled. Claude Matthews, met them on death row. Matthews went again and again to the Center for Animal Care and Control in Manhattan, taking pictures of homeless dogs and cats in cages. He made flyers for each animal, urging humans to adopt them before the CACC killed them, froze their bodies and then burn them. In June 1996, he smuggled in a mic and recorder, hid them in his camera bag, put the bag on the floor pressed record. He shuffled quietly along the corridors 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, photographing every single dog and every last narrow dingy cage stinking with piss and fear. In every cage, a dog ran up to plead with him. They threw themselves at bars and mesh. They tried to eat away the mesh. Terriers and Great Danes ramming themselves through food slots while Bulldogs sprawled and corners giving up. All the while that recorder ran, so Matthew’s took home two hours of doggie agony. Now and then among the whimpering and raging at these bag russells. The floor taps him from beneath. He’s right there in the foreground where the dogs howl. In the background, not quite distant is music. of all things that old song by Billy Joel, “Leave a Tender Moment Alone.” It’s a horror of a coincidence. The CACC didn’t know about Matthews tape recorder. He offered to build a website connecting lonely humans with homeless dogs. The CACC turned him down, choosing to leave the moment alone and kill the animals instead. Matthews wrote, it was massive and systemized violence but it is not called violence. The facilities which perform the killing are cold shelters, facilitating denial of, or at least a diffusion of responsibility for what is in fact, a premeditated policy of cruel austerity. The music is foreign in the background. Silly soft rock, sequestered beyond empty walls and coradoors. If you don’t know the song, you won’t recognize it, but you’ll know it’s music. You’ll pick up its mellow rhythms, even though Matthews position is so that the dogs would drown out everything. For the CACC staff ,it was the other way around. Music flooded the halls to drown the screens. A musical deployment to crush responsibility and willful ignorance. Howls and croons were countermeasures firing on each other in a stalemate. Their collision on Matthews recruiting is an explosion of noise. The way he recorded it was hush hush subversive. The recording had to be made in secret, or the CACC wouldn’t have let Matthew set the bag way he did. From the hidden recorders in human perspective, human crooning drowns in non human misery. Doggy howling. drowns the human staffs pretensions to normality. The fantasy that those cages are like a doctor’s waiting room or shopping mall with piped in prettiness. Listening I start to feel like the rope in a tug of war between faint Billy Joel and deafening doomed pit bulls. The music’s presence shows how determined ignorance is but with their chaotic range of pitches, tempers, dire emotions, and shared shuttering volume, what can I say? The doggies win. Their voices so loud, so distressed and then such numbers coerce my decision.
[sounds fade out]
[CRIS]
So that’s a terrifying recording, but I have to almost make light of the fact that my response to Billy Joel might be not dissimilar.
[MACK]
Yeah, the juxtaposition of Billy Joel is just almost too much.
[CRIS]
It’s terrifying. I remember going to the zoo in Chicago several years ago. It was Christmas time, and the lions were in their cages, and they had kind of big carousels outside and they were playing Christmas carols. It almost reminded me of the US military trying to get Daniel Ortega out of his presidential palace by blasting the Rolling Stones at him.
[MACK]
The thing that I really like about this is this is a almost a very Friedrich Hitler kind of thing. Where the recorder because it works differently from the human ear. It just captures what’s there. This recorder is down on the floor in this bag, and it was at the dogs level. We’ve got this kind of, musical perfume that’s trying to cover up the stench of this place. The Billy Joel, but it’s kind of up at the human ear level. This recorder’s down on the floor with the dogs. It’s picking up this different soundscape where Billy Joel just can’t paper over the pain of these animals.
[CRIS]
That’s great.
[MACK]
I think once again it’s just like Mandy Suzanne is sort of positioning us in the position of these animals. Mandy’s grabbing on to these recordings that do this work of putting us in the position of these other beings that live on our planet.
[CRIS]
It’s so distressing to hear, and many people listening will understand from their own domestic environment. Possibly they are dog owners themselves, the terror that’s being expressed through these dog wines, these dog howls. The sense of insecurity in a place that’s called shelter.
[MACK]
So cris, the last piece that we’re going to encounter today is called 30 times a minute. It’s by the video artist Colleen Plum. It comes from years of her videotaping what’s called the stereotypical behaviors of captive animals. Specifically captive elephants.
[CRIS]
Yeah, the zoo. Not as a place of beauty.
[a howling chord plays]
[MINDY]
We’re listening to a chord that should have passed us by in a fraction of a second, but it happens that it’s stuck. Trapped cord. We’re on uncomfortable benches in a dark room with a big screen. Horizontal wires slash the picture all the way through. Behind them is an Asian elephant. Behind her a thick fence. Clothed. primates stare at her. She stares at emptiness. In the near distance, swaying from side to side to side. Her name is Linda. She’s in a zoo in Kansas. Cut to an African elephants swing side to side and another zoo. Cut to an Asian elephant swaying behind bars as thick as her gray legs. Side to side, never forward or backward. Different elephants, different zoos, all doing the same thing as this long cord just sits there. Colleen plum, the artists of this work, traveled to 60 zoos in the US and Europe, videoing elephants as they we left and right going nowhere. Swaying in place is abnormal for elephants. They’d walk 50 miles a day, if they were free. We can’t know for certain what the swaying is about not being elephants ourselves. Colleen observes, only captive elephants exhibit weaving, it’s stereotypic, pathological. If a human rock from side to side to side all day, every, every single long, long, endless day, they’d be diagnosed mentally ill. In elephants these compulsive repetitive movements can cause debilitating, life threatening damage to the animal’s feet, and joints. In Pauline’s sound, and video collage, 30 times a minute. We watch beautiful gray bodies grinding themselves down, each elephant is alone wearing herself out to music that’s forgotten how to move. The trapped cord is the sound of old recordings of human animals, playing hymns and classical music on non human, non animal bodies, except Collins broken the music into fragments of sound and slow the fragments right down to one to 10% of their original speeds. So what once we’re melodies and progressions are now just cord. The pachyderms heart beats 30 times a minute half the speed of yours and mine. Slowing down human music to even less than half speed, Colleen wants us to feel how an imprisoned elephant feels her time. A photographer by training, Colleen had never worked with sound before. She wanted to make her own soundtrack because she wanted to retrain our perspective personally. To put herself through the experience of unlearning how to listen like a closed and squeaky always rushing primate. Colleen herself took on the work of unraveling familiar tunes into long piles of sound. It’s a new uncertain ritual for her. The painstaking process of her perceptions slowing ,seizing to be familiar or make sense. The long impossible anguish of becoming elephant. Colleen’s stretched sounds dream of a human body trapped in a captives time with elephants ears. Sounding out the slow sensation of an interminable day. Exposing Colleen’s own insides. Her delicate hearing organs and suggestible senses to caged elephants, monotony. Colleen’s distorted no longer human sounds, the sounds of Colleen listening to captivate elephants way of listening. Colleen’s sounds are listening in action, listening as action and response. The sounds are lovely by themselves. Juxtaposed with portraits of elephant after elephant jerking side to side compulsively, those trapped cords start to squeeze. Their grasping feels like too tight clothes. Colleen asks, how do humans seek what she calls connectivity, the feeling of being connected to others, since one of her answers is music, especially religious music. She gives us hymns with their very identities as hymns bled out of them as they bleed into sonic puddles. Zoos are another connectivity tactic. The zoo is where humans go to connect with other animals by learning about them, and above all, staring at them. Meanwhile, those at whom we stare imprisoned elephants, like Sunda retreat into themselves. Imprisoned in her thoughts, thoughts of a life imprisoned, her one outlet is side to side to side neurosis.What Colleen’s artwork tries to do is pervert feel good practices of connectivity into experiences of confinement.
[chords fade out]
[CRIS]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Mandy Suzanne Long for coming on the show. Thanks also to the sound artist and recordists whose work we listened to today: Robin Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plum. You can hear their works in their entirety. Find the link to Mandy Suzanne Long’s website, learn more about Phantom Power, and find transcripts and previous episodes of the show all that Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’s to rate and review us in Apple podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter @Phantompod. Today’s show was edited by Craig Ellie and Mack Haygood. Thanks to our intern, Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 9: A Drummer’s Tale (Charles Hayward)
Feb 15, 2019
Charles Hayward is one of the most propulsive, resourceful and generative rock-plus drummers of the past half-century. An influential percussionist, keyboardist, songwriter, singer of songs, and forward thinker through sound, Charles spoke with Phantom Power about a 40thanniversary touring with a partly reformed and enlarged This Heat as This Is Not This Heat, and then opened into generous reflections on his solo works The Bell Agency and 30 Minute Snare Drum Roll.
Charles is founding member of the experimental rock groups This Heat and Camberwell Now. Since the late 1980s he has concentrated on solo projects and collaborations, including Massacre with Bill Laswell and Fred Frith. Most recently he released an album of improvised duets with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
This Is Not This Heat play their final concerts at EartH Hackney Arts Center in London March 1st , a two-day residency in Copenhagen March 5th-6th, Le Poisson Rouge in New York City March 18th, Zebulon in Los Angeles March 20-21, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville TN on March 24th, the Albany in Deptford, London May 25th.
[radio or television static mixed with an orchestra]
[MALE ANNOUNCER]
The time now, very nearly three o’clock. The next program on BBC One: “Songs of Praise” follows at three fifteen…
[Funk/techno music suddenly cuts in]
[MACK HAYGOOD]
Episode nine.
[CRIS]
A drummer’s tale.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
So it’s great to be back. Phantom Power Season Two, and this episode is one that I have been waiting for with a certain fan-ish frenzy, because we’re going to talk about Charles Hayward; the drummer, keyboardist, vocalist, tape manipulator, pioneer of experimental rock and roll.
[CRIS]
Yeah, right. And still putting out albums. Still touring. This Heat, the band that you would just hearing, they’ve recently done a 40 year set of concerts under the name “This is not This Heat.”
[MACK]
It’s amazing to hear This Heat still making such an impact on music, because I remember playing music in Chicago in the late 90s and early 2000s and at that time post rock was a genre that was a pretty big deal. Those of us playing that sort of music were really inspired I would say by a few bands. There was Can. There was Lee Scratch Perry. There was This Heat. Talk Talk was another one.
[CRIS]
Interesting to hear that. I like them too, especially their later albums.
[MACK]
So, This Heat was just a group that once you heard them you’re like, I can’t believe this already existed so long ago.
[CRIS]
They they take a punk DIY aesthetic and then they retain some of the immediacy of the elements of that music. They were more involved with a very different kind of idea about the interrelationship between melody and rhythm and noise. Dirty sense and dirty samplers and expanded sense inside music making that leads into trance ambience, precise bursts of silence. I think all of that is part of what makes their music still sound fresh.
[ethereal music fades in]
[MACK]
Charles Hayward went on to play with so many interesting bands, including Massacre with the guitarist Fred Frith and the bass player Bill Laswell.
[CRIS]
They just put out an album this year of improvisations with [inaudible] from Sonic Youth.
[MACK]
By the way, how do you know Charles Hayward?
[CRIS]
Loosely rubbing shoulders on and off over the years. When I was playing music around various different scenes in London. This sort of person who I felt was part of a community of music makers and interested audiences over a period of about 25 years. Of course, I’ve been over here for a while now.
[music changes to have more bells clanging]
It’s been a while. I know.
[CHARLES]
It’s been one hell of a while.
[CRIS]
It’s been a lifetime and you’ve just been so unbelievably busy. Are you ever at home these days?
[music becomes faster tempoed, more contemporary]
[CHARLES]
I’m at home less often then I have been in the past, but it’s all good. I broke my ankle quite literally a jolt. I was back to playing pretty much right away, but while I was lying in bed, I told myself, I wasn’t gonna hold myself back anymore. I was going to do all the things that were in my head that I thought were good, and I was going to share them with as many people as possible. It’s all about now as opposed to having this luxurious time span up ahead.
[CRIS]
How does it feel getting back into those somewhat old shoes?
[CHARLES]
We’re not doing any new material, we’re only doing what’s on the albums and the records. That can either be an incredible constraint or it can be a big liberating with this is what it is, let’s get on with it. It’s been the second one. There was this agenda when the group was a trio, which was about moving forward. We’ve found a way by integrating it with these five other players to actually, completely revitalize it. The materials got “now” written into it from 40 years ago. For instance, on Cenotaph the chorus is “history repeats itself.”
[a sample of the song plays. Very slow and contemporary]
The deep sense of irony. A thing happening and being said, at one point, and then:
[lyrics come in singing “history represts itself]
Unfolding sometime later, and the contradictions inside that or the parallels inside that is really being investigated, partly because history has taken us around this loop. Partly because, for instance, my daughter’s in the group and to be doing that with the younger generation, all the players are at least 20 years younger than me and Charles. With lots of new versions of what the material means. New input often about technology, or about instrumental attitudes, something beyond that concept of non musician. Some might say, well, I don’t know anything about the note F sharp but that thing where they don’t know the names of the notes, but they they now to get the emotion across, and they’ve got their own way of doing that. Then you’re constantly learning and that’s good, really.
[music fades out]
It feels to me like how I imagined the folk tradition, some non-industrialized position inside music seems to be a good model. When I think about my childhood, I was getting that sort of quiet orthodox 50s music tuition, school. That would be things like English folk songs, really. Then all the Anglican Church of England hymns, and all that stuff.
[a song plays inspired from English hymns, but still sounds contemporary]
I used to love going along to the school assemblies and singing, I wouldn’t sing the words, I would just do the tunes. I still really love opening up my lungs. Doing that nine o’clock in the morning, I used to feel absolutely fantastic. So I never ran away from that. I had a lot of mates who sort of turn their back on that. That sense of song, for me, the melodies are so right. It’s not about trying to show off some sort of oblique angle or anything, it’s just getting the tune across, in a way that comes out of your own body.
[ethereal music plays]
I’ve always loved that folk thing, crossing over into Greek music, and you get it crossing over into African music. I mean, just the very same Indian music the same…it’s not even aesthetic, it’s the same ethic. There’s a story I heard about a session in the pub in Sligo in Ireland, where one of the Fiddler’s was like the man. Next to him was this 12 year old who was practically scratching at the fiddle. No one thought that the music was being impaired, that this virtuoso was being limited. What was happening was, the music was growing. That’s the good thing about this is not that it doesn’t actually sound exactly like the record. It’s more like a garden.
[simple jazzy music plays]
[CRIS]
Drummer, keyboard player, songwriter, singer of songs, forward thinker and reflector on sound.
[MACK]
So, there was This Heat and then there was This is not This Heat, but there was a long period in between those.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s kind of 35 years in between those two events. Charles has taken the politics of collective music production into community workshop settings. I asked him if he had a kind of ready made travel kit that he used.
[CHARLES]
I just be me. the most I’m ever really me is when I’m playing, unless I’m with my wife and kids. Then there’s that version of me but I don’t really find it very easy to share that with lots of people. The me that I do share with lots of people is is music. I’ve got a thing that I can carry very easily, it’s a frame drum, a little keyboard, a melodic. I think that’s basically it. Then there’s our little set of bells and my voice. Almost never words, or its words, but they’re mumbled and sort of half there. The bell agency, it grew out of disability arts workshops.
[MACK]
So what is the bell agency?
[CRIS]
Well, it’s like a game. A musical game, anybody can play. And any number of people can play. Each person as a beater, and there is either one or more bowls made of metal. Each person can take the opportunity or the opening to strike the ball with their beater, with this stick. Not in turn, but when they are moved, so to do, but then they have to wait until somebody else strikes it before they can strike it again. A music making structure that people with varying abilities could all participate in.
[MACK]
So this really gets into that thing he was just talking about folk music, right? Music for the people.
[CHARLES]
It started as a workshop thing with the brief that we’ve got to try and get funding admin and NHS.
[CRIS]
National Health Services.
[CHARLES]
Local coordinators, and us, and people with disability, there’s like 20 of us. There’s people in the group who’ve got all sorts of learning and sensory disabilities, or they’re not even necessarily disabilities, but they’re not the same as yours and mine. They give signal, and at the same time, the world often interprets the signal as meaningless or like nervous tic response or something like that. I see it as more material in the air. So I try and integrate that into what I make. There’s also dancers that work with the people.
[a single bell periodically ringing]
When we say dances and working with the people or another word other times has been clients. Another word has been participants. All these words, they basically divide us up into the people who are the professionals and the people who are the patients almost. It’s only language that really does that, because when we’re actually inside it together, that’s the thing that this particular workshop brings, is, there is no real division. The division starts again, the minute we get to half three and the support workers come in. They’re good people, but we were able to afford something that’s like, outside of practicalities. We’re in this world where we don’t even explain it to each other, we just get on with it. It’s very, very nice. It’s very, very abstract. It refreshes your soul. It wasn’t about turn taking where you could see that people getting uptight because they were three goes away from it being their turn. Nobody had any real over responsibility. Some people were hardly ever participants, you know, they would only make one sound in the whole thing. That’s sort of how it started. It was just a way of sharing what we can do with people who weren’t musicians. That’s often when it comes out the best. I did one Bell agency, which was all arts admin people. One of them was taking the piss of it all the time, she was frightened committing herself. I’ve worked with this sort of thing before. I knew I used to sort of come on all matcho, and sort of almost be argumentative, but I didn’t. I started sort of very slightly weeping. Saying, look, it’s right for you, but these sounds actually mean something to me. Then not only do they mean something, to me, it’s my responsibility to look after them. I can’t handle you not giving them the respect they deserve. Then some of the other admin people started to elbow in and say, let’s get into this. So we got into it, and she got into it as well. By the end of it, she was just like a completely different human being, it was just amazing. It was like she was actually doing the thing that she’d been administrating and sort of like having a certain distance via the paperwork and all this sort of stuff. She’d been doing that for years. Then suddenly, she was actually engaged in this sort of experience she was setting up for people, she was actually inside herself, and it was just an amazing session. One of the things I’m very interested in in a moment is the interface between social obligation and ordinary timetables, like all my trains at four o’clock. Zoning out this weird thing where you can play for a quarter of an hour and it feels like war and peace, but it also feels like the batting of an eyelid. That thing where it transcends social time, and then finding a way of bringing those two together, because in a weird sort of way, they are brought together anyway. It’s the very nature of performance, It’s got social time constraints around it. If someone wants the bell agency to be 15 minutes, then I’ll go okay well, I’ll engineer it so that it’s 15 minutes. With the bell agency I tried to get people to become very conscious of shape across time as opposed to shape in space. I think that music and theater and dance…you’re asking the audience to engage with their memory of what happened at the beginning and how that follows through to the end. If you can get the participants in the bell agency to actually, I say to them that the first sound you make it almost doesn’t matter which one of the bells you play and actually to be honest, it doesn’t really matter that much the second bell you play. The first bell on the second bill, they’re just sort of like they’re at the beginning of the path. Once you’ve got the second bell and the space between the time between the first and the second, the amount of decay you’ve let happen, that’s sort of constraining what you really think should happen for the third sound. The fourth sound becomes even more defined because of the first, second, and third. As you go further into the piece, each choice becomes more and more inevitable. So, tune into that inevitability and obey it, as opposed to think, oh, I’ve got to express myself. Instead of that, just obey, obey, obey, obey, and follow the obeying all the way through. That might mean that the pieces two minutes long, and it might mean that the piece is seven minutes long. It’s because of the choices you made by about sound four and five, they’ve set up the conditions for everything else. It’s just a question of finding what those conditions are, by the doing of it. You’ve also got to be totally present to know when it’s no longer there or when it’s gone. Sometimes I’ll record it or I’ll say to people look, just a minute and a half ago, we went beyond the point. Did you hear it? we’re just now waffling. The feedback from the people who participate is fascinating as well. Who’s that guy, [inaudible]. He did that whole thing about quantum moments. The bell agencies’ that. You think the thing is going one way, but somebody else does something. That can change the conditions of what you thought it was going to be. You’re only allowed to make one sound at a time. That’s the only rule is you can only make one sound, then you have to let somebody else make a sound.
[CRIS]
Yes, like a conversation between attentions. There’s a kind of a sense of constraint, productive constraint that’s developing as the piece goes on.
[CHARLES]
That’s exactly it. cris. Yeah, yeah.
[CRIS]
That is beautiful.
[CHARLES]
Yeah, well it is beautiful because I mean that lady I talked about at the Barbican workshop, I’ve been in this trapped inside, what will people think of me? Or sometimes I’m even still in this, how can I be me doing this? Well you’re not being you doing this, because you’re standing outside of yourself asking how can I be me doing this, the thing to do is to just do this. Then you will find that you’re being you. It washes away all these horrible burdens everyone’s carrying, including your personality and how you interact with people, suddenly, all that’s gone, because you’re just a obeying the sound.
[bell ringing continues then fades out]
[CRIS]
What do you think?
[MACK]
I find this really inspiring, and he’s so radically open and present to what’s happening. He’s using sound as a way to do that, to engage with other people. To engage with people across all these kinds of divisions that we make up as he says, with words and this whole idea of disability too. There’s a lot of scholars who work in the field of disability in the humanities and talk about how we have this medical model of disability that says, disabled people are people with bodies that don’t work correctly. Disability scholars will instead suggest that, no, there’s just a whole diverse world of different kinds of bodies. We have social and also physical material environments that make life more difficult for people with certain kinds of bodies. Just to listen to him talking about that knowledge that he has that these are sort of false divisions that we make, and that we can use music to sort of transcend those and let everyone participate according to their own authentic self. It’s really, really great and nothing I would have expected. Just from being a fan of This Heat. I had no idea he was doing things like this. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense with their politics of the band does this kind of radically open socialist perspective on dealing with other people and the spaces that you’re in.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s why I wanted to talk to him, because I find that the work that he has been doing in other contexts, and the kinds of qualities of attention that he’s been drawing out of being a drummer have opened into these inclusive spaces. You might think that to hit a bell is something that a drummer would do, but to encourage 20 people in a room to really pay attention to hitting that bell and listening to the decay on the sound and so on. The ramifications of trying to produce a little composition collectively really excites me. The thinking process of a musician and mature midlife.
[MACK]
That difference between the way he would have responded to that one woman who was sort of laughing at this process. the way he would have responded as that younger musician is to the more really gutsy way he responded to her this time. Which is such a less macho, male, masculine way of responding and yet took a lot more courage.
[slow music fades out, a drumroll on a snare drum fades in]
[CRIS]
When you’re performing something like 30 minutes snare drum roll we just heard a snippet of about a minute. When all of the attention is on you, and you’re kind of responsible for everything that’s happening but I used to play hand drums a little bit. Sometimes I would sense that it wasn’t me playing the drum it was the drum playing me and I feel like you’re really exploring that in a micro level piece like that.
[CHARLES]
If you play a role for the normal amount of time, which is like maybe five seconds, and inside a piece but if you just [makes sounds like a drum] all you really here is the role. If you only play the role and then you vary the role, it brings you into focus of what actually is going on. It’s no it’s no longer like a narrative line that’s being said, or I’m using the word narrative here or whatever. Instead of it being something that’s like a building block inside some sort of linguistic parallel, it’s instead purely sound. I did Barrow in Furness full of noises. I did a big with Laura and Axis Dryland Head, and I did 30 minute snare drum roll. We were in this large space in the interval. I’d gone outside for a breath of fresh air. When I came back in again, there was this whole paraphernalia about the door, the front door of the building. So then I’m doing the snare drum roll, and I can hear a gang of children downstairs in this big, large sort of stone staircase, running around in the building. I’m thinking well, the reason why there was all that ho-ha about the front door when I went out for breath of fresh air, the reason why there was all that ho-ha was because the backstage area wasn’t completely secure. People that got all the computers for the festival, blah, blah, blah, and suddenly there’s this gang of kids running around. I take the volume down of the snare drum and the kids disappear. I take the volume back up again, and there’s all these children singing. Of course, it’s not the children. There are no children singing. It’s snare drum. When you say about me playing the drum or is the the drum playing me, when it really gets going it’s definitely the latter.
[snare drum roll continues]
Things are starting happening that I’m not even in control of. The audience are hearing things that I don’t even know are actually happening. They’re in a different part of the space and that is something off the back corner of the ceiling. I can’t hear that.
[CRIS]
I went off and have a look other people who do drum rolls on YouTube. There’s a whole bunch of videos. Jason Sutter, Wayne Orlin, Kato Harrooto, Jesse Seef. I was looking at all of these and so many of them are all about something other than the sound. They’re sort of doing cheerleader maneuvers, twiddling the sticks in between. They’ve got some kind of marching band paraphernalia going on. What I really like about what you do is just the intense focus on the sound and the production of the sound and listening and paying attention.
[CHARLES]
The micro details of the piece change with the acoustic of this space. Sometimes there’s things I can’t bring out because they’re not actually in the room. Other times something that’s like there’s this base sort of [base noise]. There’s this is bottom thing that if you play with a particular sort of elbow, and at the center of the drum, you can bring out this sort of weird sort of base sub harmonic. You can’t do it in every room. If the floor’s not quite the right floor, it won’t happen. I do want to record it. It can’t be recorded in a definitive sense. It will change the acoustic space changes, then the actual piece changes.
[CRIS]
One of the cliches about punk is that people didn’t know how to play their instruments. Yet, you could like, if you just got three basic chord structures you could bash out a song in your garage. Leading in some quarters wrongly, to a kind of glorification of ineptitude. Charles is saying something very different. He’s pointing towards care. We heard it in the bell agency, he’s saying I really care about these sounds, I really care about this process. Clearly, he cares about his own music making. His care in terms of this sense of folk transmission that he was talking about. There’s care in terms of just wanting to stay inside the production of a 30 minute snare drum roll and make that interesting. Get as much juice out of it as he possibly can. Take people into the kind of the granularity of the sound. Taking care is the thread that we can pull here. It’s evident in everything that he’s saying.
[CHARLES]
The intellect and memory and language and the appreciation of structure through time. These things are part of the totality as well. It’s not like oh, we better be natural, so we better not do songs. Song is to be human. Construct from one day to the next. Going back to the studio to tweak the mix. That is human. It’s not some sort of alien thing. That’s what we are. To run away from that in some sort of anarcho squat parody. That that sense of, oh it can’t be right because you actually spent some time getting it perfect. Not perfect but getting it to feel like you want it to feel. You get upset if it’s not quite like that you must be an idiot. It’s like no, I’m being a human being. If I’d been like this after two days of getting engaged with the process, then maybe I was a bit childish, a bit silly. There must be a reason why I’ve been doing this for years. It’s to get better at it, share it more effectively.
[CRIS]
Coming back to a sense of daily practice whatever your line of living is, and taking care of it, and taking care about it whether it’s a garden or you’re building a model ship or you’re making music, learning how to draw or whatever it is. I think that taking care is a very interesting little guide that Charles Hayward suggests we might follow. Thanks so much, Charles.
[CHARLES]
The pleasure’s mine cris. Music actually fills the air for everybody.
[snare drum roll plays then fades out. Modern music plays]
[MACK]
That’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Charles Hayward for coming on the show. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to the things we talked about and find previous episodes of the show at phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple podcasts. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. All of the music today was by This Heat Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward and Gareth Williams, and Charles Haywards diverse solo projects. Thanks to our intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from the Robert H and Nancy J. Blaney endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[music fades out]
Ep. 8: Test Subjects (Mara Mills)
Feb 01, 2019
Season Two erupts in our ears with a film-noir soundscape—an eerie voice utters strange and disjointed phrases and echoing footsteps lead to sirens and gunshots. What on Earth are we listening to? We unravel the mystery with NYU media professor Mara Mills who studies the historical relationship between disability and media technologies.
An ink blot, often used on test subjects in projective tests.
In Episode 8, “Test Subjects,” we examine the strange and obscure history of sound’s use as a psychological diagnostic tool. In the late 20th century, while many disabilities were eliminated through medical interventions, a host of new disabilities were invented, especially within the realm of psychology. Mills’s historical work in the audio archives of American Foundation for the Blindreveals how auditory projective testing was used to diagnose blind people with additional psychological disabilities. As we listen to these strange archival sounds, we learn how culture and technology shape the history of human ability and disability.
This episode’s theme music is by Mack Hagoodwith additional music by Graeme Gibson, Blue Dot Sessions, Claude Debussy, and Duke Ellington. The show was edited by Craig Eley and Mack Hagood. Transcript
[ethereal music plays in the background]
[CRIS CREEK]
This…is…Phantom Power.
[static and creaking sounds fade in and out]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode 8.
[dial tone plays]
[CRIS]
Test Subjects.
[MAN OVER PHONE]
This is the first sound.
[fast ticking of a clock fades in. Water sloshing, then dramatic, ethereal music fades in]
[WOMAN]
They walk together slowly, their feet making a sound together. And the man wonders…wonders why all the noise, all the turmoil, so quiet. When will it stop? So quiet, so peaceful, so serene, so quiet. You can’t forget the quiet. You can’t ever forget.
[sound of a whistle, then a crash. Music and ticking play in background]
[CRIS]
I feel as if I’m being thrown into a space or a place that I am experiencing as anxiety, that sense of the alarms, the hurrying footsteps, the dramatic voice and the time passing. It’s just a kind of a…its a terror of time passing. It’s Jonathan Query’s 24/7 being made manifest in my ears.
[MACK]
Yeah, these are sounds I’ve been playing around with. Our guest for today’s episode just shared this archive of amazing sounds with me, and so I was just playing with them putting them into a collage. A lot of them do seem to induce a bit of a feeling of dread.
[CRIS]
No, I liked it. It was it was full of portent. It was almost as if I was in radio play where most of the dialogue could have been removed and I just had the sound effects left.
[MACK]
Yeah, and as we’ll learn, the sounds are sort of a relative of radio drama and believe it or not, they’re intended to be healing sounds cris.
[CRIS]
No way. I mean, the idea that the clock was kind of coming forwards and going backwards into the distance this stuff is pure terror!
[MACK]
I did mess around with the sounds a little bit, but these are sounds that are supposed to help you become the best person that you can possibly be. Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities. I’m Mack Haygood.
[CRIS]
And I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
cris is a poet and performance artist. I’m a scholar of media and communication. Welcome to season two. Today we examine the strange and obscure history of sound being used as a diagnostic tool for the betterment of human beings. Now, how can anyone think that the chilling film noir sounds we just heard could possibly be good for you? Well, maybe I should just let our guest explain it.
[CRIS]
Exactly.
[MACK]
So let’s introduce her.
[MARA MILLS]
My name’s Mara Mills. I’m an associate professor of media culture and communication at New York University, where I also co-direct the Center for Disability Studies.
[MACK]
Mara is a scholar of both media studies and a scholar of disability studies.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
But the reason she’s on our show is that she combines these two seemingly different fields by working in sound. The mysterious recordings that we were just listening to have to do with research that Mara was doing on books for the blind.
[MARA]
Well in 2015, I was collaborating with Helen Selsdon, who’s the archivist At the American Foundation for the Blind to digitize their Talking Book collections.
[jazzy music plays in the background]
So we took the entire collection because they were fairly fragile to a high end digitization company in New York. I had a grant from the National Science Foundation to pay for the digitization, so we towed them in the trunk of my car, tons and tons of these records to this company and had them digitize them for us. They gave us back an external hard drive with completely unlabeled WAV files, which meant that I had to go through and listen to each one of the files to figure out what it was and to correlate it to whatever the title was on the finding aid, if there even was one, it was extremely time consuming.
[MACK]
So Mara has all of these digitized, unlabeled files. Meanwhile, she gets this really great invitation to be a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. So by day, she’s doing all of this stuff there at the institute, and then by night, she sitting in her Berlin apartment just listening to these strange files.
[MARA]
Many of which, in fact, are pretty remote from what one would think of as a book.
[music continues to play]
So listening to these files, many of them were in fact talking books, which were novels narrated by famous Broadway stars in New York in the 1930s and 1940s for blind readers made in the AFB studios. I expected that.
[a sample of an audio book is played. Has underlying static throughout.]
[AUDIO BOOK WOMAN]
“The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde. Recorded solely for the use of the blind in the Talking Books Studios of American Foundation for the Blind Incorporated. Read by Eva Le Gallienne. High above the city on a tall column stood the statue of the Happy Prince. he was gilded all over with…
[MARA]
Some of them were very unusual. It would be sort of 60 minutes of electronic beeping, which turned out to be the output of reading machine,s scanner based electronic reading machines that were text to tone, things like the visi-toner or the stereo-toner.
[several beeps are heard]
[CRIS]
What’s A visi-toner?
[MACK]
Well, the visi-toner is like a brand of something called an optophone. The visi-toner was actually made really nearby to us in Dayton, Ohio under a contract from the United States Veterans Administration. Basically, it’s this little machine that you would pass over a line of printed text. It would turn the letters into these sort of musical tones that blind people were able to interpret as letters.
[CRIS]
That is super interesting, so they have to learn the alphabetic-turnel correlation.
[MACK]
Yeah, and they can listen to their utility bills. It was used for these sort of perfunctory things just like the mail came in, I got to see what my bills are and they could listen to it like that.
[CRIS]
I love that.
[MAN ON OLD TAPE]
You’re hearing capital B now.
[beeping that is the equivalent of a capital B]
Here’s capital C.
[Mara]
Then, I came across this album. It seemed to me to be a series of nonsense words and completely ambiguous, nonsensical, disconnected sentences. So, a narrator with a ambiguously gendered voice sounding like a speaker from mid century radio, reading out sentences like you touch and a little comes off on your fingers.
[NARRATOR]
You touch, and a little comes off on your fingers, and you have to dust off your fingers.
[MARA]
Then moving on to another sentence totally disconnected from that one.
[NARRATOR]
A long shiver, it passes. Steps coming slowly.
[MARA]
My mind was racing to understand what those sentences could mean. Was this about a sugar donut? Was it about bicycle grease? What could this possibly be about?
[a ticking clock is heard in the background]
[NARRATOR]
Afraid. Afraid.
[ominous music plays with the ticking clock]
The chair was hard, but you knew she didn’t care, and she sat very straight, and around her there was silence. He picked up the little thing and turned it in his fingers, and it seemed he might never stop turning it and feeling of it. They walk together slowly, their feet. making a sound together.
[MARA]
I decided I had to know more about what this was. Who made this? What was it meant to do?
[NARRATOR]
All the noise, All the turmoil. When will it stop? So quiet, so peaceful, so serene.
[music and clock ticking fade out]
[MARA]
It turned out that the American Foundation for the Blind, the AFB had actually commissioned this record in 1952, and they commissioned it to be an auditory version of the thematic apperception tests, or TAT, which by then was a fairly well known means of psychological testing for sighted people. It was a series of still images, black and white sketches designed in the 1930s by a psychologist Henry Murray, who worked at Harvard and artist Cristiana Morgan.
[old timey music plays in the background, light static is in the recording]
The images that Morgan drew were meant to be extremely ambiguous. They were meant to be generalized. They were meant to be interpretable in many different ways by a wide range, almost a universal range, of people. The viewer, in this case of the visual TATs, was usually asked in a psychological office to look at one of the particular images and then to write a story about it.
[music continues, mainly piano music]
After that story was written about the image, the difficulties arose. The psychologist then had to figure out themselves how to interpret that story, what it meant, what it meant about that person, what it meant about their latent personality traits or about their feelings.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
The thematic apperception test, just the story of it is really fascinating. Morgan and Murray were really interesting people. Morgan was this artist and writer and she was an amateur psychoanalyst who collaborated with the famed psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. Murray was this Harvard psychologist, and the two of them became lovers, which was actually something that Jung had recommended so that they could release their creative energies.
[CRIS]
I say nothing.
[MACK]
In the 1930s!
[Mack and cris laugh]
It was all going off.
[MACK]
Yeah, it really was.
[CRIS]
That’s what happens with prohibition.
[MACK]
I mean, I guess it worked because they created the thematic apperception test after that, and the TAT became one of the most widely used projective tests in the world.
[old timey piano music fades back in]
[MARA]
The auditory version of the projective test, the one commissioned by the AFB, was produced by a psychologist in Hartford named Seidel Braverman and also a fairly well known blind memoirist and radio script writer who lived in New York named Hector Chevigny. Chevigny had written a memoir called “My Eyes have a Cold Nose” that was a reference to his service dog, his eyes. Chevigny, having experience in radio as a script writer, but also as a producer had lots of contacts in New York from whom he could acquire sound effects, voice actors, and he helped Seidel produce this oral analog to the visual TAT. So, the auditory protective test had several sections, and I had to listen to the whole thing to figure out what those sections were. So I’ve now administered about 40 protective test to myself.
[dramatic music plays]
[NARRATOR]
It was there, strong and straight, and seemed destined never to come down. Moving and then stopping, and then moving again, but always forward. Forward, soft, very soft, and warm.
[MARA]
The opening section contained these ambiguous descriptions of objects or scenes, and at the beginning of this section, listeners are instructed to tell what happened, what led up to it and what the outcome will be. That’s followed by these very ambiguous descriptions of scenes or objects.
[NARRATOR]
It was harsh, high and loud, and it kept on and on and you couldn’t stop it. You couldn’t stop it at all.
[ticking clocks are heard, then fade out]
[MARA]
So the second section of the auditory projective test is a series of dialogues and an invented language, a completely nonsense language, but spoken in very highly charged or effective intonation. To my mind and to my interpretation, these dialogues sounded either extremely angry and heated or extremely sad. Of course the whole point of it is is to figure out what the listeners interpretation of the dialogues are, but there was no way to know what the language was because they were completely invented words.
[a man and woman speak back and forth in a made up language. Their tone appears to be angry]
The listener was asked to tell a story about what the dialogue was about, to put words in the actors mouths. It turns out that these voice actors were from New York. They knew Hector Chevigny. They were trained in double talk, a strategy used by people on stage or on radio to use invented words, usually just one at a time, sprinkled into speech for humorous effect.
[the made up conversation continues]
[MACK]
That’s why I said earlier that this recording or these recordings were a relative of radio drama, because this blind script writer Chevigny had access to all of these great voice actors to create these tests.
[CRIS]
I’m thinking about traditions of nonsense poetry. I’m thinking about Russian futurist trans rational sound, the idea of an invented language that would cross national boundaries. I’m thinking about Esperanto. I’m thinking about other traditions of nonsense poetry like Lewis Carroll’s “The Jabberwocky.” I’m thinking about Hugo Ball with his sound poems. I’m thinking about Kirch Fitters, Ursa Naughta. There’s a whole world here of composing and invented languages.
[MACK]
I’m thinking about the peas and carrots, peas and carrots that they used to teach us as actors if you were supposed to be whispering in the background.
[CRIS]
And kind of Pig Latin. We’re into a territory of opacity and transparency in relation to what words signify, what they bring. Not just a sort of literal, literal translations and literal interpretations, but the analogues, the metaphors, the dirty stuff.
[MACK]
The ways that sounds and words conjure things within us.
[the made up conversation continues, then the ticking clock fades in]
[MARA]
Then there’s a final section of the record with several tests which just have nonverbal sounds, and the sounds were from the ABC sound effects department. Each test would have 10 or so sounds played in a row, a gunshot, a dog barking…
[several sound effects are played in a random order]
The listener was instructed to aggregate these sounds into, if not a story into some sort of cohesive anecdote, to explain what these sounds are doing assemble together. The listener would either verbally, in each of these cases, say out their explanation to a psychologist or write down a story or a paragraph about them and then submit it to that psychologist.
[sound effects continue, then fade out.]
[CRIS]
So, how widespread was this kind of work with auditory perception on the tests?
[MACK]
I think that this test itself wasn’t like really used that much with blind people. it was a little bit, but as Mara did more research, she came to realize that the use of sound for this kind of projective testing was pretty widespread. In fact, the history of psychological projective testing is at least as much sonic as it is visual.
[calm music plays in the background]
[MARA]
Well, after listening to the auditory protective test, I wanted to know if this was one of a kind or if it was part of a bigger genre. I immediately discovered that of course, the entire field of projective testing probably starts with auditory protective testing, even if it wasn’t called that immediately, and dates to word association tests produced at the beginning of the 20th century by people like Carl Jung, and most famously by Carl Jung, but there were precursors to him. In Jung’s word association testing he published I think his first article on it in 1910. He wrote a list of test words,green water, ink, which he would then read in the clinical setting to a patient and ask the patient to respond to him with the very first word that came to their mind, creating a sort of couplet of terms between the tester and testee, the therapist in the patient. He then would try to interpret what that meant either with the patient or on his own.
[music fades out]
[MACK]
Alright cris, let’s do this. Green.
[CRIS]
Grass.
[MACK]
Water.
[CRIS]
I can’t say bong on the radio.
[MACK]
Bong, is that what you said?
[Mack and cris laugh]
[CRIS]
Well, Bong Water. It was that famous band.
[MACK]
A great band. Ink.
[CRIS]
Um, pollution.
[MACK]
Window.
[CRIS]
Vibrancy.
[MACK]
Friendly.
[CRIS]
Tea.
[MACK]
Cold.
[CRIS]
Map.
[MACK]
Village.
[CRIS]
Idiot.
[MACK]
I really liked that you call that you came up with poison after ink. Never give a poet a word association test, I guess.
[CRIS]
Well, I think of writing as pollution.
[slow music fades in]
[MARA]
After looking into Jung, I decided I wanted to follow up more specifically on other recorded auditory projective tests. In fact, there were a ton of protective tests recorded on phonograph records starting in the 1930s with the advent of electrical recording. One of the earliest that I came across shockingly was made by BF Skinner.
[MACK]
Yeah, and he was a guy who really didn’t care about interiority very much. He liked to call the brain a black box that just had inputs and outputs.
[MARA]
He was a postdoc at the time at Harvard, and he created something that he called the verbal submator.
[the sounds of the submator. A male voice speaking through static.]
Basically, he had been working late nights in the lab as a postdoc and hearing all sorts of weird machine sounds. Those machines sounds he was fantasizing, hallucinating, were speech. The machines were telling him go outside, go outside, because he was exhausted and didn’t want to work in the lab anymore. He thought to himself, oh, what would it be like to make a record with speech as if it was heard behind a wall or heard in another room? Muffled speech. I could play this record then for people, and it would advance what he called Verbal Behavior from them, because he was already getting interested in behaviorism. This, for Skinner, was still quite close to something Freudian. In fact, he even says in his report about it, that it might be useful for some sort of radiant analysis that you would get to know something about someone’s personality. He quickly moved way farther into his behaviorist studies which were all about the seemingly endless potential to train animals and humans to do totally new things. The human is a blank slate.
[submator sounds fade out and horn music fades in]
After encountering the Skinner Test, I learned that there was another entire sub field of auditory protective test based on music. A number of psychologists some at Harvard, some colleagues of Skinner’s like Carl Coonsa, either created new recordings, or used existing recordings of music. So Carl Coonsa’s musical reverie test as he called it, used pieces by, for instance, Debu and would ask a listener to sit in a very comfortable armchair, listen to this piece of music and then tell a story about it, which they then would use to diagnose them with personality propensities or disorders.
[background music gets louder, sounds like concert music.
[MACK]
So cris, so far we’ve heard how NYU Professor Mara Mills has assembled this curious history of auditory predictive tests. All of which propose to mind some kind of essence from the individual by having them listen to sound and then respond to what they’d heard, which is cool. What I love about Mara’s work and what really inspires me about it is that she uses history such as these to ask really big questions. Questions like, when we test someone what are we really testing, where derived notions of normalcy come from, and who or what do these ideas of normal really support?
[MARA]
Morgan and Murray described their own process as analysts of these tests as a process of double hearing. It’s interesting that they use the word hearing, because they were, again, working with visual projective tests, not the auditory ones. If the testee is supposed to look at a test and give an interpretation of it, the analyst is giving an interpretation of an interpretation, they’re supposed to have double hearing. They’re supposed to themselves think about what their interpretation of the test would be, what the average normal interpretation of the test would be, and then think about how the interpretation of the testee works. Another problem that arose for me is that as a historian, I’m supposed to have triple hearing or actually, I wanted myself to have triple hearing. I wanted to will myself into trouble hearing. I wanted to let myself take the TAT naively experience it. What did I think of this? I also had to hear like the psychologist, I had to understand what the psychologists are doing. Then I also have to hear in this very broad socio historical contextual frame like a historian.
[ticking clock fades in with dramatic music]
I come to this project as a disability historian and I came to this project as someone interested in access technologies for blind people. The idea that blind people we’re also going to be subjected to the medica perception tests just made me question access to what. Of course, there’s not just access to nice novels and other sort of things that blind people choose, but there’s, access to disciplining and diagnosing technologies that were happening at the same moment.
[MACK]
You know, the French historian of ideas and philosopher Michel Foucault was asking some similar questions as he looked at historical practices such as diary keeping and letter writing and confession in the Catholic Church. These are all activities where we think we’re burying our soul. We’re revealing our innermost depths. Foucault said, no, no, no, no, these are the activities, the techniques, these are the technologies by which we really invent the soul. In those moments, that’s where we construct the self. The self isn’t already there inside of us as this kind of unchanging essence. We invent it through these cultural activities. The ancient stoics and their journaling were trying to achieve self mastery. The Catholic’s confession was used to craft a soul that was purged of sin, and in the modern era psychology and it’s tests and therapies are designed to make us well and whole.
[CRIS]
Right, and in fact, I mean, I suppose we are increasingly being conditioned by these technologies.
[MACK]
Yeah. One last thing, there’s this historian of science at Harvard, Peter Galison, and he wrote this great piece about the Rorschach inkblot test where he says, first, in order to even create a test like that, you have to have some sort of idea of what the self is that you’re testing for. There was this idea that there’s a deep unconscious,Freudian self that could be evoked or brought out by the ink blot. Back when the first project of tests were invented, only a few bearded psychoanalysts shared this new kind of modern notion of the self. What happens? They begin administering the test and then by the very act of testing, this new notion of the self begins to spread throughout the culture.
[CRIS]
Oh, yeah. We see it all. We hear it, and we see it all around us right now in terms of arguments about identity, arguments about behavior.
[MACK]
This is the kind of cultural history that Mara Mills is exploring through these auditory projective tests.
[music and sounds fade out]
[MARA]
The thematic apperception test, the visual ones, were not meant to ever circulate widely, because it would buy us the test results if someone had seen the image before. Of course, today in the digital moment, all of the cards, all of the images can be seen easily online. If you want to look at them, the first problem that immediately one can see is that they are not as generalized nor as ambiguous nor as neutral as they were supposed to be.
[old timey music plays with static]
They’re supposed to be like inkblots. Extremely ambiguous scenes that anyone can relate to and that will plum something about that person. Of course, they’re all scenes of white people from the early to mid 20th century. Many of them are middle class scenes. If they’re not middle class scenes than they are scenes, which to the present day eye, represent middle class fears about urban degeneracy.
[music continues]
So these are clearly not neutral test taking instruments in the first place. For Morgan and Murray, who did not create a coding scheme, they eventually settled on this idea that the correct answer was the average answer. Reality is what most people perceive. If most people believe that an image of two people embracing is an image of a heterosexual married couple, then that’s the correct response, and anyone who interprets that image as a homosexual image, as an image of an affair, as a pedophile like image, whatever, that then is revealing something pathological about themselves. I mean, it’s terrifying to think that truth is the statistically typical. There were more complex coding schemes than that. That is, to me a quite terrifying way to interpret those images. Many of the disorders they were supposed to diagnose, it was often things like sexual disorders, it was often things like homosexuality, which after 1973 is no longer considered to be a disability. The suite of things called disabilities at that time, which psychologists were looking for, many of them aren’t even considered to be disabilities today. If you’re looking for homosexuality, yeah, you can find it. If they’re looking for other affective disorders, they might be able to find it, but these are things that we wouldn’t consider to be fixed traits today and aren’t considered to be disabilities today. Certainly, the way people use TATs has shifted. As people, the way we think about sexuality has shifted from something that’s fixed, from something that’s anate, to something that’s much more fluid or the way we think about gender has shifted or what counts as a disability has shifted.
[music plays, then fades out]
[MACK]
I think what all of this shows us is that normal has a history. Disability has a history.
[slow music fades in]
[MARA]
I think what was also interesting about the auditory projective test for blind people, it could be used to help blind people understand their interests, and then think about what kind of education they wanted to get, what kind of jobs they would want to go into, but it could also be used to diagnose additional disabilities in a universe of proliferating disability, which is what the 20th century was. As many infectious diseases and disabilities from prior times began to vanish, because of new healthcare interventions, pharmaceutical interventions, a whole host of other disabilities began to be invented, especially in the case of like the DSM, psychological disabilities, the proliferation in that realm of disability. It’s interesting to think of blind people then being diagnosed with this whole range of other disabilities, perhaps through the auditory protective test. All of the impairments that all of us can be tested for in this particular moment where disability and impairment are presumed to be lurking everywhere and presumed to be a sort of baseline.
[MACK]
Back when we were an agrarian nation, there was no such thing is ADHD.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
It didn’t exist as a disability because it didn’t have a reason to. When you were using the plow or
what have you, it didn’t require that much trained attention. Also, there weren’t that many things around to distract you either.
[CRIS]
That’s right. Well..
[MACK]
Some birds or, I don’t know.
[CRIS]
Yeah, flies. Dust on your shoes.
[Female laughing is heard, with the sound of people booing. A siren starts to blare, then the sound of the clock ticking takes over. Mysterious music plays with the ticking]
That’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Mara Mills for coming on the show and to Helen Selsdon on the American Foundation for the Blind for the use of the auditory projective tests. You can learn more about Phantom Power, find transcripts and links to the things we talked about and find previous episodes of the show at Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d rate and review us in Apple podcast. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter and music was by Mack Haygood, Graham Gibson and Blue Dot Sessions, as well as Duke Ellington and Claude Debussy. The show was edited by Craig Alien and Mack Haygood. We’d like to bid a fond farewell and happy graduation to our intern Adam Whitmer and we welcome our new intern Gina Moravec. Phantom Power is produced with support from rheRobert H and Nancy J. Blaney Endowment, the Miami University Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Slab trunks feature sound systems and visual displays.
Since the 1990s, many of Houston’s African American residents have customized cars and customized the sound of hip hop. Cars called “slabs” swerve a slow path through the city streets, banging out a distinctive local music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods.
Folklorist and Houston native Langston Collin Wilkins studies slab culture and the “screwed and chopped” hip hop that rattles the slabs and serves as the culture’s soundtrack. Wilkins shows us how sonic creativity turns a space—a collection of buildings and streets—into a place that is known, respected, and loved.
Parental discretion is advised. Welcome to Phantom Power. I’m cris cheek. Today on the seventh and final episode of our first season, my co-host Mack Hagood converses with Langston Collin Wilkins. Langston is a folklorist an ethnomusicologist active in both academia and the public sector. Working as a traditional art specialist at the Tennessee Arts Commission. Mack spoke with Langston recently about his research into Houston’s unique slab, car culture. The city’s relationship to hip hop and hip hop’s to community. Enjoy.
[Different hip hop music plays]
[MACK HAGOOD]
So before we get into the research of Langston Collin Wilkins, maybe we should get one question out of the way. Why would a folklorist be studying hip hop? Don’t they study things like folk tales or traditional music or quilting? Well, in fact the folklorist I know study things like bodybuilding and fashion and internet memes. Folklorists study everyday creativity. One contemporary definition of folklore is “artistic communication in small groups.” As Langston shows, it’s the way a town like Houston gets a look and a sound all its own, but folklore didn’t lead Langston to hip hop. In fact, it was quite the other way around.
[Hip hop music cuts out]
[LANGSTON COLLINS WILKINS]
Back when I was a kid, around 12 years old, I received my first hip hop record, which was the “Ghetto Boys Resurrection Album” in 1996.
[A song from the album plays]
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, the south side, where Scarface is from that same area. The Ghetto Boys in my hometown heroes as they are for everyone growing up in Houston in those communities. I just became obsessed with hip hop, and not just the music, but just the larger culture and community surrounding it. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about hip hop, I was watching everything, just studying the culture and that kind of continued through college. When I got the grad school, I went hoping to study hip hop in some form or fashion. It was through hip hop that I learned about folklore and became interested in it. I spent a year doing ethnographic research in Houston amongst the hip hop community there. I focus mostly on I guess the more street oriented or gangsta rappers, and we’re studying the artists and producers connection to place. I was looking at how and why these artists was so deeply connected to the city itself, apartment buildings, streets, neighborhoods, and how these attachments and connection to place have been reproduced in their musical output.
[Different hip hop song plays]
Why do Houston Raptors always shout out, call out, give dedications to places that they are familiar and intimately connected with?
[Several places are listed through hip hop songs]
Washington, Armstrong, Mainwelles and St. Williams. Robinson, Thomas Hopes, we all be chillin but when a sucka starts illin’, the chillin gets rough, and like (inaudible) we tie an ass up.
[song continues, then ends]
[LANGSTON]
That’s what I studied and as I was doing that research I realized that this car culture slab, which originated in Houston Texas, was a part of this place identity that these artists were projecting.
[Street sounds with cars, motors running, and people talking]
It originated amongst working class African Americans in the early 1980s. It’s hard to offer a concrete definition of slabs, but mostly they’re older modeled cars, older model American luxury cars. So we’re talking Cadillacs, Lincolns,old mobiles, if you can find those, and they’re modified in various ways. Some of the core components include the rims or wheels which are in the community call swingers or elbows depending on who you talk to. These are 30 spoked home like wheels made of chrome. That’s a core fundamental aspect to slap culture. Then you have the paint, which is typically called candy paint, really shiny, glossy, paint with bold colors, and beyond that you have the stereo systems which are also important components of the culture. These stereo systems feature multiple speakers, subwoofers that feature incredible bass sounds. They’re typically powered by multiple batteries. Essentially, slab is a modified, customized car and the components are unique to Houston because there are various car cultures, modified car cultures around the country, but I think the combination of the candy paint, the swingers, the elbows, and the stereo systems make slab unique to Houston.
[Street sounds fade out]
[MACK]
Was there anything from your training in folklore that made you see this phenomenon and maybe even hear it in a different way?
[Hip hop music plays in the background]
[LANGSTON]
I had seen these cars going up, but I’d never really appreciated them. They were just how people got from A to B. That’s how they traveled. My uncle who I’m close to, he had not a slab, but he had a modified car, but that was just his car. Going through the program and learning about how cars and other forms of material culture are results of both individual and communal creativity, I began to look at the cars more deeply.
[MACK]
It’s interesting what you’re saying there, that these material objects we come up with, almost as these reasons we create spaces to come together and generate a sense of community, but also promote this arena for individuals to show off their distinct abilities at the same time. It’s funny, because the automobile has formed that space for a lot of different subcultures. Those old codgers who have their vintage car things like in the parking lot of the Cracker Barrel, or whatever.
[LANGSTON]
Right, absolutely.
[MACK]
Maybe not that different in some ways.
[LANGSTON]
I don’t think it is. Beyond that, as I was taking the music, the cars were constantly referred to in these rappers’ verbal output. So, that’s what turned my attention for staying in the cars because I figured out that they were both an interesting form of creative culture in themselves, but also a fundamental part of Houston rappers, creative output.
[Another rap song fades in, then fades out]
People who own slabs aren’t going to your local car audio store to get their systems put together, they go to the audio guy in their neighborhood, who knows the culture, knows the community, and knows the aesthetic to put these sounds together. We were just talking about multiple speakers, heavy bass, and the base, you have to be able to feel the bass that’s part of the aesthetic. Actually, you’re able to see the music. That’s another part of this, that your slab is supposed to rattle, and the truck is supposed to rattle and kind of bump when you’re listening to your music which is typically local hip hop.
[Hip hop plays from what sounds like a car stereo. You can hear the base.]
At least in slab culture, in the music it’s meant to be felt and heard and seen. I think that’s why you get these terms like bang or bump, to refer to the sound systems.
[The bass has completely taken over. Hip hop music slowly fades back in to show how the bass fits. Both sounds fade out]
[MACK]
You mentioned that it’s local music. Can you talk about the kind of music that’s associated with this culture?
[LANGSTON]
There was a major economic downturn recession in Houston in the early 1980s that resulted in a lot of people being out of work, a lot of black people being out of work, I’ll say. At the same time in the early 1980s, you saw the rise of crack cocaine and that offered a kind of an economic pathway for many of those guys in those communities. So that’s kind of the context. There’s this community of dope dealers in the south side who wanted to flaunt their wealth and wanted their names, and their presence to be as big as possible in the cars and the music, the local hip hop sound. Scared, Screwed and Chopped, kind of allowed them to do that.
[Another hip hop song plays]
Essentially, screwed means to slow a record down. Screwed records typically are between 60 and 70 beats per minute. It kind of creates a muddy, slow and somewhat psychedelic sound for hip hop. The pioneer of the sound is DJ Screw who passed away in 2000. He was from the south side of Houston, Texas, again, from these working class communities.
[A song from DJ Screw plays. It sounds like a hip hop sound that has been slowed down.]
[MACK]
Anybody who’s familiar with dance music or hip hop production will know that 60 to 70 beats per minute is really slow.
[LANGSTON]
I think the slowness of the music is heavily influenced by the car culture, because these cars kind of originated out of the street culture in the mid 1980s. Pioneered by local drug dealers who kind of used modified cars to flaunt their wealth. They would put together these cars and they would drive them slowly, to parade them to the streets of Houston. Very slowly so people could pay attention to him and focus on him.
[Hip hop song continues]
DJ Screws first mixtapes were being purchased by these local drug dealers. They would play them in their cars as they were traversing the streets. You had this slow experience, these slow parades going on through the streets of Houston. You also have the drug culture the lean, the Serb culture, which just makes you move extra slow, and that was certainly a part of the screwed and chopped culture and certainly a part of the slap culture as well.
[Different hip hop song plays, this one with with a faster tempo]
Lean, also called syrup. There’s other names for depending on who you talk to. It’s essentially prescription strength, cough syrup, mix with some sort of sweetener. I could be soda, or people put candy in the cough syrup. When you drink it, it slows your faculties down. You move slower, you you lose your sense of balance, which is why it’s sometimes called lean because people on the drug kind of lean over so, and again, kind of like slab, it became a marker of local hip hop identity.
[Hip hop song continues]
So you have this slow, muddy kind of psychedelic sound, that’s the screwed part. Chopping is a fundamental part of the hip hop DJ aesthetic, but what DJ Screw would do was that he would take two copies of the same record, put them on two different turntables, but he would play one record a little behind the other record. When he would mix back and forth, he would repeat phrases.
[An example of DJ Screw’s mixing]
That became the chopping part of screwed and chopped. Repeating phrases and sometimes repeating percussive sounds, so that the mix between the slowness and these repeated phrases. That’s essentially screwed and chopped music.
[An example of screwed and chopped music plays]
I think if you get down into DJ Screw’s mixtapes which they were maybe 250 plus of, if you haven’t been part of the culture, it’s hard to really understand what’s going on there, what he’s doing, and how complex it is.
[MACK]
When you say it’s hard to know how complex what he’s doing is, is it because someone who isn’t familiar with the original songs that he’s mixing can’t tell how he’s chopping them?
[LANGSTON]
Yeah, I think so. I think because he’s mixing at any given time, maybe five or six records together, and he’s manipulating them in real time and then he’s going back and slowing it all down. It’s just these record,s these songs are hard to navigate.
[Upbeat, childlike music plays]
[CRIS]
People, people, help us out just a little bit here. Go to iTunes, give us a rating. It’ll take under five seconds. If you have more time, a small review helps us bring this to you. Give us some feedback on Facebook. Hit us up on Twitter. You know the score.
[Upbeat music fades out and slow hip hop music fades in]
[MACK]
So far, Langston has shown us how some of south side Houston’s African American residents customize cars, and customize the sound of hip hop. The slab swerved a slow path through the city streets, banging out music that paid tribute to those very same streets and neighborhoods. In the process, individuals made names for themselves as makers of money or cars or sound systems or music while at the same time, the community made a name and an image and a sound for itself. This is the everyday artistic communication folklorists look for. It’s also the way of space, a collection of buildings and streets, becomes a place that is known, respected, and loved. All of this is taking place on the consumption side of the music, but as Langston explained to me, a similar social process was taking place on the production side. When DJ Screw and screwed up click rappers like Little Kiki, Fat Pat, ESG, and Big Hawk made tapes at house parties.
[Hip hop music winds down and ends]
[LANGSTON]
the screwed and chopped mixtapes. Essentially, he would invite rappers over to his house, maybe 3, 4, 5. They would have a big party, and in the midst of this party, he would begin playing music and recording a mixtape. What you’re getting on these mixtapes are a social experience.
[A mixtape is played. We hear music with rappers talking and laughing over it.]
This whole culture was rooted in the drug game, and so you had a lot of early deaths in these communities in the late 1980s early 1990s. You had a lot of memorial mixtapes, mixtapes that were created in dedication to someone who had just lost their life. You also had mixed tapes that were for someone’s graduation celebration. You had mixtapes to celebrate someone in community who had given birth. All of these tapes has some sort of social function to them.
[Mixtape continues. We hear a rapper come up with a wrap.]
[MACK]
So in that context then, DJ Screw is basically DJing and a party and then people are free styling.
[LANGSTON]
Yeah he’s DJing a party, people are drinking, eating, having fun, talking crap to each other, and then he would hit record and he would do his mixes. If you’re a rapper in the space, you can come up and you can freestyle. Then they go back to partying for a couple hours. Then he would start recording again, and some other rappers could come up. If you talk to different members of screwed up click they’ll tell you that some of these quote unquote recording sessions will last all night. You would go over to Screw’s house around 7pm and you’d leave at maybe 9 o’clock the next day, the next morning. These are just kind of social events organically captured on tape. That’s what happening.
[MACK]
While it’s happening in real time, the beat is actually faster, it’s the original.
[LANGSTON]
Yeah, they’re recording it regular speed.
[Mixtape continues, then fades out]
The DJ Screw would take the recordings, put them into his four track, and use the piss control knob to slow the speed down.
[An example of this slowed down track plays]
[MACK]
Wow.
[Track continues]
[LANGSTON]
In my eyes, makes especially their rap performances much more interesting because most of those freestyles were done completely off the top of the head, and they were completely extemporaneous and performed in real time. These rappers don’t get the credit that they deserve for being incredible freestylers.
[MACK]
So maybe we should talk a bit about what that does to the voice.
[LANGSTON]
Just a darker, almost otherworldly tone to the voice. I think again, that goes hand in hand with the drugs that were being consumed, to drug market based environment that they’re coming from, and also the slab culture. It just kind of produces an almost ghostly vocal sound.
[Mixtape continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
I don’t know if you’ll agree with this, but I almost feel like to me, this music sounds more like west coast hip hop from the 1990s then the sort of, at least the stereotype of Southern hip hop.
[Different hip hop track plays, this one with a slightly faster tempo]
I was wondering if there’s some kind of connection there between,, like that car culture you’re talking about? Where there’s just something about this, that it sounds like riding music to me.
[LANGSTON]
I think there’s a deep connection. I think you’re correct for multiple reasons. One, DJ Screw, the pioneer of this whole culture, his favorite artists were from the west coast. We’re talking, Ice Cube and CBOE from Sacramento, California. Much of the music on those early screw tapes and even towards the end of his life were comprised, most of the music was West Coast based, hip hop, gangster rap.
[MACK
Just that endless, ribbon freeway.
[LANGSTON]
Right, there you go. I mean, you have to have a car to get anywhere in Houston. Our public transit system wasn’t great. You have to have a car to get around. Therefore, people spend a lot of time in their cars. The culture seems similar. It seems like you have to have some sort wheels to get around in Los Angeles. I think just the sheer geographic sizes of these two hip hop centers creates a relationship between the two. I think that manifests in the similarities between Houston and west coast based hip hop.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
In the 2000s, both slabs and the chopped and screwed sound spread beyond Houston south side, and eventually beyond Houston itself.
[LANGSTON]
Between 2004 and 2007, local hip hop culture for the second time, because the first time was with the ghetto boys in the early 1990s, rose to national and maybe international prominence through music that was created on the northside of Houston, through this label called Swish a House. Rappers like Paul Wall, Mike Jones, and Slim Thug.
[One of these artist’s songs plays]
It was through them that screwed and chopped music rose to the mainstream, and they did it I think, by using car culture, because the first few songs that came out in that era from local hip hop artists were songs that were dedications to car cultures. Still Tippin was about SAP culture. Come Millionaires, Riding Dirty was about local car culture and the criminalisation of it.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out]
[MACK]
It’s fascinating to me, because growing up in New Orleans, Houston and New Orleans are pretty close, as close as any place in Texas can be to anywhere, because Texas so big. It’s around that same time DJ Screw was creating his innovations, in New Orleans there was just really fast hip hop that was happening. With producers like Mannie Fresh, Hot Boys, Little Wayne, juvenile in this kind of bounce music sound with the trigger man beat.
[Another hip hop song plays, very fast tempoed, then fades out]
It just seems kind of interesting that these cities are so close together and yet their music couldn’t be more opposite, at least to my ears.
[LANSTON]
It is fascinating, and I will say that bounce and all of that New Orleans music had a strong presence in Houston as well, and we did also see it end up on DJ Screw’s mixtapes and such. I think the special thing about hip hop when I was growing up, and I hate to sound like old man, at least to me was the fact that hip hop in New York didn’t sound like hip hop in Houston and hip hop in Houston didn’t sound like hip hop in New Orleans even.
[Another hip hop song plays, more moderately tempoed]
Each region has its own unique sound. I thought that was a beautiful and incredible thing. The internet kind of has broken down those regional barriers and has made different regional sounds readily accessible to everyone around the country. In some respects, that’s awesome. I’m glad that sounds have changed. I’m glad that hip hop has grown and is continually reorienting itself, but I wish there was some sense of regional or local uniqueness because I just think that’s virtually disappeared in the culture and in the industry.
[MACK]
It’s almost like the regions are the different regions of the internet now. Like, you have SoundCloud rap, that’s a neighborhood in internet land.
[LANGSTON]
Exactly. I think connection to place is a fundamental aspect of hip hop culture. It exposes an intimate relationship between the person and their place. Place in itself is something very different now.
[Hip hop song continues, then fades out. Another hip hop song fades in]
[CRIS]
That’s it for this episode, and this season of Phantom Power. Thank you again to Langston Collin Wilkins, and we’ll be back in the fall with season two. We hope to connect with you then. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve heard and talked about a phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’d love it if you’d rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook, give us a shout on twitter @PhantomPod. Today’s show featured music by DJ Screw and the Screwed Up Clique. Our interns are Natalie Cooper and Adam Whitmer. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[Hip hop song fades out]
Ep. 6: Data Streams (Leah Barclay and Teresa Barrozo)
May 23, 2018
On July 18th this year, Teresa Barrozo‘s question — What might the Future sound like? — will be opened to global participation. We bring news ofWorld Listening Day, and speak with Teresa about her intervention. We also hear of data archival developments in acoustic ecology. And we speak with Leah Barclay, the editor of Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, about her Biosphere Soundscapes project and some of the challenges of developing accessible apps for mobile platforms. Cris grapples inadequately with the terminology of the anthropophone, the biophone and the geophone in his everyday life. The audio work heard in this episode can be found on the Soundclouds of Leah Barclayand Teresa Barrozo. Transcript
[low humming and static playing]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This…is…Phantom Power. Episode 6.
[squeaking sounds]
[CRIS]
Data streams.
[sound of flowing water fades in as squeaking continues]
[MACK HAGOOD]
Welcome to Phantom Power, I’m Mack Hagood. Today, My co-host cris cheek prepares us for World Listening Day, an annual global event held every July 18th and sponsored by the World Listening Project with events held all over the planet. We’ll get you tuned in to acoustic ecology and World Listening Day with plenty of time to find an event near you, or perhaps to start one of your own. cris has a show for us in three parts. First, we’ll meet Teresa Barrozo, a sound artist, composer and sound designer for film, theater and dance, and the creator of the theme for this year’s World Listening Day. Next, cris does some close listening of his own in a meditation on the sounds of humans, animals and earth in his neighborhood. Finally, we meet Leah Barclay, who made the recording we’re hearing right now in dolphin code on the great Sandy Biosphere Reserve in Queensland, Western Australia. She’s the president of the Australian forum on acoustic ecology, the editor of Soundscape Magazine and the Vice President of the World Acoustic Ecology forum. Leah spoke with Chris from a remote biosphere reserve when it was still summer in the southern hemisphere.
[sounds fade out, ethereal music fades in]
[CRIS]
World Listening Day enters its second decade in 2018. This year’s theme is future listening, created by Filipino sound artist, Teresa Barrozo. Phantom Power caught up with Teresa amidst her preparations.
[ethereal music continues with drum rolls, wooden chimes, and traffic noises periodically playing]
[TERESA BARROZO]
I’m Teresa Barrozo, and I’m a composer and a curious listener from the Philippines.
[CRIS]
Whereabouts in the Philippines are you?
[TERESA]
Carson City, Manila.
[sounds continue]
[CRIS]
Theresa, how did you get involved with the World Listening Project?
[TERESA]
It’s quite popular every year. I get to read up on it. For this year, I got invited by Eric Leonardo and Leah Barclay to create a theme for this year’s World Listening Day. I’m actually surprised that they invited me, because I’m starting out as a sound artist. My day job is that I’m a composer for film and theater and sound designer for theater, but this since that’s my background, I’ve been very fascinated with how sound and music is used in storytelling. How we use sound and music to manipulate our audience.
[sounds are distorted, sped up and slowed down, with an occasional car honk being heard over the noise. Technological sounds are added.]
That’s where my interest began. Here in the Philippines, there’s no such thing as sound studies, so I started looking outside the Philippines. I started reading about sound and listening online. Mostly, we find everything online, so I just started Googling stuff about sound. I really got interested. I got interested with sound installations; how sound can stand on its own as an art work. I’m interested on how sound can shape the society.
[sounds become softer and have more of a rhythm, or steady beat]
I saw online there’s this thing called acoustic ecology. There’s this thing about deep listening, of course I heard about (inaudible).
[CRIS]
So, what’s your idea for World Listening Day this year?
[TERESA]
The theme for this year’s World Listening Day is Feature Listening. Here we are inviting people to respond on the question what does your feature sound like?
[distorted sounds play again in the background]
There are also other general guide questions to consider. I’m going to read them. What does your past sound like? What does your present sound like? Which sounds do you wish to retain? Which sounds do you wish to never hear again? Which sounds do you consider as toxic waste? How does the silence and noise sound in your feature? Which sounds have gone silent? Can you still hear?
[rhythmic technological sounds play in the background]
[CRIS]
People will be responding to World Listening Day all over the world, I hope. Are they expected to make recordings, or to write about the their experience, or both?
[TERESA]
I personally feel that anyone is welcome to respond in any way they prefer. One example, they’ve been doing this for the past few years, other communities do sound box, and there are some other groups that gather and talk about sound. There are groups who curate concerts or performances that’s inspired by the theme, not just artists but anyone who has something to say or anyone who hopes or dreams can actually be included in this global campaign. It’s not exclusive.
[CRIS]
What kind of future sound do you imagine?
[distorted sounds play again in the background]
[TERESA]
How we can change our future by being present in our listening.
[rhythmic technological sounds play in the background]
How we can examine our hopes, dreams and even our ambitions to go where we want to by being conscious of what we hear.
[CRIS]
One term often used to describe the some of what we hear is “acoustic ecology.” Theresa Barrozo used that there, but what is it? It seems kind of specialist, right? Here’s is a very brief description.
Acoustic Ecology, sometimes called echo acoustics or sound safe study, is a discipline studying the relationship mediated through sound between human beings and their environments. My thinking increasingly became about phones. The anthropophone, the biophone, and the geophone. Here’s my own attempt to get to grips with that. I make a quick local inventory of what I hear around me.
[as sounds are listested, we hear them in the background]
The racket of a pair of my shoes tumbling in the dryer, drifting up from the basement of the house clanks like a broken part in some kind of drum. Not as loud or persistent as the repetitive whirl and woosh of an air conditioner spinning into action during high summer or the clicks and hums of the fridge in the kitchen, but examples of anthropophone nonetheless. Someone sanding a plank with a cranked amp in a trunk to bring some kind of bump crawls by. Peer pressure is the sound of summer mowing, leaf and snow blowing, and all the fun of the power tools that change the dynamic. An anthropophone in the anthropohone scene. All sound produced by humans, whether considered coherent, such as music and language allegedly, or incoherent and chaotic, such as random signals generated primarily by electro mechanical means of ambient noise all forging part of this ongoing sonic patina. In the evenings, I hear the voices of various people calling to their pets across the hill, emergency sirens on the arterial, whistles from distant trains. A stronger wind brings chimes from the neighbor’s deck. A cackle phone of city dwelling here in Northside, Cincinnati.
[rhythmic music continues]
Lying awake at night, we can hear screech owls outside the house sometimes. Raccoons fighting, persistant dog barks, sometimes even coyotes hunting along the creek bed in nearby woods. By day, blue birds, cardinal sparrows, hawks and starlings flick and tweet and sing and sometimes swarm the trees around our house. Imitate phone tones, perhaps, and in a decent breeze, tall trees creek out and rub against each other. Bees troll for pollen. Squirrels skitter from branches to gutters in across rooftops. At dusk, possums edge out eerily across the steps leading up to the porch. Mice in the leaves. Moles cruise street side strips of lawn along the edge rows of this urban biophone. We cannot hear their frequencies. A resonance within the hill on which house is set. The sounds that travel underground. Granular land, water runs, ears with roots, rock cracks and earth tremors in the gathering ice and or heat. Those songs of the earth, geophony.
[moderately tempoed music fades in]
Hey everyone, its Mack Hagood. Here at Phantom Power we are so fortunate to have generous funding from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among other things, this means that we don’t have to implore you to buy a new mattress or join a Sock of the Month Club. If you’re a regular podcast listener, you know what I’m talking about. So luckily, we don’t have to do that. We do however, have one small ask, just go to iTunes and leave us a review and a rating. We’d really appreciate it. It’s a great way for the people who are funding this show to know that folks really are listening to it. It’s also a great way for more people to learn about Phantom Power. Thank you.
[music fades out]
[CRIS]
for the rest of the show, here’s Leah Barclay.
[calming music with nature sounds fade in]
It sounds like you’re in a great environment right now, actually. There’s some nice bird sounds in the background.
[LEAH BARCLAY]
I am. Yeah, I’m actually in the biosphere. There’s cicadas, very loud cicadas. Can you hear those now?
[sound of cicadas fades in]
[CRIS]
I can.
[LEAH]
Okay. I mean, I can close the windows. If that’s…
[CRIS]
No, no, no, I like it. I like it.
[LEAH]
All right.
[cicadas sounds fade out]
My name is Leah Barclay. I’m an Australian sound artist and composer, and my work really revolves around acoustic ecology and environmental field recording. I work with different ecosystems, particularly ecosystems that are often beyond our auditory perceptions, such as rivers and lakes, and marine environments. I create experiences of being immersed and present in those ecosystems.
[surreal music and sounds play in the background]
[CRIS]
Installation style, or concert style, or a mixture of both?
[LEAH]
Both. So, I use these environmental field recordings in different contexts. Immersive installations, which are always in surround sound, usually eight channel surround sound, and often have interactive elements so that human presence in the space affects the sonic environment. I also create live performances with these materials where I’ll mix all the sounds live again in a surround sound context. These often involve live streams as well, so live streaming hydrophones from a different ecosystem that I will bring into that live performance.
[surreal music and sounds continue. A chime sounds, then sounds distorted.]
[CRIS]
Can you talk about the biospheres project?
[LEAH]
Yeah. Biospheres Soundscapes is a project that I started in 2012, and the idea launched in the new biosphere reserve in Queensland, Australia. Inspired by the model of biosphere reserves, which UNESCO designated sites designed to look at innovative approaches to the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. It was a model that revolved around a local environment but was globally connected. Biosphere soundscapes really started as this project that could develop participatory acoustic quality experiences in the context of local communities of biosphere reserves, and connect to different sites. Using sound as a tool to inspire ecological engagement, but also leveraging the scientific possibilities of sound for understanding ecosystem health.
[gong goes off, music and sounds are more ominous, then fade out]
We’re actually rebuilding our sound maps and databases at the moment to create this central repository for community recordings. What we found when we’re running workshops and engagement exercises in the biosphere reserves, is the communities want to keep going. They want to keep recording the environment for both artistic and scientific purposes. We want to create these interfaces that enable them to keep doing that and enable them to share and compare those recordings with other biosphere reserves as well.
[a low hum is played in the background with an occasional bug chirping]
[CRIS]
How are you archiving the data that’s collected?
[LEAH]
That’s an excellent question. It has been ongoing challenge with the project. Initially, we looked at this model of cataloging everything on site, backing everything up on hard drives, and we’re always taking a different approach to recording. We’’re doing in situ field recording where we’re staying with the equipment, which might be a three hour session. Then we’re doing long duration recordings, which can be a 24 hour recording, or could be a two week continuous recording. So obviously, the kind of backup systems and the data management on site is dramatically different for that kind of material. We’ve gone through different processes of the best way to manage that. That’s why we’re building these new databases and sound max now, which will streamline that process so communities can upload their material directly. As with any project of this nature, where we’re generating huge amounts of acoustic data, there’s a lot of material from the past that hasn’t been annotated at all. Basically, the exciting point where we are now with this kind of technology, with real time species recognition and algorithms that can analyze that acoustic data, we believe that we’re going to be able to use that material as we move forward to prepare acoustic diversity to 10 years ago.
[the hum fades out as nature sounds continue]
While we’re not annotating and data basing everything in a perfect way, we see great value in collecting as much acoustic data as possible.
[CRIS]
Yeah, and I presume that tagging must be a really big part of that too.
[LEAH]
Absolutely.
[CRIS]
What layers and levels of tagging you get into, how much detail and how much complexity?
[LEAH]
That’s exactly right. The new community system basically has layers of tagging. You can select location is the big one, time of day, and then our communities can choose them to add more layers of information to the point that they can actually identify specific species if they want to, or identify, simple differences between biophilia and giophilia and things like that.
[nature sounds continue, this time more water-based sounds]
[CRIS]
There will be this gradual…I’m going to be a bit of a space cadet in saying this, global mapping in terms of complexity of sound and location.
[LEAH]
I think there’s been a lot of calls for that throughout various artistic and scientific communities. Obviously, there’s a lot of incredible soundtracks that exist online that have inspired elements of this project, but often they don’t call for community participation, or the ones that do call for community participation are around specific themes or very broad. Looking at the way that listening can inspire presence and connection to place and all of the future possibilities we have in these scientific fields that allow us to use to monitor environmental health.
[calm, quiet music plays in the background with an occasional metal clank]
[CRIS]
The potential proliferation of live streaming sites triggered by presence or triggered remote.
[LEAH]
Exactly, the live streaming element is a really interesting one as well. We had set up various models and frameworks to live stream within biospheres, within a parallel project called River Listening using hydrophones in rivers.
[sounds of rivers mixed with calm music]
[LEAH]
It didn’t always work. We had all these issues with, if you’re in a remote area, internet dropping out and technology going missing and the interfaces we were using weren’t working. Then I discovered Sound Camp in London in the UK, who has been running really fantastic community by the live streaming projects for many years. We started working with them to build various frameworks for community streaming kits. That’s quite transformational to data management, the stream to use them both for artistic and scientific context. They can be integrated into installations and performances, but they can have algorithms attached to them that do real time species recognition.
[sounds continue]
[CRIS]
Do you notice a difference between recording an environment when people are there and recording an environment when people aren’t there?
[LEAH]
Absolutely. That’s been an interesting process for me personally, as a field recorder. I notice the difference when I am there as well. If I’m setting up equipment in the environment, and I’m in situ on there, with headphones on actively listening, which I love doing. I think it’s such a magic way to connect to the environment, but I notice a distinctive difference in those recordings between when I’m there and when I’m not there, because obviously, everything that lives in that ecosystem is equally as aware of my presence and of anyone else has presence, and naturally, they vocalize in different ways.
[subdued nature sounds play]
[CRIS]
lEAH, I think I’m right in saying that you’re involved with the development of apps for mobile platforms?
[LEAH]
That’s exactly right, which has been a big part of the community engagement. I’ve been really interested through both biosphere soundscapes and (inaudible) to develop mobile apps that enable communities to record and locate their sounds very easily. When they’re in environments where they’re hearing different species, they can literally just pull out their phone and start recording and add that to the database. For example, you know where we are, right now you may hear the waves of cicadas in the background which aren’t necessarily a common soundscape for this time of day, but we know that this particular species of cicadas comes out when the temperature gradually starts to rise. It would mean that a community member could pull out their phone and record this and upload it straight to the database.
[calm music and a bell chiming in the background]
[CRIS]
While we know that sound has been the relatively less focused on human sense, in terms of development of internet platforms and interfaces, using the technology is also humans interfering in the environment even further. So there’s a kind of a trade off.
[LEAH]
Of course, yeah, and look I mean, realistically, I think, there’s an inherent contradiction in in many of the projects that I’ve really been pushing in a acoustic ecology and using mobile technologies as a tool to reconnect young people to the environment obviously, is problematic in more ways than one. At the end of the day, when young people are carrying these mobile phones in their back pocket, it’s not like they’re going to get rid of them tomorrow. I see great value in using the available platforms we have and repurposing these technologies in ways that can inspire this culture.
[sounds continue]
The fact that I can create these augmented reality sound walks and installations with mobile applications, and I can take those to climate change conferences and literally put them in the hands of decision makers so they can be listening as they walk past in the hallways, it transforms the accessibility of these experiences. When we start to think about these environments that we don’t traditionally have access to. Throughout auditory perception, the freshwater environments in rivers, the horrific impact that anthropogenic noise is having now on marine environments, but then, when they’re immersed in an installation or listening experience where they actually hear how loud and intense and heartbreaking in a way, that sound load is for species such as humpback whales who are migrating, yet it’s quite confronting.
[music and water-based sounds play]
[CRIS]
Well, thanks, Leah. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.
[LEAH]
Thank you.
[CRIS]
I wish you a great day there in the biosphere.
[LEAH]
Thanks very much for having me. I’m excited to hear more episodes of this podcast as well.
[acoustic music plays]
[MACK]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks to Teresa Barrozo, the track that played during her segment was a piece called “Duet” and thanks to Leah Barclay. All of the sounds in Leah’s segment were by her. You can learn more about those pieces and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve talked about at phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you’d review and rate us on Apple podcasts. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook or give us a shout on Twitter @PhantomPod. Our interns are Natalie Cooper and Adam Whitmer. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[music fades out]
Ep. 5: Ears Racing (Jennifer Stoever)
May 10, 2018
This episode, we talk with Jennifer Lynn Stoever–editor of the influential sound studies blog Sounding Out!–about her new book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). We tend to think of race and racism as visual phenomena, but Stoever challenges white listeners to examine how racism can infect our ears, altering the sound of the world and other people. We discuss the history of American prejudicial listening since slavery and learn how African American writers and musicians have pushed back against this invisible “sonic color line.”
[CRIS] When you heard those voices, did you give them a race, a class, perhaps some kind of assignation of character and if so, why do we do this? Where does this discriminating ear come from?
[MACK]
I’m Mack Hagood,
[CRIS]
and I’m cris cheek.
[MACK]
Today on Phantom Power we listen, to race or to put it more correctly, we examine how we are always listening to race. Our guide is Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York Binghamton. Stover is the author of the “Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening” a book that argues that white racism depends just as much on the ear as it does the eye. She shows how listening has been used since slavery to distinguish and separate black and white and how African American artists and critics like Richard Wright Leadbelly and Lena Horne have identified, critiqued, and push the boundaries of this sonic color line.
[techno-like music and a choir play in the background, then fade out]
[MACK] Cris, when I spoke to Jennifer, she reminded me of a story that really shows how high the stakes of this kind of listening can be.
[JENNIFER STOEVER] You know, I talk in the opening of the book about the case of Jordan Davis.
[piano music fades in]
[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
It happened November 23rd, 47-year-old Michael Dunn told investigators he felt threatened at a gas station. Parked side by side with an SUV full of teenagers, the alleged gunman complained they were playing their music too loud.
[JENNIFER] Jordan and his friends are playing hip hop at the gas pump. They were driving they had their music on. They were getting gas. Gas stations in theory (are) a transitory shared space where we all come in with our music we pump our gas and we leave.
[MALE NEWS REPORTER] Detective say Dunn confronted Davis who was in the backseat and told him to turn the music down.
[JENNIFER]
The white man at question felt a proprietary access to the soundscape both it if he decided it was too loud, is too loud for everybody there, that his sensibility should be catered to. That there is a way that a gas station should sound and hip hop is not part of that. And when they said no, he saw that as as aggression.
[MALE NEWS REPORTER] Dunn’s attorney says his client thought he saw a gun so he pulled his own weapon and started shooting.
[last line echos a few times]
[JENNIFER] Shot into the car.
[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
Firing at least eight shots.
[JENNIFER]
And killed a young man.
[MALE NEWS REPORTER] Investigators never found a gun and the teen’s car.
[ethereal music plays in the background]
[MACK] In her book, Jennifer Stoever has a term for the way Michael Dunn heard Jordan Davis at that gas station back in 2012. The listening ear.
[ethereal music cuts out]
[JENNIFER] The listening ear helps us get at what’s really happening in a case like that. The listening ear is a term that I use to think about the way that racialized listening practices come about the way that they accrete over time. I was also trying to think of about how whiteness in the US has become aligned with citizenship, what it means to be a full citizen with all of the rights and privileges there of and have them be respected. And you know, that this has become soldered to not just a white visuality, but a white way of being in the world. And where does this white way of being come from?
[ethereal music returns to the background]
[JENNIFER] At times, it’s a form of distancing. It’s a way of habit, drawing a line between what is music and what is noise, and putting, say, hip hop on the other side of that line.
[cut to snippet of Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News]
[BILL O’REILLY]
Now I submit to you that you’re going to have to get people like Jay Z, Kanye West, all of these gangsta rappers to knock it off.
[JENNIFER]
And then not just doing that, but then associating the sound of hip hop with a long history of stereotyping of black masculinity as dangerous as outsized as…
[BILL O’REILLY]
Listen to me, listen to me. You gotta get where they live, alright? They idolize these guys with the hats on backwards.
[JENNIFER]
And then the sound itself becomes a stand in for talking about black masculinity, and excluding black men from neighborhoods from equal treatment under the law.
[BILL O’REILLY]
And the terrible rock rap lyrics and, and the drug and all of that.
[JENNIFER] Our moment is shifting now. And I think, you know, we are having more overt racial threats. But say, three years ago, conversations were being had through these sonic codes, and so part of what the book is to kind of expose, you know, when we talk about hip hop as being loud, and as being culturally, when we hear these conversations about about hip hop, what are we really talking about?
[BILL O’REILLY]
It’s these gangsta rappers, and it’s the athletes, it’s the tattoo guys.
[JENNIFER]
So the listening ears also very, for white people, white men, in particular, the very kind of proprietary. It’s about the imposition of power.
[ethereal music fades out]
[MACK] I think the thing that I appreciate the most about your book is that it addresses this racial dynamic, this kind of judging by listening that white people do. Something that I think any American really no matter what their politics are, they would at least admit that this does exist, right?
[JENNIFER]
Yes.
[MACK]
But when it gets discussed at all, which is pretty rarely, it generally gets reduced to this debate about Ebonics and so called standard speech, but what you seem to be arguing in this book is that we use a prejudicial and even, you know, white supremacist form of listening that involves way more than accent or dialect and that this actual type of listening is central to American racism itself. So maybe could you talk a little bit about your concept of the sonic color line and what that does?
[JENNIFER] Yes, thank you. I think that’s a really excellent interpretation of my work. I think that why I chose that title drawing on Dubois’ concept of the color line was the way in which the sonic color line brings together and helps us understand the linkages between the prejudicial listening, that happens in terms of speech, in terms of musical production, musical taste, musical desires, and also the way in which we think about soundscapes and space and really the sonic color line ultimately becomes a way to understand how we create spaces that are exclusionary. America is free and we have these legal protections in terms of space, but if experiences of race and racism are internalized through the senses, we all walk and experience space in very, very different ways.
[FEMALE NEWS REPORTER]
11 women kicked off of a wine train and Napa Valley after complaints they were being too loud, but the women say they we’re not booted for being rowdy. They say they were kicked off for being black.
[news transition sound]
[WOMAN KICKED OFF TRAIN]
We made it ya’ll. Look it us; we ready to get on the wine train.
[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
What started as a joyful event for 11 African American book club members quickly grew sour even before they left the Napa wine train station.
[WOMAN KICKED OFF TRAIN]
And she said to us, “I’m going to need to lower your…the noise level needs to come down a little bit because you’re being offensive to some of the other passengers.”
[MALE NEWS REPORTER]
So 45 minutes into the trip, they were told they had to leave and would be escorted off the train. And when that happened a further indignity.
[WOMAN KICKED OFF TRAIN]
We had to walk all the way through all the additional five cars to be able to get off the train. So they took us and they paraded us through every single car with all the passengers watching us. It was humiliating, degrading, and that’s the part that I will never, ever ever forget.
[JENNIFER]
It can say that it’s open, and that it’s diverse, and it’s accessible, but because of the way that experiences of sound can be fractured, can be very different. These spaces can be very actively exclusionary toward people of color in ways that can be, hidden or covered over and, and so I kind of started there. Trying to understand where we’re at, in the contemporary moment, but then needing to go back historically to document and trace that.
[ethereal music fades out]
[MACK] And so, we tend to think about sound as something that just is.
[JENNIFER]
Yes.
[MACK]
And something sounds a certain way, but what you’re really emphasizing here is that we all listen through these ideological filters. So, as a guitar player, I think about this sometimes in terms of like, effects pedals.
[JENNIFER]
I like that metaphor.
[MACK]
We listen through these different distortions and delays, and we don’t really realize that we have these things in our signal chain. We think we’re listening to a clean natural signal, but there’s no such thing as that. I think a couple of questions for me come to mind. First, what do you want white people to do with that knowledge? I guess we could just start there. What kind of intervention would you like to see your book make with white folks?
[JENNIFER] That’s a really important question. I mean, first, as you put it, just this calling attention to the fact that listening is not a natural process for folks that work in sound studies, it seems very basic. in some ways, that’s the foundation of our field. I’m going to paraphrase Hari Kunzru. I just finished teaching the book White Tears with my class. There’s a point where he says, “whether or not you believe in race, race finds you.” I think this is part of it, that the book is written to counter color blindness, and the ideology of color blindness, that if you don’t see race, quote, unquote, that it doesn’t exist, that there’s a certain element of white people, often very liberal white people that no longer believe in race. Race has been proved as a scientific fiction for over 100 years now, but the materiality of racialization is everywhere around us, and so getting white people to not imagine themselves at the center of the human experience. That the way that they hear is not the way everybody hears, and that the way that they hear is impacted by race is impacted by this idea of what whiteness is, and how to inhabit whiteness. One of the ways I think that sound, at least in terms of producing white racial identity works more powerfully than vision is because it allows a feeling of whiteness, that it makes whiteness and race real for white people rather than an abstraction. The way we talk about visuality in race is often that whiteness is invisible, that race is marked onto other bodies, but with sound and hearing in white ways, and sounding in white ways, it actually makes it this very material experience, and because it’s been so associated with Americanness.
[orchestra plays out of an old radio]
[MALE RADIO ANNOUNCER]
The ear is the human organ, the public speaker is most likely to try to impress as he makes a speech.
[radio static]
[JENNIFER] And naturalize this way. The white way of hearing has been in America for many decades, if not a century and a half or more, the way to be as a human.
[MALE RADIO ANNOUNCER]
People can be interested in new ideas when those ideas are expressed in well selected words, but did you ever consider how many jobs depend on your ability to express yourself to a group of people? Whether it’s the former owner of project, or a judge on the bench, or a salesman, it’s important to be a good speaker. And when you speak well, you get along better with people. Whether it’s persuading them to come along and have fun at a wiener roast, or trying to be a better citizen at school or in the community.
[JENNIFER] And so challenging that and getting an opening of multiple perspectives and multiple interpretations of the same sound is really important.
[static continues on a loop]
And even the idea say, of a quiet neighborhood as the goal.
[upbeat music plays through the old radio]
[MALE RADIO ANNOUNCER]
The suburbs.
[JENNIFER]
there’s a way that race and class meet in that, and that brownness, blackness is associated with noise and sound, and the way that neighborhood soundscapes are policed.
[nature sounds with kids yelling and playing]
The way that noise complaints are called on neighbors that often start a whole chain of potentially dangerous legal implications and problems.
[nature and kid noises fade out as ethereal music fades in]
These conversations need to be opened up, not imposed based on a white middle class sensibility. So really, kind of shaking up and realizing the partiality of white listening for white listeners. It sounds simple, but it’s actually quite difficult to do, and I work on that in my teaching all the time.
[ethereal music fades out]
[CRIS] As a literary scholar, one of Stoever’s techniques is to engage with African American literature as a storehouse of historical sound. One example being a close reading of Richard Wright, author of Uncle Tom’s Children, Black Boy and Native Son.
[JENNIFER] I’ve come to think of certain kinds of music in particular as being sonic traces of listening experiences and DJ’s as communicators of ways of listening. I realized when I dropped into Richard Wright’s Native Son, I was receiving similar transmission of listening practices.
[man imitates an alarm clock as upbeat jazzy music fades in]
[CRIS] An alarm clock clang in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman’s voice sang out impatiently. This is the first three lines of Native Son. All establishing the scene through sound.
[JENNIFER] Bigger Thomas moving through the streets of 1940s late 1930s segregated Chicago. We were, as readers, invited to listen as hard as we can to how bigger heard the city and realizing that many of his cues and many of the most important metaphors and imagery in the book comes through sound. That Bigger can walk across the street from his extremely noisy apartment complex in the tenement I should say kitchenette really in the in Bronzeville, in South Side, and then move across the street to the Dalton mansion in the very wealthy, white neighborhood in Hyde Park, and everything becomes quiet.
[upbeat jazz fades out and ethereal music fades in]
This seems very natural. We’ve come to naturalize that inner city neighborhoods are noisy that wealthy neighborhoods are quiet but what Right does is to show us that it’s the overcrowding of the neighborhood that makes it noisy. It’s the lack of protection or controls on industry and conditions of segregation create that metallic noisiness something that Laura Toledo calls “environmental racism.” That’s where the factories get put. That’s where the incinerators are. When he moves across the street that this quietness is not a natural state of affairs, but it’s extremely constructed, and that buffer is set up so that the residents do not encounter or have to think about the black neighborhood down the street, but they in fact own the building that Bigger lives in. That invites us to think about that these two spaces are connected that the sonic color line appears as a division but it’s really this link that we need to pick up and hear between these spaces.
[ethereal music fades out as mellow techno music fades in]
[MACK] Hey everyone, its Mack Hagood. Here at Phantom Power, we are so fortunate to have generous funding from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Among other things, this means that we don’t have to implore you to buy a new mattress or join a sock of the month club. If you’re a regular podcast listener, you know what I’m talking about. So luckily, we don’t have to do that. We do however, have one small ask. Just go to iTunes and leave us a review and a rating. We’d really appreciate it. It’s a great way for the people who are funding this show to know that folks really are listening to it, and it’s also a great way for more people to learn about phantom power. Thank you.
[mellow techno music fades out]
[CRIS]
We’re going back now to Mack’s conversation with Jennifer Stoever, author of the Sonic Color Line out on NYU press. As Jennifer mentioned earlier, her book attempt not only to explain racialized listening in America, but also to trace its history. She does so by assembling a historical archive of texts, slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, newspaper reviews of black and white opera singers in the 19th century, the writing of WEB Dubois and Richard Wright, musical recordings, radio dramas featuring the Jubilee singers, Lead Belly, Lead Better, and Lena Horne. By examining these as texts, Stoever shows how the sonic color line evolved and how African Americans documented, theorized, and resisted America’s dominant cultural politics of listening.
[MACK] There are these different moments that you point out where it becomes really important to listen for race to people who are invested in racial divisions, because the paradigm of the visual ality of race actually gets undermined. The first of these occasions in the book has to do with just the mere fact that so many white slave owners were raping the African American women on their plantations and having mixed race children. Then we get into the one drop conception of blackness and all of this where it becomes difficult for people to discern by the eye what race someone is, right?
[JENNIFER] Yes, And, the fugitive slave law I think was also part of that too, when the nation in the 1850s at the same time was then, the entire nation was turned into essentially slave territory, in part by that act. It also caused a discernment of can you detect if someone’s slave or free by listening? Those two things I think working together began to create this language of what blackness sounds like.
[ethereal music fades in]
[MALE NEWS REPORTER] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was telling people privately that Barack Obama’s campaign would be helped because he was, quote, a light skinned African American with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one. Should he resigned?
[WOMAN ON NEWS]
I don’t think so. The President has accepted the apology and it would seem to me that the matter should be closed.
[ethereal music fades out]
[JENNIFER] Blackness and race and sound were then associate and then also at the same time, then what does whiteness sound like?
[MACK] This sonic color line at this point, it’s doing more than just defining and judging what it means to sound black. Also, it’s this subliminal process by which whites are figuring out what it means to sound white without without even consciously thinking about it.
[JENNIFER] Yes, yes, absolutely. this happens a lot in music and studies of music that when we talk about race and sound, it’s about blackness, it’s about brownness, it’s about the other as having a racialized sound.
[MACK] The sonic color line is doing other kinds of work. Now it’s not simply a way of sort of disciplining and identifying black bodies and black voices. It also becomes this way of essentializing them, like this way of making them exotic of sexualizing them, making them profitable to white people. I’m thinking here about the great musician Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly.
[country music out of an old radio plays]
His relationship with the folklorist and record producer John Lomax. Can you talk a little bit about their relationship, those two men?
[JENNIFER]
Well, I actually want to start with with Lead Belly, and he actually hated that nickname and that’s why in the book I most often talk about Ledbetter and use his name because that nickname was given to him in prison. Lomax insisted on it because he saw him being you know his imprisonment as a kind of racial authenticity. John Lomax was a folk collector and grew up in Texas and he would travel. He worked for the Library of Congress and various other organizations and saw himself as the great preserver of black folk culture.
[country music fades out]
Lomax quite disturbingly saw prison as a way of preserving folk culture. He would often travel to prisons because the convict system, which really is an extension of enslavement, and a new form of enslavement, where black men would be picked up for petty crimes, quote unquote, vagrancy, etc, etc, and then in prison for inordinate amounts of time and then used on a chain gang as labor.
[folk singinging starts]
He would see them as they were segregated and cut off from the radio and all of these modern technologies that he felt were ruining the folk culture. He didn’t like blues and jazz that were being played on the radio or mass produced through records. He actually saw these kinds of musical exchanges as corrupting this kind of purity but then what does it mean? So little concern for the men that were producing these, and he just saw them as producers of music, not human beings. He didn’t do anything to try to dismantle the convict lease system and so when he says he met Lead Belly there and you know quote unquote discovered him as a great talent.
[folk music cuts out]
He would often force Lead Belly to perform in prison gear that actually in my research I found hadn’t been used in the state of Alabama for a decade because even the government at the time found it to be dehumanizing. Lomax felt that he was, and this is where the essentizing comes in and this is part of the naturalising of criminality with blackness, was constructing a racial image. He felt he was reflecting it and representing it, but it was a very dangerous thing to do.
[MACK]
This was the early days of something that persists to this day, which is white men sort of assessing and determining what authentic black musical culture is.
[JENNIFER] Yes, I’m feeling a kind of possessiveness and ownership over this authentic image.
[MACK] Yeah, yeah, I mean, I hear it today of lamenting that African American people have turn their backs on the music of John Coltrane or whatever, in favor of hip hop. I mean, this is still something you hear all the time.
[JENNIFER] Yes. And I mean, even in hip hop, what is the real hip hop and real hip hop is political, and hip hop uses samples.
[Lead Belly music plays through an old radio]
Lead Belly was an incredible musician. He had, as it’s been reported, over 500 songs committed to memory. He really viewed himself in the tradition in the south of what’s called a song stir that he would travel from place to place that he would be very attentive to his audience and play songs that they would relate to that and he would switch this depending on where he was. He very much wanted to be a pop star in the vein at the time of Gene Autry and had his own goals and desires and really wanted to cross musical boundaries, but was bound through a contract with Lomax until 1939. This contract, actually prefigures what are called 360 deals now in the music industry where Lomax had control over where he played. Lead Belly couldn’t book shows without Lomax’s permission, in addition to the fact that Lomax made the lion’s share of the profits. This idea that he controlled Lead Belly’s entire image and doing anything that Lomax would deem inauthentic was him really exerting this, back to the listening ear, this proprietary ownership over Lead Belly, the person not just Lead Belly, the music. The music becomes a way to express this desire and need for control and containment of black music and through this kind of fetishising.
[Lead Belly’s music fades out]
That I think is what really shifts from the 19th century into the 20th century is that consumption of blackness for the white listening ear becomes about a certain kind of pleasure that in the 19th century was a different experience. There was almost immediate dismissal of black music as noise, where in the 20th century if it’s noise for many people, it has profitable currency because of the sonic color line and because of the pleasure for white listeners of transgressing without losing their position in the racial hierarchies of the US.
[MACK] Ledbetter goes on to be covered by pretty much I mean, it’s astounding how influential his music was. Frank Sinatra, Led Zeppelin did a version of his song “Gallus Poll.”
[cover of Gallus Poll plays then fades out]
If you listen to Led Belly’s original…
[Original Gallus Poll plays]
It kind of blows Jimmy Page away and he’s doing it on a 12 string guitar which seems so difficult.
[JENNIFER] Yes.
[Gallus Poll continues then fades out]
There’s been a lot of discussion in England about the skiffle revival and that that was part of the circulation of Lead Belly’s music to England George Harrison sites him as who also plays the 12 string, plays the 12 string sometimes as an influence in that regard as well and none of which monetarily are enough. Lead Belly has very poor health and died young. He was very much on the economic edge his whole life and so he never really saw any kind of… I mean props are amazing but you cannot eat props though.
[MACK] It is interesting because Lomax was attracted to Lead Belly because he heard something from the past or at least he thought he did, but Lead Belly’s influence shows that he was playing something from the future. Even into the grunge era like a Nirvana covered “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” and if you just listen to the guitar part on that song it just sounds so modern.
[Nirvana song plays then fades out]
It completely makes sense that a band like Nirvana would use it and Cobain said that Lead Belly was very influential on the band and I’m of the same generation is as Cobain and I remember being in high school and sort of obsessively listening to Lead Belly in Robert Johnson records in high school and hearing something that felt really true to me and or in vital, painful authentic. This is where I get some confusion because is this a way that white men have found empathy in resonance with black experiences or is it actually a reinstantiation of the sonic color line a way of marking what is supposed to be an authentic black sound? I’m just asking for a friend here.
[Mack and Jennifer laugh]
[JENNIFER] There’s some question about…the sonic color line is about the commercializing of and the capitalizing of black pain. What happens when you turn black pain into a commodity and I think that’s really central to this authenticity is a form of arrest and a form of limitation of forcing a kind of boundary. It’s also a way of bracketing. If you can bracket that power from the past, then it erases the contemporary connections and it’s a challenging question like I say in the book. I actually dedicate at the beginning the book to fishbone.
[MACK]
Yeah, I love fishbone.
[JENNIFER]
Oh, I love them too. They were as I say in there, my first and funkiest is critical race theorists.
[fishbone plays]
Through fishbone and the way that listening to fishbone opens up my ear to not just many different kinds of music, but the potential and the fusion and connection between them. That’s the very reason why the music industry failed fishbone in the sense. It was never consistently ska or funk or heavy metal. The band really found these points of intersection and merging of the sounds that we can’t label you and therefore we can’t sell you.
[fishbone ends]
So music has that potential and because it has that potential to open up listeners ears.
[ethereal music fades in]
That’s why the sonic color lines there. It’s to contain that power that music has.
[ethereal music fades out]
[MACK] I want to skip forward to this second moment when the listening ear and this sort of listening for race becomes very important. So there was the earlier stage during slavery and trying to discern if you couldn’t discern visually what race someone was trying to listen for race. Then we get into this new era where we get the scientific knowledge that race really isn’t biological.
[JENNIFER]
Yes.
[MACK]
Yet, this sort of ironically, actually seems to recharge the sonic color line. So you’ve mentioned color blindness earlier in our discussion, but can you kind of talk a little bit more about what color blindness is, when it began, and how it kind of amped up the the listening ear.
[JENNIFER] Color blindness is the belief and it’s the reigning racial formation of the US and the late 20th century and up through our contemporary moment is the idea that race can be fundamentally ignored.
[WOMAN ON REALITY TV SHOW]
Call me crazy but I just don’t see race.
[JENNIFER]
The metaphor for color blindness is that if we cannot see skin color as a factor, then it follows that a race free society or society free from racism will emerge.
[WOMAN ON REALITY TV SHOW]
I guess I’m just the least racist person here.
[MAN ON REALITY TV SHOW]
Ok.
[JENNIFER]
This is impossible and, as a matter of fact, that creates and enables a new layer of racism to emerge. In fact, the more dangerous one because then you can no longer talk overtly about race.
[MAN ON TV SHOW] You’re only telling yourself that so you don’t have to think about racism or confront your own prejudices.
[JENNIFER]
The only way that the colorblindness could take root as an ideology is that the race has to transfer and move somewhere else, and that if sound allows racism to do that.
[TV static]
If racial profiling is only thought of as a visual entity, what does it mean to stop a car because of the kind of music that’s playing, or what does it mean to use accents to determine citizenship?
[TV static fades out]
[MACK]
This notion of color blindness it’s an ostensibly liberal move, right? I mean, but it really turns blackness into a choice that’s the wrong choice. Something to be listened for, it becomes “well are you going to join the great middle class standard way of being or aren’t you?” and if you choose not to there’s something wrong with you.
[old timey music plays in the background]
[JENNIFER] Yes, World War Two and the Cold War was an essential part of this realignment of kind of body and and voice that what we think of color blindness as a 90s thing or even a 70s thing that color blindness was part of the effort by the American government to recruit people of color to the armed forces, that there is a kind of inclusion that’s offered through color blindness that if race is no longer a factor than everyone can be American but at the same time, skin color no longer bars you and visual appearance no longer bars you from being American, but maybe everyone can sound quote unquote American. Then it becomes about this kinds of disciplining, of the voice disciplining of listening to hear and have those kinds of middle class sensibilities and this idea of kind of standardization through voice speech, music, musical taste. It starts in that Cold War moment.
[MAN #1 ON TV] Well, since you want to talk so very badly, I guess I’m not going to have much trouble getting you to talk into this machine. Alright now, who’s going to be the first to try this out, huh? How about Moralis? What’s the matter with Moralis?
[MAN #2 ON TV]
Sure, Moralis, he loves to talk.
[MAN #1]
Now Tomita, suppose you step up here and try it.
[MAN #2]
You against Morales because you don’t talk good english?
[MAN #1]
That has nothing to do with.
[MACK]
one of the things that I think is so interesting about your writing on this is that you connect this to the technology of the radio and so this is another one of those things where just like listening, we generally think that technology is neutral but you really think a lot about the way that radio fed into color blindness and this standardization of speech.
[JENNIFER]
There are very few representations visually, literarily, in the radio research on black listenership and then thinking about well, wait a minute, there’s this overlying, very entrenched discourse on the 30s and 40s as the Golden Age, quote unquote, golden age of American radio.
[sound of radio tuning into a station]
[MAN ON RADIO] From a humble beginning in a Pittsburgh garage, to the sumptuous studios of the national radio networks in New York, Chicago and Hollywood. These are the years we refer to as the golden age of radio.
[song plays on the radio]
[JENNIFER] It’s important to understand how and why that came about, and how and why it’s also seems to perfectly align with the worst and most segregated both legally and de facto in US history. So how can we then refer to, or think about this as a golden age, given this level of exclusion? The Make America Great Again, campaign, I think, is very much tied to these nostalgic images of white radio, listening in the 40s and 50s.
[radio music fades out as ethereal music fades in]
How were black artists actively excluded from the radio, and not just actively excluded, but their performance and their representation, tightly controlled, and the fact that the belief in technology as neutral as just something that is and thinking about radio itself. There’s a huge discourse about radio as blind and connecting that to color blindness, that you can’t see race over the radio, and that it’s this open, equitable space. A lot of the Cold War propaganda was saying exactly that. Thank God our airwaves are free and open. They’re not like Germany, but also it really ignores the way in which racial hierarchy was driving the industry and the way that the industry was thoroughly segregated down to separate musicians unions for black and white musicians. Black musicians, did not get nearly as much work as white musicians.
[ethereal music fades out]
Many, many people, when I give presentations or teach are surprised to find out how black actors, the dialect was scripted for them. Many black actors were quote unquote, taught this way of speaking by white producers. That there again, I think that price of admission of getting working roles on the radio with having to speak in dialect and this very dialect that no one speaks. Having to speak this white, imagined language of what black sounds like.
[radio show fades in]
[MAN ON RADIO] Take it easy. Take it easy. Don’t get so excited.
[WOMAN ON RADIO]
Yes, but Mr. Marlin, you know what…
[MAN ON RADIO]
I love you, relax. Now go out and come in again.
[WOMAN ON RADIO]
Yes sir.
[sound of woman leaving the room, audience laughing.]
[WOMAN #2 ON RADIO]
Now Marlin, that’s ridiculous.
[MAN ON RADIO] Well, she’s got to learn to control herself. This will be good for her.
[WOMAN ON RADIO]
Mr. Marlin, may I speak with you sir?
[audience laughter]
[MAN ON RADIO]
Yes Bueller. Now you see what I mean?
[WOMAN #2]
Yes, go ahead Bueller.
[WOMAN #1]
Well, when you hear what happened, I was down at the grocery store.
[audience laughter]
[JENNIFER] Again, normalizing and naturalising it for a huge swath of American listeners. Microphones weren’t weren’t colorblind as so many of the radio industry executives seem to feel, but the belief that they were is really telling, and it’s shaped a lot of how we’ve come to understand race through sound that way.
[MACK] Well, in fact, the invisibility of the performer charges the racialized listening. You listen more closely for race because you don’t know. You can’t see what race the person is.
[JENNIFER]
That’s exactly it. One of the great fears of radio producers was that black performers would be indistinguishable from white performers. That’s why Wonderful Smith was fired from the “Red Skelton Show”, because it was a sketch show, and he was slipping in and out and changing character so often, and that this racial boundary, this aro ratio boundary could not be reliably maintained. He was also himself asserting his agency and constantly challenging it.
[MACK]
Which shows colorblindness to be a lie, because the whole premise here is that if you will just, pay the price of admission and speak correctly and behave in a bourgeois middle class way, then we will ignore your race and all will be good. Then you get performers who actually do this, and then that becomes so threatening to white identity that they have to be fired.
[JENNIFER]
In fact, the dialect from the very beginning and Gavin Jones is a scholar that has been working on this for many years, and white southerness and black southerness sounded alike, almost indistinguishable, and that’s exactly where the dialect comes in. To separate the sense of white and black, to draw those boundaries and to enforce and to create the sense of a difference.
[slow, jazzy music plays as a woman starts to sing]
Lena Horne. She’s middle class New York, Brooklyn. She was one of those artists that challenges the sonic color line and really challenging this enforcement of what blackness sounded like.
[song continues]
Lena Horne’s voice posed a dilemma, in that her voice fit neither of the kind of stereotypical white nor stereotypically black.
[different jazz song plays]
It was this voice that challenged both of those imposisions. It had a kind of racial fluidity. Lena Horne had a kind of, many people described it as a kind of coldness to her voice, that she was aloof. Yet, even with this, the white press tried to racialize Lena as a blues singer, and she was definitely not a blues singer by any stretch. What does it mean again, that this listening ear then has to label her according to this racialized music genre, and black listeners heard Lena Horne as a beautiful singer. What does it mean then to kind of think about and discuss the beauty of her voice in relation to her body. There’s a very different discourse about Lena Horne’s voice in the white press, and the black press.
[jazz song continues, then ends]
The sonic color line is not about accuracy. It’s not about an accurate description of diverse racial identities. It’s actually about the reduction of race to the idea that there can be this firm boundary between blackness and whiteness, and then other racial identities then have to contend with these polls.
[ethereal music fades in]
[MACK] The racial makeup and dynamics of the country are a lot more complex than this, and yet this is where we always seem to come back.
[JENNIFER] Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. This isn’t to say that this is the only Sonic color line or that race and sound does not impact Asian Americans and indigenous peoples. As a matter of fact, and this can be a point of solidarity in terms of organizing against racism and an equity but yet, like you said, here we are again. How do we jam the signal of this black white binary and the inequity, it’s wreaked on all of us?
[ethereal music continues, then fades.]
[upbeat techno music plays]
[CRIS] That’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks again to Jennifer Lynn Stoever. You can learn more about the Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve heard and talk about the Phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you to rate and review us on Apple podcasts. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook or give us a shoutout on Twitter as PhantomPod. Today’s show featured music by Grim Gibson and Blue the Fifth. Our interns are Natalie Cooper, Nicole Keshock, and Adam Witmer and a special thanks and bon voyage to Nicole who is graduating. Thanks for your great work on the new website. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center the National Endowment for humanities.
[upbeat techno music fades out]
Ep. 4: On listening In (Lawrence English)
Apr 25, 2018
Lawrence English is an influential sound composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. In this episode of Phantom Power: Sounds about Sound we speak with Lawrence about listening. In particular we think about his reworking of an important work in the fields of musique concrète and field recording, Presque Rien by Luc Ferrari, and the recent premiere of Wave Fields, his own 12-hour durational sound installation for sleepers at Burleigh Heads in Queensland as part of the Bleach* Festival.
Lawrence is interested in the nature of listening and the capability of sound to occupy a body. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of relation listening and perception, through live performance, field recordings and installation.
The show includes extracts from the following tracks:
[buzzing sounds fade in, and fade out as Cris begins to speak]
[CRIS]
The hive of the sugarbag bee, endemic to northeastern Australia.
[loud music starts abruptly]
The first notes of a piece called…
[more loud notes]
Hammering the Screw.
[scratching noises and metallic noises begin]
Found objects – a 44 gallon drum, a ghost town in far northern Australia.
[scratching sounds]
Just some small extracts from recordings made by today’s guest.
[MACK HAGOOD]
It’s Phantom Power, sounds about sound. That’s Cris Cheek, and I’m Mack Hagood.
[LAWRENCE ENGLISH, pre-recorded]
I’m Lawrence English, and I have been described as a professional listener.
[bullfrog sounds fade in]
Which does make me sound like a very second-rate therapist.
[laughing]
But, it is the kind of thing that I spend a lot of time doing in my everydays. There is a lot of listening that goes on, and I suppose in some respects you know, I’m increasingly interested in problematizing what that actually means, what our relationship is with that way of knowing the world around us.
[music fades in, intense and somewhat sad]
[MACK]
So, Cris, I’m really excited that you got this interview with Lawrence English.
[CRIS]
Yeah!
[MACK]
I’m familiar with his work. I always thought of him as the Drone Guy, you know he does these really amazing and complex droning soundscapes, but it turns out, as you’ve just shown us by playing that material, that’s not even the half of what he does.
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s right. He’s a highly contemporary model of the artist scholar, I think. A prolific composer – there’s at least 18 solo records and rising in the current millennium. He’s a sound art researcher, an artist, a fine photographer, and he supports a ton of other artists through his highly influential imprint, Room 40, based in eastern Australia, but genuinely servicing a global audience. Really interesting.
[MACK]
So, Cris, I know today you’re gonna walk us through some of Lawrence English’s recent work, including this recreation of a piece by a godfather of sound art, Luc Ferrari, and also some of his recent albums such as Cruel Optimism and Wilderness of Mirrors. But, what was it like talking with him? Did you find that there were any sorts of through lines to his work?
[CRIS]
One of the through lines that I found is that we were always coming back to talk about listening in relation to audience, listening in relation to where you are, to context, listening as a kind of politics, collective listening – all of his projects are situated in relation to the act of listening. As both an artist and as a scholar he’s making an intervention into how we listen and how we filter sound.
[LAWRENCE]
I always argue that we are much better at filtering sound than we are at actually listening to it. We’re much more successful at filtering. And all you have to do is go outside and walk around for half an hour.
[everyday sounds cut in – the chiming of a clock tower, a few chattering people, the leaves rustling]
And you realize actually if you stop and then consciously listen you will suddenly recognize all of this material that is going on around you that you have been very successfully filtering with almost no real effort.
[sound of wind lightly blowing]
And I think that’s a great thing to be conscious of because even in social settings, semantic listening, we often still kind of have that going on, and it has implications for Communication Theory as much as it does for a kind of Aesthetic Listening Theory.
[background sound cuts out]
[MACK]
This is really interesting. So, just to get through our day, we filter out the vast majority of what presents itself to our ears.
[CRIS]
That’s right.
[MACK]
But we get so poor at paying attention to what’s going on around us that this even happens when we’re listening to others – the semantic listening that he’s talking about, listening to others’ words, we filter those out, too.
[CRIS]
Yeah, or we filter out part of what they’re saying, and focus on another part, the part that we want to focus on, or the part that we’re more comfortable with or familiar with.
[music fades back in]
[LAWRENCE]
This idea that somehow listening is this given, that we can just all do it all of the time, is a fallacy. It’s the same as any other kind of serious pursuit or practice, it needs training. You look at a bodybuilder, a bodybuilder cannot lift 300 pounds straight away, they build up to that and they build techniques that facilitate them doing it in a way that allows them to maintain their strength over a certain period of time, and I think it’s the same. Listening can be very fatiguing. You talk to people that are potentially introverts, or something like that – it’s very fatiguing for them to be out, with lots of conversation going on, and then trying to navigate their way through it. I think it’s the same way going out and making field recordings. It requires a lot of commitment and focus and energy from you to apply yourself to those particular things as they unfold in time.
[bullfrog noises fade back in]
Because, if you lose that focus, they’re gone. You can never get those moments again. They’re just there for that instant, and then they’re gone.
[music fades back out]
[MACK]
So, Cris, this kind of focused attention to the sound of our lived environment, this is something that you’ve spoken about in our previous episode with Brian House, but we really haven’t discussed soundscape recording and what that is and the history of it.
[CRIS]
You’ve got to think about somewhat portable reel-to-reel tape recorders. That makes a huge difference, when you can start to take technology, carry it around with you, to take it on journeys, to take it to some place to record the sound of the place rather than just to record a concert in a concert hall. And somebody like Luc Ferrari – and he was an early pioneer in this field – is known for being an electro-acoustic musician, combinations between technology and acoustic sound.
[music fades in, with pounding drums, flutes, and some electronic sounds]
He’s also known as being a progenitor and pioneer in the field of concrete music, musique concrète, a sense of listening to everyday life with acute perception, or a kind of affective listening, as Lawrence writes about it.
[music and sounds fade out]
So, in 1968, Ferrari is attending a conference in what was at that point Yugoslavia and is now a part of Croatia, a small town, Vela Luka, on the seaside, so we’re fifty years ago, and he gets very fascinated by what he’s hearing in the everyday environment.
[a recording begins; it is old, and contains sounds of footsteps, chickens, and other everyday sounds one might hear in a small village; the sounds continue as CRIS continues]
By the sounds of how people move around that space, donkeys, wagons, carts, the kinds of engines that they’re using to drive with or the kinds of engines that they’re using to manufacture with, the sounds of the voices and the architecture and how the architecture affects the resonance of those voices, church bells, cicadas in the treetops, the sound of the seaboard close by and how the sound of the sea carries over the town at night, and so forth. He spends several days doing not much more than recording in various different parts of the town. He made a composition – it was about 20 minutes long – it was called Almost Nothing – Presque Rien.
[sounds fade out]
And it’s that piece that Lawrence seeks to kind of recreate. He goes back to that town just under fifty years later, and re-records that town, and listens to Ferrari’s compositional arc, and stitches something together that really is in a relational conversation with the act of listening that Ferrari got engaged with.
[MACK]
So Lawrence English is going back to the same town that Luc Ferrari originally recorded in some fifty years ago, and he’s recording there again, is that right?
[CRIS]
Correct.
[Lawrence’s new recording of Vela Luka fades in. Includes sounds of small bells, bugs chirping, and people talking]
[LAWRENCE]
Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Vela Luka is a very particular place in that some things have changed a lot and that some things have not changed at all.
[laughing]
It’s quite extraordinary. I can say categorically, there are less donkeys then there were in Ferarri’s day, that is for sure. I don’t believe I saw a single donkey walking. But now I would say there are a lot more scooters than there were before. But, it was interesting certain things that, the character of the architecture of the space was incredibly similar because the nature of the stone had not changed in the sort of fifty years since either of us had been there. Some of the motors were, I’m pretty sure, the same as they were, it’s just that probably I was able to record them in a slightly different way, and I probably approached them quite differently to the way that Luc might have done that. And the kind of language, the accent there is very particular, and I think that is still very much the same. When I play that to other people in Croatia they identify that as a very particular kind of accent that you get in the Adriatic. So, I think there’s scales of time, I think the expressions of time, and that the material influences of sound are at play there. Whether that be the kind of fixed architectural things, the thing that we understand maybe as “space,” it’s in some ways constant, but then the implications of place, how it is that we make the atmosphere that sort of tenuous thing that we understand as “place” rather than “space,” has obviously shifted dramatically in that time. There’s this weird tension there that exists between these things that are lingering and that are fleeting, and they’re constantly kind of pulling at each other in really quite interesting ways.
[sounds of bugs and birds chirping continue in the background]
[CRIS]
I think the interesting thing there is Lawrence’s engagement with Ferrari’s act of listening, and feeling that he can hear – sounds kind of weird, but it’s not totally weird – that you can hear somebody else’s listening inside their recording.
[background noises fade out]
[LAWRENCE]
I think that for me is actually one of the pleasures of field recording, is that, as a practice, you’re trying to bring those things into focus or out of focus. What it is you’re trying to capture out of a particular moment is so individuated.
[sounds of nature fade in]
It was very much about this kind of concept of Relational Listening, around how it is that the interior psychologicalist thing that we undertake and the external technological reception of the prosthetic ear of the microphone, if you like. What that relationship is there, but also how it is that you interrogate or can interrogate your own capacities for listening.
[sounds of nature continue]
There are lots of different examples where there can be these situations where, suddenly, it’s like, “wow, okay, I was so focused on the bird in the tree that I didn’t hear the highway behind me”
[the sounds change slightly, first to a highway as Lawrence speaks, and then to the sounds of trickling water and other noises before fading out]
But the microphone has no interest in the bird or the highway. It’s just interested in capturing sound.
[MACK]
Yeah, this is a fascinating point, because, on the one hand, English is pointing out that the microphone hears everything, it doesn’t filter out sounds the ways that the human mind does, right? It provides us more of a sense of everything that’s going on – within it’s technical capabilities. But, on the other hand, this brings us up to an important concept in Lawrence English’s work, which is Relational Listening.
[water sounds fade back in]
[LAWRENCE]
So, and that’s why for me the Relational Listening idea was so critical, was that I recognized that these things are not naturally aligned, that we need to work towards that, not just our capacity as listeners but our capacity as being able to relate to the kind of auditory capacity of the microphone – it’s critical if we’re going to be able to reflect our listening through that lens, to use a physiocentric metaphor, we have to kind of have that relationship, we have to be conscious of it, it can’t just be a given. It needs to be investigated.
[water sounds continue]
[CRIS]
I am thinking about the question of how the experience of memory is continually modifying our experience of listening.
[LAWRENCE]
I became quite interested in this idea of [inaudible] almost like memory construction. I think for me, as I return to field recordings, in the same way that if you return to photographs, I think there’s a certain capacity those documents or whatever you want to call them have for shaping our memory. It’s interesting that you can identify yourself or your presence in those things, even though, obviously, it’s not necessarily represented, it might be visually represented if it’s a photograph… when I return to field recordings, in the ones that I feel are most successful, I can sense myself in those recordings, because I’m sensing my listening in that moment. And I think for me, that’s really the value of the field recording, and what I love about people’s work, with field recording particularly, is when I sense them in it, whether that be the technical capacity that they have to transmit that interest, or sometimes just the sense of personality that comes through in the way that people approach a particular environment in those moments.
[water continues and music fades in; water slowly fades out]
[CRIS]
The key phrase that I’ve read from Lawrence is the idea of listening to the listener’s listening. So, if somebody goes outside, like Luc Ferrari, and records a particular sound – the trains in the trainyard, for example – because of how they position their microphone, because of how they frame the material the microphone records, what I end up listening to, if I hear that recording, is Luc Ferrari’s listening, in that particular place at that particular time.
[MACK]
Yeah, so a field recording isn’t just a recording of sound, it’s a recording of someone’s listening.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
The person who made that recording. That sort of agency, that intentionality that we bring when we do the kinds of focused listening that Lawrence English was talking about earlier, that can sort of be heard through their recordings. You leave your mark on the recording, on the memory that you have constructed, through the recording.
[CRIS]
Right. And so that’s the Relational Listening.
[music fades out; distorted technological sounds fade in, which change to soft music]
[CHRIS, soothingly]
Help us out, just a little minute, everybody please, if you like the show, go rate us on iTunes, like us on Facebook, hit us up on Twitter. Helps us all to rise…
[distorted sounds again, and an abrupt cut back to the show]
[CRIS]
So, I was thinking about the diversity of the kind of things that Lawrence does, and wondering what happens if you pay this kind of intense, close listening to conventional instruments. The recording of them, and the production of the sound from them. And I asked him quite specifically to give me an example of how he produces his sounds.
[MACK]
Oh, is this where we get to find out how he makes those magnificent drones?
[laughing]
[CRIS]
Well, you know, the source for what you think is a drone does not sound the way you expect it to sound.
[LAWRENCE]
The first sounds on Wilderness of Mirrors, that kind of droning tone, is actually a piano.
[a cut to the droning piano tones that continue as Lawrence speaks]
Played with an EBow, but recorded very close and very hot, so a lot of the artifacting or the kind of harmonic distortion element of that sound is built in to the recording. For me that’s part of the framing and not being able to step back from something to kind of undo it, is in the capture of that.
[droning continues, becoming more intense and then fading into the background]
[MACK]
Yeah, I definitely would not have thought that was a piano. And he said he’s using an EBow – that’s really interesting. An EBow is this little handheld device with a battery in it, and it’ll stimulate a steel string and make it vibrate, and it’s usually used by electric guitarists. And it really changes the attack, so you don’t hear the string get plucked, it just starts vibrating due to this magnetic field. And so, the attack, the beginning of the note, really gets changed, and it often makes a guitar sound more like a violin. And he’s using this on piano strings, that’s really cool.
[CRIS]
Right. And I like this term that he uses, recording something “hot.”
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah, turning the levels up and getting these harmonics of distortion going.
[CRIS]
Super close miking, contact mics, and so forth to get very different kinds of resonances out of their instruments.
[MACK]
And he’s making this decision from the get-go. He’s not recording a “clean signal,” so to speak, and then adding distortion later in the computer. He’s doing it in real time and listening carefully as he does it. He’s committing.
[LAWRENCE]
In some respects, I guess it reflects the practice in listening in field recording, that I’m making a decision in that moment, and that decision is the decision I need to live with, so I need to think about it there and then, rather than this idea of being able to go back and change things later, which, for me, I totally understand in some circumstances that’s really critical, but for the work that I do for myself, I want there to be decisions made that are irreversible, that can’t be changed, that in some respects shape the way that the future of the work will become. There’s a kind of pressure or a weight that gets behind the way that the work is developing, and you can’t really return to a sense of ground zero, or to get back to the roots of that thing. I like the fact that some of those decisions are sort of hardwired, and they inform what that come after them. And there’s this kind of additional pressure or material pressure.
[the music gets louder and intensifies before fading out]
[MACK]
And so I bet these swelling drones, these fields of sound that I normally experience through my headphones or a speaker, must be an incredible experience live.
[CRIS]
Yeah, I think I used the word “visceral” to describe the experience of the sound. It’s almost as if your body is being taken over by the sound. Your body, your body-mind, your psyche is being occupied.
[MACK]
Is that something he thinks about in terms of live performance? The bodies of the audience?
[CRIS]
Yeah, absolutely. He talks about the embodied listener.
[string music fades into the background]
[LAWRENCE]
Yeah, I mean, that’s actually a lot of the performative end of what I’m doing, the sort of synesthetic nexus, I suppose, that exists between audition and sensation, the transitional points where sound falls out of our sense of acoustic audition into the realm of the flesh. There’s that very powerful moment where sometimes you recognize yourself, as in your body, in the sound, in a way that you don’t necessarily get in everyday life. I think that’s one of the powerful things about concerts, is the opportunity for that to be realized, particularly now with the quality of sound systems that are available, and that kind of thing. But it’s also interesting as a kind of collective experience, because I think for me it’s actually, and I say this quite often when I’m talking just before concerts, it is a very powerful metaphor, the fact that we can all come together, to this place, and we all have these very individuated experiences, whether they be the psychological experiences of how the music affects us, or whether they be the physiological way that our bodies resonate in that time and place, and everyone will have those, very different to one another, but we’re sharing this common time and place together, and for me that’s a really interesting metaphor for the idea of community, where we do have all these different opinions and different kinds of value systems, but we can come together and share these things and have a dialogue, whether it be a purely sensory dialogue or something more afterwards. It’s very powerful, I think, to think about it in those terms, that it’s not just this very simple appreciation of performance, but there’s other resonance, you can think of a social resonance.
[music continues]
Partly, Judith Butler’s most recent books about public assembly, this idea of a sort of performative language for public assembly, I think is really interesting. Because it does lend itself, I think, to having ratings that are outside protest, that are about different kinds of gatherings. Obviously, she touches on those.
[music continues, sounding more intense]
Something like Cruel Optimism or Wilderness of Mirrors is entirely born out of these interactions with the broader socio-political cultural sphere. I’m not one of these people that can just make music for the sake of it, I tend to work much better when I’m trying to address a particular theme or difficulty or whatever the case may be. I like a frame, and I like it to be tightly bound. I think there is great energy to be absorbed out of being bound and the kind of pressure that it brings.
[CRIS]
Constraints, working with constraints.
[LAWRENCE]
Absolutely. And I think it’s one of those things that for me is more and more important. And also because I think it breathes a certain intensity to the way that the work can be expressed.
[music fades out; popping sounds fade in, almost like fireworks; the sounds fade out]
[MACK]
So, you did this interview a little while ago, but you asked him what he had coming up next, and that sounded pretty interesting too.
[CRIS]
Right, so here he is talking about a piece called “Wave Fields,” that premiered on the gold coast in Australia, in early April, this year.
[music fades in, ethereal, with deep, long sounds and higher sounds of the same length]
[LAWRENCE]
I’m working on a very long duration, twelve hour piece, actually, which will be performed next to a beautiful headland and [inaudible] which is a very significant indigenous site, and people we invited to come sleep on the beach, 200, 300 people sleeping on the beach together, and overnight, basically, the piece runs from dusk until dawn. And it’s a very interesting process, maybe because a lot of the work is to do. I’ve been very interested in the way sound operates in sleep for a long time. This is probably a very particular investigation into that, because I’m also working with the natural environment, the waves are very present there, very strong sound base. So it’s how all these things speak to each other, and how do they speak to each other in a way which facilitates various levels to which the sound can be participated in or experienced in with people, whether it be conscious or subconscious in this case.
[MACK]
So wait, this is a concert where you actually have permission to fall asleep?
[CRIS]
Yeah, and I’ve had that experience, too.
[laughing]
It’s too long a story, but at the beginning of the Japan festival with a Noh performance in London, the guy who was the Japanese cultural ambassador said, “feel free to go to sleep; because whatever you see when you wake up, will be the essence of Noh.”
[MACK]
Oh, that’s nice.
[laughing]
[CRIS]
So he’s encouraging people to think about the function of sound and hearing during sleep.
[LAWRENCE]
When I think about the history of how it is that our ears have operated, they have been our greatest security device. In those very early days, when there was the campfire and nothing else, it was our ears that told us the wolves were coming for us or the bear was behind us, whatever the case may be. Our eyes failed us, but our ears kind of opened up the dark. You have those moments occasionally where you are out somewhere and you don’t necessarily know a space, and it’s dark, and you hear whatever it might be, a twig snapping, footsteps, whatever it is, and you feel in your body a very visceral, tactile response to that audio information that still somehow ties us back to that ancestral sort of way of steering clear of trouble in the dark.
[music fades up from the background again, then fades out, while a new piece starts]
[MACK]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thank you to Lawrence English. Today we heard a little bit of sound by Luc Ferrari while Cris was talking about him, but other than that, all of the incredible sounds you heard today were by Lawrence English. We’ve got some great shows lined up for the coming weeks including English professor Jennifer Stoever on her new book The Sonic Color Line, sound artist Leah Barclay on acoustic ecology, and ethnomusicologist Langston Collin Wilkins on the slow, loud, and bangin’ sounds of Houston’s hip hop car culture. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve heard and talked about at phantompod.org. And those transcripts take a little time to write up and drop, so I think we’re up to episode two – we’re catching up, so please be patient with us on that. You can also subscribe to our show at phantompod.org or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook, or give us a shout on Twitter @phantompod. Our interns are Natalie Cooper, Nicole Keshock, and Adam Witmer, and Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[music continues then fades out]
Ep. 3: Dirty Rat (Brian House)
Apr 09, 2018
This time we talk with a fascinating sound artist and composer Mack met at a recent meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. As his website puts it, “BrianHouse is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His background in both computer science and noise music informs his research-based practice. Recent interests include AI, telegraphy, and urban rats.” If that description looks a little daunting on the screen, the work itself sounds really cool to cris and Mack. We’ll listen to three pieces of Brian’s: a composition that imprints motion-tracking data on collectible vinyl, a field recording from the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and an encounter with the wildlife that put the “burrows” in New York’s five boroughs.
Mack notes that it was incredible to edit this episode using Daniel Fishkin’sdaxophone arrangement of John Cage’s “Ryoanji” (1983).
The other music on today’s episode is by Brian House and Graeme Gibson.
Transcript
[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This… is… Phantom Power.
[FEMALE COMPUTERIZED VOICE]
Episode 3.
[CRIS]
Dirty Rat.
[unidentified sounds raising and lowering in pitch, banging noises]
[CRIS]
So, what are we listening to here, Mack?
[MACK HAGOOD]
What do you think we’re listening to here, Cris?
[noises continue, Mack laughing]
[CRIS]
I don’t know, what is that? Is that an owl, put through a filtering device or something?
[MACK, still laughing]
You think it sounds like an owl put through a filtering device? Let’s listen to some more.
[CRIS]
Oh, wow. So synthetic.
[MACK]
It sounds like an old theatre organ having a bad day.
[CRIS]
Oh, yeah, no, I’m hearing that now. A pipe organ.
[MACK]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
Or something that hasn’t got a lot of wheeze left in it.
[MACK]
Something sad is happening in the silent film.
[CRIS]
Something very sad is happening.
[MACK]
Harold Lloyd fell off the clock.
[both laughing]
[CRIS]
And so he did.
[MACK]
Alright, so… it’s… it’s rats.
[CRIS]
That’s a rat?!
[MACK]
That’s a rat.
[clanging noises begin, rat noises stop]
[MACK]
So today we’re gonna meet the guy behind the rat recordings that you just heard a moment ago: Brian House. He’s a composer and sound artist I met last November at the Conference for the Society of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which is this really crazy conference for interdisciplinary scholarship and creative experimentation. I met Brian, and when I heard about what he was working on, I just knew we had to have him on the show. His work uses sound to express relationships between bodies, human and nonhuman bodies, social relationships, geographic relationships, temporal relationships, and sonic relationships. So we’ll be hearing three different pieces of his: a musical composition that traces human, urban, and transatlantic movement, a field recording from the wetlands of Botswana, and an installation that will take us into the underground boroughs of New York City. This is work that helps us make sense of relationships we normally can’t sense at all.
[BRIAN HOUSE]
Well, my name is Brian House, and I’m an artist based right now up here in Providence, though I frequently do work down in New York. Yeah, I’m up here at Brown University at the moment, working on my PhD in music.
[♪ upbeat technological music ♪]
[CRIS]
So, Mack – how does Brian get interested in rats when he’s working on music?
[MACK]
Well, I think in order to get into that, we need to understand more of his previous work and some of the themes that are going on in it.
[BRIAN]
You know, I’ve been particularly interested in the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, right, who, in his last writings, outlined this poetic methodology called “Rhythm Analysis.”
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah, he was the French Marxist sociologist, spent a good amount of time thinking about life in the city, and –
[CRIS]
And the design of the urban environment, and –
[BRIAN]
And that’s been the basis for a lot of my recent work. And, through focusing on time in a specific way, or rather, temporality, in a way that maybe subverts some of the epistemological biases of the society that we live in, which is very object-focused, very visually-focused. So, to have a more acoustic way of experiencing things, but not in a way that’s limited to sound, more the ways that the rhythms of our body come into contact with the world around us.
[MACK]
So, if this is sounding a little bit abstract, maybe it’ll help to talk about a particular piece. What we’re listening to right now is a piece of Brian’s called Quotidian Record, and it’s a kind of sonic mapping of his movement through space.
[BRIAN]
Well, you know, I was really interested in the rhythms of everyday life, as you move around the city, and how that had a particular kind of musical quality to it – or, at least I thought it did, right? So, I tracked my location, using an app on my phone, right, for an entire year. So, I had the latitude and longitude coordinates. And I took that, and transformed it into a piece of music. So every place I visited became a note. And the same pitch of the note meant the same place. But the rhythms from one place to another were largely as I experienced them, except for the fact that instead of taking a year, I condensed it down to about 11 minutes. So that’s about 1.8 seconds per day.
[music fades out]
And the reason it was that speed is because, I realized that a vinyl record –
[sound of a record crackling]
is a beautiful kind of representation of time. You have its rotation, you have this feeling of moving in and out on the platter, so I made this piece of music so it’d fit on the vinyl record such that one rotation of the record –
[clanging noises begin]
was one day of my lived time. So you hear it go around, and you hear the kind of motifs of my everyday life unfold as this record turns, and you can actually see what time that you’re hearing by where the stylus is on the record.
[clanging stops, record crackling fades out]
[CRIS]
I’m liking this idea of the revolution of the day, or the day as one revolution.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah, it’s lovely, and I gotta say, this is a beautiful object, this record, I’m just so sad that they only made 20 of them because I really want one.
[Quotidian Record fades in again]
[CRIS]
They could at least have made 365.
[MACK, laughing]
Exactly, right?
[BRIAN]
So, I worked with a friend of mine who’s a designer, Greg Mihalko, and we made a diagram for the surface of the record – you know, like it was like a clock, so you could see the time, and you could see what month you were at in the year, and we even put in there what city I was in. So cities corresponded to key changes. And it turns out that it sounds pretty cool, it sounds good, because most of the time it’s just riffing on this major third, which is me at home in New York City, and when you get to the jazz intervals, that’s when I’m going farther field.
[MACK]
So, yeah, but he’s making audible this kind of unheard rhythm of urban life, right? And definitely we’ll put a link to the website so you can see what the record looks like.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
Yeah, so I think an important point to think about here is that, from Brian’s perspective, this isn’t a representation, per say, he doesn’t want you to decode this –
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
– and figure out that he was in Berlin in July, or whatever.
[CRIS]
Berlin is F sharp.
[MACK, laughing]
Right. But he’s giving us a way of sensing these social relationships in these different kinds of rhythms through space, the ways we move through space, and the ways we interact with humans and nonhumans, actually.
[CRIS]
Right, this is what people ought to be thinking more about, is pattern among organisms.
[MACK]
Yeah, these relations and expanding our idea of what social relations are.
[CRIS]
Exactly.
[clanging noise]
[MACK]
So far, what we’re hearing mainly is his sort of geographic location, but as you’ll hear, he got inspired by some more work that he did, and started to think more about the relationships that are going on between humans and even nonhumans.
[CRIS]
Right. So he’s going backwards and forwards through this network of spaces, but there are other things in those spaces.
[BRIAN]
I had some experiences with field recording over the last couple of years that really opened up my thinking in regard to rhythm as a social relationship. And this really comes off of some of the classic work in acoustic ecology from people like Bernie Krause and this idea of the Niche Hypothesis.
[MACK, laughing]
Ah, yes, the Niche Hypothesis. And what is that, Cris?
[CRIS]
It’s that sense that every living thing that is producing sound has its place within the overall sonic ecosystem of a given environment.
[BRIAN]
Different organisms communicate in their own kind of frequency bands, in a way that they won’t interfere with each other, and can just kind of zero in on the particular frequencies that are of interest to them. So, I went to Botswana with National Geographic and did some field recording in the Okavango Delta region.
[fade in sounds from the Delta, including frogs and a myriad of other creatures]
And this is one of the richest ecosystems in the world. Tons of sound made by all kinds of animals. And so I would just put up the microphone and let the soundscape unfold, and then looking at those recordings later –
[MACK]
Now, when Brian says “looking at the recordings” he’s actually talking about a spectrogram. So, you feed a recording into this software and it shows you all the different frequencies that are being used in that particular recording.
[BRIAN, continued]
It’s very clear how different species have organized themselves in very specific frequency bands. So, they’re layers, it looks like geographic stratification. Absolutely fascinating. You can pick out, “here are the frogs, here are the insects, this is this particular type of bird, these are the big mammals at the bottom.” So they’re all organized in their particular frequency bands, and also temporally, right? There’s different rhythms that these animals use that spread out and interweave with each other. So it’s very apparent that the different species within a soundscape like the Okavango have learned how to listen, not only to each other, but a certain sensitivity to where they fit in within the environment. And, you know, in some cases, they might not be able to even hear each other, because of the physiology of their hearing, or in other cases, they might be paying specific attention to noises outside of their frequency band, because that’s a different type of relationship, maybe a threat or potential lunch.
[CRIS]
That’ll be the mammals at the bottom.
[BRIAN]
But within their own frequency band, that’s a very social relationship. Those are mating calls, are territorial calls, this kind of organization within a society. So sound in that context becomes a very direct way to think about social relationships through rhythm, and we can learn about how these things inform themselves.
[CRIS]
Hang on a minute, Mack. Brian is talking about pitch, but I thought we were talking about rhythm.
[MACK]
Yeah, I had that same reaction, too, but he’s reminding us that pitch is rhythm, that frequency is a micro-rhythm that just moves so quickly that we perceive it as pitch.
[BRIAN]
One way to think about it is that this is all just movement. It’s movement at different speeds. Music, for instance, is audible human motion. That’s an interesting way to think about it because the different speeds of the human body show up in the way that we organize musical time. For instance, the main pulse of a song, the beat –
[a metronome starts]
That’s a heartbeat rhythm. Or it’s a walking rhythm –
[a scale on a piano is played]
Those two things together reflect the energy of the piece. But of course –
[the scale continues, this time twice as fast and in three octaves]
There’s faster sounds that happen in that, the notes flying by, that’s at the speed we move our fingers. It’s a different type of rhythm because it references a different part of our physiology.
[the scale continues, even faster]
And the tone is something that does correspond to the voice, this idea of timbre, something that vibrates on a level that we hear as the quality of the sound or even the pitch of the sound that vibrates our eardrum.
[the scales stop; the metronome fades out]
[electronic music starts; it sounds like what you might hear fighting a boss in an 8-bit video game]
[a distorted, computerized voice that fits the quality of the music fades in; he reveals himself to be MULLOCK]
Hey, what’s up guys, it’s Mullock, the Dark God of Information Capitalism. Mullock, whose eyes are a thousand blind windows. Mullock, whose soul is electricity – and banks! Just takin’ a quick break to remind you guys to rate Phantom Power on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, and even better, write a review of the show! That’s what we in the industry call “engagement,” and it lets Apple know that this podcast rocks! Today we wanna give a big ol’ shoutout to Steph Cerasko, who wrote an iTunes review called Sound Nerds Unite! “Really thoughtful and provocative,” she writes. “Great podcast for sound nerds.” HA HA HA HA HA. Thanks, Steph! So remember, do Cris and Mack a solid and leave a review. Who knows? Maybe you’ll get a shoutout from yours truly, Mullock, the Dark God of Information Capitalism! Now back to the show!
[music fades out]
[MACK]
So, it’s all about relationships between bodies, then. It’s all these temporal relationships between different parts of our bodies and our bodies connecting with one another temporally through sound.
[CRIS]
Yeah, and there’s a similar idea in dance, which is that when you try to stand still, there are multiple small dances going on within the standing still body.
[MACK]
Hmm. That’s really nice. And I think finally we can bring this back to the rats.
[CRIS]
Bring the rats back, Mack.
[clanging noises sound intermittently; the rat noises from earlier very slowly fade back in]
[BRIAN]
So I guess the rhythms that I’m particularly interested in are those that happen on a scale that are outside of the motion of our human body, they’re either faster or slower, and so we don’t typically experience them as sound or music. But through electronic technology or some other strategy, we can scale those things so that they can make sense – I mean literally make sense to our bodies – and we can feel as music or sound something that would normally be operating on a different level, on a different frequency strata, so to speak, just like the Niche Hypothesis of Bernie Krause. And, this is what got me interested in rats – well, that’s a little bit of a lie, I’ve always been interested in rats, for multiple different reasons. Rats are fascinating because they’re an animal, they are a wild animal, but they live entirely within human urban areas. We’re talking about the Norwegian rat or the brown rat here, which spread via capitalism to every major metropolitan city around the world. Rats have adapted to living among us in a really remarkable way. And this idea that there’s a human/nature divide, that nature is somehow elsewhere, and that a city, a human city, the center of human culture, is quintessentially non-nature. Rats burrow through that all the time. They make it very clear that we have our own animal nature and that nature is a process that’s continually happening.
[CRIS]
This is a very different idea of a city, too.
[MACK]
Yeah, this whole idea he’s opening up that the city is actually a natural space and this natural and cultural divide that we’ve made, these boundaries we’ve set up, the rats have no respect for whatsoever, and in fact all of our efforts to be “civilized humans” have just produced this environment for the rats to burrow through.
[clanging noise]
[BRIAN]
I was particularly excited about rats when I learned that the social vocalizations that they make are largely above the human range of hearing. So we all know what a rat “sounds” like, quote unquote, in terms of squeaks or high-pitched growls, or something –
[normal rat noises fade in as he speaks of them]
But these kinds of awful rat noises, we associate with fear, or anger, or these kinds of emotions that we attach to rats – and that’s what they are, that’s what’s being expressed in the squeaks that we can hear. But what’s going on above what we can hear is all the fun stuff.
[upbeat electronic music fades in that includes the altered rat noises from before; it fades to the background as he speaks]
All the social interactions, the playful interactions, the mating, when young rats are playing, when rats are courting each other, when they’re establishing their social hierarchies, all of this is happening outside of our range of hearing.
[CRIS]
So, this is fabulous, and I can’t help thinking about all of the other species’ communication that we’re not hearing. Some of it is to do with pitch, as in that Niche Hypothesis idea, and some of this is to do with volume. And location.
[MACK]
Yeah. The rats are, by design, rather imperceptible to us. We don’t perceive the rats very easily, and, interestingly enough, they don’t perceive us.
[BRIAN]
The range that it can hear presumably covers its entire vocal range, so up to in the 90 kilohertz range. The lower range, of course, is dictated to some extent by the size of its body.
[fade in chatter of a human crowd]
And a rat can actually not hear the fundamental frequencies of the human voice.
[a sliding noise takes out the human voices until nothing but silence remains; a pause]
The overtones of our voices do transmit something, but the fundamental frequency is still below the rat’s range of hearing. If you really wanted to talk to a rat, doing so with the human voice is not ideal. It’s a subsonic frequency to them.
[a sliding noise brings back up the loud chatter of the human crowd from before; funky electronic music fades in as the chatter fades out]
[MACK]
So, I just find this so fascinating, Cris, that we have this sort of symbiotic relationship with these creatures, but we can’t directly communicate with them through the voice, that we live in these sort of parallel universes or niches.
[CRIS]
Yeah, absolutely. When Brian was talking about the hearing range of the rat there, it immediately made me say to myself, “well, what’s the hearing range of the human?” We’re 20 to 20,000 Hertz. This is way lower than that rat range. Dolphins and bats, for example, can hear frequencies up to 100,000 Hertz, higher than the rats, even. And elephants are even lower than we are. So, there’s something there to do with mass and frequency that I think is of interest, too.
[MACK]
Yeah, it’s the embodiedness of our perception. It’s very based on the instrument that we are.
And what makes this very interesting from an artistic point of view, for Brian, is, our tools are designed to record frequencies that humans can hear.
[CRIS]
That’s right.
[MACK]
So when Brian did decide that he wanted to create this artwork of recording the voices of rats, he had to find special, ultrasonic microphones that could record those frequencies. And, of course, it’s really only because digital technologies operate at such high frequency rates now that these sounds can even be recorded at all.
[BRIAN]
I realized that it might be possible to build something that would let me record rats in their burrows in New York City – under the sidewalk, in the parks, in the trash dumps, whatever – if I could leave a microphone there for a long period of time, and let them habituate to it, maybe I would pick up some of the social interactions that were happening when I wasn’t around, and listen in on how they were talking.
[CRIS]
Yeah, and it makes me wonder, when people say that they’re making a field recording, what they’re actually catching, and were they to put them through a similar process of modification, they would hear other sounds that they didn’t realize were part of that field of audition, or that horizon of listening.
[slowly begin fading out music]
[MACK]
And this raises the point of just the technical issue that he faced of down-pitching the rats voices into a perceptible bandwidth for human beings. So, maybe we should –
[CRIS]
Let’s hear some.
[MACK]
Yeah, let’s hear how he did that.
[CRIS]
More rats.
[MACK, laughing]
More rats, please.
[rat noises start; they are of various pitches and lengths, sounding like sliding noises up and down]
[rat noises stop]
[BRIAN]
Yeah, so I did this project called Urban Intonation, which was just taking these rat recordings that I’d been making in the ultrasonic range and changing the frequencies of the rat voices in those recordings to a range that we could hear, that we could experience.
[rat noises again for several seconds]
And, whenever you change the frequency of something, that’s an act of interpretation. You’re changing the pitch in a mathematical sense, but you’re also changing how it’s situated in the world, what it resonates with, all kinds of other things shift. So, I aimed to make it as close as possible to human speech. Close as possible meaning, putting it in the range of human speech, and also making it a little bit slower temporally. Rats speak very high and they also speak very fast, so I slowed it down a bit, and lowered the pitch, so that we would hear it as speech, hear it closer to something that we would understand as a social relation.
[rat noises again, fading to the background as Brian speaks]
And they sing. They sing and hum and make these sounds that are uninterpretable by us, but clearly have a social meaning to them.
[a pause for rat noises to continue, this time sounding more like a song; they again fade to the background as Brian speaks]
It’s not an “other” creature that is “too low” or “too high” or “too other,” it’s coming at us as speech would come at us. But when you listen to those sounds, they really are uncanny in this way, because you hear aspects of personality, you hear these things that sound human, but of course there’s a kind of fundamental “unhumanness” to it. In terms of how to present the piece, then, I used PA speakers – something that’s making announcements, that is addressing the public, that’s making a particular type of public space through that address. So, why not put the rat voices… why not present them like that, right? [he laughs] Because that’s a totally different relationship. It’s positioning the animal not as a subservient position to our idea of public space, but as the kind of authoritative voice.
[clanging noises; instrumental music fades in]
[MACK]
So, one of the interesting final pieces of this for me, was that, when he was recording the rats, and getting at the frequencies where they live and communicate, so to speak, he found that there were very few human sounds in that space.
[BRIAN]
Well, so the first thing that struck me when recording ultrasonically in New York City is that, even though this is a noisy city – there’s all kinds of things happening, there’s people talking, there’s busses going by, the occasional bird, the radio, whatever it is – all of that, or at least most of that, happens within our hearing range.
[city sounds fade in, including loud automobiles]
So, its below 20 kilohertz that the noise of the city is really present. Once you get into the ultrasonic range –
[a sliding noise as the city fades out into a low whooshing noise]
that goes away. You hear the occasional eerie squeal of certain mechanical sounds or certain electric devices that are making noise up there, but for the most part, there’s a lot more space. So, part of their adaption to living among us is that they’re able to hear and they’re able to speak in a range that isn’t interfered with by all the noise that we’re making. I find that really interesting because, what is it about our species that we make noise within the range that we can hear?
[the city noises fade back up, almost drowning out Brian]
Thus making it more difficult for us to hear ourselves.
[electronic music fades back in as the city noises fade out]
[CRIS]
And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Thanks again to Brian House. You can learn more about Phantom Power and find transcripts and links to some of the things we’ve talked about at phantompod.org. You can subscribe to our show there or wherever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you rated us on Apple Podcasts, that helps a lot. Tell us what you thought about the show on Facebook, or give us a shout on Twitter @phantompod. Today’s show featured music by Brian House, Graham Gibson, and Daniel Fishkin’s Daxophone Quartet. We want to bring up our interns, Natalie Cooper, Nicole Keshock, and Adam Witmer – welcome aboard. [to himself] Oh, no, I can’t say “welcome aboard,” that’s a terrible thing to say… [returning] Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 2: City of Voices (Shannon Mattern)
Mar 26, 2018
This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s Shannon Mattern. We have teamed up with Mediapolis, a journal that places urban studies and media studies into conversation with one another, to interview Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media(U of Minnesota Press: 2018).
And lucky for us on Phantom Power, a large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves to Roman amphitheaters to telephone wires and radio towers—she shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and affective, as well as informatic. Before there was the smart city, there was the sonic city—and the sonic city isn’t going anywhere soon.
Shannon Mattern: When we reduce the city to a computer, we think that everything can be ‘datified,’ everything can be fed through an algorithm. There are actually a lot of really important dimensions, human dimensions in particular, historical dimensions, things that resist ‘datification,’ that don’t really fit into that model. So, there’s a lot about a city that sort of leaks through those algorithms, that isn’t captured when you equate the entire city with a computational machine.
Mack Hagood: That’s Shannon Mattern, an associate professor of media studies at The New School in New York City. Thanks for joining us on Phantom Power, a podcast about the sonic arts and humanities. I’m Mack Hagood, flying solo this episode. cris cheek will be back for episode three. Last year we put this episode online as a preview of the series. So, for the couple hundred of you who listened to it, give it another listen. There’s a lot going on. Or just check us out again in two weeks, when we’ll talk to sound artist Brian House. But for everyone else, this episode, we talk with Shannon Mattern about her new book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. A large portion of Mattern’s story is about sound, from the echoes of ancient caves,
[echoes]
to Roman ampitheaters,
[chanting]
to telephone wires and radio towers.
[pre-recorded radio broadcast]
She shows us how sonic infrastructures allow us to communicate and form communities, cultivating forms of intelligence that are embodied and effective, as well as informatic. Before there was the Smart City, there was the ‘sonic city,’ and the sonic city isn’t going anywhere soon.
[♪ bell music ♪]
If you spend any time looking at architecture or design blogs, or reading tech websites or watching TedTalks, you’ve probably encountered a couple of truisms about how human beings will live in the future. The future is urban, and the future is ‘smart.’
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: Half of the population of the world’s actually live in cities.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities covering less than 2% of the earth’s surface
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: But cities also give off a lot of challenges.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: Never have cities been so challenged.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: Well, many cities are starting to adopt ‘smart technology.’
[♪ upbeat music ♪]
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: Public transportation, IT connectivity, water and power supplies, sanitation and solid waste management, efficient urban mobility, governments, and citizen participation, and it does this using every buzzword imaginable!
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice 2: Such as the Internet of things.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: The Internet of things?
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: The Internet of things.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice 2: An artificial intelligence.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: And harnessing the power of data.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: From Big Data –
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice 2: For a multifaceted solution – the smart city.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Male Voice: Smart City.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice 2: The Smart City.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: The smart City.
Pre-recorded Unidentified Female Voice: Everyone talks about being ‘smart.’
[ethereal bell music]
Mack: Despite the recent hype, the Smart City has been beta testing since the second half of the twentieth century.
[♪ fade music ♪]
Shannon: After World War II, for instance, there were quite a few organizations and research groups, and kind of corporations who tried to sell their services and technologies because the War Department didn’t need them anymore – the government, the federal government, that is – to cities. So, companies like Rand and various government agencies used their computer power and their data-based methodologies to try and address urban issues
Mack: Mattern thinks we should approach this so-called ‘Smart City’ with caution, and unearth the history, ideas, and assumptions that form its infrastructure, just as much as its servers, routers, and fiber-optic cable. And in her new book, she does a kind of urban media archaeology, digging through the strata of media technologies that have always made cities ‘smart.’
Shannon: Today, with the ubiquity of computing, and particularly with the presence of computing devices in everybody’s pockets and bags, the ‘computer as’ is a metaphor that tends to be kind of universally applied. And we often use the computer, as a metaphor to think about how cities work. And that’s not just a metaphor, actually – we are incorporating a lot of computing power, a lot of sensor technologies, a lot of algorithms, a lot of central control rooms to really regulate and monitor, urban services and flows. But when we reduce the city to a computer, we think that everything can be ‘datified,’ everything can be fed through an algorithm. There are actually a lot of really important dimensions that don’t really fit into that model. Again, there are lots of historical, embodied, and also non-human types of things. These are all our co-inhabitants in urban environments, too. So, these are the things that sometimes leak outside of those algorithmic models.
Mack: And so, your book really intervenes in this misperception that intelligence equals informatics, right? There’s a passage where you write, ‘yesterday’s cities, even our earliest settlements, were just as smart, although theirs was an intelligence less computational and more material and environmental.’ Can you talk about that?
Shannon: Sure. So, when I’m mentioning that cities have always been intelligent, but that the historical forms of intelligence have been perhaps more material or environmental than they are computational, I’m arguing that forms of knowledge, even forms of the kinds of things that a computer does today, things like accountancy, administration, that those things have always been performed in cities – in fact, the whole need to account for things, to keep ledgers of things, was something that arose, some historians and archaeologists and anthropologists argue, with the rise of large-scale human settlements. So, things like computation, logistics, management of resources, again have always been inherently urban operations and necessities, but they’ve been taken, they’ve taken place often through more material media – things like clay tablets, bullae, which were kind of the clay tokens that some theorists including Denise Schmidt argues preceded a lot of writing systems. So, these, these forms, these historical forms of intelligence were always there, it’s just that they were registered and processed, if you want to use kind of contemporary computational metaphors, of media that were more analog than digital. Even the urban environment itself, the facades of buildings, the grid of the street, these forms, these types of things, the environment itself, has served as a conduit and a register of a lot of this form, this type of intelligence.
Mack: Yeah, and you used the word, ‘logistical,’ which reminds me of John Durham Peters’ recent book, The Marvelous Clouds, right, he mentions that our digital new media sort of foregrounds the logistical role of media once again. So, for our field of media studies, it arose during the broadcast era, trying to study radio, film, and TV, but these might really be a sort of deviation in terms of media, right? Or the essential quality of media for somebody like Peters is not sort of the, the sort of transmission of or broadcast of representational information, but its more about managing our relationship to time and space and power.
Shannon: Absolutely. And if you look again, a lot of historical media, which were prevalent in cities all throughout history, they serve that purpose. So, you had, and this might be kind of a liberal definition of what constitutes media, but this comes from kind of my training in media studies from graduate school, is taking a kind of a McLuhen-esque, informed by his own mentor Innis, and really being pretty capacious in determining what fits within the ‘basket’ of media, so if you look at statuary, at architecture itself, at inscriptions on buildings – which again stretch our perception of what we might consider as media technologies today – these were all helping to shape people’s experiences, interactions, sync people up with time and space, which is again that much kind of more fundamental understanding of what function logistics serves.
[♪ ethereal bell music ♪]
Mack: As a student of media ecologist Neil Postman at NYU, Shannon Mattern took her place in the intellectual lineage of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, and others who consider media and mediation as integral parts of the lived environment. When in the late oughts she encountered the emergent field of media archaeology, it gave her a new way to frame her already ongoing studies of media cities. Media archaeology is a field that attempts to understand new and emerging media by examining old and often dead media technologies. Mattern takes inspiration from the field, but notes that most of its ‘digging in the past’ is metaphorical. ‘What if we took media archaeology literally,’ she writes, ‘and borrowed a few tricks from archaeologists of the stones and bones variety?’ Her book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, pushes us in that direction. Each chapter moves us farther back in time, in an examination of old urban media infrastructures, starting with the sonic technologies of the telegraph and radio, then moving to the urban emplacement of the printing press, followed by an examination of the earliest surfaces for writing, clay and stone; and finally, perhaps the oldest medium of them all, the human voice. Each of these media reorganized the city around itself, and each of them is still with us today, as past and future media mingle in the present.
[♪ fade out music ♪]
One of Marshall McLuhan’s more famous ideas, which I think he sort of cribbed from his student Walter J. Ong is that voice communication is this more primitive yet holistic form of communication and he associate, tends to associate it with tribes and villages and that sort of thing. And then we get this more rational yet alienated print culture that I would assume would allow us to build complex things like cities, but one of the things I really liked about your book is that it doesn’t have these sort of clear-cut stages, and in fact it gives us a way to think about the city as a sonic development, and in many ways, to think of a city as a space made for voices.
Shannon: Right, so, while McLuhan and Innis and Ong have been influential in kind of my foundational study, I think there’s been a lot of thinking and scholarship in the years since they did their work that still values the contributions they made, particularly their very liberal interpretation of what constitutes a medium, their idea that media shape environments, Innis’s idea that even infrastructures and staple goods constitute communications media. So, there’s a lot of value in their work, but at the same time, I think scholars have really questioned this idea that history precedes in various, not necessarily ‘clear-cut,’ but defined revolutions. So, we’ve kind of realized, since these foundational thinkers did their work, that history didn’t really happen the kind of periodic way that they presented it. So, when we think about our urban histories, and how those have been intertwined with our media and communications histories, we also have to recognize that traces, and not necessarily historical ruins but also living, still vibrant, existences of these quote-unquote ‘old media’ are still present in our contemporary cities.
Mack: Yeah, I really like this word you used of ‘traces,’ and, it makes me think of the sound scholar Patrick Feaster?
Shannon: Whom I do not know, I’m afraid.
Mack: Okay. So, so he’s a really interesting person, and somebody who I think of as a very literal media archaeologist. So in his, in his terminology, he educes, the information in old media objects. So, so Feaster is best known for digitally educing sound from the phonotograph –
Shannon: Huh.
Mack: – which was that 19th century stylus that traced soundwaves onto sort of scratchy lines of paper.
Shannon: Uh-huh.
Mack: And he figured out, with his partners, a way to, digitize that sound and actually turn it into sound, educe sound from this thing that was just supposed to be a visual tracing of sound waves.
[scratchy sounds from phonotograph fade in]
And then he moved on to do things like use this technique on medieval musical notation, drawing sound out of these pieces of paper.
Shannon: Hm.
Mack: And, once he said to me – and I think he was half-joking [laughter] – that he would like to educe acoustic events that had sort of registered themselves on clay walls millennia ago. But I think this word ‘eduction’ is a good word for the kind of work you’re doing in this book, because we can’t reproduce the sounds of the past, but we can treat the city as a historical medium in itself and try to coax these remnants of forgotten sounds from that medium.
Shannon: So, I appreciate that very much. And yes, I like this idea of ‘eduction,’ which isn’t really a word that I used in the book, but now that you’ve mentioned it, it really does resonate very nicely. And I think that plays out that methodology kind of, unintentionally on my part, kind of plays out a few places in the book. Sonic media are one particular, kind of I guess you could call it ‘class of media,’ that make it, make historic study kind of difficult, especially when you’re looking past the beyond, or preceding the time before recorded sound. How do you know what a space sounded like before you had recordings that you could play back on machines today? This is something that sonic historians, the rise of the whole field of sensory history over the past 15 or so years, they have been addressing these methodological issues, particularly the problematics of doing things like recreations or re-staging, because our contemporary ears that are so, ruined by earbuds and the contemporary use of autotune, et cetera, the way we’re trained to hear today, we just couldn’t possibly imagine the cultural, class, racial, historically defined ways that people heard in these preceding eras. But, there is still something to be learned by thinking about our historical environments, not just as visual and material spaces. We don’t necessarily have to be limited by the senses that our, existing historical records leave for us. Even images, tracings in the walls, ruins – archaeological ruins, for instance, still offer, again, traces or echoes of what they might have sounded, how they might have reverberated or resonated in the past. So, Emily Thompson wrote a really foundational book in 2002, goodness, Soundscape of Modernity, where she really has to use things like photographs, catalogues of acoustic materials, textbooks from the, kind of the rising field of architectural acoustics, to piece together what these new, modernist architectures sounded like. You also have then the field of archaeology, I would say maybe a marginalized but still present community of people who are practicing archaeo-acoustics who are using somewhat speculative methods, still adopting a lot of the media technologies, so there’s a lot of intersection of what we do in media studies in this field of archae-acoustics, to try to imagine how certain rituals or everyday practices might have functioned as sonic practices in historical or ancient environments. So, testing reverberation patterns, seeing how particular hallways or subterranean spaces might’ve lent themselves to particular types of acoustic or verbal events or performances, and again this is speculative, but still it opens up a richer, more multisensorial, more performative form of history, and, allows us to recognize kind of different, different types of embodied history, I guess you could say.
Mack: Yeah, there’s a really lovely episode of David Hendy’s BBC radio series Noise: A Human History –
Shannon: Yes, uh-huh.
Mack: – with the French scholar Iégor Reznikoff, who, you also mention in your book.
Shannon: Mm-hmm.
[clip from Noise: A Human History]
David Hendy: Iégor Reznikoff is one of several archaeologists who’ve tried an intriguing experiment. Moving slowly, and in total darkness along the narrower passages in caves –
[Iégor Reznikoff vocalizing in the background]
Like Arcy-Sur-Cure they’ve used their voices as a kind of sonar, sending out a pulse of sound, then listening out for any unusually resonant response.
[end clip]
Mack: He is sort of moving through these caves in France, using his voice to sort of sound out the spaces, and then when he encounters particularly resonant spaces, he’ll turn on his flashlight and quite often, that’s where the cave art will be located, not in a space that would be the most obvious visually, and in fact often the cave art is in a pretty inaccessible and strange space from a visual perspective, but from a sonic perspective, it’s a place where the cave speaks back to you.
[another clip from Noise: A Human History]
[Iégor Reznikoff vocalizing]
David Hendy: We’re near the bottom of the main hall, where each sound might provoke up to seven echoes, and, looking around, we can see several mammoths, some bears, a rhinoceros or two, some fish, some sort of big cat, and on the floor, the delicate outlines of a bird.
[end clip]
Shannon: Right, absolutely. To understand how some of our oldest media, including things like cave paintings, worked, we have to realize that they were very much embodied, performative experiences. They were kind of training rituals, for people to learn the hunt, essentially. The resonance of the space was combining with the flickering light which made the cave paintings supposedly look like they were dancing – not dancing, but moving, which really kind of reinforced the power of those experiences, of seeing the bison running, hearing their footsteps, and kind of psyching yourself up to go out for the hunt.
Mack: And so this perspective allows us to start thinking about the city as an outgrowth of that, right? That there’s a sort of embodied and affective intelligence and communication that evolves in and through the city and that throughout time we have actually developed spaces for verbal and oral communication, as you argue. So, Walter Ong thought of Ancient Greece as the site where the transition form orality to literacy happened, but you show in your book that the oral rhetoric and the Ancient City were sort of a co-production, right? Like, they literally shaped one another. Oral rhetoric and the space of the Roman City, for example, were shaped for and by one another.
Shannon: Right, so if you look at Classical, philosophy, you look at the work of kind of early architects, before they were officially architects, the work of Vitruvius, for instance. You can see that acoustics was an integral part of not only the way a city should be designed but also of even these idealistic visions or imaginations of what a just, ideal city would be. So, the city is a space of discourse. The voice is an integral thing that has to be essentially planned for when we are organizing our cities. The idea that a city shouldn’t be so big that you can’t hear the voice of a herald standing in the center of the city calling out to everybody. You need something that’s going to unite everybody within an acoustic environment. So there are a lot of these principles that shaped ideals for the city and actual plans. You can look at things like the way an amphitheater was designed, for instance, or the way certain kind of meeting spaces in Ancient Greece and Rome were designed, kind of legislative spaces. There were definite acoustic principles that were shaping the materialization of those sites.
Mack: You use this wonderful term, I don’t know if this comes from Carolyn Birdsall’s book Nazi Soundscapes or not, but you talk about this ‘affirmative resonance,’ right, the way that sound in a collective space can sort of interpolate us as subjects or group members.
Shannon: Right. I do think that is Carolyn Birdsall’s term in regard to Nazi Soundscapes, but you can see that principle applying elsewhere too. You can see it today in protest movements around the world.
[rhythmic clattering sounds fade in]
In, the sound politics of making noise among marginalized populations, the fact that they’re kind of claiming their right to space by creating an acoustic envelope for it. So, these are still examples of this principle of affirmative resonance. It’s enclosing people who are within the earshot as being within a community of some sort.
[clattering fades]
Mack: I can’t help but think about Trump rallies when I’m, uh…
[both laugh]
I mean, Trump is sort of a master architect of effective spaces –
[fade in an unintelligible Trump speaking through a megaphone, crowd cheering]
[fade out clip]
– Trump is a sort of architect of effective spaces, and sound is a big part of what he does.
Shannon: Yeah, so I guess you could say that the idea of affirmative resonance does not necessarily suit one particular political orientation over another, it’s not an inherently democratizing, progressive type of thing, it’s not necessarily for radical protest, for instance; it is a method, I guess you could say a socialization method, for lack of a better phrase, that could serve multiple political purposes and end goals.
Mack: Yeah, I think that’s very important, because we get excited about things like The People’s Microphone in Zucotti Park, and, I mean, that’s very wonderful, but these resonances can have all kinds of effects, and it’s definitely not only progressive, for sure.
Shannon: Right. The Third Reich used that principle very well too, just as the liberation movements in the Middle East around 2011, and, as you mentioned, Zucotti Park, so, yes, it operates for multiple ideologies.
[♪ ethereal music and radio interference fading in, a man’s voice ♪]
Mack: But I also want to talk about the radio stuff.
Shannon: Okay.
Mack: In chapter one, you focus on radio as what you call an ‘ethereal medium,’ so, it’s a medium that almost supernaturally affects the atmosphere of a city with sounds and voices that are carried on electromagnetic waves, but at the same time, it’s also a heavily material system. As you mentioned, there are wires and tubes and transmitters and switches. So, maybe we could say that this chapter is about radio as a force that reshaped the city both materially and immaterially?
[ ♪ fade in song “Mr. Radio Man” broadcast over a radio]
Shannon: Yeah, absolutely.
[♪ music continues to play ♪]
Sound, we could say, is a medium without a body. It doesn’t really have a material instantiation in the same way that a printed book does, or a carved clay tablet, for instance. So, it is ethereal, in that way, and particularly if you look at some of the early writing about radio when it first came into existence, it kind of was, there was a lot of spiritualized language surrounding it. It was very much connected to kind of the rise of spiritualism, with some of its wired predecessors, the telegraph and the telephone as well.
[song becomes clear. ♪ Mr. Radio Man, tell my mama to come back home, won’t you do what you can, `cos I’m so lonely, I’ve been listening here every day, since she went away, but no word from Heaven’s been heard, can’t the angels hear me pray, when the sandman is nigh ♪]
[♪ music fades ♪]
But, these seemingly ethereal media do have, as you said, a lot of very material kind of effects on the landscape. And this is something that sounds like a new revelation in the Data Age, and the past few years a lot of theorists and artists and designers have talked about, surprise, the Internet is a place, you know, it actually has a material existence, it lives in data centers and cables and satellites, et cetera, and that was very important for us to recognize because it helps us to realize the uneven distribution of connectivity, it helps us to recognize there’s a political economy and ownership structures, to see the Internet as a thing with a geography that shapes space and is shaped by geography, which I think is a very kind of important revelation for us in the Digital Age, to think critically about these seemingly placeless ethereal media. A similar thing was happening in kind of the radio and telegraph and telephone age – these things that were kind of discussed in this romantic, often spiritual language, had a very physical, architectural impact on the landscape. Again, laying cable, building new architectures, new purpose-built buildings, the rise to new in some cases beautiful antennae that inspired a lot of aesthetic movements at the time, so their traces were very physically present in the landscape, too.
[♪ fade in ethereal music and radio interference ♪]
Mack: And this is where we come full circle. Because, you know that ethereal magic we all love today – WiFi, and LTE? Yes, that invisible connection that allows us to text our friends and control our thermostats from afar, and imagine our data as sending into the Cloud just like the angels – that’s radio too. Both the hardware and the spiritualism of the Smart City show evidence of radio’s material and ethereal influence.
[fade in clicking computer processing sounds]
Shannon: And also today, with the rise of Smart Cities and the Internet of things, is the fact that we have these devices that are talking to each other all throughout our cities, supposedly making life much more efficient and allowing us to monitor things like air quality and traffic, et cetera, we’re still relying on radio technologies and a lot of line of sight communication to make that happen. So, radio might be used by different devices, but radio, kind of the whole world of radio technology, is still super present in our cities today.
Mack: Shannon Mattern, talking about her book, Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, out on Minnesota Press, and this episode was written, edited, and musically scored by me, Mack Hagood. Special thanks to Shannon Mattern and special thanks to Orfeas Skutelis at The New School for his engineering assistance. This episode was produced in conjunction with Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture. Mediapolis is edited by Brendon Kredell and Erica Stein. The reviews editor, who suggested today’s interview, is Noelle Griffis. You can get lots more great content on media and cities at mediapolisjournal.com. Phantom Power is produced by me and my cohost, the poet and media artist cris cheek, and you can get more information at phantompod.org. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ep. 1: Dead Air (John Biguenet and Rodrigo Toscano)
Mar 12, 2018
On our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible.
We begin with author John Biguenetdiscussing his book Silence (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the relationship between quietude, reading, writing, and the self.
Next, we speak to poet and hurricane responder Rodrigo Toscano, who takes us into the foreboding silence in eye of a storm.
Finally, our own co-host and poet cris cheek ponders the many contradictory experiences of “dead air” in an age of changing media technologies.
Today’s episode features music by our own Mack Hagood and by Graeme Gibson, who is currently touring on drums with Michael Nau and the Mighty Thread.
Transcript
[♪ ethereal music playing ♪]
[CRIS CHEEK]
This… is… Phantom Power.
[MACK HAGOOD]
Episode One.
[CRIS]
Dead Air.
[RODRIGO TOSCANO]
You know, silence…
[JOHN BIGUENET]
It’s like, uh, it’s like a vacuum… like a walkie-talkie, where you’ve gotta press the button to speak and let it go to hear.
[CRIS]
The signal drops out.
[MACK]
Hello, and thanks for joining us on Phantom Power, podcast about sound in the arts and humanities. Over the next six or seven episodes this season, we’ll be investigating how artists and scholars are thinking about sound, writing about sound, and using sound to make things. My name’s Mack Hagood, I’m a media scholar, a writer, and a musician.
[CRIS]
I’m cris cheek, I’m a poet. Sometimes a sound poet, sometimes an unsound poet. I’ve also done a lot of work with music over the years. And I’m gonna be learning a lot as we make this series in terms of thinking about listening and talking together. Sounds about sound.
[MACK]
And I don’t, I don’t know if this is ironic or fitting, but we’re starting off this first episode talking about silence. So today we sort of have a three parter. We’re thinking about the roles of silence, uh, in reading and writing, and we’re going to think about the dead air in the eye of a hurricane, this kind of silence that prestiges something terrible. And, um, then we’re going to think about silence as a disruption. You know, an interruption of your regularly scheduled broadcast, or what they call
[CRIS]
Dead air.
[MACK]
[laughing]
So, cris, a long, long time ago, I was a 19 year old college student in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Loyola University. And I just took this, you know, intro English class with this professor named John Biguenet and he just made a huge impression on me, really started making me think in different ways. And then I went on with my life, and it turned out that this gentleman John Biguenet turned into a well known fiction writer, poet, playwright, um, he has written a collection of short stories called The Torturer’s Apprentice, which is just this sort of spellbinding collection that is a little bit Chekov, a little bit Kafka, a little bit Borges. Um, he’s won the O’Henry Award for Short Fiction, uh, he’s won a Harper’s Magazine Writing Award. He wrote this trilogy of plays about Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans. And now he’s written a book on silence, uh, for this series of short books that have titles like Bread, or, uh, Golf Ball. [laughing] So, just kind of thinking deeply about these quotidian objects in our everyday lives and John chose silence. I read it, it’s a terrific short book, I highly recommend it. And so the last time I was down in New Orleans, I went to his office and we had a terrific conversation.
[♪ record crackles, loud bells chiming ♪]
[JOHN]
We may conjecture that somewhere in the cosmos, beyond the border of all human trace, a zone of silence awaits.
[♪ bells chime again ♪]
Always receding, of course, before the advance of future explorers. A great sea of stillness unperturbed by the animate. An utterly quiet virgin territory. Our imagination misleads us if we conceive of silence as a destination at which we might arrive. Similarly, in a less poetic vein, if we assume that silence is merely the absence of soundwaves, or more precisely the absence of a medium capable of transmitting sound waves, though we are correct, we miss a larger point. Silence is a measure of human limitation.
[record crackling]
I began to be involved in this book, um, when I was approached, um, by Ian Bogost and Chris Shayburg, who are the co-editors of the Object Listens series for Bloombury. Uh, they gave me my choice of subjects and I chose silence.
[papers crinkle]
It didn’t occur to me at the time that it was an unusual choice, um, for a book of um… that is supposed to focus on objects, because as a writer I spend so much of my day in silence either reading or writing that, um, it’s the most common object in my life in fact.
[footsteps and pant legs swishing]
Uh, it’s the farthest corner of my house.
[door opens, footsteps]
Um, the one where I can control the sound, um, we just say the one in which there is no sound.
[door closing]
It’s, uh, it’s more of a nest than an office.
[papers swishing, low murmuring, typing]
I’m surrounded by the notes and photographs and maps and all the kind of information that a writer needs to tell a story, and since I most often am writing fiction, inventing where I go, um, the reality that’s grounded in those documents I find very helpful. But for the most part the one thing that I really need is silence, and a cup of black coffee to be able to write.
[♪ ethereal music fades up, low whispers overlay each other, and fades slightly down ♪]
Silent reading is a contradiction in terms, um, as I began to understand, the deeper I got into my study of silence. Because, um, a book is not intended to be a monologue but a conversation. We – It’s a lot like a walkie-talkie, where you’ve gotta press the button to speak and let it go to hear. We suppress our own consciousness for a moment, and read a few paragraphs, and then we stop reading and look up and ask ourselves, ‘do I agree with that? Does that make sense? Is it accurate? Is it true?” And once we’ve made a judgement about that, we return to that other consciousness which is manifest in the words of the book, um, and, um, or for a sort of hospitality, um, to another mind, um, we internalize it, and then, once again, we stop, freeze things, and judge it, and decide, “is this true? Is this a representation that I can embrace?” And then we continue reading. So reading for me seems to be a movement back and forth between my mind and someone else’s mind.
[Singing, whispering, ominous music]
In fact, I told a story recently, um, and I was asked at the end of an interview about that story what books would I suggest that Donald Trump should read. And I said, “the real question is not what should he read but why can’t he read.” And I think the reason he can’t read is he is such an extreme narcissist that he can’t admit anyone else into his consciousness. He fills himself. And so, because he can’t escape himself, understandably he is furious all the time. The fact that he can’t read a book, that he can’t read anything, all he can do is watch television about which he is the subject. Uh, suggest that someone without the capacity to admit another’s consciousness is incapable of reading.
[music and sounds fade]
[CRIS]
So, um, uh, listening with great interest to John talking there, Mack, and I think he’s asking at least one very provocative question. And the first one is, “can we really think of silence as an object?” in the terms that he lays out and I have to admit I don’t feel I have an adequate response. I just find it a provocative question.
[MACK]
Yeah, I’m-I’m probably not an object fan or someone who would really think about silence in terms of being an object myself. Um, especially because I feel like this relationship he’s talking about between a writer and a reader is really suggestive that silence is a kind of relationship.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
And I’m really fascinated by this, this idea that silent reading is this kind of contradiction of terms.
[CRIS]
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I think about is the other voices we hear inside our heads when we’re reading. It might be the voice of the author, but it also might be our own voice interpreting the voice of the author. I agree that reading is a conversation.
[MACK]
Yeah, but I really like that though because, you know, again, there’s this relationship going on, right? There’s this dynamic. So you’re in a quiet space where the inner voice can emerge and then you do this kind of silent reading where, you know, some kind of co-production between your own interior voice and the voice of the author happens. Or perhaps it’s this walkie-talkie two-way relationship that’s happening, um, although that seems a little bit sort of sender-receiver? Right?
[CRIS]
Right, it does, yeah
[MACK]
Like there’s just this pure message that sort of travels between the author and the reader which maybe I’m a little bit unsure of. But I still, nevertheless, I just love the idea of this internal dialogue.
[CRIS]
Call and response.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah. And there’s this psychologist who wrote this book called The Voices Within, Charles Fernyhough, I believe. And he makes this entire argument that thought itself is a matter of voice. That there’s this interior dialogue that’s always happening, so that thought itself is dialogic, but we sort of have these conversations going on inside of ourselves as well as the conversations we have with people on the outside.
[CRIS]
Right, yeah, I mean, the poets would – okay, now here’s a bit of fancy terminology for you, poets would talk about the endophone, which is the voice that stays within the body,
[MACK]
Hmm.
[CRIS]
and the exophone, the voice that leaves the body.
[MACK]
Oh, that’s nice. And what is the relation between those two?
[CRIS]
Well, the endophone is the sound of you thinking, the sound of you reading things over in your mind, the sound of you reading a book without speaking out loud. And the exophone is when you begin to talk, or begin to read out loud.
[MACK]
Yeah. I have to say, that this really appeals to me, because I feel like I’m an interior voice person. [Cris laughing] Like, I, uh, remember teachers telling me that, you know, you should read more quickly by not sounding out the words and I feel like I’ve never been able to accomplish that.
[CRIS]
Right, right.
[MACK]
But in fact, there’s a lot of research that suggests that very few people actually do that. That there’s this interior voice.
[CRIS]
Speed reading.
[MACK]
Right, right. But, I was describing this to my wife, and she tells me that she does not hear an interior voice when she reads, and it also makes me think of you know, um, a conversation that I had with a deaf artist Christine Sun Kim, and, you know, she told me that she thinks in signs and images.
[CRIS]
Right.
[MACK]
So there’s obviously a sort of diversity of experiences of thought going on.
[CRIS]
I like that too.
[MACK]
Different kinds of silences.
[CRIS]
Absolutely.
[MACK]
So maybe we should, uh, keep listening.
[JOHN]
Yeah, I think the, um, this entire question of whether one has the calmness, and the leisure, and the relaxation of the self sufficient to read in a fully engaging way requires the right circumstances, and that if one is under stress from disease or disaster, that reading is going to be slow to recover.
[♪ helicopter whirring, bell music ♪]
(recording of unidentified female reporter)
Eighty percent of New Orleans underwater right now, the levies have broken and they can’t figure out why and they’re having a difficult time trying to fix the situation. The damage is staggering, insurance companies are saying that they could be suffering losses anywhere between… (fade out)
[JOHN]
What confirmed this for me was my own experience after the levy collapse in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina sideswiped the city. We lost everything like almost everyone else in New Orleans and were homeless for about a year. In the beginning we were sleeping in a daycare center. I was writing for the New York Times and in fact I became their first guest columnist sending out bulletins basically about what was going on in New Orleans from the point of view of someone who knew the city.
[background music]
(unidentified male reporter)
Here’s where it began for those of us who live near Lake Pontchartrain. My neighborhood since childhood, a neighborhood now abandoned to the bulldozers of the corp of engineers [fade to background]
[JOHN]
That first month, sitting on the little twelve-inch plastic chair in this daycare center writing on a 18-inch plastic table, I wrote 15 columns for the Times and also shot two videos, and had no trouble writing that or other pieces that I was producing about, uh, the serious problems that New Orleans faced in the midst of the flooding and its aftermath.
[♪ bell music, helicopter sounds ♪]
(unidentified male reporter)
Eventually, a mandatory evacuation enforced by US military units emptied the city for the next month. Half a million New Orleanians have been driven from their homes and were forced to live as evacuees around the country. Over 300,000 have still not returned to the city. Many of those that have returned cannot live in their homes.
[JOHN]
But, I also found it almost impossible to read seriously. Um, my wife and I were taken by my sister in Texas just a few days after the flood. We had gone there to evacuate. Uh, to a film comedy, just to get our minds off of things.
[whispering in the background]
And at the end I told my wife I felt like I was suffocating in there, there’s something wrong with me. She said, “me too.” I think what happens is that when you go through something traumatic, you’re holding on so tightly to the self that you can’t admit anybody else into your consciousness. And therefore, serious reading becomes almost impossible. You can read a newspaper article or instructions or directions, but the kind of intense reading I’ve done as a teacher of literature and as a writer, um, seemed beyond my grasp. And it’s only little by little that I’ve recovered the ability to read intently, to make room for somebody else inside my consciousness. And if I have one lasting injury from the flooding of New Orleans, it’s that I’ve never fully recovered the intensity of my reading that I had before the flood. And in fact, at dinner parties here in New Orleans, when I’ve brought it up in the years after the flood, people were relieved to hear that someone else also was suffering from something that seemed quite widespread. The inability to relax the grip on the self long enough to be able to read, or even watch a film, for that matter.
[♪ ethereal bell music♪ ]
[JOHN]
Silent reading is a contradiction in terms. Reading for me seems to be a movement back and forth between my mind and someone else’s’ mind. Yeah, silence… silence is, um… silence itself is something that in its very essence can’t be experienced, since our understanding of it is something that’s inaudible. So, sort of like the placeholder “zero.” It’s an extremely useful concept for us, even if we have no experience with it. Imagining silence is as close as we’ll come to it.
[static]
[CRIS]
The interesting bit there for me was this sense that he needed to make room for somebody else in his consciousness, and that inability to relax the grip on the self long enough to read, uh, was something that he’s suffered lasting damaged from, and that reading has only sort of very gradually, little by little recovered, because he was holding on so tightly to the self. Which does feed back directly into his critique of our great leader.
[MACK]
[laughing]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
That sense of the narcissistic peopleing of himself with the clamor of his own selves. Holding so tightly to himself that he has no room for anybody else and he has no room to become a reader of other voices
[MACK]
Yeah, it kind of reminds me, now that you mention that, of, um, Sherry Turkle’s argument that a media scholar at MIT Sherry Turkle, who talks about spending so much time on our devices and kind of having this, uh, low involvement form of “togetherness” where we’re kind of alone together but we’re never really alone and we’re seldom really “together,” and so that there’s not this space for self-development, this kind of quietude that John was talking about.
[CRIS]
Right, I also really liked his statement that silence is something that cannot be experienced, since our experience of it is something that’s inaudible. We’re left imagining silence, which I feel does begin to answer some of my initial quibbles with his initial proposition.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah.
[CRIS]
So, while I was listening to John, uh, having heard these extracts a little earlier in the summer, I met up with an old friend of mine who is a poet, Rodrigo Toscano, who lives in New Orleans right now. Uh, but I actually know Rodrigo as also being a union worker. He works for the United Union of Steelworkers, and that’s the largest industrial labor union in the US right now. And he does a lot of liasing with areas of the country that have been hit by major storm damage to recover. So he’s been in these command and control center situations for five hurricanes now. Uh, and I sat him down really with very little notice and asked him, “Rodrigo, what does it sound like inside a hurricane?” And this is what he said:
[previous recording]
[CRIS]
Is there no sound when you’re right under the eye?
[RODRIGO]
That’s correct. That’s correct. If it’s over land, it’s like a vacuum, and it’s sunny above you and then [laughing] but you know that this is a temporary thing. The sound then becomes the arms… You hear it at a distance. For example, in your living, walking, daily life, when you see, um, a cloud, say, ten miles away from you, it’d be absurd to say you can hear that cloud. Not so in a hurricane. You begin to hear the rumble of the arms of that hurricane. Different pressures of air hitting others, so it’s air on air is what it is at first, and it’s a strange sensation because, to hear wind not interacting with material objects, but with wind itself, that’s the first thing that you hear. As the winds start to pick up, as the hurricane approaches, you begin to hear, you know obviously, the rustle of trees in a sort of orchestration of all these things moving all at once. Uh, a rumble, a pinging, wind on wind.
[CRIS]
What kind of rumble is it? Is it.. Is it, like, distant thunder?
[RODRIGO]
No. It’s… it’s more like a… like a huge piece of velcro being ripped above you.
[CRIS]
Uh huh, velcro.
[RODRIGO]
Because what’s happening is… yeah… there’s fissures of air, and there’s gashes of pressure systems being ripped open for this pressure of the wind, it’s gotta push, or it’s gonna sometimes slowly bellow up and sometimes rip through a certain pressure system. And then ultimately, as the winds start to pick up, you start to hear, um, the thunder of projectiles hitting solid surfaces, iron on brick, brick on wood, uh, you know, tree trunk on car, you know, what’s the sound of an automobile hitting a bridge?
[CRIS]
Right, right
[RODRIGO]
And that’s when things get really, really frightening. I remember one time, the winds weren’t the worst, there was an incident where a sort of canister, a container of some sort form a vacant lot, was picked up in the air and flung against the concrete walls of the command center. That thud, uh, [laughing] um, I could feel it inside my body. You might liken it to being in a tank and being hit by a shell. You hear the sound of walkie-talkies, you hear the sound of hasty, hasty reports, sirens, um, people checking in with each other, you know, warning bells, you know a lot of the expletives. Or, and, for instance, often heard is “this is getting bad.” you know, and then you hear, you know, more intense, “this is getting really really really bad!” But you cannot concentrate. I can assure you that nobody that I know with these experiences can do anything other than listen to the storm hitting. You cannot listen to your music, you cannot listen to the TV, you are completely locked. And that’s what very dominating about that experience. Its being dominated by visuals, and sound.
[whispering and buzzing noises]
[RODRIGO]
And then, and then, and then what happens is the storm eventually passes, and there’s the sound of water you know clapping against waves, little wave-lets clapping against buildings, bubblings, uh things floating, definitely boots splashing in the water. People walking by, boats
[CRIS]
So the sound of uh, of an area of a city that’s flooded out if you’re going through it on a boat, must be totally alien from the sound of that city if you were walking.
[RODRIGO]
Absolutely. For one, traffic is stopped. Completely stopped. So there is no traffic. And once car traffic stops, a city, you’d be surprised how far you can hear. You can hear somebody a mile, practically, you know saying something. Or across the street, you don’t have to shout, you can just say something. Definitely the absence of car noise is an eerie, eerie sound.
[CRIS]
And the whole resonance space, the whole sonic space of that part of the city…
[RODRIGO]
You know that something’s wrong.
[CRIS]
Can it be a different amplitude?
[RODRIGO]
No, that sound itself lets you know that something is wrong with your city. Absolutely. It’s the sound that lets you know. You open the door, and you come out, and it’s… something happened here. It’s not just the visual, absolutely. It’s not just the knee-high or the waist-high water. In many cases, the electric lines have a sort of buzzing sound that you get used to as sort of white noise. Those aren’t working anymore. And then, you know, we’ve fought the water for so long with levies and all sorts of things to reclaim land from the swamp and erosion, and you see the water returning and asserting itself and having this way with, you know, our built landscape.
[CRIS]
Yeah. Thank you.
[RODRIGO]
Yeah.
[buzzing and whispering fades]
[end of recording]
[MACK]
Uh, yeah. He, uh… Rodrigo has quite the ear for detail. [laughing] Quite a good auditory memory. And yet, you know, as someone from New Orleans, I’ve been through some hurricanes myself, and those things really imprint themselves on you. Those sounds that he mentions, they, they form an impression, you know?
[CRIS]
Yeah, that’s an embodied memory.
[MACK]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
One of the things… I almost wonder if John and Rodrigo might not have met. [MACK laughing] And know each other. They would have some things to talk about.
[MACK]
Yeah, yeah, especially because both of them are talking about this relationship between interiority and exteriority, right? You can’t think about information in a moment when this hurricane is bearing down on you.
[CRIS]
Right, right.
[MACK]
You can’t listen to the radio, or think logically about anything, your body is being affected by sound and you’re listening at this kind of primal level.
[CRIS]
Yeah, in some ways this does refer back to John’s idea of having no space for other thoughts and other voices.
[MACK]
Yeah.
[CRIS]
And there’s that beautiful thing that he says there in the sense that we are so used to hearing cars in our environment that when you remove all of those ordinary hums, suddenly the distance you can hear and the detail you can hear at distance is radically transformed.
[MACK]
Yeah, and I have had that experience several times in New Orleans, the post-storm power outage silence. It’s really something to get to hear a large city within that kind of quiet state.
[CRIS]
Right. Another kind of silence.
[MACK]
Yeah. Yeah. Another kind of silence. So, for our last piece, this is something that we’re playing around with, short audio essays by one of us on a particular topic. And this time, it’s by Cris, so we’ll let him take it away.
[♪ slow, jazzy music ♪]
[CRIS]
I’ve been thinking about the term “dead air,” and the contradictions it might embody. Does “dead air” mean air without any life in it, or the air the dead breathe? Air without that which makes it “air.” Jane Joyce’s black snowflake that swirls through the air, looking for the meaning of life. Dead air is more than an uncomfortable period of awkward silence, which would sound like this.
[a long pause]
[inhaling]
Landlines are losing their pride of place in many a house. But almost every weekend I speak with my 91-year-old mum 3,000 miles away, her on her corded phone and myself all gone cordless. She most likes to write letters, but the post office that is close to where she lived sort of closed, and an air letter now involves a bus journey. She calls herself part of the Lost Generation that will never absorb computers into their daily fabric. Very often, when we’re in the throws and flows of conversation on a Sunday morning, the line we’re talking on will suddenly go dead, seemingly for no reason. The signal drops out. Transmission cuts into a void. Sometimes, I’ve imagined her having fallen, or having stretched the cord too far, it pulled out of the wall socket, or perhaps simply put the phone down, having lost interest in and patience with her errant son, and so on. And other times, I think that a break might’ve been caused by me roaming the house so much that the stable signal came undone or some other such nonsense. I imagine we are being listened to by agents and footage edited from a 1970s conspiracy theory, the line tapping surveilance squad run rampant. That sound like thi-
[silence]
[♪ music resumes♪ ]
There’s a difference then, I hope you can hear, between the intentional broadcast of silence and the unintention of dead air. Dead air freaks broadcasters out. It might occur as a result of operator negligence and it might also be a technical fault introducing unmoderated carrier wave into circulation. For a few seconds, just after 4:30 pm, Pacific Time, during Super Bowl 2018, viewers were treated to about 30 seconds of absolutely nothing during an ad break by an NBC network citing “equipment failure.”
[♪ new music starts, a bit slower in tempo ♪]
Bu growing up in a post-Second World War United Kingdom, Remembrance Day was marked by participating in a two-minute radio silence broadcast by the BBC, to meditate on the guns no longer firing and the arrival of peace. Across the UK, people dropped out of their everyday thoughts and actions to fall still, observing, listening to silence, minimizing their outward movements, paying respect to the millions who lost their lives in both World Wars. Undoubtedly creepy in respect of dead air, during an unnerving search for the term for this tiny think-piece, brought up marketing materials for the dead air silencer, and oft used gun modification, so that not merely did the guns fall silent, but now their very silence can be deadly too.
[MACK]
cris cheek. And that’s Phantom Power for this week. Big thanks to John Biguenet and Rodrigo Toscano. You can get more information about Phantom Power and find links to some of the things we discussed at phantompod.org. You can also subscribe to our show there, or where ever you get your podcasts. We’d love it if you rated us on Apple Podcast. Tell us what you thought about this show on Facebook, just search for “sound pod.” Or give us a shout on twitter @phantompod. Today’s show was written, edited, and sound designed by cris cheek and me, Mack Hagood, with music by me and Graham Gibson. Phantom Power is made possible through a generous grant from the Miami University Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
What is radio art? It’s a rather unfamiliar term in the United States, but in other countries, it’s a something of an artistic tradition. Today’s guest, 
This episode, we talk with 
This episode we have a single longform interview with a media scholar of note–The New School’s 
On our first episode of Phantom Power, we ponder those moments when the air remains unmoved. Whether fostered by design or meteorological conditions or technological glitch, the absence of sound sometimes affects us more profoundly than the audible.
