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 Sound and the Sacred by Tim Wilson tksw@personamedia.com It sounds a little grand to say it, but along with an increasing number of artists I have come to consider my work in sound as something sacred, an engagement with the source of things. Sounding is a primal act of creation, listening just as much if not more so. This take on things, though common in esoteric philosophies and among indigenous peoples, sounds hopelessly mystical to modern ears. But it may be that our cultural failure to consider sound at this level is at the root of our noisy, troubled lives. Following are some rough notes that I've gathered in preparation for a CBC Radio IDEAS program, aired November 28, 2001 , on the problem of Noise. These are, if you like, some of the metaphysical underpinnings of my approach, which I think also touch vitally on the motivations for and practice of producing sound art. The wrap-up session of this year's Full Moon Over Killaloe audio art camp began a discussion of some of these ideas, but these just began to stir the pot. ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGY AND BEING "HERE" More and more of the sounds that we hear are cut off, divorced from their source. That's to say, the location and time in which they are heard may be distanced greatly from where and when they were first produced. They may have been recorded and delayed, or transmitted over a great distance before being played back. Even the best speakers and playback systems distort or to some extent colour a sound, create an "infidelity". Why does a dog or cat rarely respond, in spite of RCA Victor's famous advertisement, to the recorded sound of His Master's Voice? Because it is "dead" in some way that humans accustomed to living in an electro-acoustically mediated soup do not seem to acknowledge. There is a difference between "live and Memorex." Such sounds then always represent a less than one-to-one reproduction of the original. But apart from that reduction, they may have effects on us simply because of the displacement. This effect/condition is what the composer R. Murray Schafer called "schizophonia." I share his opinion that, though we don't exactly know why, and though it may be unconscious, given that we've used radio, telephones etc. for so long, one result of this displacement is a feeling of anomie, disorientation. We are not "here" so much as our ancestors were. Auditory memory itself, demonstrably more acute in earlier times, is now also displaced, stored outside the body in home recordings, CDs, computers. What effect is this having on our "presence" in the world? What does it mean that we are surrounded thus by disembodied (McLuhan was kind in calling them "angelic" presences)? What does it do to our desire to create a better environment when such a powerful influence on it acts at such a remove? Have our perceptual systems actually adapted to this profoundly changed situation, or are we still lumbered with the ears of our primate ancestors? SOUND AS THE "SIGNATURE" OF THINGS The pervasiveness of mediated sounds has resulted in the rise of the profession of sound engineer, and more recently, sound "designer". Practitioners of this art would, in any self-respecting indigenous culture, have been regarded as shamanic. They directly tamper with the sonic "signature" - the "name" - of created things and beings. Read Bruce Chatwin's "Songlines" for a description of the prodigious aural abilities of Australian aboriginals, for example. Sufi mysticism, also richly describes the originating power of sound, and in The Book of Genesis, Adam's power over the beasts arises out of his ability to "name" them. Sound shamen erase and reproduce voices, alter them in subtle and profound ways, fling them into the aether or embed [entomb?] them in shiny metallic disks. Even though we moderns have become used to it, this is deeply occult stuff. In those same indigenous cultures, such wizardry (a word often used to describe sound and image-editing technology) would require long training, initiation, and an accountability to the psychic and spiritual welfare of the community. In "The Poetics of Space ", a (for me) seminal essay written at the dawn of radio in the1930's, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard argued that the creators of radio would be "engineers" of the soul and psyche, with a correspondingly large responsibility. Who insists on that now? THE EYE'S REVENGE UPON THE EAR Sound frustrates our desire to make permanent, to hold on to things. Recording technology reasserts this. We are a new Adam, (note that this was how Christ himself was heralded in biblical myth), reasserting our mastery over creation by our re-sounding powers. I became aware in recent years that one of my own motivations in recording sounds has been to try and arrest the inexorable passing of life, and of loved ones: I wanted to use the CD as a painting of Dorian Gray. How much of the desire to manipulate sounds comes from this conscious or unconscious desire to control what cannot be reversed? I have a recording of my late father, actually of quite decent fidelity, talking about the act of making tape-recorded 'letters' to the family. He speaks, "literally", from beyond the grave, but it isn't so eerie as my way of describing it would make it sound. The more often I listen to this recording, the less vital it gets. It's as if some mechanism in my own listening, akin to the ability of the household dog to discern what's living and what's dead, leeches the emotion, the life, out of the sound. In photographs of the deceased, newspaper obituary editors used to airbrush out the highlights in the eyes. Maybe this goes as well for the ears. Sound, argues Walter J. Ong (of the University of Toronto) in his seminal book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word , "exists only when it is going out of existence. I cannot have all of a word present at once: when I say 'existence', by the time I get to the '-tence', the 'exis-' is gone. The alphabet implies that matters are otherwise, that a word is a thing, not an event, that it is present all at once, and that it can be cut up into little pieces, which can even be written forwards and pronounced backwards." Our manipulation of sound, and particularly our translation of it into visual terms (as is now commonplace with computer editing) represents, in my opinion, a revenge of the eye upon the ear. A replacement of oral culture with visual culture. This represents a huge change in consciousness. (Interestingly, the best, though rather speculative, book on this subject, Julian Jaynes' Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Brain (1976), has been enjoying something of a resurgence recently.) Computers, says Ong, continue what the earlier technologies of writing and print began, i.e. "the reduction of dynamic sound to quiescent space, the separation of the word from the living present, where alone spoken words can exist." Sounds that are frozen onto disc would seem to deny death and ephemerality, the passing away of things. Now they bid to stay with us for eternity, or at least past individual lifetimes. Interesting, though, that the vaunted indestructibility and long life of the compact disc is already suspect. Decay, a term used in acoustics to describe the dying away of sound, but which of course applies as well to flesh, has set in, in spite of us. Tim Wilson, Kingston, Ontario has been a radio documentary producer since 1969 and has composed documentaries for radio programs such as Ideas and Sunday Morning. He has been influenced by composer R. Murray Schafer, as well as the European documentary tradition and continues to explore the creative possibilities of audio production through associative documentary, personal sound essay and soundscape. He also taught radio writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts and has also lectured on radio as an art form at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology at University of Toronto. More on Bruce Chatwin - www.mindspring.com/~canner/chatwin.htm More on Gaston Bachelard - www.u-bourgogne.fr/PHILO/CENTRE-BACHELARD/biogb.htm More on Walter J. Ong - homepages.udayton.edu/~youngkin/biblio.htm More on Julian Jaynes - julianjaynessociety.tripod.com/ Copyright CSIRP 2001 Copyright for materials on this website is the property of the content creators and the Canadian Society for Independent Radio Production, unless otherwise noted. Materials may be freely used by non-profit organizations and educational institutions for non-commercial purposes only. For evaluation purposes, CSIRP would appreciate it if you would let us know how you have used these materials, and in what context. Material reproduced from this website must include the CSIRP logo, website address and this message. |
