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15
Introduction – Auditory Ethnography and the
Sound of Indigeneity
Indigenous societies of the Americas have always acknowledged
sound to hold a prominent position in cultural life and the
taxonomy of the environment, granting it a pivotal role also in
artistic expression, which, today more than ever, builds the keystone
for the formation and re-formation of identity in many indigenous
communities (Schoer in press).
To dance a mask of supernatural origin in a Kwakwaka’wakw
potlatch ceremony requires song; the parishara hunting ritual of the
Pemón and Makuxi includes songs acquired from tapirs and other
prey animals. Among indigenous peoples in the Ucayali Valley of the
Western Amazon, it is very common that in both magical rituals as
well as non-magical or secular songs non-human agents appear in
the songs’ lyrics. e contemporary art scene has cautiously started
to embrace these cultural expressions as being part of the canon
beyond the primitivist notion of indigenous form as exotic inspira-
tional material.
But not only in song does this strong relation between sound and
culture manifest. It is argued that the natural soundscape inuences
the characteristics of a culture, as the latter’s articial soundscape
impacts on its environment (i.e., Schafer 1977).
In relation to the critics of western primacy of the visual (McLuhan
1962, Welsch 1993, Tworuschka 2009) and on the basis of ethnomu-
sicological works by Seeger (1987) and Menezes Bastos (1978, 1999),
the authors take o where Schafer (1977) and others leave us, intend-
ing to initiate a discussion on an auditory anthropology as a tool for
rapprochement between American indigenous cultures and Western
observers, allowing for “coeval” exchange of thoughts and ideas, of
contemporary and traditional expression on the artistic as well as the
metaphysical and social level.
is paper discusses the value of an auditory approach to indige-
nous culture, contemporary identity rearmation and cross-cultural
communication, prompting a debate on whether an auditory anthro-
pology can help us learn from each other and to relocate indigenous
culture where it belongs, transcending the still-persisting evolutionist
and orientalist notion in favour of an emancipated coexistence.
We conclude that by including sound in all its active, and reactive
forms as manifest in cultural life, our understanding of identity
formation will be enhanced, utilizable in eld work as well as in
mediation of ndings, in exhibition design as well as in publication
formats such as books, audio CDs, and interactive platforms. It will
also facilitate exchange on a glocal level, transforming the researcher
– interlocutor relationship into a mutually benecial dialogue.
To D a nc e a M a sk
“If the air is jam full of sounds which we can tune in with, why
should it not also be full of feels and smells and things seen
through the spirit, drawing particles from us to them and them
to us like magnets?” – Emily Carr1
In October 2009, Hein Schoer had the honour of being invited to
Chief Bobby Duncan’s Potlatch at the Campbell River BigHouse on
Vancouver Island, BC.
He was on eld research for his ongoing project e Sounding
e Sounding Museum:
Towards an Auditory Anthropology
The Value of Human / Non-human Soundscapes and
Cultural Soundscape Composition in Contemporary Research and
Education on American Indigenous Cultures
By Hein Schoer, Bernd Brabec de Mori & Matthias Lewy
Abstract
Based on the authors’ field experiences, one of anthropology’s main theoretical reflections in the past decade is used here as a starting
point: the relations between humans and non-humans. It reveals that the role of sound is paramount within the Amerindian ontology
named
animism
, especially if compared to Western
naturalism
and its visual primacy. Consequently, we propose an auditory anthropology
as a theoretical concept, underpinned by further examples from the field. Finally, the practical application of an auditory anthropology is
discussed. Researchers may make use of cultural soundscape composition in order to supply a museum’s audience with a means to listen
to the manifold cultures of the world.
e Sounding Museum has been credited for its
contribution by the Swiss UNESCO Commis-
sion as a contribution to the International Year
for the Rapprochement of Cultures.
16
Museum, making recordings of the cultural soundscape of the
Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation on commission for the NONAM
(Nordamerika Native Museum, Zürich, CH), which he was to supply
with a composition covering indigenous cultures of the Pacic
Northwest Coast of North America.
Equipped with surround and shotgun microphones Schoer
recorded the proceedings of the potlatch, the most important
traditional festivity of Northwest Coast indigenous culture, over the
course of 16 hours, collecting a vast number and variety of dances
and speeches honouring the chief and his family, making claims on
inherited titles, a hamatsa initiation, and many other ritual and festive
performances, inadvertently unfolding as ceremony over a noiseoor2
(here used as a mere technical expression without connotation) of
background conversation (usually ceased during performance). e
large re crackled in the middle of the space comprised of a huge
wooden plank house on earthy ground smoothed with woodchips.
Although much of what happened due to his limited knowledge
remained un-decoded for Schoer, the atmospheric impact on him
was profound. e acoustic aspect, being an essential part of it,
makes an impressive representation of what he experienced.3
At one point, somewhere in the later evening, the Chief opened
his Box of Treasures, which contained a number of important super-
natural heirlooms of his family, embodied in the form of masks, that
prompted dance to the appropriate songs. One of these supernatural
treasures was the power of the deer. is mask is “danced” by a male
human, and by means of a hidden string, opens up to reveal a (carved)
human face underneath the deer head to show how all creatures are,
from their own perspective, in fact also humans, just in dierent garb;
in essence the dance to the song belongs to the mask. Schoer mistook
the dancer to be Chief Bobby Duncan himself (Schoer 2011), when
in fact, as he learned later on, it was master carver Beau Dick who
wore the mask that day, whom he had seen carving it in the weeks
before, as to be endowed to Bobby Duncan at the feast.
When Schoer wanted to apologise for his mistake (which by that
time had been published) with both Bobby Duncan and Beau Dick
on a consecutive visit, they both put him at ease, exclaiming that once
either one of them wore the mask, they became the spirit represented
by it, so it did not really matter who actually took it on. e dancer
literally transforms into the entity whose dance he performs, which is
also why one does not “wear” a mask during a dance, but one dances
the mask.
is notion of transformation, or rather, trans-specic communica-
tion (Halbmayer 2010), will accompany us as a fundamental concept
in our proposal of an auditory anthropology based on Amerindian
ontology and its expressions in the praxis of performance.
Amerindian Ontology
Based on the model of four ontologies introduced by Philippe
Descola (2005) and on Amerindian perspectivism as proposed
by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) and Tânia Lima (1999), our
proposal for an auditory anthropology is mainly informed by the
ndings of eldwork with indigenous peoples from lowland South
America as well as the aforementioned Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation.
We have started to consider an auditory anthropology out of the
incomplete methodological framework within ethnomusicology,
sound studies and anthropology. Whereas the ethnomusicologists’
prime domain should be sound, many of the ndings in the eld
are still presented predominantly visually, as transcripts, scores, and
texts, with a strong focus on analysis and interpretation of music
(although in many Amerindian societies the concept “music” does
not even exist, see e.g. Seeger 1987, Brabec de Mori in press) while
sonic and ontological circumstances remain widely unacknowledged.
Following Classen (1990), Sarah Pink (2009) has already suggested
an approach to ethnography that attempts to include “sensoriality”
in the ethnographic process. However, sensory ethnography and
anthropology are still very much biased towards the visual, evident in
the growing body of research in the eld of visual anthropology. On
the other hand, sound studies, as wide, ramied and interdisciplinary
as they may present themselves, have not yet generated a compre-
hensive symbiosis of sound with anthropological theory (cf. Brabec
de Mori 2012, 79). In Four Worlds (Schoer in press), we introduce an
approach to an applied auditory anthropology that aims to mediate
theoretical concepts and eld research on an aective/atmospheric
level, borrowing from Gernot Böhme’s considerations on atmospheric
perception (Böhme 1995, 2000, 2001).
An auditory anthropology addresses the perception and produc-
tion as well as taxonomies and axionomies of sound (Menezes Bastos
2013), the role of the sonic in the construction of ontologies, and the
quality and nally the interaction of senses. It takes a clear position
against the primacy of the visual. Before delving into the sonic
domain, however, one shall reconsider a basic question: What do we
hear? Sound, of course, one may reply, but what is sound? Is it waves,
the physical compression and decompression of a carrier medium;
vibration? Or is it rather events, like, if I knock on a table, does a
listener actually perceive the sound–implying an event of knocking?
Or is it the properties of the material that is being knocked on/excited
that are revealed by the act of knocking? Is it the table itself that we
hear, or its interaction with knuckles?4
Here is another set of questions only partly answered at this
moment: Do we only hear with our ears? It has been noted that
the sense of hearing, namely through phase discrimination allow-
ing for distance and directivity analysis of sound sources, as well
as spatial attributes of an environment, is of crucial importance for
our orientation in space. e same holds true, evidentially, for the
equilibrium sense, which happens to be physically located in the
inner ear; its function based on the same physiological principles as
hearing; lymph in the vestibular system exciting hair cells through
its movements. us, spatial information, not only of the acoustic
kind, is generally perceived by the ears. Frequencies below 20Hz
cannot be transduced by the cochlea, but with our body we can
feel them;5 high frequency vibrations can be felt on the skin, even
enabling humans to distinguish vibration patterns, as exemplied by
a cello’s timbre from a trombone (Russo et al. 2012). e possibility
of the skin being able to process frequencies above 20kHz cannot
yet be nally eliminated. Finally we are confronted with phenomena
such as inner voices, imagined music and auditory hallucinations or
tinnitus, where sounds are perceived but not measurable – and the
other way around, in the case of blocked out sounds, where measur-
able acoustic waves are not (consciously) perceived.
It is common that researchers doing eldwork among indigenous
people report situations where their interlocutors heard sounds that
they, possibly due to their dierent cultural background, did not (e.g.,
Menezes Bastos 2013, 287). So the questions posed above all hint
towards the complexity of sound and hearing that cannot be reduced
to physical attributes. One alternative interpretation was proposed
with Böhme’s atmospheric approach, with all its synaesthetic and
multisensorial aspects. is approach takes into account that dierent
cultures or collectives may deal dierently with the acoustic world
around them, not the least in several cases due to dierent ontologies.
Descola’s matrix lists four ontologies (animism, totemism, natural-
ism and analogism) that oppose each other in the way they deal
with physicality and interiority. Here, physicality refers not only to a
materiality of organic and/or abiotic bodies, but to a totality of visible
and touchable expressions which takes the characteristic disposi-
tions of an entity (Descola 2005, 182). Interiority, on the other hand,
includes for instance habitus, intentionality, reexivity, aect, and the
capacity of dreaming (2005, 181). Considering Descola’s ontological
model, the opposition between naturalism and animism appears most
striking: In naturalism, which Descola equates with Western thinking,
a similar physicality is opposed by a discontinuous interiority. is
17
means that we are all made of the same substance, but our minds or
“souls” are the point of distinctiveness, condemning us to a monadic
existence in all these inner aspects. Contrastingly, in animism6 – an
ontological system Descola explains with examples from Amerindian
societies – physicality diers (we all have dierent bodies), but we
are of the same interiority. is means that a peccary, for example,
owns a body obviously distinct from humans’ bodies, but the inherent
perceptual organization of peccaries shows every feature of human
individual, social, or cultural behaviour, living in houses, dressing in
clothes, celebrating festivities and rituals. However, if naturalism and
animism are described by terms of physicality (body) and interiority
(soul), the question arises, where is sound located; from whence is the
voice? Does the voice pertain to the physical, or to the interior?
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) proposes a concept he calls
Amerindian perspectivism, according to which humans and
non-humans perceive the world in the same way, but they perceive
a dierent world. e world they perceive is determined by their
bodily form – and as bodies are dierent in indigenous ontology,
consequently the world is dierent, too. Going with the above
example, peccaries see themselves as “persons” wearing clothes,
etc., and humans do so likewise. e perspective determines who
is a (human) person and who is a (non-human) other. Again,
perspectivism relies on a strong visual bias, the very term being a
visual idiom, ignoring the sonic. erefore and again, is the voice
dierent in distinct perspectives (as pertaining to the body), or is it
similar, as an emanation of the interior?
Acoustic Communication and Trans-specific
Soundscapes
In ethnographies of Amerindian rituals and other occasions
where the community deals with non-humans (animals, spirits, the
deceased) it is almost always sound that enables ritual specialists
and participants to bridge the gap between species. erefore, we
can locate the voice as a part of interiority.7 Lewy (2012) confronts
the visual primacy expressed in Viveiros de Castro’s thinking. Based
on historical and ethnographic examples, he concludes that humans
and non-humans, according to animist ontology, may hear similarly
between perspectives, allowing them to interact trans-specically via
sound, resulting in a concept Lewy terms “sonorism.” With sonorism,
we propose an auditory primacy as a valid orientation when dealing
with Amerindian ontologies and lived worlds (Lewy, in press), as will
be shown in the following case studies.
e Pemón, a Carib indigenous group living in Venezuela, Brazil,
and Guyana, practice the hunting ritual parishara, consisting of a song
cycle of 30-something songs that take three to four hours to perform.8
To understand how this ritual works, we have to follow Lewy’s obser-
vation that Pemón myths reect perspectivism in Viveiros de Castro’s
sense: Prey animals, from their perspective, see themselves as humans,
but humans as spirits or hunter animals in an anthropomorphic
framework, accordingly.9 However, and that is where sonorism comes
in, in the parishara, hearing, not seeing, is employed as the central
mode of comprehension. Clearly, “real humans” (the translation of
Pemón) sing the songs, but these are tapir songs! When the tapirs hear
the songs of the parishara, they believe that there is a party of their
own people going on, and they feel invited to join. Since the songs
are their songs (according to many Amerindian ethnographies, most
original sound creation is attributed to non-humans),10 they perceive
the people who are singing them as being of their own kind. Only
once the tapirs see the hunters, they realize their mistake; the hunting
begins.
Another example of auditory ethnographical ndings comes from
the Western Amazon, namely the Ucayali valley in the Peruvian
lowlands. From the parishara we have heard that on the sonic plane
animals and humans (who all perceive themselves as humans) can
interact. However, interaction is not always intended; on the contrary,
oen it is necessary to prevent interventions from (dangerous)
non-humans, for example in social gathering. Among the Shipibo-
Konibo (henceforth Shipibo), certain species of birds are understood
as equally or more powerful than the Shipibo themselves, specically
in their competence of perception.11 erefore, such bird-persons
may not be mocked without risking unpleasant consequences. For
example, when wandering in the jungle, these birds, having a much
better overview than the humans, may warn them of imminent
dangers. However, birds can likewise pass on information about the
Shipibo’s vulnerability to dangerous entities (like spirits). But if you
have ever been to the Amazon, you will know that birds are always
around; you can hear their singing all the time, so consequently, they
can hear you, too. In order to avoid discord, the Shipibo have devised
a way to break the inter-specic acoustic link in a way that reminds
of the masking properties of the noiseoor briey mentioned in the
introduction: ey create a sound carpet, a lo- soundscape, with
rattles and small objects attached to the women’s festive garments, that
is so loud that the birdsong cannot be heard anymore. Accordingly,
the birds will not be able to hear the humans’ singing, as long as this
noiseoor is kept up.12
In one last example, which also comes from the Shipibo, we want to
introduce a phenomenon that to a certain extent spans an arch back
to the Kwakwaka’wakw far in the North. In indigenous communities
all over the Americas much heed is given to trans-specic transforma-
tions. As briey stated in the introduction to this article, a researcher
may feel embarrassed when mixing up entities, in the way it happened
to Schoer when mistaking Bobby Duncan and Beau Dick in reference
to the deer transformation mask, and how they both put him at ease
by stating that when dancing the mask, they become the entity repre-
sented by it. In this case, however, it was obvious for the (Western)
spectator, that there was a real human behind the mask, and that the
transformation therefore must be symbolic. No matter how ercely
a “traditionalist” indigenous person might object, no ethnographer,
from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego, has ever actually seen such
a transformation happen in the esh. In the sonic realm this is dier-
ent. Shipibo médicos (shamans) are believed to possess the capability
of transforming into animals, even spirits13 during magical rituals.
at as well cannot be observed visually. But it can be heard. Becom-
ing, for example, a spirit, the singing voice of the médico changes, and
this change can be experienced and made evident also in recordings,
a sonic transformation called “voice masking” (Olsen 1996, 159). e
médico now is a spirit, and it would be dangerous for a common man
to let himself be seen during that time, because the médico would
see him as prey (while perceiving himself still as a human, but in the
way all spirits perceive themselves as humans).14 e ritual usually
takes place in darkness. While from a naturalistic point of view,
nothing may have happened, except for either deception or delusion,
for the animist this change is absolutely real. Stoichiţă and Brabec
de Mori (2012) have introduced the term “sonic being” to describe
this non-personalised intermediary – in-between – agency that is
facilitated by sound.
“ e initial question then must be
extended from “what do we hear?”
to “how do we hear?” and “how
does the Other hear?” In respect to a
eld of sound ontology dealing with
trans-specic soundscapes we nally
need to ask: “How do humans think
non-humans hear?”
18
From the above examples and many more experienced during
eldwork as well as examples found in the literature, we conclude that:
• Sounds and their ornaments (structure, instruments, lyrics)
indicate the identity of a singing non-human;
• Non-humans transmitting these identities to humans and
humans imitating these identities in performance aim to
communicate trans-specically;
• And, referring to Descola’s concept of ontologies, sound
perception and production is more related to interiority then
to physicality.
With this relational denition of being15 in mind we postulate:
• Amerindian ontologies are constructed principally around
auditory perception and sonic phenomena.
• Neither is it sucient to analyse and compare myths and
other narratives (although it may help), nor just to look and
see (which may help, too).
• All senses and modes of expression must be considered when
intending to understand indigenous ontology.16
From Field to Museum: Applied Auditory
Anthropology
From the exotic magic of the Amazon rainforest we now move
on to the – for researchers raised in the naturalist tradition – more
familiar setting of a (ethnographic) museum.
In the didactic branch of applied auditory anthropology17 aimed at a
lay audience the ontological and epistemological groundwork behind
such practices as the parishara, voice masking, or other, cannot be
brought across one-to-one, but by applying sound and understanding
the “aisthetic” (Böhme 2001) nature of perception and rationalization,
the analytic, naturalism-informed gaze can be confronted. And once
the atmospheric entry has been made, the rest will follow eventually.
A potent device for this has been installed at the NONAM, Switzer-
land-based museum for indigenous cultures of North America, the
Sound Chamber. On two oors the NONAM covers historical and
contemporary indigenous cultures of North America, from the icy
wastes of the Arctic to the hot deserts of Nevada. Out of the ten cultural
areas dened for the continent, it features the Arctic, the Sub-Arctic
and the Northern Woodlands, the Northwest Coast, the Plains and
Prairies, and the Southwest in its permanent exhibition. Temporary
special exhibitions have covered a broad range of topics in recent
years, such as kayak building, the silver smithery of the Hopi, Navajo
and Zuni, mask carving of the Inland Tlingit, beadwork, wildlife, the
paintings of Karl Bodmer, and a photo exhibition about Greenland
and its indigenous people, to name a few.
In 2008, the former video cabin was transformed into what is now
the Sound Chamber. According to the designs of acoustician Richard
Schuckmann, we refurnished a small wooden booth into a space of
acoustic experience. Four high- and mid-frequency loudspeakers
and a subwoofer hidden behind black curtains allow for surround
playback in an acoustically treated environment that comes close to
an anechoic chamber.
By covering all walls, ceiling, and oor with Basotect acoustic
foam, reverberation was reduced to a minimum. Initial sketches
still included the use of visuals, either in the form of photographs,
or screens on the walls, but were quickly decided against. e nal
design takes the visitor onto a circular metal platform with a handrail
around it, all black and dark (except for a very chary and fuzzy chain
of light halfway from the oor – and dimmed by the black, half-
transparent acoustic curtain in front of it – and an emergency light
above the entrance), accessible via a soly ascending ramp. e little
visual and lighting design applied creates, as Schoer conrmed in a
visitor study, a feeling of being in a cocoon, an igloo-like bubble oat-
ing in the dark, with the light chain suggesting a horizon.
us Schoer’s laboratory came into existence, where he could
research on the impact of sound with all other senses (especially
vision), if not cut o, at least heavily attenuated. Once inside the
Sound Chamber, the outside world is shut out by heavy curtains that
swallow all the light and almost all the sound from the exhibition area.
And then you hear it. Wind in the trees, a creek, the crows, rst in
the distance, then all around you; the forest awakes. Eventually you
nd yourself in the streets of Alert Bay, then you visit a dance class
at T’lisalagi’lakw Native School, and before you know it, you are at
the very same potlatch where Schoer saw Beau Dick dancing the deer
transformation mask, taking a stroll into the spirit world along the way.
e Sound Chamber is a place designed to bring the soundscape
of North America’s indigenous peoples to the museum visitor, in high
delity surround sound and without the distraction of visual or other
sensual channels where the experience of the sounds of a culture
brings an immediacy and intimacy, an immersive quality, that the
usual object-focused approach of classical exhibition design is lacking.
However, such a tool, as convincing as it may appear especially
to audiophiles and soundscape researchers, is not without risk. A
museum is a place of great opportunity, a place of learning, but also
of great danger in terms of creating or conrming misconceptions of
the world around us, particularly when your target group, as holds
true with many museum visitors, has not spent years studying its
exhibitions’ subjects. When “re”presenting the Other, schizogenic
(schizophonic) aspects of exhibition design must be taken into
account as much as matters of orientalism and coevalness; established
power relations need to be questioned. e author’s (here used in the
widest sense, including exhibition designers and museum curators
as much as eld researchers and theoreticians) impact must be
made transparent in order to drag the audience out of the illusion of
experiencing the world as it is, instead of a distinct version of it seen
or heard through the eyes and ears of the individuals who created its
“re”presentation.
To a vo i d t h es e p i t f al l s a t t h e S o un d C h a mb e r, a nu m b e r o f s tr a t e-
gies have been developed, mainly aiming at achieving a high level of
transparency in respect to what is being presented. Two Weeks in Alert
Bay is not pure eld audio, for it is a complex composition, rather
rooted in a musical than a documentary tradition.18 e recordist/
composer’s own voice can be heard occasionally, breaking down the
illusion of being in a dierent world, detached from one’s own as the
interaction between researcher and researched becomes apparent in
such moments. e contemporaneity/cotemporality of the piece and
with it that of the audience and the ethnographic subjects is further
heightened by de-emphasising the focus on “cultural” sounds in
favour of an everyday soundscape, which includes elements that for
European ears will convey a feeling of exoticism, but equally many
passages that depict daily routines that would not sound much dier-
ently in the outskirts of Zürich.
In workshops (Das Tönende Museum), school classes equipped
with listening tools provided by clairaudience training as initiated by
Schafer (Schafer 1986, 1992) can learn to analyse the sounds of their
own (cultural) environment and compare them with what we have
composed from our experiences with other cultures, thereby learning
about themselves and their relationship with the Other. e composi-
tional aspect is important here, because understanding unedited eld
recording would require tacit knowledge that only natives can possess
or scholars with according contextual knowledge might access.
We are very clear about this aspect; the participants (and museum
visitors in general) listen to our image of the Other’s soundscape,
which, however, is being enhanced by as many First Voice (literally
the informant’s personal voice in the piece, but also the inclusion
of as many of her/his suggestions as to what to include and how to
position it) aspects as suitable in the compositional concept, creating
19
immediacy and realism, but not claiming general objectivity at the
same time. Consequently, the pieces are made in the spirit of a session
musician’s approach, which diers from the ethnographer’s stance
in the sense that not scientic completeness is the paradigm guiding
the data gathering, analysis and presentation, but the mutual interest
in each other and what can be done in a collaborative eort, on the
interlocutor-researcher as much as on the instructor-student end of
the process with the composer-researcher-educator as mediator.
We cannot step into someone else’s mind; we can only learn to accept
that we will never understand it in full but still may regard the Other
as equal (in dierence). is applies to our acquaintances in the eld
as much as to the people to whom we wish to mediate our ndings.
Conclusion
“[true] communication is possible only between equals.”
–Hagbard Celine19
All these phenomena and the ontologies behind them cannot be
exhaustively described without listening to the sounds that are ali-
ated with them. ey also cannot be properly interpreted without
taking into account the dierent ontologies, which also means to
step out of one’s own frame of reference (naturalism in our case) and
accept that other ontologies are not simply false, but dierent takes
on reality, as dierent perspectives of the same phenomenon. By
integrating various perspectives–perception theory, the soundscape
approach, Menezes Bastos’ world hearing, Feld’s acoustemology,
Descola’s ontologies and Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism–with
our methodological approaches from the applied auditory anthro-
pology, the First Voices and the session musician’s approach (for the
latter two see Schoer in press), we aim to develop an atmospheric
approach to anthropology, transgressing the primacy of the visual
and the Western “view” on culture. An auditory anthropology will
have to employ “a multidisciplinary approach of socio-semiotics,
ethnomusicology and a phenomenology of acoustic experience–an
akoumenology” (Tan 2012, 23).20 e initial question then must be
extended from “what do we hear? ” to “how do we hear?” and “how
does the Other hear?” In respect to a eld of sound ontology dealing
with trans-specic soundscapes we nally need to ask: “How do
humans think non-humans hear?”
Sound is, aer all that has been said on the previous pages, beyond
any doubt one major and powerful medium for this exchange. e
strength of the Sounding Museum’s concept lies in its integrative
power, which, to no little extent, is the power of aects. If you are
in academia, think about what attracted you to your eld of study
in the rst place. Was it the promise of dusty archives to which you
might spend much of your life, or was it the childly fascination for the
adventure promised by the appeal of the unknown? We cannot take
you to Alert Bay, or the Amazon, but we can give you an atmospheric
(call it auratic, if you like) object to hold in your very hands, be it in a
museum or immersed in a book discussing our ndings and theories.
In each case, theory needs to be backed up by hands-on experiences
for the recipient, a Sound Chamber to walk into, an audio CD or an
interactive DVD application that helps to relay a data-informed and,
more importantly, aective impression of our theoretical musings.
It is this atmospheric totality that creates a synthesis of soundscape
studies, ethnographic eldwork, anthropology, and museum
didactics, and reconciles academic research, art, and education,
and that can help establish coeval intercultural communication, be
that between museum visitors and Amerindians, between research-
ers and their interlocutors on every level, or between humans and
non-humans.
e main tools are the Session Musician’s Approach and the First
Voices’ perspective, the glocal framework and the conscious and
constructive integration of schizophonic aspects into it, and, particu-
larly, the personal perspective: I am talking to you, not an impersonal
omniscient naturalistic consciousness. ereby we intend to build
bridges between the worlds of the audiophile, the “Exotic Other,” the
scientist and the interested lay public. e Sound Chamber, originally
built in 2007 as a xed installation at the NONAM, has by now been
set up in a mobile form as the central “object” at numerous events all
over Europe, enabling the respective lay and expert audiences to step
into the worlds they had heard of in talks, workshops and discussions
on various aspects related to academic and political implications of
an auditory anthropology. e Sounding Museum has indeed le the
laboratory.
Endnotes
1. http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/canadian/
Emily-Carr.html (accessed 10-04-2013)
2. Please listen to audio sample 1 “noiseoor” for a model example
(http://soundingmuseum.com/soundscapejournal).
3. An excerpt from the potlatch can be found in audio sample 2 “Two
We ek s in A le r t Ba y ( Wa l k -I n E d i t) ” (h t tp : / /s o u nd i n gm u s eu m . co m /
soundscapejournal).
4. For a detailed treatment of the ontology of sound from the perspective
of analytical philosophy see, among others, the comprehensive thesis
by Sharif (2012). Further: Böhme (1989, 121–37) on the doctrine of
signatures found with Paracelsus and Jacob Böhme.
5. In Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie Jurassic Park frequencies down to 3Hz
are used to create terror among the crowd; you don’t hear them, but
you will be scared out of your wits!
6. Please refer to Nurit Bird-David’s paper “‘Animism’ Revisited: Person-
hood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology” (1999), including
replies by Ingold, Viveiros de Castro, and others, and the author’s reply
to these comments, for an overview over the origin of the concept of
animism and a debate on its broader contemporary reception among
scholars.
7. Please note that in animist thinking, the voice, especially when
super-formalised in song, can be heard and understood by dierent
species (including spirits), therefore it pertains to interiority, which
is considered similar among beings. In naturalism, on the contrary,
many problems arise from misunderstanding and mutual unintel-
ligibility of languages, especially when it comes to inter-specic cases.
Here the voice is again part of interiority, though conceptualized as
discontinuous.
8. Please listen to the rst song of the cycle in audio sample 3 “Kewei”
(http://soundingmuseum.com/soundscapejournal). For an exhaustive
account on the parishara, please refer to Lewy (2012).
9. See Viveiros de Castro (1998, 470) and Lewy (2012).
10. is was most prominently stated by Anthony Seeger (1987), but see
also the volumes edited by Hill/Chaumeil (2011) and Brabec de Mori
(2013), among others.
11. For the concept of competence of perception and action, see Brabec
de Mori (2012, 2013).
12. Please refer to audio sample 4 “Shipibo Party (technical progression)”
(http://soundingmuseum.com/soundscapejournal).
13. It is beyond the scope of this short account to discuss the precise
nature of this transformation, but see Brabec de Mori/Seeger (2013)
for a detailed treatment.
14. Please listen to the audio sample 5 “Transformation” (http://
soundingmuseum.com/soundscapejournal). It is the moment when
the médico transforms back from spirit to human, returning from his
high-pitched spirit voice to his low-pitched regular speaking voice.
20
15. Viveiros de Castro acc. to Karadimas (2012, 27).
16. Cf. Brabec de Mori (2012, 98).
17. e political dimension implied by the lexical proximity to applied
anthropology is explicitly intentional. We have learned from
Lévi-Strauss and others that anthropology nowadays cannot elude
social and political entanglement, which must hold especially true
in the context of the power relations inherent in museum politics,
particularly regarding the consequences they have on its visitors; see
especially Nader (2002, 47–54), also Colwell-Chanthaphonh (2009).
18. e full length piece CD is available at gruenrekorder.de; a surround
version is underway (Schoer in press).
19. Shae/Wilson (1975, 286).
20. See also Faudree’s (2012, 519–36) suggestions for a synthesis of the
soundscape approach and chronotopy with semiotic anthropology.
About the Authors
Hein Schoer (hein@schoer.net) is a soundscaper and musician.
He investigates the academic, artistic, and pedagogical implications
of cultural soundscape production and implementation in collabora-
tion with Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, Maastricht
University and the NONAM (Nordamerika Native Museum, Zürich,
CH), where he also operates the Sound Chamber. Research foci are
applied auditory anthropology, acoustic ecology, representation of
the Other, museum and hearing pedagogy, surround eld recording,
interdisciplinary art practice, and multi-sensory exhibition design.
Bernd Brabec de Mori (bernd.brabec@kug.ac.at) studied
musicology, philosophy and art history. He specialises in ethnomu-
sicology of Amazonia, non-human music, music and extraordinary
states of consciousness, and music psychology. He has conducted
extensive eldwork on medicinal songs and the indigenous music of
the Ucayali Valley in the Peruvian Amazon, where he also worked as
a language teacher. He currently works at the Centre for Systematic
Musicology, Karl-Franzens-University Graz, and as a senior scientist
at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Music and Perform-
ing Arts Graz.
Matthias Lewy (matt hiaslew y@gm ail.c om) fo llowe d pre-Colum-
bian and comparative musicology studies and cultural and media
management. His dissertation in the eld of pre-Columbian studies
was based on a three-year eld project on sound and ritual among
the Arekuna and Kamarakoto in the Guyanas. He has worked at FU
Berlin, Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder, and HU Berlin. His regional foci are
Amazonia and Mexico. Currently he works on the conceptualisation
of an auditory anthropology and the material culture of the Guayanas.
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Note: Audio Samples (http://soundingmuseum.com/soundscapejournal)
include (1) Noiseoor, (2) Two Weeks in Alert Bay (Walk-in Edit), (3)
Kewei, (4) Shipibo Party (technical progression) and (5) Transformation.
Wayback Sound Machine:
Sound rough Time, Space and Place
Article & Photos by Maile Colbert (except where noted)
Abstract
Two years ago I found myself in a location and situation that brought to mind the connections between sound and memory, which lead to
considerations about sound and history. Upon thought and research, then experiments within my own practice, I have since been exploring
what can come from recreating or creating sound from back in time. I have been excited about what this research has meant to my own
work, as well as exploring the work of others who I meet of other disciplines engaged in similar lines of practice.
Introduction
Frank Vanclay said nicely in Place Matters, “Place is generally
conceived as being space imbued with meaning. us, it refers more
to the meanings that are invested in a location than to the physicality
of the locality” (Vanclay 2008). He goes on to state, sometimes it
is the biophysical characteristics that establish the foundation for
those personal meanings.
When I travel to an unfamiliar location to create a work, I have
become accustomed to bringing my VLF receiver, hydrophones,
and underwater camera for exploration. Whether what comes out
ultimately becomes part of the work or not, my interest in these
particular tools stems from a fascination with capturing obscure
events around me, real and happening, that I could not otherwise
perceive. It also marks my wonder at events and elements in our
world that have been, while evolving, continuous in a time line
extending much further than my own. Similar to the sense one may
garner from varied surroundings, such as a desert, or an ocean,
with time and patience, what might at rst seem bleak, barren, or
monotonous, begins to give hint to a rich world hidden from our
day to day experiences. Fig.1: Joshua Tree State Park, California. Photo by Vahid Sadjadi