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Audio Recording as Performance
Abstract
Audio recording is conventionally understood either as reproducing sounds or as representing them. This chapter begins by outlining these two conceptual filters, and then elaborates a third way of hearing audio recording: as performance. Bringing together elements of non-representational theory and materialist media theory, Gallagher draws attention to the physical processes of audio rather than its communicative and discursive functions, and discusses the implications for truth claims and the politics of sonic knowledge. Gallagher then examines how styles of audio production used in sound art can be used to amplify the performativity of audio.
... Such methodological approaches may, but do not necessarily, involve the production of audio recordings, which is also referred to as phonography (Drever, 2002). They may also involve analysis of recorded sound, and the performativity of audio representation, raising questions about the politics of sonic knowledge (Gallagher, 2019) and how recording 'mediates or actively constructs particular cultural performances of listening' (Droumeva, 2016: 82). In more recent years, the proliferation of affordable and mobile audio(-visual) recording technologies has created new opportunities for gathering, analysing, expressing and sharing ethnographic information (Gershon, 2019). ...
Matters of sound and listening are increasingly being attended to across the social sciences and humanities, reflecting what has been termed a ‘sonic turn’ since the early 2000s. In urban ethnographic research, scholars are starting to pay attention to the role of sound in social relations, in expressions of identity and senses of belonging, as well as in processes of othering. In this paper, we explore the theoretical and methodological opportunities of sonic urban ethnography, that is, an urban ethnography that foregrounds sound and listening in theoretical and methodological ways. We argue that the promise of sonic urban ethnography lies in its ability to interrupt the predominant focus on text and the visual by developing expanded practices of listening for alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the urban. We share four empirical vignettes from Shanghai, Berlin and London that illustrate, in their different ways, the power exercised through sound in the urban environment. Our discussion of the empirical cases highlights three key ‘lessons’ for doing sonic urban ethnography.
... In the wake of an ontological turn in sound studies (Kane, 2015;Thompson, 2017), a second (sometimes mutually overlapping) avenue of research evolved that focused more closely on the practices of listening and hearing of sound, and the affective power of sound (see for example : Cox, 2011;Goodman, 2009;Thompson, 2017). This latter line of research does not necessarily involve the production of audio recordings, what is also referred to as 'phonography' (Drever, 2002), but it has included analyses of recorded sound (that exist out in the world) and the performativity of audio representation, raising questions about the politics of sonic knowledge (see Gallagher, 2019), and how recording 'mediates or actively constructs particular cultural performances of listening' (Droumeva, 2018, p. 82). Approaching recorded audio as performance emphasises its power to do things. ...
... Westerkamp asserts that it is with the 'materials' each composer gathers and listens to, combined with their unique cultural, social, political and spiritual perspective that soundscape composition takes place. As we will map out in the section below, sound portraits reflected such seeking to mobilise a 'performative' element of field recordings (Gallagher, 2015(Gallagher, , 2019 by montaging and juxtaposing sounds. ...
Sound portraiture blends audio-documentary techniques and qualitative arts-based and narrative methods, privileging participants’ voices and conveying the complexity of their stories through the layering of sound. We created sound portraits that negotiated the multiple and often conflicting voices, histories and subject positions for South African migrants who psychologically straddle home and host lands. Sound portraits speak to the history of colonialism, Apartheid, displacement, and the continuities of power and privilege in people’s lives. We argue for the use of sound portraits as an aesthetic representation of lived experience and as a medium through which research knowledge becomes democratised.
... We sought to situate these findings in relation to the rich existing literature that explores the ways in which people engage with natural environments through listening, but without claiming that in situ natural sounds and field recordings are comparable. The team started from the premise that recorded sound is not a direct representation of sound and should not be treated as such (see Gallagher, 2019). ...
This article draws on an AHRC/EPSRC funded project called ‘A Sense of Place: Exploring nature and wellbeing through the non-visual senses’. The project used sound and smell technologies, as well as material textures and touch, to ask: what does ‘wellbeing’ mean for people in relation to the non-visual aspects of nature, and how might technology play a role in promoting it (if at all)? This article takes recorded sound as a case study. It argues that recorded soundscapes should be understood on their own terms rather than as ‘less than’ or a simulation of natural environments. They have specific value in creating space for imagination, particularly when delivered with care and as part of the co-creation of sensory experience. Overall, the article argues that the value of emerging immersive technologies is not to simulate nature better. An ‘immersive experience’ is richest when it allows for – and reveals – the nuances and complexities of individual responses to natural environments.
This paper proposes a pragmatic response to the broad philosophical question of what constitutes a soundscape and in what ways it might resonate through consciousness and perception. It also discusses phonography, criticizes its incapability to capture the essence of environmental sound, and explains how a series of artistic practices emerged and established themselves within the non-linearities of the recording-reproduction paradigm. Further, it elaborates on how sound art inaugurates new ways of perceiving, thinking about and representing soundscapes, accordingly. In this respect, several examples are discussed, including a selection of works by the author.
This article is about the use of audio media in researching places, which I term ‘audio geography’. The article narrates some episodes from the production of an ‘audio drift’, an experimental environmental sound work designed to be listened to on a portable MP3 player whilst walking in a ruinous landscape. Reflecting on how this work functions, I argue that, as well as representing places, audio geography can shape listeners’ attention and bodily movements, thereby reworking places, albeit temporarily. I suggest that audio geography is particularly apt for amplifying the haunted and uncanny qualities of places. I discuss some of the issues raised for research ethics, epistemology and spectral geographies.
This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term ‘noise’ and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum: for example, music and speech. Examining work by Max Neuhaus, Chris Kubick, Francisco Lopez and others, I suggest that the richest works of sound art help to disclose the virtual dimension of sound and its process of actualisation.
The introduction of new techniques for audio reproduction such as HRTF-based technology, wave field synthesis and higher-order Ambisonics is accompanied by a paradigm shift from channel-based to object-based transmission and storage of spatial audio. Not only is the separate coding of source signal and source location more efficient considering the number of channels used for reproduction by large loudspeaker arrays, it also opens up new options for a user-controlled interactive sound field design. This article describes the need for a common exchange format for object-based audio scenes, reviews some existing formats with potential to meet some of the requirements and finally introduces a new format called Audio Scene Description Format (ASDF) and presents the SoundScape Renderer, an audio reproduction software which implements a draft version of the ASDF.
Sound has come to have a particular resonance in many disciplines over the past decade. Social theorists, historians, literary researchers, folklorists, and scholars in science and technology studies and visual, performative, and cultural studies provide a range of substantively rich accounts and epistemologically provocative models for how researchers can take sound seriously. This conversation explores general outlines of an anthropology of sound. Its main focus, however, is on the issues involved in using sound as a primary medium for ethnographic research.
Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Qualitative Inquiry, published by and copyright Sage. The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance—as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utterance—something intractable, unspeakable, unreasonable, unanalyzable. Silence confounds interpretation and manifests, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence” or living voice. Yet it also incites the search for meaning and is therefore productive. How might Method work with the alterity of silence, rather than seeking to cure or compensate for its necessary insufficiencies? The article is organized around three examples or parables of silence. Humor gets tangled up in the text further on.
Sound from modern, tall wind turbines is related to sleep disturbance and is, per decibel, more annoying than sound from common sources such as road or air traffic. Surveys among residents indicate that there are several reasons for this: the swishing character of the sound, the intrusiveness at night, and the visibility of the wind turbine(s). Residential reaction is also determined by the attitude towards wind turbines in the landscape and by economical benefits. From acoustical research different explanations have arisen as to why the sound is amplitude modulated. For a distant observer it is the result of the change in trailing sound level due to the change in wind that the revolving blades encounter. High night-time sound levels are due to an increase in rotor height wind speed simultaneously with a decrease in near-ground wind speed. Wind turbine design has been directed to higher yields per turbine. Less attention has been given to low noise blades and rotor speed reduction. Low noise design could also include a reduction in the modulation amplitude and more sophisticated speed reduction; viz., at high annoyance conditions. Also, involving residents in wind farm planning may have a high potential to reduce annoyance.
The last twenty years have seen fascinating developments in the nature of collaboration between artists and architects and in the approaches taken by artists making work intended for public spaces. These sophisticated projects go far beyond the standard 'art for architecture' remit, limited as it is to the addition of 'artworks' to already designed buildings, the work described here invites us to rethink the reputation that public art has acquired over the years amongst both the public and the artists themselves. Timely and wide-ranging, "Art and Architecture" explores the proliferation of recent pioneering work by both artists and architects that seeks to blur traditional boundaries between the two fields. Looking back to precedents in land and community art by artists from Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Joseph Beuys, Rendell discusses international projects by artists including Tacita Dean, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Paul Pfeiffer and Rachel Whiteread and architects as varied as Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Diller + Scofidio and Shigeru Ban.
She visits 'site-specific' artworks, interventions into existing buildings, galleries operating outside their physical limits and the best of collaborations between the fields. More than a survey, however, "Art and Architecture" also draws on the work of thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Michel de Certeau to probe the meanings of place, space and site.
This article proposes the audio reality effect as a meaningful translation of Roland Barthes’s literary reality effect to the sonic realm. This refinement of transcontextuality and source recognition is applied to electroacoustic music and soundscape composition using the works and writings of Emmerson, Truax, Wishart, Smalley, Fischman, Young, Norman and Field. Lastly, this study mimetically analyses 2 seconds / b minor / wave by Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto in order to demonstrate the relevance of mimesis and the audio reality effect for understanding current musical practice.
This article follows the critical theory that Canadian wilderness painting exists only when the artist disavows their presence at the scene of capture, and suggests that it is due time the theory be applied to Canadian sound pieces such as Glenn Gould's The Idea of North (1967).A contrapuntal radio piece that marked Glenn Gould's baptism into experimental documentary, The Idea of North explores how the North is placed in the Canadian imaginary as an ambivalent object of national identity. In this article, I argue that the aesthetic procedures of The Idea of North create a narrative space through which the Other is constructed as a savage who is subsequently saved by the benevolent welfare state. Thus, The Idea of North idealizes the North by virtue of (1) its distantiation from the North, and (2) its Othering of Canada's Inuit as savage and helpless, reflective of (3) a new benevolent racism that made up assimilationist ideology, a requisite for post-World War II Northern resource development. The Idea of North is, thus, an aesthetic example of 'differential racism,' which proceeds through perceived cultural rather than biological differences, and works to include the targeted social group rather than exclude them. Given The Idea of North's narrative of the North's future, I argue that the future is a convenient temporal schematic through which the present remains governed. I maintain that we must add benevolent racism to the cultural theory of exploitation and domination in order to understand the contemporary structure of racism that haunts any cultural denials of colonialism.
This paper outlines a way forward for an anthropologically inclined electroacoustic music. Considering the similarities in methodological approaches between the fields of ethnography and soundscape composition, this paper proposes to further the use of contextual information when making compositional decisions with sound materials derived from field recordings: a socio-sonic methodology. To begin the discussion, theoretical readings of sound in context are presented. Parallels are highlighted between the practices of ethnographic study and soundscape composition, illustrated with the work of Steve Feld and the World Soundscape Project. A brief consideration of the soundscape–acousmatic continuum with reference to works by Luc Ferrari, Denis Smalley and Hildegard Westerkamp is followed by a combined summation of ethnographic, soundscape and acousmatic approaches to outline a socio-sonic methodology for composition. Examples of work by Peter Cusack, Justin Bennett and Bob Ostertag are discussed alongside my own work Manifest – a fixed-media composition based on field recordings and interviews made at political protests in Barcelona. The potential is for a music considered equally for its sonic and socio-political properties.
This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It: Introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience. Provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities. Begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre. A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift's outstanding work brings together further writings from a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. This noteworthy book makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area and is essential reading for researchers and postgraduates in the fields of social theory, sociology, geography, anthropology and cultural studies.
Listening to Noise and Silence engages with the emerging practice of sound art and the concurrent development of a discourse and theory of sound. In this original and challenging work, Salomé Voegelin immerses the reader in concepts of listening to sound artwork and the everyday acoustic environment, establishing an aesthetics and philosophy of sound and promoting the notion of a sonic sensibility.
A multitude of sound works are discussed, by lesser known contemporary artists and composers (for example Curgenven, Gasson and Federer), historical figures in the field (Artaud, Feldman and Cage), and that of contemporary canonic artists such as Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Bernard Parmegiani, and Merzbow.
Informed by the ideas of Adorno, Merleau-Ponty and others, the book aims to come to a critique of sound art from its soundings rather than in relation to abstracted themes and pre-existing categories. Listening to Noise and Silence broadens the discussion surrounding sound art and opens up the field for others to follow.
Despite roots in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, the practice and study of soundscape composition is often grouped with, or has grown out of the acousmatic music tradition. This can be observed in the positioning of soundscape compositions juxtaposed with acousmatic music compositions in concert programmes, CD compilations and university syllabuses. Not only does this positioning inform how soundscape composition is listened to, but also how it is produced, sonically and philosophically. If the making and presenting of representations of environmental sound is of fundamental concern to the soundscape artist, then it must be addressed. As this methodological issue is outside of previous musical concerns, to this degree, we must look to other disciplines that are primarily engaged with the making of representation, and that have thoroughly questioned what it is to make and present representations in the world today. One such discipline is ethnography. After briefly charting the genesis of soundscape composition and its underlying principles and motivations, the rest of the paper will present and develop one perspective, that of considering soundscape composition as ethnography.
The last twenty years have seen fascinating developments in the nature of collaboration between artists and architects and in the approaches taken by artists making work intended for public spaces. These sophisticated projects go far beyond the standard 'art for architecture' remit, limited as it is to the addition of 'artworks' to already designed buildings, the work described here invites us to rethink the reputation that public art has acquired over the years amongst both the public and the artists themselves. Timely and wide-ranging, "Art and Architecture" explores the proliferation of recent pioneering work by both artists and architects that seeks to blur traditional boundaries between the two fields. Looking back to precedents in land and community art by artists from Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria to Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Joseph Beuys, Rendell discusses international projects by artists including Tacita Dean, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Paul Pfeiffer and Rachel Whiteread and architects as varied as Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, Diller + Scofidio and Shigeru Ban. She visits 'site-specific' artworks, interventions into existing buildings, galleries operating outside their physical limits and the best of collaborations between the fields. More than a survey, however, "Art and Architecture" also draws on the work of thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Michel de Certeau to probe the meanings of place, space and site.
The increasing number and size of wind farms call for more data on human response to wind turbine noise, so that a generalized dose-response relationship can be modeled and possible adverse health effects avoided. This paper reports the results of a 2007 field study in The Netherlands with 725 respondents. A dose-response relationship between calculated A-weighted sound pressure levels and reported perception and annoyance was found. Wind turbine noise was more annoying than transportation noise or industrial noise at comparable levels, possibly due to specific sound properties such as a "swishing" quality, temporal variability, and lack of nighttime abatement. High turbine visibility enhances negative response, and having wind turbines visible from the dwelling significantly increased the risk of annoyance. Annoyance was strongly correlated with a negative attitude toward the visual impact of wind turbines on the landscape. The study further demonstrates that people who benefit economically from wind turbines have a significantly decreased risk of annoyance, despite exposure to similar sound levels. Response to wind turbine noise was similar to that found in Sweden so the dose-response relationship should be generalizable.
This paper is about the importance of witnessing and how such an act, or call, makes place or our place in the world. Pushing forward the agenda of nonrepresentational theory, this is about attending to differences -- those imperceptible, sometimes minor, and yet gathering, differences that script the world in academically less familiar but in no less real ways. I am thinking here about the folded mix of our emotions, desires, and intuitions within the aura of places, the communication of things and spaces, and the spirit of events. Such folds leave traces of presence that map out a world that we come to know without thinking. Throughout, I argue the political importance of our current debates concerning a performative appreciation of society's unfolding. In the first part of the paper I sketch out the academic territory that makes witnessing space potentially unfamiliar by problematizing the representational setup and the interpretation of empiricism that facilities knowledge production. In the second part I present an overview of the operation of Gilles Deleuze's thinking as a possible apprecenticeship in becoming able to perceive, and hence better able to express, the folded mix of the witnessed and witnessing world. In the third part of the paper I investigate the philosophical and ethical mechanics of the act of witnessing itself, translating the arguments found here to question the laws regulating the act of representation. Throughout, as an exemplary witness to that which I am trying to present, the paper is haunted by Olga Tokarczuk's novella The Hotel Capital .
Introduction: Four and a half film fallacies
- R Altman
HS2 SoundLab demonstrations, simulating the sound of trains along the proposed HS2 route
- Arup
Wind farms: Hearing is believing
- K Burgemeister
Listening to noise and silence: Toward a philosophy of sound art
- S Vogelin
Ghostly footsteps: Voices, memories and walks in the city
- D Pinder