Soundscapes by
Sonnenschein
l Primary emotion sound
l Secondary emotion sound: the spectators noticed but the protagonist is not conscious.
l Identification music acts as a psychological container for a melodramatic dialogue
scene, for example by underscoring, delaying, amplifying, or otherwise nudging
the audience to feel empathy for the character’s emotional state.
It provides a depth above and beyond the literal spatial
depth into a nonverbal psychological human depth.
l Spectacle music lends a sense of epic scale to a scene. (Star Wars or Platoon)
Rather than involving the audience inside the narrative,
the larger-than-life spectacle dimension places us in contemplation of the
moment in order to externalize and make commentary.
Environments and the ‘soundscape’
l The term ‘soundscape’ is coined by the Canadian composer R. Murray
Schafer.
l The soundscape is composed of several types of sounds: keynote sounds, signals, soundmarks, and archetypal sounds.
l The keynote is equivalent to the
tonal center in music in that it represents the anchor and reference point to
all other sounds. As a contrast, it may be listened to unconsciously, but it is so important as
the background that
it may have on the characters’ behavior and moods. (Gestalt principles and
illusion)
Quote: Indispensable to the environment, it serves as the
ground for the figure.
l The signal is considered the figure
or foreground sound
to be consciously
heard, like sirens, whistles, horns, and the clock tower which can convey more
complex messages.
l A soundmark establishes a particular
place possessing some unique
quality for only that location.
George Watters addresses the importance of the authentic location recording and
explain the concept of ‘soundmark’ in further.
l Archetypal sounds stir our
ancestral memories, bringing us into an environment through a universal emotional reaction.
Eg: Light wind blowing through the grass, birds twittering,
and a babbling brook elicit a sense of peace in the world.
l The natural soundscape can create not only a wide range of emotional
spaces, it can also link with our human environments through analogy or simply
because of our tendency to seek meaning in all stimuli. Eg. Birldcalls.
l In designing the intention of the scene, actual voices or animal
sounds can be mixed in very low to accentuate the desire we have to identify
the unknown.
l Common sonic symbols
l As time passing by, more types of sounds added in to the soundscape
of wars.
l “bellicose” means “warlike”. Bells symbolize the passage of time,
reminding man of his morality and fragility in the universe, just a war does.
l In the 19th century, keynote sounds are different in
England and American, the stone and the wood separately. But in the 20th
century, all sounds become uniform when concrete and asphalt overtook all other
materials.
l As labor changed from the human rhythm of manual farming to the
mechanization of all types of work, man and machine got out of sync.
l The level od the noise represents the power of the protagonist.
l Locations can be distinguished through such subtleties as the kind
of train whistles… and even electrical hums (50Hz in Europe, 60Hz in America).
l Within one location there can be variation of the soundscape as
signals according to weather, time of day, or season.
l The natural force of wind can put manmade chimes into motion whether
what the material it is, which allows us to sense the invisible forces in the
air.
l The human voice is always raised outdoors, with no reverberation (混响) to
augment the vocal energy. And it is also influenced by the weather.
Inside recording creates a kind of private relationships between people.
In all, the type of human
communication occurring will influence and be influenced by the environmental
setting. (Spatial dimension)
l The size of an indoor space will also influence the speed of
information that can be conveyed. With a Gothic church, the music must play
slowly to allow for the
long reverberation time.
l The sounds of the
spaces themselves can be characteristic of their era, function, and
style. (under some invisible cyber-control)
l The fundamental resonance of a room, or Eigentone (本征音), will
give emphasis to certain frequencies because of the reflection of sound waves
between parallel surfaces. The notion of room tone as a basic level of sound below all
specific voices or effects is related to this, although there can be other
contributing factors, like electronic or mechanical hums, traffic background,
or weather sounds.
l Another form of orienting the audience to a specific geographical or
cultural space is through the music style accompanying the scene.
It talks about the interactivity between the sounds in rhythm, melody, or harmony on the soundtrack.
l
Convention has developed
certain stock characterizations of time and place, seen in specific orchestrations (和谐的结合) and
arrangements. Many of these themes are so overused that they serve more for
comedy or historical references, yet their continued force on our subconscious
cannot be denied.
l While transitions between one environment and another can be marked
by the change in sound, even a single soundscape may be composed of several
elements that are mixed at different levels according to the dramatic moment.
l An anechoic chamber (the opposite of an echo chamber) gives a
disconcerting effect/ the deathlike acoustic experience. (eg. explosion)
Acoustic territories (intro)
l Sound provides the most forceful stimulus that human beings
experience, and the most evanescent (逐渐消失的). –Burce
R. Smith
Sound gives us a deeply powerful stimulus that is equally evanescent,
passing- which opens up to a highly suggestive horizon for my own auditory
journey, and its continuation into writing: that in the combination of
intensity and ephemerality(短命的事物), the
significance of auditory experience may be located.
l This book mainly talks about where
do sounds come from and where do they go…
l The seemingly innocent trajectory of sound as it moves from its
source and toward a listener, without forgetting all the surfaces, bodies, and
other sounds it brushes against, is a story imparting a great deal of
information fully charged with geographic, social, psychological, and emotional
energy.
l My feeling is that an entire history and culture can be found within
a single sound; from its source to its destination sound is generative of a
diverse range of experiences, as well as remaining specifically tied to a given
context, as a deeper expressive and prolonged figure of culture.
l This arc, this soft trajectory, is a beautiful rendering of sound as
an itinerant (流动的) movement
that immediately brings two together; it suggests the intensity and grace with
which sound may create a relational space, a meeting point, diffuse and yet
pointed; a private space
that requires something between, an outside; a geography of intimacy that also incorporates the
dynamics of interference, noise, transgression.
l From one body to the other, a thread is made that stitches the two
together in a temporal instant, while remaining loose, slack, to unfurl back
into the general humdrum (单调) of place.
This is our moment.
l Knowledge formation
l This is our place. A place is generated by the temporality of the auditory.
l Auditory knowledge is a radical epistemological(认识论的) thrust(推力) that
unfolds as a spatio-temporal
event; sound opens up a field of interaction, to become a channel, a
fluid, a flux of voice and urgency, of play and drama, of mutuality (相互关系) and sharing,
to ultimately carve out a micro-geography of the moment, while always already
disappearing, as a distributive and sensitive propagation. (传播)
l This makes sound a significant model for also thinking and
experiencing the contemporary condition, for as a relational spatiality global
culture demands and necessitates continual reworking.
l It locates us within an extremely animate and energetic environment
that, like auditory phenomena, often exceeds the conventional parameters and
possibilities of representation.
l The momentary connection found in the arc of sound is equally a spatial formation
whose temporary appearance requires occupation, as a continual project.
l The dynamic of auditory
knowledge provides then a key opportunity for moving through the contemporary
by creating shared spaces that belong to no single
public and yet which impart a feeling for intimacy: sound is always already
mine and not mine.
l Sound is promiscuous. (混乱的)
It exists as a network that teaches us how to belong, to find place,
as well as how not to belong, to drift. To be out of place, and still to search for new connection, for
proximity.
l Auditory knowledge is non-dualistic. (非二次元的)
It is based on empathy
and divergence (分歧), allowing
for careful understanding and deep involvement in the present while connection
to the dynamics of mediation, displacement, and virtuality.
l It is already unfixed-in tune with the material and paradigmatic (词型变化的) energy
found within sound, that weave(编织) of
intensity and ephemerality (短暂的事物), of
animate (有生命的) flexibility
and charged spatiality, and importantly, within listening as a central and
organizational perspective.
l It is my sense that an auditory paradigm is tacitly (心照不宣地) embedded (嵌入) within the
contemporary condition and offers a compelling (引人注意的) structure
for elaborating what is already in play.
l The radical transformation of global experiences, in shifting the position of the
subject, the operations of economic
markets, and the borders
of the nation-state, initiates (开始) new
trajectories and struggles that cut across social reality.
l Questions of belonging and migration, of environmental and political conflict, swarm
through everyday life and touch the smallest corners of so many places.
l It is necessary to consider that how to participate within this mass of information,
to figure oneself in relation to all the presences to carry numerous identities
and how to be located within the flux of multiple geographies both proximate and remote.
l Lee Back The Art of Listening
sociological listening
l Acoustic Territories seeks to examine the exchanges between environments and the people
within them as registered through aural experience.
l Performative relations inherent to urban spatiality
l Research on urban theory, popular culture, and auditory issues
How sound conditions and contours (画轮廓线) subjectivity
by lending a dynamic materiality for social negotiation (谈判).
l It gives challenge to debates surrounding noise pollution by
appreciating the breadth of sound as based on conditions of disjunction (分离),
temporality, and difference.
l My intention has been to chart out an ‘acoustic politics of space,’
unfolding auditory experience as locational and poignantly (深刻的) embedded
within processes of social exchange.
Sound Studies
l
In the movement from the source
and the destination of the sound , it figures multiple points for distraction,
divergence (分歧), and interference (冲突), as well as connection and conjunction.
l
The associative dynamic of sound lends to triggering associate forms of discourse and
knowledge.
This is both participant
within the physics and phenomenological (现象学的) behavior of sound, as well as forming the conceptual and
psychodynamic (精神动力的) frame for recognizing how hearing is already an associative act.
l
The Modern Auditory I Steven Connor
The diffuse and disintegrative
movements of sound open out to a multiplicity of sensorial configurations (配置), technological networks, and shifts in spatiality.
The relationship between the
visual and the auditory: listening became more fully an act of imaginary
projection (投射) and transference (转移).
l
As Connor proposes, “The self
defined in terms of hearing rather than sight is a self imaged not as a point,
but as a membrane(膜)；not as a picture, but as a channel through which voices, noises and
musical travel. ”
Such diffuse and associate
experiences have only intensified throughout this past century, allocating the
switchboard experience to the entire field of everyday life, among the weave of the actual
and the virtual.
l
Sound studies takes such ontological (存在论的) conditions of the sonic self and elaborates upon the particular cultures, histories, and the media
that expose and mobilize its making.
l
Acoustic Territories aims to
lend this field of research, following the sonic self as a special figure
embedded with a sphere of
culture and social habits, what Richard
Cullen Rath calls “soundways,”
or the ways people come to express their relation to sound and its circulation.
In particular, Acoustic Territories traces the soundways of the
contemporary metropolis, rendering a topography (地形学) of auditory life through a spatial structure.
This structure follows sound
as it appears in specific auditory systems, within particular locations, as it
is expressed within various
cultural projects, and ultimately queries how sound comes to circulate(流通，传播) through everyday life, to act as medium for personal and social
transformation. This leads to an appreciation for how sound is manifest in
forms of local practices that also echo(反射) across greater historical and geographical terrain. (地形)
l
Sound reroutes the making of identity by creating a
greater and more suggestive(暗示的) weave
between self and surrounding.
l
In the book, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art,
the rich undulations(波动) of auditory materiality do much to unfix (使不安分) delineations (描述；画轮廓) between the private and
the public.
l
Sound operates by forming
links, groupings, and conjunctions(连接) that accentuate(强调) individual identity
as a relational (相关的) project.
l
The flows of surrounding sonority can be heard to weave an
individual into a larger social fabric, filling relations with local sound,
sonic culture, auditory memories, and the noises that move between,
contributing to the making of shared spaces. This
associative and connective process of sound comes to reconfigure(重新配置) the spatial distinctions of
inside and outside, to foster(培养) confrontations(对质) between one and another, and
to infuse(灌输) language with degrees of
immediacy.(直接) In this regard, sound studies
and auditory knowledge contribute greatly to understanding of the “geographic”
and the modern legacy of spatial production with a view toward engaging the
influential energies and ideological processes that lie in and around what we
see and touch.
l sound performs to “disintegrate(瓦解) and reconfigure space” –Connor
l The temporal and evanescent(消散的) nature
of sound imparts(给予) great
flexibility, and uncertainly, to the stability of space.
l Sound disregards(忽视) the
particular visual and material delineations(轮廓) of
spatial arrangements, displacing and replacing the lines between inside and
out, above from below.
l Edmund Carpenter& Marshall McLuhan: acoustic space creates
inself in time, for “auditory space has no point of favored focus. It’s a
sphere without fixed boundaries,
space made by the thing itself, not space containing a thing. It is not a
pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own
dimensions moment by moment.”
l Jean-Francois Augoyar: “the ubiquity (普遍存在) effect,” which “expresses the difficulty or impossibility of locating a
sound sorce.”
Sound, in its distributive(分配的) and dislocating
permeability (渗透性) appears
as if from everywhere; it flows as an environmental flux, leaving objects and
bodies behind to collect others in its movement.
He further links this effect to the urban milieu(都市环境): “because
of their particular conditions of propagation favoring the delocalization of
sound sources, urban milieus and architectural spaces are the most obvious
locations for the emergence of a ubiquity effect.”
The city, as a particular sonic geography, highlights sound’s inherent dynamic to
“disintegrate and reconfigure,” bringing forward its spatial and temporal
particularities.
l Though allowing for flexible participation, for a temporal contour (轮廓), acoustic space is often a
disruptive spatiality. It sparks annoyance and outrage (愤怒), while
also afford important opportunities
for dynamic sharing-to know the other.
l Government is more conscious about the acoustic pollution in
industrialized and metropolitan areas. Eg: London’s ANS. The policy is
structured around three key areas: securing noise-reducing surfaces related to
road construction and traffic, securing a night aircraft ban across London, and
reducing noise through improved planning and design strategies related to new
housing.
Transport and traffic stand are essential noises.
Acoustic Territories
l By interlacing (使交织) the pragmatic
(实际的) concerns
of ambient (周围的；环绕的) noise
strategies, and the challenges of noise in general, with Carpenter and McLuhan’s more
positive and poetical(理想的) acoustic, we arrive at a
crucial auditory tension.
l Although the noise has some disadvantages, it also has advantages.
On one hand, there is no denial as to the intensities with which
noise interferes with personal health and environmental well being, while on the other hand
noise may be heard as registering a particular vitality(生机) within the cultural and social sphere:
noise brings with it the expressiveness of freedom, particularly when located
on the street, in plain view, and within public space; it may feature as a communicational link by
supporting the passing of often difficult or challenging messages; and in its unboundedness(无介性) it both
fulfills and problematizes the sociality of architectural spaces by granting(承认；允许) it dynamic movement and temporal energy.
l Noise can partially be heard to give form to the radically(根本上) formless,
creating space for the
intensities of diversity, strangeness, and the unfamiliar.
l “Noise, then, can be heard not merely as a symptom(症状) of
symbolic vulnerability(脆弱性) or
theoretical disorder(混乱), but as
the evidence and the
occasional catalyst(临时的催化剂) of dynamic cultural
change operative(有效的) across the urban topos.(传统主题)
”
l Acoustic space(声学空间) thus
bring forward a process of acoustic territorialization(声音领域化), in
which the disintegration and reconfiguration(重新配置) of
space Connor maps becomes a
political process.
l The author tries to impart(给予) meaning
to the ambiguity inherent(固有的) to
acoustic space, as a
productive form of tension.
The divergent(相异的),
associative networking of sound comes to provide not only points of contact and appropriation(拨款；挪用), but also meaningful challenge; it
allows for participation-importantly,
as Back suggests, for the excluded-that is also already unsteady or demanding(要求高的).
l The author doesn’t focus on an analysis of sound pressure levels but
toward a general inquiry(调查) into the
meanings noise may have within
specific contexts, for particular communities.
The author’s work begins with
sound and at times arrives well past its physical trajectory(轨迹), for in
traveling away from itself, sound is picked up elsewhere, through memories and recordings,
to enliven(使活泼) the making of social
space.
Acoustic territories are then
specific while being multiple,
cut with flows and rhythms, vibrations(振动；犹豫；心灵感应)
and echoes, all of which form a sonic(音速的；声音的) discourse
that is equally feverish(发热的；极度兴奋的), energetic, and participatory(供人分享的；吸引参与的).
Sound is shared property onto which
many claims are made, over time, and which demand associative and relational understanding.
l To develop an
analysis of acoustic territories, I have chosen to
focus on specific
locations and sites within the everyday.
From the underground to the
sky, these sites act to knot(打结) together
multiple forces and trajectories(轨道) found
within daily conditions. In this way, the everyday is an open geography shaped and contoured by specific
forces and relations.
To engage these territories
through the mode of listening, and according to auditory behavior, the author
is interested to define such geography
as generative (生产的), full of dynamic resonance, as
an orchestration (管弦乐编曲；和谐的结合) of sharing and its
arrest (吸引); that is,
to recognize the already existing
relational movements of the contemporary situation which mark the globe.
The sound brings me closer to
these relational movements by insisting on more than a representational semiotic, giving
way to a sense or need for actual
meeting.
l Sound explicitly(明确地) brings
bodies together.
It forces us to come out, in
lyrical(感情丰富的),
antagonistic(敌对的), and
beautiful ways, creating
connective moments and deepening the sense for both the present and the
distant, the real and the mediated.
l If, as the contemporary situation seems to pronounce, we continue to
meet the other, in the flows
and intensities of so much connectivity, then sound and audition
readily(容易地) provide
a paradigmatic(词形变化的；范例的)
means to understand and
engage such dynamic.
l The presentation of specific acoustic territories should not be
exclusively(独有地) read as
places or sites but more as itinerary(旅程)
l As territories, the author defines them as movements between and
among differing forces,
full of multiplicity.
l Exposing them to listening I also map them onto an auditory
paradigm, exploring them through a particular discourse, while allowing them to
deepen my own listening, to influence and infect(感染) what I
have so far imagined sound providing- intimacy, in provocative(刺激的) and
complex scale. Sound creates a relational geography that is most often emotional, contentious (有异议的), fluid, and which stimulates
a form of knowledge that moves in and out of the body.
l Detailing the micro-epistemologies(认识论) and everyday terrains(地形；领域) of auditory experience,
I’ve come to hear sound as a movement that gives us each other, as both gift
and threat, as generosity(慷慨) and
agitation, as laughter and tears, marking listening as a highly provocative(刺激的) and relational
sense.
l Follow the precarious(危险的),
temporal, and detouring behavior(迂回行为) of
sonority. (响亮；响亮程度，宏亮度)
l It is my proposal that in the promiscuity(乱交) of sound,
its reproducibility, in its anxious and restless transfiguration(变形), we might
identify a means for occupying and exploring the multiple perspectives of the
present.
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