WEEK 3. Listening: Sound and Anthropology

What is my relationship to sound? I <3 silence. During the first week of lockdown, my partner and I committed ourselves to 3 days of silence. It was bliss. It felt spacious and cleansing. Calming and productive. Non-verbal communication meant that we made more eye contact with each other and in some ways this reduced the confusion brought on by too much choice with words. I am an advocate for silence, but I understand that having it or being able to access it is somewhat of a privilege. Reflecting on a trailer we watched as part of the lecture, 'In Pursuit of Silence' in some ways it evidences this privilege, a comment on the video crudely sums up some of my thoughts. It seems to suggest that silence is accessed by travelling to dramatic landscapes far from civilisation, not so accessible for a lot of people. It could be argued that noise pollution and socio-economic status are linked. Often noisy environments are difficult to escape.

Different sounds mean different things to different people. Noise that feels familiar and comforting to some might induce anxiety in others. When I was growing up in Glasgow, on an evening it wasn't uncommon to hear a lone drunk man finding his way home from the pub, singing incoherent folk songs or football chants to himself. For some reason, I would always find this comforting. Later in life after I would notice the difference in the calibre of street sounds as I moved around different parts of Newcastle. Realising that after moving to a more urban area, after living in a middle-class neighbourhood, that I had missed the sound of police sirens and late night crawlers making themselves heard in the streets, it made me feel 'at home' and part of the bustling city.

LEARNING LAB - Notes

Task one.

We were asked to recite a passage from one of the weeks readings.

I chose the passage below from Ingold's - Lines: Chapter on Language, music and notation, because I really loved the image implied of a journey taken when reading a story. As if we as the reader are free to roam around the environment created by the text, each finding our own individual way through the tale, drawn in different directions by details that resonate with us personally. And with each return to that landscape, through re-reading, a new detail is found and a different journey taken.

“In reading, as in storytelling and travelling, one remembers as one goes along. Thus the act of remembering was itself conceived as a performance: the text is remembered by reading it, the story by telling it, the journey by making it. Every text, story or trip, in short, is a journey made rather than an object found. And although with each journey one may cover the same ground, each is nevertheless an original movement. There is no fixed template or specification that underwrites them all, nor can every performance be regarded as a compliant token that is simply ‘read off’ from the script or route-map (Ingold 2001: 145).”

Task two.

We were asked to take a three minute audio recording.

In taking up the task of making a recording. I ventured out with my sound recorder with no agenda whatsoever apart from to simply listen to the environment and press record at random. I made a few recordings but the one above represents for me the notion sketched out in the passage from Ingold's chapter. This recording was made whilst I waited in the car as my partner collected an office chair for me from an old art studio building. In an exercise in audio voyeurism, I recorded the sounds as someone from the studios took out the bins at the front of the building. What I like most about the recording is the depth created by the degrees of action happening over varying distances. This really helps to conjure up images in the mind, as you try to place yourself spatially in the sound. Internalising the sound experience, imagining a landscape.

Soundscape? Ingold wouldn't be happy!

Seeing sound. The listening eye?

Design drawn from memory by woman of Caimito village 1981 - from Tim Ingold – Lines - Chapter on Language, Music and Notation. Reminds me a lot of these images produced by Chladni plates.

Sound vibrations on Chladni Plates.