Sumários

Class 6

2 Dezembro 2024, 18:30 • Maile Colbert

Monday October 3:

Sound is vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality.

Meta phors for sound construct perceptual conditions of hearing

and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life. Sound

resides in this feedback loop of materiality and meta phor, infusing words

with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations. To engage

sound as the interrelation of materiality and meta phor is to show how

deeply the apparently separate i elds of perception and discourse are entwined

in everyday experiences and understandings of sound, and how

far they extend across physical, philosophical, and cultural contexts.

-Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny

“A sonic sensibility makes thinkable complex connections and trajectories in time and space.” (Voegelin, 2010, p. xvi)

Upon entering our ears, sound signals travel first to the oldest, pre-reflective areas of our brain, in constant process. Rather than the lines and paths and bordered sections most drawings would illustrate, in reality those paths and processes are still mysterious, and the complicated mess of neurons and neural substrates would look more like a Jackson Pollock painting. From the Auditory Thalamus, two paths form: a high speed and unconscious path towards the Amygdala, then Hippocampus; and a slower, more conscious path through the Auditory Cortex then Hypothalamus. Blesser and Salter connect this to the way we tend to think of ourselves as two selves; the experiencing self (our now: our implicit memory), and the remembering self (thinking then now: our explicit memory). (Blesser and Salter, 2018) Rather than the immediate blending of perceived information, such as with vision, most information in sound (such as location and loudness) is kept and processed separately along these routes, allowing the infinitely complex activity of hearing to collect instantaneously a large amount of data, and simultaneously choose and process a selection of that information towards affect, sensation, and thought, in application and collaboration with our other senses. Modes and methodologies that take this into consideration can be applied when designing sound in creative practice, in particular work that considers sound with visuals, which can allow us to enter deeper and outside borders and frames, and play a crucial role in transmitting an experience from most time-based media, in a partial mimicry of how we experience our aural environment in relation to vision; we cannot see what is behind us, but we can hear it. We can apply that to what we see in front of us, and we have almost the full picture.

Audition has a special relationship to emotion, instinct, and memory, both individual and collective. While hearing, if not hearing-impaired, is usually defined as an automatic system of perceiving sounds, listening is a conscious act giving attention towards those sounds. Tapping into that ancient area of our brain, listening provides immediate information telling us where we are, if it is safe, and how we should feel about that. “Based on hearing, listening (from an anthropological point of view) is the very sense of space and of time," Roland Barthes wrote in his 1985 essay, Listening. (p. 247) Barthes further notes, "[N]oises have been the immediate raw materials of a divination, (cledonomancy): to listen is, in an institutional manner, to try to find out what is happening”. (p. 247)

Henri Bergson described, the “moment when the recollection (…) is capable of blending so well with present the perception that we cannot say where perception ends or memory begins.” (Bergson, 1911, p. 106) Sound perception is multi-tiered. “In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our minds, we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself.” (Brentano, 1874, p. 179)

“What is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as content at the same time.” (Brentano, 1874, p. 180)

But what are we apprehending? Are they objects? Are they emissions? Are they properties of objects, or events? If we know what they are, then where are they? Where they are heard, or where they are emitted? We don’t currently have direct answers to these questions, and it is exactly that ambiguity that can make sound so compelling, bonds it to the art world, and renders it a constructive theme for philosophical discourse. Sound does not fit neatly into our worldly rules, and while history tells us we have understood the biology and anatomy of the ear, and its basic functions for a very long time–Aristotle postulated a theory that the inner ear was filled with a special purified air, aer ingenitus, then in 1761 Domenico Cotugno discovered through dissection it was fluid rather than air, and concluded in his dissertation, De aquaeductibus auris humane internae anatomica, (1761) that there were acoustic nerves suspended and oscillating like strings to transmit the sensation of hearing to auditory centers in the brain–we still cannot easily define what exactly sound is, or at what point, i.e. when, sound is. Is it the point where an event pushes airborne waveforms towards the hearing ear; the point those waves enter the ear and convert the waveforms into electrochemical signals that are then transmitted to and processed by the auditory pathways of the brain, or the point of that processing itself? This is the act of hearing: perceiving sound.

In David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny’s invaluable book keywords in sound, (2015) Feld defined the term “acoustemology”, conjoining “acoustic” and “epistemology” to describe sound as a way of knowing and being in the world. (2015, p. 12) His work calls for a sensuous relationship and investigation with place. “What is knowable and becomes known through sound and listening”

In Acoustics chapter, the simplest definition would be the physics of vibrations when received (ear, microphone, recording device) …we should also consider perception.

Psychoacoustics: the concern with aural perception along parameters other than the bodily