unsounded

“Hannah Wallis is an artist, curator and researcher based in the Midlands. Marked by an attention to the boundaries between making, performance, locality, curating and disability rights, Hannah’s practice exists at the intersection of these disciplines; concerned with how visual and performative knowledge production can inform and be informed by collectivisation, collaboration and long-term research cycles.

Collaborating under the moniker of Dyad Creative with artist Théodora Lecrinier since 2014, and supported by organisations including a-n, East Street Arts, National Centre for Writing, Kettle’s Yard, and Arts Council England, Hannah has led residency programmes and learning projects, developed interactive commissions and curatorial research, as well as managing several temporary artist-led spaces.

Currently working as curator-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre, as part of a programme to support the career development of D/deaf and Disabled Curators, in partnership with DASH, Midlands Art Centre and MIMA, Hannah also provided curatorial support within the wider Wysing programme before joining the curatorial team at Nottingham Contemporary as Assistant Curator.

Committed to the long-term application of accessibility practices within the arts, Hannah has worked with Aural Diversity, Deafroots and National Gallery, London. Hannah currently works as artist mentor and support aide for DASH members.”

Hannah talked about her interest in Sound and how it’s a complicated relationship. . Wallis was born with hearing, but due to complications from illness, became deaf. She could hear for the first 18 months, which is a very formative period, so Hannah can speak, but relies on lip reading alongside cochlear implants to listen to others. This means that she has transitioned through various states of hearing, experiencing hearing aids before needing cochlear implants. She referred to this as ‘Hearing mechanically’ and that it “Opened up the space to how I understand just how sound shapes us”. With these experiences, Wallis takes her responsibility as a curator seriously. We talked about ‘captioning’ and how artists should take greater consideration of captioning before completing a work, so we can aim to approximate and “…. translate sound for those who don’t hear it in a ‘mainstream way”.

I was interested in the term ‘Captioning’ and mistook it for an aim towards more multi-sensory works. Which whilst Wallis encouraged multi-sensory aspects to Sound Art it was not necessarily the main concern when it came to captioning, more just taking more time to accurately describe sound and not seeing the process of describing ones work as demystifying but something that could accurately discern that experience for disabled people. Text and Image offer another way into the sound, as people who enter a space don’t enter on equal terms. Examples of good/bad captioning in film; “eerie music” or “music playing” in text on the screen. One specifies the mood of the music, the other just tells us there if some music is playing. Wallis also spoke about translation and how good captioning would work like a very considered translation of a novel. Notably, translation always has a bias, as the translator is a conduit for something that isn’t naturally their own words. Captioning another person’s work can be done well but like translation is a sensitive form of representation, that is why Wallis encouraged us to practice a ‘caption-conscious ecology’… “These things need to be integrated into practice daily and not added at the end when you might not have much budget left and resource left”, thinking about how these works will be translated to disabled audience members from the start of the practice, means its less of an afterthought and more inclusive.

Wallis helped curate an exhibition with Ain Bailey and Wilf Speller called Version.

This piece was drawing from Ain Bailey’s exploration of her cultural identity. Sculptures and the vibration of bass add extra sensory elements to this installation increasing its inclusivity.

Christine Sun Kim, whose sound art directly references and uses captioning as a means to explore her relationship to Sound as a non-hearing person.

Here is Christine Sun Kim introducing her works from ‘The World is Sound’. This sound art maps out a type of deep listening. Using classical music’s notation for dynamics as means to describe complex types of neurological behaviour and global warming. Kim explains how surprisingly descriptions captioning in film influenced this work. This work really opens up what sound art can be.

In a previous post I spoke about how Lightning Field by Walter De Maria could be arguably a piece of Sound Art. The ‘Land Art’ piece is designed to capture Lightning, which regardless of whether the weather… permits such a sound event, we are aware of this sound as consequential of the structure and therefore we are thinking of the sound when it is not physically occurring. Through Sun Kim’s work I am starting to make this connection (prior to reflecting on De Maria). How I am learning the discipline of Sound Art, through a musical background as a gateway into practising Art and not Music. To recognise Sound Art as a branch within Art and not a separate entity we can start to have more fun with the visualisation and vibration of sound. Through text or associative sound producing objects, we subconsciously hear these sounding objects abstract from experiencing a physical sound. This is itself is a type of deep listening that is potentially more inclusive. These abstract sounds could be entirely culturally constructed too, so whilst I might hear an associated sound in my head, and Wallis might, these are still not a completely shared experience. This challenge of art that can be fully accessible to everyone further’s the point of Captioning.

When I think of images that naturally evoke a sound without the need for sounding, I might think of Ocean, Forest. I generally think of environments which are very complex sounds that someone without that learned experience of hearing could understand. Is acousmatic listening useful in how we explain/caption these sounds which we can’t help but think of through word association (our learned experience from an ableist-set culture)?

In a previous Visiting Practitioner Lecture, Andrew Pierre Hart spoke about how painting a rock, or a bicycle makes him hear an associated sound when speaking about the deep ancestral history of the sound of rock’s smashing together. “Don’t think of an elephant” can be applied to this type of thinking.

Hannah Wallis when speaking about how she hears and drawing off these layers of hearing differently throughout her life. She has a certain amount of learned experience of sound through periods of hearing and periods of not hearing.”Whilst I might not hear in a natural way I have knowledge around that”. This is different for every deaf person. Some people born deaf won’t be able to contextualise sound in the same way as her. She spoke about how chords and tonality are things deaf people may struggle to define due to no learned experience of these concepts. Wallis says that learned about sound from interacting with its absence to gain a unique perspective. How do we define Deep Listening in light of these incidents? Captioning our Deep Listening experiences might help deaf people sculpt a clearer sense of what is around them, or remind them of sensations imbedded in the subconscious. But also, might teach us to think about this ‘space around sound’ that Wallis describes.

Drawing off my own experience with sensitivity to sound and tinnitus, I have an interesting relationship to silence. For a long time I hated silence and tried to avoid it. Therapy practices often involve a kind of westernised meditation, in which I am encouraged to sit in silence with myself, sit in silence with the damage. I couldn’t care less about silence until I convinced myself I couldn’t hear it anymore, but silence is subjective, so sound must be subjective too.

Hannah Wallis documented a collection of research for Wysing Broadcast during the beginning of the pandemic. https://wysingbroadcasts.art/explore/hannah-wallis. This open research shows the books and sources of interest Wallis was uncovering, and is a very transparent look at independent study, with book recommendations and Sound Art recommendations all linked so the visitor can follow along with whatever might pick their interest. I have personally found this very helpful for some recommendations for books on the subjects of chronic pain, living with disability, aural diversities and sound theory. So many quality resources to unpack.

Reading List:

Beyond Unwanted Sound: Marie Thompson

Sonic Agency: Brandon Labelle

The Human Voice: Anne Karpf

The Body Keeps The Score: Bessel Van Der Kolk

The Delayed Present: Wolfgang Ernst

Matters Of Care:

We spoke about practising a ‘caption-conscious ecology’ with Sound Art and how for best translation, thinking about the caption process should exist from the beginning of the performance. Whether that’s accompanying text or image, or any other sensory forms of art. The biggest takeaway for me is that whilst I operate under the helpful term of Sound Art (as a person with no Fine Art experience, but lots of music experience) there is something intimidating to me about visual forms of art. But I find Sound Art works can often look quite unattractive without a visual or sensory element – this lack of visual attention potentially cuts of sensory avenues that could include more visitors. Annea Lockwood drowning a piano for example, without the striking image of that drowned piano the sound could be underwhelming. Gestures by Yan Jun showcases a dichotomy between action and sound. The flash from the cameras tells us when sound events are occurring. An exciting and freeing concept to me is a silent sound object that produces the thought of a sound still being a sound? Yet, not all sound works can exist in a multi-sensory domain, which is where captioning plays a vital role in helping those who can’t (or at variable levels) experience sound and why we should all think harder on how we can translate these feelings and concepts of sound to someone without the same learned experience. This lecture put into perspective the myriad of relationships to sound that I have taken for granted. Understanding tonality, harmony, frequency and by proxy vibration. Speech, silence, distance, positionality and probably countless more things that don’t come to mind right now.

I hope to continue this line of research and relate more to my own experiences of experiencing sound.

“You can listen with your body, not necessarily with hearing”.

“An absence of something can shape you as much as the presence of something”

Deconstructing how sound operates in society. Sound is something that can be captioned.

How do we approach the accessibility of past works?

We spoke with Vicki Bennett a couple of months ago, which in the moment of working towards our exhibition shows, I completely forgot to do a follow up write-up from my notes.

For the sake of working towards some sort of bio for myself, which may prove useful for my DPS year. Here is the full bio from the People Like Us website, Vicki’s moniker;

“Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. 

In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.”

In the 90s, Vicki Bennett started a late-night radio show in Brighton. “Making radio out of radio”. Vicki would record Sussex Radio, as they had to constantly speak causing strange conversations to take place as the presenters had to speak unnaturally to fill the time. Bennett would take the samples of this speech and repurpose them into her show. “Boring waffle, but interesting in a John Cage kind of way”. I found this very enlightening, as I have a radio show in Brighton where I piece together mixes regularly and after listening to her speak, I am considering starting a new show where I can explore some more experimental practices.

“The Sound Of The End of Music”

–inspired by mash up culture. The Doors, Apocalypse Now, blended with The Sound of Music. Pre-existing material has a previous life. “Ideas are not linear” Originality isn’t important, Uniqueness, Energy, Experience. “Ideas are endless if you are open to them”. We grow up to mimic that’s how we speak. “You’re always sampling”.

“By accusing someone of stealing by sampling, you aren’t letting people learn, or letting them be inspired.”

Self imposed limitations = Good

Environmental Limitations = No romanticism, can work for some people.

As Vicki Bennett felt the need to distance herself from the term, I do wonder whether these Artists consider themselves plunder phonics. Some more examples of musical collage I think off on the top of my head are Holger Czukay from Can. Movements from songs are spliced into his own recordings and used as solos and flourishes. Frank Zappa would repurpose unused solo’s on different tracks, enjoying the different phrasings that would occur from taking the sound from its context.

This Ambient piece by Terre Thaemlitz contains very hidden samples of Bronski Beat ‘Smalltown Boy’, alongside the main lyrical sample of ‘Falling’ and ‘Runaway’ the samples within the track, help meditate potentially on themes of queer loneliness through the connotations of including those tracks. Collage aligns a collection of similar emotions from disparate genres under the unifying guise of a dance track. I believe Thaemlitz usually works under genre of Ambient and not plunder-phonics, but I am not entirely sure. We will be covering Ultra-Red soon in class so will refelct on Thaemlitz (a collaborator) then.

In regards to John Oswald and this idea of plunder phonics, I can see Vicki Bennet’s decision to distance herself from this concept, claiming it was ‘too political’. The album John Oswald created with the tag of his created genre features quite a problematic image of Michael Jackson naked with a woman’s body. The image of Michael Jackson accompanies a complete discectomy of musical elements, as they are ground up and repurposed. It feels a bit like MJ is the butt of the joke.

Whilst the music itself is quite interesting, I find it difficult to really decipher the intent with the Artwork (which you could argue as racist, transphobic or sexist if the intent is read as debasement).

Vicki Bennett effectively sees recorded music as material for collage and is interested in the dichotomy between sample source and the transformation through collage they undertake. Bennett sees this approach of the reusing of material as no different from other artistic forms of collage. Plunderphonics whilst of a similar anti-copyright sentiment, takes things onto a sort of grandiose revelatory place which contrasts Bennett’s low-key insistence that she is like any other collage-based artist. Even though her work can at times decontextualise ideas into quite epic new proportions (See the Hills Are Alive.), the explanations she gives for the work are much less so. Her work is more accessible and striking in it’s re-contextualisation of samples and more understated. Multiple sounds and samples are combined in a long-form way. Themes from the original works stay intact but are often juxtaposed in a kind of ‘mash-up’ with another cultural artefact to create a new meaning. Plunderphonics is a lot more short-form, fitting tons of second-long snippets into a disorientating-ly rich tapestry. It’s a more challenging listen with a more epic explanation.

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/vicki-bennett-queen-digital-folk-underground

Vicki Bennett’s work is concerned with propagating or decontextualising materials into sound events, but more recontextualised into new and different narratives. She stated her main reason for distancing herself from Plunderphonics was the politicisation of ‘collage’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_hJmmi_mnI

I find the Plunderphonics use of manifesto pretentious. For comparison, Richard Pheonix writing the manifesto “DIY is a privilege” for how we can be more inclusive in music scenes and spaces for disabled people, earns a right to demand its importance, because its a manifesto that seeks to guide the music world out of concepts which upkeep oppressive, ableist structures. Whilst I like the effect of hearing these sounds cut away from their source materials and context, If I had been working simultaneously at this time on media collage (ideas that have been in play in experimental music since tape machines were invented) I would probably take issue with being bundled in with plunder-phonics, if not for anything else but the dodgy cover and the over-reaching importance of collage as some world-breaking phenomenon.

“The reuse of existing recorded materials is not restricted to the street and the esoteric. The single guitar chord occurring infrequently on H. Hancock’s hit arrangement “Rocket” was not struck by an in-studio union guitarist but was sampled directly from an old Led Zepplin record. Similarly, Michael Jackson unwittingly turns up on Hancock’s follow-up clone “Hard Rock”. Now that keyboardists are getting instruments with the button for this appropriation built in, they’re going to push it, easier than reconstructing the ideal sound from oscillation one.” – In this excerpt from the Plunderphonics manifesto, I take issue with the use of the word appropriation. By this logic, Led Zeppelin writing songs inspired by blues music is the appropriation/sampling of blues music. So is it appropriation when black artists reuse that material or re-appropriation? or maybe even reclamation? If attempting to write music influenced by other music is a sample, How do you account for the ancestry of a sample? It’s simple to say, when I try and sound like Bruce Springsteen, I am sampling Bruce Springsteen, but it fails to account for my hardware (political), my voice (political), my musical knowledge (political) and my musical ability. It also fails to account for subconscious musical influence and the layers of other artists I may be bringing from. No artist can sit down and truly write another artists song. There is clearly a distinction. I may be missing some nuance to this text, as Oswald does mention ‘layers of authorship’. But I feel like this term means very different things to us. For him, this means, everything is plagiarised so nothing is. Which I agree with to an extent, but when we think about unethical practices of anthropology and appropriation, layers of authorship can mean something that perhaps should be protected, which has ownership to a society. If there is historical proof to these thefts (e.g blues music) having happened, is it okay to use that as an excuse for it to continue?

“Is a timbre any less definably possessable than a melody? A composer who claims divine inspiration is perhaps exempt from responsibility to this inventory of the layers of authorship. But what about the unblessed rest of us?” – Plunderphonics, John Oswald

As Sound Artists, we repurpose and abstract sound. Most of us have experimented with field recording, but even when using it practically to create a ‘truth’ we crop, EQ and cut. All sound is effected and processed, therefore abstracted. Timbre of any recording has an unquantifiable amount of artefact that can be repurposed. Layers of Authorship is an interesting concept to me. When thinking about the ethics of sampling, I would personally work intersectional feminist principles into a debate into these ethics, look at myself and where I stand within these oppressive systems as a guide to that process.

Bennett’s work takes big culturally significant materials and repurposes them, so often what we are seeing or hearing is something we already have a relation to. “I’m not taking from underground artists and certainly not unpublished artists”, Bennett hates the ‘policing’ of creativity, and says anything that is published has its rights in the public domain, thus becomes a material to be played with, for new artists to use and repurpose. Thinking of an idea as its own life-form separate from an artist, that almost deserves to be repurposed and played with. “We grow up to mimic” and “We are always sampling”. For the most part I agree whole-heartedly with these sentiments, collaging and sampling recycle old ideas and timbres which cannot exist today, due to technology and just shifts in musical trends but also the personnel.

I think Bennett is a well-spoken artist with concerns over the exclusivity of the art world, an exclusivity over information. Bennett refers to her work as collage, which may be due to it using video and audio mostly, but I wonder if its also due to the unloaded, simplicity of that term. ‘Call a spade a spade’ type rejections of pretentious ‘art-speak’ and the academia surrounding Plunder-phonics and even Musique Concrete. I think when I talk about plagiarism, I mean, when a new artist makes a piece of music that sounds incredibly similar to a pre-existing musician, who hasn’t been credited, and that artist is set to make money of not being creative enough to come up with their own idea – That is the crux of what I dislike about plagiarism, when someone else gets rich of it.

I think in a sense, I agree with Vicki Bennett, but I think like any kind of anthropology, there is a code of conduct. When sampling a sound, you take with it political context of that sound. If I sampled Michael Jackson now for example, it comes with all that horror that we have come to think of when hearing his name or hearing his songs. Oswald when talking about H.Hancock sampling Led Zeppelin fails to navigate race critically. There is a known subtext or context to a sample that as an artist I must be aware of. Kanye West samples King Crimson on a song about Power – it could be argued there is a deeper context to that choice of sample, King Crimson being a band of middle-class men from England. It also is a much lauded progressive rock album that is only given new life to a completely new audience. A Tribe Called Quest sampled a lot of European Jazz Fusion, arguably giving that genre a completely new lease of life and context. Ultimately, post-modernism drives all forms of art into material to be used, but I think that it also drives with it political context. Everything is material, but not all material should be on the table… to everyone. In the same way you would call out a upper-class fine artist for wearing Burberry ironically, it’s important to remember that context is key…

In our first lesson with Annie, we broke down what is required from us for the hand in at the end of this module. For this unit, we are developing our own practice and exploring what Sound Art means to us. We have to research a topic of our choice rigorously, internally reflecting based on this research from where our pre- conceptions about the subject were.

We will write a 1,500 word literary review. In which we will respond to one literary resource and refer to roughly 5 books as well as an essay on a title of our choice, which will be informed by the literary review and relate to contemporary issues in Sound Art, contemporary issue effectively meaning my own idea of what Sound Art is.

Constance Classen’s ‘Foundations for an anthropology of the senses’

Human behaviour, physical phenomena, but also avenues for the transmission of cultural values.

Whilst reading this text, I took a lot of quotations just to help me digest the parts I found more dense than others. We spoke about this text in class. I will try to formulate a mixture of what we discussed then with my own thoughts on the topic;…

“Sight may be linked to rea-
son or to witchcraft, taste may be used as a
metaphor for aesthetic discrimination or for sex-
ual experience, an odour may signify sanctity
or sin, political power or social exclusion.
Together, these sensory meanings and values
form the sensory model espoused by a society,
according to which the members of that society
‘make sense’ of the world, or translate sensory
perceptions and concepts into a particular
‘worldview”

The relation of sight to reason or ‘witchcraft’ is a powerful use of a term worth digging into. Classen goes on to explain how things in the past that could not been seen or explained through the visuo-centric model were often accused of as being occult. I was not aware of the “Odour of sanctity”, essentially, common catholic thought that saint’s blood had a floral aroma that was released upon death. This aroma was an indication of the purity of a soul leaving the body. Their blood often referred to as the ‘Oil of Saints’ with healing properties, these graced Saint’s were referred to as Myroblytes. (Myron etymology in Myrr, A Healing Liquid).

Very important with our assessment of other cultures is not to fall into the trap of basing that culture off the lineage and history of our own, completely separate culture. In doing so we lazily imply a sense of superiority. I also felt personally that this type of thinking assumes that progress is a given in societies. Which fails to account for the mistakes of colonialism, genocide and war that has plagued the West and all the times civilisations have crumbled over the millennia of humankind.

“The anthropology of the senses has had to overcome three prevalent assumptions in order to
establish itself as an alternative approach to the
study of culture. The first is the assumption that
the senses are ‘windows on the world’, or in
other words transparent in nature, and therefore
precultural. Considering the amount of attention
paid in recent years to the different ways in
which the human body is socially constructed,
it is surprising that the senses should still be
thought of as purely biological in nature. The
senses, in fact, are as regulated by society as
most other aspects of bodily existence, from
eating to aging. Social codes determine what
constitutes acceptable sensory behaviour at any
time for anyone, and indicate what different
sensory experiences mean. To stare at someone
may signify rudeness, flattery or domination
depending on the circumstances and the culture.
Downcast eyes, in turn, may suggest modesty,
fear, contemplation or inattention.”

In this text Classen talks about how a ‘sensory model is espoused by a society’, this is very important for us as students to note, to choose a more rigorous specification in opposition to, as Annie says “making grand statements about the world”. We reflected on how our senses our based in biology, but their uses are conditioned by cultures.

Ocularcentrism/Visuocentrism – “A perceptual and epistemological bias ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures. An example would be a preference for the written word rather than the spoken word”. This to me seems very apparent in a book by Annie Besant, socialist and theosophist called Thoughtforms (1901). In Thoughtforms, Besant talks about divine energy and uses paintings as diagrams to help us visualise this divine energy. I find this quite fascinating, as perhaps these ideas stemmed from a kind of visuocentrism that would’ve been emboldened due to the development of sciences in that period (the late 19th Century) and having to ‘see something to believe it’. Perhaps what was trying to be visualised was not this completely divine and spiritual energy, but more subtle sensory information; the quality of sound and echo in the space, vibration, smell, taste, all of which could be changed by pressure in the air (outside/inside/seasonal changes). A vast unquantifiable things effect our sensory experience. I wonder how much of these things were aware to Besant at the turn of the 20th century, and whether this mapping is more a representation of honed senses, displaying something more scientific than perhaps it’s considered when removed from its spiritual context.

epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge.

The cultural bias of sight…

“Focusing on the visual (or the audio-visual)
elements of culture to the neglect of other sen-
sory phenomena can furthermore introduce a
rupture in the interconnected sensory system of
a society. This occurs most notably with arte-
facts, which are frequently abstracted from a
dynamic context of multisensory uses and
meanings and transformed into static objects for
the gaze inside the glass cases of museums or
within books of photography. Navajo sandpaint-
ings, to give an example, are much more than
simply visual representations for the Navajo.
Sandpaintings, which are created in the context
of healing ceremonies, are made to be pressed
onto the bodies of the participants, and not
simply seen. From a conventional Western per-
spective, picking up sand from the sandpainting
and applying it to the body ‘destroys’ the paint-
ing. From the Navajo perspective, this act ‘com-
pletes’ the painting by transfemng the healing
power contained in the visual representation to
the patient’s body through the medium of touch.
According to traditional Navajo religion it is,
in fact, sacrilegious to preserve a sandpainting
untouched: such an act of visual hubris is said
to be punished by blindness.” – Constance Classen

“‘The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts
. . . which the anthropologist strains to read over
the shoulders of those to whom they properly
belong’ (Geertz, 1973, p. 452).”

“Seeger further found the Suya
to emphasize the social importance of speaking
and hearing, while linking sight with anti-social
behaviour such as witchcraft. He argued that
the importance of aurality was evident in the
lip and ear discs worn by Suya men, an instance
of body decoration serving to remind individ-
uals of the proper sensory hierarchy (see further
Turner, 1995; Howes, 1991, pp. 175-78)”

“The grandma sits on a wooden stool . . . Her face dark,
her hair tied in a bun, her hands freckled and rough.
The child slips into her lap. It is time for fairy tales.
Slipping into her lap is slipping into a surround of
different smells and textures, sediments of her work in
the fields, the kitchen, with the animals. (Seremetakis,
1994, p. 30)
Seremetakis states that her aim in undertak-
ing an anthropology of the senses is to recover
the ‘often hidden sensory-perceptual dispo-
sitions’ of traditional societies and thereby
recover the memory of culture embedded in
personal recollections and material artefacts”

“During this period, traditional sensory
concepts such as the odour of sanctity largely
passed away, while new concepts such as photo-
graphic truth were introduced. Nonetheless,
anthropologists should not assume that, because
smell, for instance, was more important in earl-
ier periods of Western culture than it is now,
non-Western cultures in which the sense of
smell is important today represent an earlier
stage in the scale of sensory and social evol-
ution. To make this assumption is to harken
back to the old days of anthropological thought
when the cultural transition from smell to sight
was deemed to accompany the transition from
savagery to civilization. The history of the sen-
ses in the West must not be considered a yard-
stick against which to measure the sensory
development of other cultures. Each society has
its own trajectory of sensory progression and
change.”

This was quite a dense piece of text that I found quite challenging to absorb. The takeaway was this discussion about higher and lower senses. It made me think about other factors that might influence a person and how they prioritise senses. For example, someone hard of hearing may lead with visual cues or sight for information, or speak in sign. Some neurodivergent people may lead with sound and find eye contact over-stimulating or may not develop verbal communication until later in their lives. It also made me think about how we listen. Everyone listens differently, as I come from a musical background, I am aware that I mostly hear tones in music, and prioritise these over lyrics and words in music. Often never learning the lyrics to my favourite songs. Other people know all the lyrics to a song after a few listens. In music, we often talk about established western harmony, so we perceive music through this social model. In a book I am reading ‘Music To The Self’, the author postulates that classically trained Indian musicians find that the tuning of a grand piano sounds wrong. Also personally speaking, sometimes I find if I am listening to someone or something, I need to look away from them in order to listen more carefully, or close my eyes. Or sometimes vision can distract me from listening. These senses compete for my attention/for dominance. Whether or not that applies to more anthropological studies am not sure. The big takeaway for me from this discussion was that, a sensory model that relies too heavily on sight or sound is actually a form of exclusion for disabled people within a society who don’t see or hear in the mainstream capacity, so I think not only is a realisation of a visuo-centric or “audio-centric” bias bad when attempting to learn and document indigenous or foreign cultures, but also bad for any society when aiming to create a unifying language. Everybody’s experience of their collective senses are different. Perhaps there is no way to not exclude with art, but related to visiting practitioner Hannah Wallis (who I am still formulating my notes on) maybe it’s about doing our best to create works that are properly ‘captioned’ for those who might be excluded in mind. Captioning in the sense as Wallis put it – A caption that is intrinsic to the understanding of the work, in a way that is a process from the beginning, instead of an afterthought.

I found our discussions difficult, as personally speaking I have rarely been dropped into another culture, so found it a hard concept to get around, without drawing on learned stereotypes about other cultures.. or things I have no way of proving without experience. That being said I live within a melting pot of various cultures, importantly all under the branch of western society. It’s easy for the conversation to steer towards generalisations of cultures maybe, and that part of the discussion made me slightly uncomfortable. It was interesting to hear perspectives on English culture (specifically South of England) from people who came from different countries. English sensibility has always been perceived as unkind or reserved it’s interesting to ponder why that is, the north and Scotland being archetype-d or stereotyped as a lot warmer. As previously stated, I dislike these generalisations and as someone who has only ever been immersed in this culture, I lack anything to compare it to.

Thoughts on Books to research:..

There are a few issues I am interested in off the bat here: Deep Listening, Pauline Oliveros and New Age. How are these two things connected? I felt reading Deep Listening, that there was an element of new age to it due to its formation in a time where the west was more and more influenced by far reaching cultures as an answer to unrest and unhappiness in the increasingly capitalist west. I’m also interested in New Age because of Healing Music, which has strangely filtered to the present day with things like ‘binaural beats for study’. New Age musician Iasos wrote music that he believed took people to a higher emotional plane and had a complete new age-y scientific explanation for how to achieve this within music. Most notably, he composed ‘Angels of Comfort’, which some counsellors in America give to terminally ill patients to ease there anxieties and discomfort with confronting death. Some people who have had near death experiences claiming that this music is what they heard in heaven. This cult-like response to music was very powerful and when I discovered I had tinnitus, I found this music helpful in alleviating symptoms by sleeping with it on at the tiniest volumes. This kind of spirituality attached to sound is interesting, and reminds me of a book I bought but have yet to read released by sacred bones called Thoughtforms, about theology and the manifestations of divine energy. Perhaps quite interesting when speaking about anthology of the senses, about how we try to make sense of intangible spiritual concepts, and which senses we choose to relate them too. My hearing conditions were entangled with an anxiety disorder and for years I dealt with a sensitivity to sound. With Hannah Wallis’ talking at the University, I have been inspired to engage more with this line of enquiry. I personally feel that my hearing problems effected my relationship to sound quite profoundly. So as we enter the final stage of my BA, it makes sense that I try to start relating the course to my experiences, which hopefully on a personal level might clarify with myself what that ordeal taught me. Healing Music is an interesting concept, New Age and ‘wellness’ culture, these tangible dreams are sold to us, as society we do not consider often that pain is a part of life until it becomes a part of our lives. Chronic Illness and Disability are left out of this equation.

Syneasthesia is an interesting avenue which links to Thoughforms and Theosophy and also even back to the Art movement Symbolism early 19th Century. Mostly painters became interested in how certain colours may connote emotions within viewers. This in turn could’ve lead to colours being use to signify or represent unseeable divine energy in thought forms, which could be a visualisation of a person from a visuocentric period not fully considering the power of touch, smell, taste and sound (not music).

Now it’s about narrowing down some kind of relation between Theosophy, New Age, Occult, Cults, Deep Listening and Aural Diversities. Some will most definitely have to be left on the cutting room floor.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826693

We had a very compelling talk with Yan Jun, he first spoke about his background in performance with a laptop, which he referred to as ‘Table Music’, as there is always a table in front of the performer for their laptop.

We were then shown a piece I believe was entitled ‘Table Music’, which took this idea, through the lens of a dinner setting. Where Yan Jun sat at the head of a dining table with his laptop and small speakers cones were laid out across the table with the audience sat around. Yan wanted people to sit around the table in this formal setting. The formalities of a concert performance blend with formalities of a completely separate human activity, sharing of food. This shifts a quite bland type of performance, ‘the laptop performer’ which is something sections of the Sound Art community have become critical of in the last decade. (Against Ambiance, Seth Kim-Cohen).

Yan seems to be similarly frustrated with laptop performance and prefaced with Table Music saying that they have been trying to shift their performance over the last ten years away from this. Stating he “didn’t want to write emails whilst people listened to recordings of noise”.

‘Feedback Solo’

Hand gestures, responding to high pitched drones. Yan Jun’s body in control of the occurring feedback within the room. ‘Free from the table’, Jun holds his hands out and slowly gestures with his whole body. He says that feedback connects him to a room.

All signals are grounded, which Jun says protects people and the equipment from electric shocks… but also the sound itself. If there’s too much feedback signal then the piece is too noisy and cannot be ‘just noise’. So far I feel that these two works are connected. The way Jun postures with his body, and the setting of the table. Both have this abstract visual aspect of gestures which interestingly as I was fixating on this word, was the title of his next piece

Gestures,

For this performance, we see Jun in a chair, gesturing with his hand. The Sound/Music is from flash cameras. Everybody is encouraged to take photos of the performance for which Jun has prepared no sound. The sounds come from the points of interest related to certain movements and poses Jun choses to pull and the frequency of which he chooses to pull these. So, he conducts the performance, but the points of intrigue aren’t totally his to know. The sound is circumstance of what images the photographers want to capture.

“My music has to share space with sounds, like a neighbour or room-mate”, Jun claims that he is not fund of Cage ‘Everything is Music’ philosophy. I guess music to him is planned or created and sound exists, maybe everything is music but each separate music. ‘Sharing space’ things are often unwanted or deemed that way, but as an afterthought accepted.

Jun performs a lot in peoples homes,

“I go to audience home to play plastic bag”.

“Do anything stupid in someone’s home, and they can’t be angry”

Jun spoke about the freedom of performing in these environments. How the scrunching up of a plastic bag in the setting of a home is something that has merit. But if you did that at a paid venue, particularly a larger venue. It would be harder for you to win over an audience with that type of performance. Space plays a huge issue in the kinds of messages work can put across. There is an expectation with a performance in these larger settings. ‘You know what you are going to get from Merzbow’ – in a way there is less freedom and more expectation on an established artist than there would be in a smaller performance.

“Being an artist is about building a connection with a small room or a big room… [and to]… show that you are free.”

I personally relate quite a lot to this sentiment. When I was younger I performed a lot in a solo setting, with a background track and I leant towards making it as robotic a performance as possible. Standing still whilst instrumental segments played out, looking bored, drinking a beer whilst a musical segments played out. Trying to make the event less special in a way. Reacting to how uncomfortable I felt performing and becoming some sort of persona – and through that becoming one… But I rarely cared about the size of the crowd, and found that it worked better the less busy the gig was, and more people would actually want to talk to me at the end in those settings.

Meaningless Work by Walter De Maria, mentioned in passing by Yan Jun.

“When you enter the room, you can feel the rich smell of well-preserved soil and sense the warm humidity of the breezing. The installation of the Earth Room occupies three gallery rooms, with a knee-high sheet of Plexiglas boxes placed off the viewing stage so that visitors can see how deep the dirt is.

The New York Earth Room is installed in a white-painted room, and the dirt itself appears warmer or cooler depending on the hour of the day. The viewing area is fixed because the soil covers the floor from wall to wall. Visitors are allowed to take photographs of the Earth Room. Although de Maria himself was against it at first, he eventually caved in and let people savor the art by taking pictures.” – Publicdelivery.org

De Maria’s work is often ‘land art’, taking place outside, very much concerned with our relationship to the world. In one of De Maria’s most notable land art works ‘The Lightning Field’, 400 Stainless Steel Poles were erected across a square km in Quemado, New Mexico.

This work strikes me as Sound Art adjacent, as the sound of lightning is cause and effect with this piece. Much like Gestures by Yan Jun, in which photographers take photos from conduction of Jun. In the case of The Lightning Field. De Maria conducts the lightning by nature of placing poles in a scientific location where lightning is likely to strike. When we spoke to Andrew Pierre White last term. He spoke about painting objects like rocks and spoke about the sounds associated without placing them within the piece. In this case, with something like lightning (which sound is known to us through our set human experience), we don’t need to hear the sounds associated with lightning necessarily to hear it in our heads. So this work could be catatgorised as Sound Art in some sense.

Land Art takes art outside of a traditional gallery space sometimes because the ideas wouldn’t work in those spaces. Is this a rejection of the white cube? Similarly, is Jun’s use of smaller spaces like peoples homes a similar line of inquiry? Both artists are concerned primarily with space with very different application.

Jun ended our talk with a line from his bio. ‘I wish I was a piece of field recording’.

I want to read a few of Jun’s articles for the Wire in future and learn more about his thought processes. He spoke about how the piece above came to him shortly before the performance was due to start. I find something quite profound in these abstract movements and their sound generation, the humour present in the work speaks for itself. The playful approach and ‘master of none’ type philosophy that Yan Jun has is infectious and most of all, free.