The papers that have been presented in this session affirm that whatever centers and peripheries may need de-centering out in the world, there is no center to the field of sound studies, and there is no periphery. In different ways, these papers exemplify an idea mentioned in the last seminar that sound studies need not ultimately even be about sound per se, but rather takes notice of the interrelationships that sonic and other sensory engagement can imply as a way to get into matters of cultural, political, historical, or other significance. So these papers take listening and sounding as entry points to constellations of interrelationships. Sidestepping acoustic ecology, they each delve into a complex “acoustic political ecology”, as Ana Maria Ochoa terms it, “a form of echolocation in inter-cultural relations”.
Charles Hirschkind has shifted from his previous work on the cassette sermon and the role of agentive listening in motivating ethical action in the crowded electroacoustic sonic environment of contemporary Cairo, to a project that opens up more broadly to notions of European cultural identity and the place of the Moorish past in giving form to the European present. Again the entry point is a sonic encounter, here focusing on the creators and performers of musical forms whose elements signify a network of historical and contemporary exchanges, inventions, and reinventions. Despite still-dominant nationalist discourses which insist on writing out or writing off a several-hundred year period of intense artistic and intellectual productivity, the political and cultural geography which is entailed by the travels and friendships and personal relationships of these musicians — and of course, by the constructed or reconstructed music itself — is one that, as Hirschkind says, “trace[s] the cartography of a Europe deeply entwined with Arab-Islamic aesthetics and constitutively bound to the other side of the Mediterranean.”
Ochoa’s paper performs an even more radical decentralization. As the implications of Al-Andalus cause us to revise our understanding of European identity, she is concerned with reexamining the supposedly ocular-centric 19th-century creole Latin American elites in the formation of the Lettered City, finding that such lettered elites were in fact profoundly immersed in practices of listening which shaped their epistemologies and their very concepts of what constitutes a proper human being. Voices were categorized as in tune or out of tune, speech or song, human or animal, properly or improperly accented speech, and pedagogies were designed to train the voice, “to intervene in the animal aspect of the human voice in order to produce a desired notion of the person.” As she puts it, “the acoustic creeps through the crevices of the lettered city.”
Now, Ochoa’s goal is to sketch a decolonial anthropology and an ontology of sound & listening and to do so simultaneously and with the same terms — but all the while speaking totally literally, rather than metaphorically, about sound and listening. It’s a whirlwind journey, but we get there (and we’re thoroughly decentered when we do). Just to touch on some of the contours of her argument, her ontology is built on multiplicity rather than singularity, and multidirectionality rather than unidirectionality. It’s as far from Claude Shannon’s mathematical model of communication as we could get. But rather than reducing the multidirectionality of relationships between the ear and heard sounds to a kind of anthropological relativity (in other words, that there’s an independently existing object, or sound object, but the way we hear it is dependent on own specific cultural background), instead she articulates a theory of sound in which “entities that listen and entities that produce sounds produce each other” (p. 23).
These “acoustic assemblages”, as she calls them, consist in “the mutually constitutive and transformative relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that is generated in the interrelationship between listening, ideas about listening, notions of the listening entity or entities, the [sound]-producing entities, and the interrelationship between them”. Multiple levels and directions of transduction and transformation are going on here, leading to lots of opportunities for equivocation or ‘mis-hearings’. Crucially, such mis-hearings are not to be taken as mistakes, but as “as a constitutive feature of [not only] the sonic, [but also] of intercultural encounters”. Ochoa, along with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, proposes for a decolonial anthropology an idea of mutual equivocation (or communicative ambiguity) between colonizer and colonized as a potentially transformative process, in which “different perspectives in the conceptualizing of a single object or person” are understood as intrinsic to each object or person. Viveiros de Castro’s notion of transduction serves as a model for this idea; both that and Stefan Helmreich’s notion of a “transductive ethnography”, Ochoa says, “suspend the idea that decolonizing means arriving at ‘the truth’ of the other in order to explain it”.
questions
I expect that conversation will turn to some of the areas of overlap between these papers, in that they both rethink aspects of Hispanic history to unsettle notions of Europe as a stable center, and the colonies or the other side of the Mediterranean as peripheral. But to start off the conversation I first wanted to touch on aspects of the sonic in the two papers.
So, Ana Maria Ochoa, there are so many directions we could go with this that choosing one seems arbitrary, but I’m interested in hearing more about the role of nonspeech human-made sound in all of this. So perhaps a preliminary question would about the relationship between musical and nonmusical sound which is implied by terms you use in your paper, such as “acoustic design,” in this context, or “sonorous expressive practices”.
Also, you describe four “anthropotechnologies” for creating the desired type of human being, including training in etymology, eloquence, orthography, and the documentation of folklore. Of these, you give a fascinating example of orthography as a means of essentially performing a lossless compression in transcoding one format, musical staff notation, to another format based on standard typography, with implications for projects of literacy as well as music education. This appears to be intended for Western classical music, with the example given being Chopin. So one question, is, how were Colombian styles of music, whether considered folkloric or not, thought of, or maybe dealt with, in relationship to these technologies in the political agendas of the early postcolonial period?
Charles Hirschkind, in your discussion of the “creative reconstruction” or “creative synthesis” that’s involved in Javier’s compositions, you point out that he’s combining elements from different regions and different eras in a single composition — for example, a Syrian late 19th-early 20th century melody, with a Turkish rhythm, and Andalusian poetry. Similarly with Ahmed’s groups, with one example combining medieval texts, melodies from contemporary Andalusian traditions in North Africa, and the aesthetic treatment of the European Early Music movement.
I’m fascinated by the way that there are multiple and not necessarily mutually coherent notions of ‘authenticity’ in play in many of these reconstructions (or as the case may be, constructions). And yet with Javier, one has the sense that he makes concessions for his audiences that he’d rather not make, and despite his commitment to his own concept of authenticity, that goals of “recovering lost forms” might sometimes be at odds with projects of musical synthesis. I’m wondering how (or in what ways) authenticity is gauged by participants in general, and if for example there are disagreements about, or limits to, what’s deemed acceptable or somehow “true” in these compositions or performances.
Another question would be about the listener here, and you said a little about this in your comments. In your work on cassette sermons, one of the central concerns was with the way in which the right kind of active listening would motivate an appropriate disposition, an ethical one, on the part of the listener. Here, we don’t hear a lot about actual contexts for performances of this music, or about what listeners bring or should bring to bear. Could you imagine a parallel in the current project, in terms of the bodily reception of the music, and appreciation? And here this might also bring in issues of literacy (including musical/cultural literacy), and ability to understand the poetry or significance of the music. And, how might these issues of listening and audience play into your picture of cultural, geographical, and temporal flows in the reimagining of Al-Andalus?
Ernst Karel is an anthropologist, phonographer, musician and Core Faculty member for the “Hearing Modernity” seminar. This text is adapted from his response to the talks during our recent session, Decentering Sound.
Leave a Reply