As with some of the past sessions, we post here a transcript of the response by Christopher Hasty, as well as a later exchange between Mara Mills for Mark Butler on tensions between affordance and entrainment. These fragments highlight content from the session podcast, which can also be accessed from the ride sidebar of the Hearing Modernity homepage, from each session of the Events page, and also from our Soundcloud account. As it happens, both of these excerpts point in subtle ways to the difficulty of negotiating sound technologies and performance (i.e., academic talking). We’re thankful for the tremendous support we receive from the Media Production Center (Jerry MacDonald, Dave Baker, and Tony Di Bartolo) in handling the complexities of these sessions, as well as Lesley Bannatyne from the Music Department for help managing these media.
And in answer to Mara’s and Mark’s questions–the microphones were on throughout but a loudspeaker overheated.
Christopher Hasty’s response
What I thought I would do is just begin by making a few remarks on Mark’s piece with maybe a question embedded in it and then turn to Mara’s. The intersections of these two papers, I do think, are interesting, maybe in kind of contrasting ways. What I especially appreciate in Mark’s paper—well, this betrays my own interest, and that may be the case in Mara’s as well—is the interest in temporality and rhythm in dealing with sound studies. Sometimes those aren’t issues that are foregrounded, and I suspect partly because of the difficulty we all have in talking about actual temporal passage and embodied experience, which is either embodied here and now or it’s not embodied. Also I think Mark’s discussion of the circle was a good way of seeing how difficult it can be to find our way toward imagining a real world where we can absolutely adore listening to these carefully, almost precisely repeated figures. And as the DJ was saying, look at the perfect one, you could listen to for hours and not get bored. In dealing with that telos—and Mark, the thing that I rather liked here was, you mention Hughes calls the grooves “self-generating,” and Mark says, “Not quite.” Rather, what these grooves generate is their own telos. Of course, teleology is something we’ve been taught not to say often. But this telos is for their own regeneration, for their own life and liveliness. So to try to talk about liveliness, the momentary, is I think a great undertaking and also it’s something that I think gives sound studies in general—if I can speak in general—a special appeal because sound in a way has been so marginalized. And I think—I think—one of the ways often that that happens is because it’s so hard to capture, because it is so radically temporal. Of course, everything is radically temporal, but for some reason we find other things easier—we forget that there’s sound in poetry, for example. So that difficulty is sort of the shadow, it’s what makes music sometimes seem not quite on the level of philosophy, or poetry, or literature conceptually. So that sort of dark side of not being clear could be one of the attractive things and real challenges for thinking about sound in ways that allow us to think outside of so many concepts that seem so natural to us, like a circle, for example.
Now I absolutely loved Mara’s story, which was great. And also very vividly told. So at the center of the story is a convergence in the 1920s and ‘30s of medicine and communication theory, through what Mara speaks of as the new media paradigm, where a coded message is delivered to the nervous system via some sort of transduction. Now the question I’d like to ask, and I hope it isn’t too far afield, really has to do with another figure in this, and that’s the connection of communication studies or communication theory and what became the cognitivist revolution in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and also if there’s any connection then with biomedicalization here—or perhaps better, the term you use here, biotechnification. Did this also converge in the birth of a cognitivism that is still very much with us as the normal way psychologists look at human understanding as information processing, which by the way is a radically detemporalized way of thought? I guess one of the reasons I’m interested is, because this goes into the future, in a sense, or at least to the present-day—you’re drawing attention to the interest of science-fiction writers and futurists in these weddings of body and machine, and particularly, if 2029 is when the singularity is going to happen, then we can’t lose any time. [Laughter.] In this connection, finally, I find the title of your talk especially provocative: earless hearing. And I know this comes from the Time Magazine or originally the notion that you hear through your bone structure. But I’d like to take it in another direction as a sort of turn to disembodied rationalism, a turn from the more or less sense-specific model of resonance, to a sense-neutral model, a mathematical, algorithmic, controllable model of human experience. So why bother with the ear, or perhaps with one sensory mode, if what matters is algorithmic, sense-neutral information? To hear the cochlear implants use sound but perhaps they could be programmed to use any input and so be a form of soundless hearing, to make it even more paradoxical.
[Listen to the podcast for the complete answer.]
Mills/Butler on affordance and entrainment
Toward the end of the session, Mara Mills posed the following question to Mark Butler:
Mills: I have a question for Mark—I’m going to just pretend that the microphone is working, because I’m entrained—and actually the question is about entrainment. Do you, in the bigger project, theorize the relationship between affordance and entrainment? And the reason I ask is, I feel like I come up against something very similar in my work on cochlear implants. And in the article I published in the Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, in which I interviewed Mike Corist and other users, and these are people who themselves are themselves technological enthusiasts and they work with lots of different high-tech equipment, and not just implants. And they expressed a lot of frustration about how difficult it is—impossible to hack into an implant and how black-boxed the technology is, even for someone with technical expertise or programming expertise. So it has very limited—it has affordances, but there’s preset listening situations, you can choose from only a handful, the affordances are very minimal. And entrainment comes into play—and the language of entrainment is used to describe how someone’s brain over time adapts to that sound, especially someone who was born hearing and acclimatized in the hearing world and suddenly is hearing these electronic noisy sounds. At some point there’s an entrainment process where they turn into speech, there’s a shift and you hear speech in that stream again. And this is described by many cochlear implant users. But entrainment and affordance seem to be moving in opposite directions and I wonder if you see entrainment as the end of affordances, as the moment when there’s something deterministic happening.
Butler: No, that I can say, no. I think that’s a wonderful question. The book does not particularly put these concepts into relation to each other. So I think that’s something I should be thinking about further. But with regard to entrainment, I am talking about it definitely with a kind of very specific kind of temporal tactic, so it’s about entrainment to a regular stimulus in the environment, whether that’s a musical beat or some other kind of regular thing. But that certainly does not preclude some kind—it does not preclude agency on the part of the listener or the ability to play with a range of hearings, as well as in some cases, electronic dance music offers a lot of possibility to choose what one entrains to—the layered nature of the music. And that in a way is one of its affordances. Yeah, I think this idea would work best with the more general idea of musical technologies, and not so much with the idea of the physical technologies. There the emphasis is on what can people do with these kinds of things? How can the surfaces of the interfaces be navigated?, for instance. And then how does that interface with musical design? But that doesn’t necessarily have the very specific entrainment-resonance in the same sense. By the way are the microphones working?
– Peter McMurray
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