By Dr Marina Peterson and Dr David Novak
Questions and introduction by Ana-María Alarcón-Jiménez, Junior Postdoctoral Researcher
This blog post presents a critical conversation on “soundscape” between Dr. Marina Peterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin and Dr. David Novak, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The post includes an edited transcription of Peterson’s and Novak’s Zoom conversation around two questions I sent them via email on the concept of “soundscape”.
The concept of soundscape is at the center of the ERC Artsoundscapes Project. Furthermore, its relevance for the field of Archaeoacoustics means that it is essential to reflect on its intellectual history, and its different and frequent applications from a multidisciplinary perspective. The dialogue below, edited to conform to the space-limits of the blog, raises important issues that resound with wider discussions on “soundscape” by anthropologists, historians, and ethno/musicologists like Stefan Helmreich, Emily Thompson, Tim Ingold, or David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello.
Q.- With these and other readings on my mind, I first asked Marina Peterson and David Novak whether they thought that soundscape was a useful concept for music scholars in the 21st century.
A.- Marina Peterson
I generally start with the position that we need to move away from the notion of soundscape because it tends to do two things: [first,] it objectifies sound as external to a listener; it turns it into an object. That is R. Murray Schafers’ project – you can compose a soundscape and it becomes a kind of text. Or it becomes a recording that has an object form. I want to shift toward an acoustemological question, asking how do we listen with other people? Or how do we listen to how other people are listening? So, my second critique of soundscape is that it tends to be from the position of the ethnographer if it’s used by anthropologists or ethnographers, and then becomes a kind of description, an acoustic description or sonic description, rather than actually being an ethnographic question. It isn’t in an ethnographic mode, though it might rely on a knowledge of a place. It tends to also then not be really asking the question that we always ask as ethnographers: How are people engaging with these [places], making meaning in a place, or practicing [there]. And so the aim is to shift from soundscape to a sonic ethnography that listens with others. Nonetheless I think that we’re so indebted to the term because it does a lot of work, it’s common sense. And it has also done a lot of work for different genres and different kinds of practices. Do you want to pick up on that?
A.- David Novak
Yes, the concept of soundscape has that objectification within it which generates all sorts of useful things for fields that have paid attention to sound, like language studies, music studies, history and other fields that help us place concepts like noise in spatial context. When we measure sounds in place or when we look back at a historical archive of sound, we might get interested in, say, the sounds that occurred in 13th century London, and which would have been perceived as noise. There are a lot of great works in this vein like Victorian Soundscapes by John M. Picker that talk about things like organ grinders coming into London from Italy and how that sonic presence of immigrant labor might have been perceived or categorized as noise. We know these are social categories, but we are looking at the ways that categories of sound were sort of legally folded into noise regulations and how noises then become measured. So that means something like gentrification could be understood through applications of sonic measurements that ordinarily would be done with a decibel meter. And yet we know very well that if it’s hip hop, the same amount of decibels are going to cause more complaints and produce more regulation, since hip hop is associated with African American communities that are being more radically policed in the United States. So, when we look at the sound objects that come out of the soundscape concept, we see how it can be productive and dangerous for music scholars. In one sense, it frees them from their object of music and allows them to think differently about what’s in play. But in other ways, soundscape can be used to sort of blanket everything so that there aren’t distinctions about how sounds are actually heard, and how soundscapes are actually relationally applied in practice. You brought up Steven Feld, and his concept of acoustemology is all about this relational field, in which people’s experiences of a sound are coming out of this personal, cultural, and environmental worldview. Thus, a sound, even a non-human sound like bird song isn’t the same sound for everybody. This is not an invitation to just go down a radically relativistic path with that and say, you know, your noise is my music, or something like that. We want to recognize the ways in which these modes of listening are socially accepted and brought into being when we use the term soundscape. It has to be kept in a relational field.
Q.- My second question concerned the use of “soundscape” as opposed to “noise” in the context of popular/citizen science and educational projects. As an example, I suggested the project “Soundscape/Noise” at Yosemite Park led by the National Park Foundation (NPS) of the United States. What did Marina Peterson and David Novak think about the above-mentioned dichotomy?
A.- Marina Peterson
I have two points in relation to that. The thing you [David Novak] said about sound as being flattened into a kind of singular notion – all of those technological interventions do that. That’s what this is suggesting: that a decibel is a metric that makes a universal horizon, that universalizes and flattens. It completely escapes the actual experience, an experience that also is often differential.
A.- David Novak
It’s like the classical Zen concept about the tree falling in the forest: people say noise exists in the ear of the hearer. But it’s more than just existential relativism; it’s a relationship with sound and space and what is understood to be audible. You hear things because you are part of the soundscape/environment/context of noise, and you can’t unhear all of your past experiences that are part of that culture. And so, hearing a sound is not a radically singular experience. It’s part of how a person is formed and how their being as a listener is formed, and that’s in relation to other forms of listening
A.- Marina Peterson
Right, and there’s actually such a disjuncture between the way that, Iet’s say, the decibel meter listens as opposed to an ear, even though the metric was developed to somehow account for the way that humans listen. I send students out with just the phone decibel meter to get that disjuncture. The first thing they notice is that the bell in the distance isn’t picked up at all. Or the bird that’s close to them, which doesn’t sound like a noise to them, reads very high on the decibel meter. So the evaluation, the socio-cultural evaluation of sounds doesn’t sort out in the way that the metrics pretend they do. The other part about the dichotomy between soundscape and noise, I think, is really deeply embedded in R. Murray Schafer’s original formulation. His notion of soundscape came out of his environmental activism which, among others at the time, honed in on noise pollution as a problem. His work on noise is very much in keeping with others’ at that time. The fear of increasing volume and decibels, and in general, the airplane, as the sound sewer of the sky. This is in his Book of Noise, his notion of soundscape is an entirely normative one. That also plays out in his hi-fi lo-fi distinction. So I think that’s what carries in these spaces like the NPS project or The One Square Inch of Silence project. Which is also this notion that places without human sound are quieter and also preferable. But nonetheless, you know, it might also be loud in the rainforest, which is the one square inch of silence.
A.- David Novak
Yeah, the popular citizen science projects of measuring soundscapes sometimes lead to dogmatic and unachievable proposals for treating noise in our societies, you know, because it’s often based on idealizing a pure state of soundlessness or silence in nature. That doesn’t exist, and that can’t be part of the human world. This is not a useful way to approach something like an airplane or an airport, as you discuss in your work with airports and the ways airports impact people’s living spaces and life experiences in radically different ways. So, I think the question is partly about the ways soundscape creates this impossible, idealized state of sonic being that sidesteps the real conditions of the problem that we call noise, and what that means in terms of people using that term to acknowledge sonic disturbances to their lives in these technological sites.
A.- Marina Peterson
Airport noise is a complicated one because it seems at face value to just offer a case in which noise is annoying and causes health issues or what not. But it’s such a politicized terrain. There are residents living around airports who tend to be bothered by the noise (not everybody is, but most of them are) but who also might not really want to move, who actually love their home more than they want to be free of the sound. They would say that it’s not as bad as what the airport is saying, as the airport starts buying property to cover their legal grounds so that they are less likely to have lawsuits brought against them. At the same time, the airport and airplane manufacturers are always pushing back against people’s experience, and so it becomes this kind of fraught and contentious site where experience has to do a particular kind of work. In this way, everything becomes unstable, including noise. Airport noise isn’t long lasting. Questions about how to measure or account for airport noise were always indeterminate. Some of that indeterminacy has to do with ways in which the experience of noise is contested; for instance, if there’s a health study, then the FAA or the airplane manufacturers will challenge it, saying that the correlations don’t hold, which is probably true. There’s a lot of work going on around the effects of the noise, the outcomes, or ways of trying to account for the noise. People’s experience becomes the anchor for airport noise as a problem, and then experience is something that doesn’t actually really mean anything. So, again, this resonates with these questions. There’s a way that a soundscape, as a snapshot of a place, is relational and temporal, but it tends to become something that seems to fix noise, inscribing a normative dynamic. We think we know what noise is, but when you put pressure on it, it doesn’t really hold.
As a final coda and with the ideas and points raised above resounding in our heads, I want to invite our readers to dive into Marina Peterson’s intimate piece walking to wegman and David Novak’s interactive listening presentation of “Electric Peekaboo,” a piece by Japanese artist Merzbow. Let’s let these two different points of reflection serve as conclusive axis for this conversation.