Some open-ended thoughts on sound in relation to environment (from Yolande Harris on YASMIN): After attending and presenting at the Mutamorphosis conference in Prague in the eco-sonification panel, and being tantalized by the beginnings of a discussion on sound, I would like to respond to the topics being raised in what’s become the ‘lovely sound’ section of the lovely weather thread (any intentional connection to the ‘lovely music’ label?).

As often, the coherence of discussions around sound can be somewhat unfocused, but I believe we’re slowly building up a ‘way of talking’ about sound through an increasing body of work that’s emerging from beneath the visual. But although as mentioned, sound can work in the sphere of emotions, I don’t think it needs to be primarily thought of in these terms. It is very easy to think of sound as purely emotional, as it is easy to think of music as expression, as a way of circumventing the problem of further understanding sound and how it works.

In terms of environment, sound can be considerably more than an emotional communication of phenomenon. For example, we listen in a functional way in order to locate ourselves and move through an environment, a kind of listening where we only act when we perceive a sonic change, we do not consciously listen continuously but when our attention is directed. We also create sound, both intentionally and as a by-product of movement, which situates us as a part of the sonic environment we are in (a factor that is suppressed in the concert setting). In this way I would like to say that our relation to environment is directly sculpted by sound, the sounds around us, the sounds that we produce and the continuum between them. And from this can arise a sense of connectedness that could become emotional.

This is where sonifications of environmental data become so interesting, and so enigmatic. They present data collected by and for scientific means, which in itself is a string of numbers in need of interpretation. But by scaling these into sounds that fit within our human audible range, we experience a kind of magical transformation (!), a strange alchemy that makes us listen intently as the environment starts to speak as it were. And perhaps because we don’t understand it’s language, the experience is all the more be-witching! Is this why are we so willingly taken in by these affects of sonified data, or even the recorded sounds of extinct species? What is actually happening here?

The transformation of data into sound, and presentations of place through sound, inevitably have an emotional impact that can carry multiple political interpretations and subsequent manipulations. I wonder then that our discussion of sound and awareness of its impact needs to be greatly expanded, and the questions raised by sound artists working in these areas fine-tuned. What is interesting is that composers, who I would suggest are (potentially at least) the most versatile in their understanding and construction of sound and its affects through time, must work scientifically, practically, technologically (not emotionally at all!).

And so, one last provocation, I would like to question whether it is futile to think of sound in isolation, but situate it within the visual and environmental…the aesthetic as well as the political?

Yolande
http://www.yolandeharris.net