acoustemology

Advances in technology are generally perceived to be great leaps forward in innovation and ways of understanding ourselves and our worlds. The telephone for example, helped bring people across the country together through real-time transmission of the voice and this heralded great advances in our society. Knowledge and information was thus not limited to one region and could soon be shared across the world. Radios and satellite technology similarly shrank our world by allowing us to transmit live broadcasts to a vast array of citizens. Additionally, the current proliferation of the internet to all corners of the globe has allowed us to access stores of information in a heartbeat. In this sense our technological advances have helped to shape our understanding of our world. However, there are issues to be drawn from these advances in technology, and particularly in the rise of sound transmission and reproduction. Looking specifically at sound reproductive technology, I will be assessing the implications this has on our ability to access knowledge and meaning from our world. To begin, I shall develop an understanding of our perceptive abilities; particularly engaging with an understanding that perception is not limited to any one sense faculty but rather an interplay of the senses and a process of living in the world. Next, I will move on to discuss sound and how we draw on meaning from our natural environment. Here I will be introducing the notion of an acoustemology, or knowledge of the world through sonic means. Lastly, the two aforementioned sections are employed to aid in illustrating how reproductive sound technology is problematic for developing a valid acoustemology.

Perception
As human beings we are active perceivers in this world. We come equipped with five senses, and are socialized through culture. For anthropologists studying humans in their cultural habitat, we are interested in not only the structure of their society, tribe or collective but of experiences as human beings living and working within that environment. Perception becomes an integral part of understanding culture because of the way it greatly shapes our lived experiences. Yet this is an integral two-way process. The culture and environment we live within impacts the way people perceive their worlds and this will subsequently influence how they further develop as a group. Classen (1993 cited in Ingold 2000), writing on sensory models, states that cultures develop particular senses over others through collective experiences: for example aural cultures in Papua New Guinea to visual cultures in the West. Thus a person’s sensual perception can be understood as a reflection of their culture’s knowledge structures, language, rituals and history.
Perception for most psychologists is a secondary function in the whole process. Initially a physical sensations occurs, this is when a stimulus makes contact with a sense organ (eye, ear, nose, mouth, skin); and the interpretation of this sensation is our perception. Thus, sound waves hitting the ears are sensations and the interpretation of these haphazard waves into a dog’s barking is our perception. Merleau-Ponty (1962; 1964) objects by arguing that if indeed perception is a composite of raw sensory data, then our visual field would be made up solely of isolated impressions and never grasped in terms of their interconnectedness. In this respect, if I was facing three trees side-by-side, each would be registered as an entirely new and unique sensation. I would be able to recognize the similarities of one tree to the next based on comparison of the first tree. However, if one the third tree had lost all of its leaves and was thus bare and dissimilar to the other two, according to this model, I would be unable to recognize it as a tree. Simply put, this model removes our consciousness from the perceptual process (Merleau-Ponty 1962). This way of understanding how we perceive the environment additionally adheres strictly within a doctrine of Cartesian dualism, or the separation of mind and body. That is, our body interacts with the environment and our minds interpret the events and impose structural meaning on them based on our cultural knowledge. Ingold insightfully adds that:
At the heart of this approach is a representationalist theory of knowledge, according to which people draw on the raw material of bodily sensation to build up an internal picture of what the world ‘out there’ is like, on the basis of the models or schemata receives through their education in a particular tradition. The theory rests on a fundamental distinction between physical and cultural dimensions of perception, the former having to do with the registration of sensations by the body and the brain, the latter with the construction of representations of the mind (Ingold 2000: 282-3).
Indeed, with a separation of the physical and cultural dimensions a rift is created in what would be the experience of the world. We do not inhabit a solely physical world devoid of cultural significance and meaning that relies on us to fill in the gaps. Instead, our world is less dualistic and more realistic. This places an emphasis back on the experience we have in the world. In light of this, there has been a significant drive for anthropologists to examine the lived experiences of people and their cultures through the exploration of the senses (Pink 2006). However, even this move to a more holistic approach of studying human experience through the senses is still too focused on representing these modalities and has returned us, again, to a ‘dichotomy between mind and nature’ (Ingold 2000: 286); and the aural and visual realms are commonly misrepresented as two senses with opposing characteristics battling it out. This drama has seen itself unfold throughout history and particularly recently. Historically, anthropology had maintained a thoroughly visual and text heavy format of representation and analysis. The visual was recognized as the civilized mode of acquiring objective and rational information; the aural, on the other hand was deemed to be a less-civilized structure of knowledge that was subjective and intuitive: ‘vision objectifies, sound personifies’ (Ingold 2000). With the critique of modernity (Erlmann 2004) and the recent paradigm shift in anthropology, a revolt ensued against the visual/textual, and a romantic longing for an aural/oral mode of discourse emerged. A reversal of sorts erupted with anthropologists laying claim to the astounding nature of aural/oral tribes with assertions as grand as: ‘the more a society emphasizes the eye, the less communal in will be; the more it emphasizes the ear, the less individualistic it will be’ (Howes 1991 cited in Ingold 2000). Such work has indeed introduced a multisensory dimension to the study of human cultures, however this penchant for a single sensory domain over another reiterates a duality of visual/individualistic and aural/communal whilst also implying a hierarchy of importance (Erlmann 2004; Ingold 2000; Pink 2006).
In the everyday lived world, senses are not mutually exclusive. We hear, see, taste, smell and touch things almost constantly throughout the day and most times these sensations fuse into one another. The nature of our perception is a result of the interconnectedness of our senses (Ingold 2000; Pink 2006). When I visit a garden, it is not a case of my eyes are seeing this and my nose smelling this. Rather it is a holistic experience of being in the garden, taking in the sights, sounds smells, textures and overall feeling. It is the physical being of my body in the place and the subsequent interplay between the two which my perception is made up of. Ingold (2000; 2007) adds that ‘perception is not an ‘inside-the-head’ operation… but takes place in the circuits that cross-cut the boundaries between brain, body and world’ (2000: 244). From this standpoint, my perception is fuller and more enriched and rather than extracting truth from nature I get ‘presence’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964). This ‘presence’ we receive from perception is the certain je ne sais quoi that is impossible to obtain were we to perceive in the traditional static sense and relies on ‘the fact that we are our body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 206). The classic model of perception, describes sensations within a completely static environment. Our real world is quite the opposite, in fact we regularly perceive through movement either as we move in our environment, as things move around us or as a combination of both. Since movement and motion ‘draw upon the kinesthetic interplay of tactile, sonic and visual senses, emplacement always implicates the intertwined nature of sensual bodily presence and perceptual engagement’ (Feld 1995: 94). Hence, our movement in the world as we perceive is precisely that which places us within the environment.
Lastly, we perceive within the grander scheme of things: culture, life histories and memories. One’s perception, in essence, is a continuous event with no beginning or end. This creates a contextual element to our experience as well. Hence perception is a process and a way in which we engage with our world (Ingold 1996). Perception becomes less about an isolated stimulus-response relationship and more about a bodily relationship with the environment that is continual and processual. A model such as this also emphasizes the subjectivity of experience, however this:
Consciousness of being in the world - is formed within an experiential reality… with whom individuals assume both a degree of commonality in experience and a shared framework of understanding through which they become aware of their own and other’s experience’ (Kapferer 1986: 189).
Here we come to understand that there is a certain synergy between our perception, personal history and experience within a shared cultural environment to give us a unique experience in this world. It is thus important to understand how our perception comes to shape our experiences and with specific attention paid to how our sonic environments allow us to extract meaning and knowledge from our world.

Sound
In the West, our world is greatly defined by visuality. A casual conversation of the sonic environment is much less heard of than one of the visual environment. We may be able to eloquently describe for hours a beautiful view. A beautiful sound, on the other hand, will be more difficult and we might soon find ourselves at loss for words, and not in an astoundingly profound way. We do not commonly talk about sounds - unless they are extremely bothersome or annoying do we burst with passion. Visuality is also apparent in our everyday language, usages such as: ‘see you later’ or ‘I see what you mean’ illustrate our visual mode of expression. Employing a Kantian line of thought that claims ‘all knowledge begins in experience,’ (Feld 2003: 223) we can step away from a purely visual mode of understanding to a multisensory one. Paying particular attention to our aural faculty of perception we come to appreciate that our sonic environment is just as richly varied and inscribed with cultural and historic meaning as our visual environment. Our landscape becomes a soundscape: a sonic environment, characterized as all encompassing such as landscapes are (Schafer 1994). ‘Soundscapes’, adds Feld (2003: 226), ‘are perceived and interpreted by human actors who attend to them as a way of making their place in and through the world’. Sounds are not meaningless waves through the air; rather they become recognized as significant parts of our cultural experience, development and understanding: an episteme; or as Feld puts it: an acousteme or acoustemology.
The sensorial qualities of sound are particularly unique. To begin with, sound physically penetrates the ears and cannot be blocked out by simply closing them. Thus when we perceive sounds, we are experiencing them on a bodily level as they travel inside of us. This innate ability of sound to travel gives it one of its most definable characteristics: movement. And this is particularly apparent in the way in which we describe sounds (e.g. humming, ringing or creaking) as actions in motion (Ingold 2000). The significance of the movement of sound is that it affirms our physical groundedness in the present environment and thus emplaces us in the world. In addition to this, sounds also embody a temporal quality. Entering and dissipating, their presences are unique moments in our lives and are able to transform the space around us through their effervescence. Thus:
By bringing a durative, motional world of time and space simultaneously to front and back, top and bottom and left and right, an alignment suffuses the entire fixed or moving body. This is why hearing and voicing link the felt sensations of sound and balance to those of physical and emotional presence (Feld 1996: 97).
In essence, the ability of sounds to capture and immerse us into the physicality of our worlds enables us to gain knowledge of our environment unique to that obtained through visual observation. Through developing a sense of knowing a place, sounds also help to shape our identities and fuse communities through a shared episteme (LaBelle 2010). It is through this all encompassing engulfing ability that aurality imposes a sense of communality, yet this should in no way be defined against visuality. An acoustemology does not overrule our visual faculties of accessing knowledge and meaning; instead it sheds light on the sonic facets of our lives and acknowledges their influence in shaping our worlds.
Within this framework, the temporal and spatial qualities of the sounds in our environment allow us to develop schemata, or our way of understanding and categorizing the world. Whilst documenting the various bird species and birdsongs in the rainforests of Papua New Guinea with the Kaluli people, a local informed Feld stating, ‘to you they are birds, to me they are voices in the forest’ (1982: 45). The Kaluli are a small tribe deep in the rainforest and are known for their aural culture. Birdsong, for the Kaluli, are said to be voices of deceased relatives. The rainforest inhabited by these birds is dense and thus the sounds appear to be coming from the forest rather than the birds themselves. Although the Kaluli are aware of this, it does not change their perception of where the sounds are produced. For the Kaluli this is also sentiment, in that the sounds the birds make are not regarded as just birdsongs but true connections between past and present and reflect Kaluli traditional beliefs and customs. Contrary to this, Feld’s own beliefs and customs lead him to perceive the importance of cementing the birdsong with the physical animal body and its species classification. Rather, as he observed, ‘knowledge is something more: a methos for putting a construction on the perceived, a means for scaffolding belief systems, a guide to actions and feelings’ (1986: 45).
The significance of the physical geography of the environment in shaping acoustic knowledge is equally important when it comes to our own vocalizations. As these become additives to the sonic environment it plays a considerable role in how these sounds resonate. Sound waves travel various distances before becoming absorbed by surfaces in their path. Thus sounds will resonate differently as a result of different surfaces they encounter: a mountain, a skyscraper or an open plane. Thus the unique reverberations we receive from our physical environment will subsequently shape what we vocalize back into it. ‘This reciprocity of reflection and absorption is a creative means of orientation – one that tunes bodies to places and times through their sounding potential’ (Feld 2003: 226). Therefore, our vocalizations will similarly carry our cultural identity as shaped by our environment. The diversity of accents across Great Britain are a great example of this reciprocal relationship within the environments they have developed. In How the Edwardians Spoke 2007, it was evidenced that British accents tend to mimic the geographic landscapes they are located; for example a Welsh accent is drawn out and full of rich intonation which visually resembles the long expanses of hilly grassland characteristic of the countryside. Conversely, accents in and around major industrialized cities in Britain are typically fast-paced, choppy and certainly more nasal in the northern chillier regions of the country.
If we are able to understand our worlds both culturally and meaningfully through sonic means produced in our environment and through our own resounded vocalizations, then it is logical to construe that the music and poetic utterances we create are also a part of this acoustic knowledge. Here we can come to understand the active role we, as social beings, play in developing this acoustemology through an expressive manner. For Bruner (1986: 7), forms of expression are thus, compartmentalized ‘units of experience’ in the world that have been coloured by our perceptual engagement in it. It is additionally important to pay note to the sociality of our being and the significance it plays in creating shared meaning. The sounds we hear as a collective unit reflect upon and shape one another - music performance is particularly evident of this capacity to bring agents together and impart social knowledge through the collective act of playing or listening. Music inherently ‘gives structure to time and creates its own sense of space and volume’ (Chanan 1994 cited in Filmer 2003:103) and Feld describes music as a ‘bodily mode of placing oneself in the world… and expressing it out as an intimately known and lived… a world of local knowledge that is articulated as vocal knowledge’ (Feld 2003: 237). In this sense, music intensifies the natural properties of sound and infuses them with ritual to engender a heightened form of social interaction that embodies and emplaces us in our world. However, with the proliferation of reproductive technologies, these collective aural experiences and domains of knowledge are threatened with the increasing privatisation of sound.

Technology
Our acoustic environments are resources for us to extract knowledge, meaning and understanding of our worlds. An acoustemology allows us to ground ourselves in the world around us and share our cultural experiences, histories and identities. Yet the recording, editing and reproduction of sounds and music hinder our ability to access knowledge through sonic means. Drawing on what has been discussed above; one perceives sound as an experience or a process of being in the world. Even the most advanced recording technology that can reproduce sounds to the minutest detail is unable to capture the experience of it. Since we listen with our entire bodies (Ihde 2003) the interplay of our senses during perceptual experience is what allows us to draw information from our environments. Reproductive technologies cut us off from our other senses and as one can observe ‘it is the very incorporation of vision into the process of auditory perception that transforms passive hearing into active listening’ (Ingold 2000: 277). Thus reproductive technology only lets us listen solely with the ears and this removes an entire dimension of perceptual experience.
The key elements of an acoustemology are the sonic sensations we receive through interaction with our environments. The emphasis here is on the environment’s role in developing our aural knowledge. Sound recording technology removes sound from its original place in time and space; and with the portability of playback devices, any place can become a simulation of the original place in time (Schafer 1994). If the temporal and spatial elements of a sound are what emplace us in our environment, then a sound recording should then, in theory, be able to emplace us within the original environment too, meaningfully and experientially. However, without the interplay of the senses we are unable to experience the sounds in the same way and our acoustic understanding diminishes. Schafer (1994), disheartened by the proliferation of sound recording, coined the term ‘schizophonia’ referring to sounds which are extracted from their natural environments and then reproduced elsewhere; he was obstinate in characterizing this as a nervous phenomenon with detrimental circumstances. Feld, describing the deleterious effects of schizophonia, states that, ‘once sounds like these are split from their sources, that splitting is dynamically connected to escalating cycles of distorted mutuality, and that mutuality to polarizing interpretations of meaning and value’ (1995: 121-2).
To illustrate this point, we can take a closer look at Feld’s work himself recording Voices of the Rainforest (1991) an album that aurally illustrates a typical day in the life of the Kaluli. The entire CD runs just short of an hour and opens with a morning rainforest soundscape, followed by a range of various activities (e.g. making sago, clearing brush and drumming) and closes with a nightfall forest soundscape. The sounds do indeed ‘take you away’ to the rainforest, of our imagination or one of memory, however the meaning one extracts is far more ambiguous and cannot alone give us a knowing of the people or place without contextual information. Additionally, the use of technology in and of itself poses an epistemological problem. Feld (1995) admits to having mixed an assortment of recordings from a range of microphones placed within various locations in the forest to capture the ‘full spatial dimensionality… and depth of the ambient rainforest environment’ (1995: 116). This throws a wrench into the recording works, even through employing state-of-the-art recording equipment and technology to not only capture but also meticulously mix together tracks with the help of the Kaluli people to recreate the nuanced sounds of the rainforest; it lacks ‘aura’. For Benjamin (1999: 216), aura is what he defines as ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’. Benjamin’s ‘aura’ is strikingly akin to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘presence’. Both refer to a corporeal intimacy that is degraded during the reproductive contract. A clear example of the degrading nature of reproductive technology is Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969). In this recording Lucier recites a statement that is continually replayed in an empty room that gradually increases its feedback and becomes completely inaudible and unintelligible. This work is significant because of how it illustrates technology’s unwarranted tendency to distort and interpret the sound it records. His piece is a definite exaggeration of this, but nonetheless it sheds light on the fact that (visual and aural) recording technology is simply a man-made device designed to ‘imitate the human sensory apparatus by performing specific ranges of limited functions from which perceivers recreate fuller perceptual cues’ (Feld 1995: 116).
The privatization of sound is another effect of reproductive technologies. We are able to listen to recordings in the privacy and comfort of our homes, or on the go through headphones wherever we are. The sounds we are thus hearing take on another role for us, and rather than passing on a sort of knowledge, we are able to impose our knowledge and ideas onto them. Bull (2004), in his study on Walkman users, found that the music they listened to disengaged them from their environment and instead allowed them to create a sort of fantasy world. This is not limited to music, (as illustrated above) ethnographic records also cannot impart beneficial knowledge or understanding of cultures without broader information to contextualize the sounds, such as text, still or moving images. On top of this, the intimacy of the privatization of sound creates an illusionary sentiment of understanding and familiarity. Thus sound recordings remove the sound from its place of origin and therefore the understanding and knowledge of the place is disconnected. Hence, it becomes solely a sound in a vacuum with nothing rooting it to its original creator. Subsequently the ‘inconsequentiality of aesthetic control is what makes its pleasures unclouded... I make them [people] into whatever I wish. I am in charge; I invest their encounter with meaning’ (Bauman 1993 cited in Bull 2003: 183).
Sounds, in effect are true facets of the environments they are produced in. Removing them from their worlds, they lose meaning and are thus almost blank slates for us to impose our own conceptualizations onto. Sonic perception is also a bodily experience that cannot be reproduced through technological means. We hear through all of our senses and to constrain sound down to the ears discards the vital elements that make our sonic environments so enriching. Thus the meanings we gain from our aural worlds are truncated when listened to as a recording. Technology not only diminishes our acoustic knowledge of our world, but also destroys its ‘‘aura’’ or ‘‘presence’’. Subsequently, an acoustemology that does not take the use of reproductive technology into account threatens the validity of acoustic knowledge.

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