hallowsound

notes // sounds // noises

[hallowsound-blog]

Calling Cards

Close the distance between looking and listening.

Calling Cards, a game in which players generate an interactive soundscape based on the 78 cards in the Collective Tarot tarot deck, aims to bring tarot practice into the sonic realm. Each card is paired with a specific sound. This sound may be the vocalization of an animal, background noise, human conversation, noise of machinery and vehicles, weather sounds, musical notes or sequences, or virtually any other kind of sound or combination of sounds. Calling Cards highlights the subjective and personal nature of tarot card interpretation, rooting the tarot in lived experience and providing a bridge between the cerebral and the physical. The cards escape their two-dimensional confines to become vibrations in space.

Major Arcana sounds were composed using an alphabetic code I created. Minor Arcana cards include a variety of my own recordings as well as sounds obtained from databases under open-source Creative Commons license. All images of cards copyright The Collective Tarot (2009).

Follow the link above to generate your own three-card (Past, Present, Future) spread and corresponding soundscape. The sounds from your reading can be downloaded here, combined in an audio editing program like Audacity, and saved for future listening.

To hear a ten-card soundscape, listen here.

(Endless thanks to Edward Haven and Brian Fligner for their coding expertise)

[hallowsound-blog]

Containment and Regeneration

Middlebrook, Jeb. “Prison Music: Containment, Escape, and the Sound of America.” Sounding Out! (2011)

“Prison is a necessary function of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism– a necessary warehousing of surplus (bodies) for exploitation or elimination. Prison music is a documentation of this process.”

Ernest, Marcella. “Creating New Words from Old Sounds.” Sounding Out! (2016)

“We...proudly describe ourselves as being aboriginal, but just saying that one word, straight away we’ve lost identity. ... It’s a Latin word. ... The word ‘indigenous’...does more harm to us than anything else.” (Daryn McKenny)

How is the evolution of prison music involved in the relatively recent rise in popularity of trap music? How does this genre (with themes of police evasion, addiction, and escapism) address or contribute to the cultural conversation started by prison music?

Interviewee Leslie Harper, director of the National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs, relates a personal account of how learning the Ojibwe language has shaped her children’s cognitive development. Her two sons, she says, automatically address the world from an Ojibwe perspective because it is their first language. This example supports the Wharfian hypothesis, a linguistics theory stating that language has a direct effect on culture. For example, the Japanese word mizuko, which translates to “water baby” in English, is used to refer to aborted or miscarried fetuses. Mizuko kuyō is a Japanese ceremony intended to honor the spirit of the fetus and to comfort and assuage the grief and guilt of the mother. This word, according to Wharfian scholars, directly contributes to Japanese attitudes about abortion and miscarriage that are remarkably different from American ones. This is related to the dilemma faced by Ojibwe speakers when they must create new words. Typically, Harper says, these words are for modern technological devices like cell phones and computers. Ojibwe speakers who recognize the power of language to construct reality must consider whether the new word is true to Ojibwe cultural standards and prosody, or risk compromising the integrity of their language.

[hallowsound-blog]

Queer and Trans Artists of Color

King, Nia. “Untitled Tumblr Post.” (2016)

“The way we value certain types of art and devalue other is so arbitrary, but often has to do with whether that artist has some kind of institutional backing, which is part of why white art continues to be elevated above Black and Brown art.”

King, Nia. “Lynn Cyrin.” We Want the Airwaves. Episode 52 (2015)

“People in San Francisco with money are really bad at solving the homelessness problem, but they really like to think they're trying. It's really easy if you share a career path with one of these industry people who want to help out, to get them to catch on to you, and try to pull you up…that being their way of solving the homelessness issue, just by helping you.” (Cyrin)

How is the systemic devaluation of work by artists of color related to the desire of wealthy white philanthropists to sponsor or elevate individual artists of color? 

Langston Hughes’s classic story, “Slave on the Block,” provides an all-too-realistic example of early twentieth century white exploitation of black bodies for artistic purposes (and in a self-congratulatory effort to “uplift” people of color). Cyrin points out a similar pattern among wealthy white San Franciscans. This has worked out to Cyrin’s individual advantage, but it is obviously not a sustainable long-term solution for San Franciscans experiencing houselessness or for artists of color seeking equal footing with white artists. Cyrin’s solution is to use these connections to involve and employ other queer and trans people of color. This seems like a reasonable next step when addressing the issue of intra-community funding King brings up in another post. King quotes video game designer and critic Mattie Brice, who notes that queer and trans artists of color often get projects off the ground through crowd-funding. Brice’s problem with this is that it leads to endless shuffling around of the same money, and this is money that most people in the community often can’t afford to spare.

[hallowsound-blog]

Visit Original Link

This is a musical translation of the English translation of Li Qingzhao’s 12th century Chinese poem “To ‘Like a Dream’”:

I will always recall that day at dusk,          the pavilion by the creek, and I was so drunk I couldn't tell          the way home. My mood left me, it was late when I turned back in my boat and I strayed deep among lotuses — how to get through? how to get through? and I startled to flight a whole shoal          of egrets and gulls.

[hallowsound-blog]

Call or Response?

Mismar, Omar. “Sing for Me a Little.” (2015)

Mismar asks people living in Palestine to imitate the ubiquitous sound of drones. 

Kerbaj, Mazen. “Starry Night.” (2006)

Kerbaj and his trumpet take on the Israeli military during the 2006 July War in a performance that is both a stand-off and a collaboration.

Mismar, Omar. “A Trumpet Blows Speech.” n.d.

“What effectiveness does this work have? Is it a heroic act of resistance? A futile act? An aestheticization of violence?”

What is the significance of Kerbaj’s various modifications of his trumpet? Can we read these as resilience/survival/adaptation, or as accomodation/assimilation?

Participants in Mismar’s “Sing for Me a Little” are both adults and children. The children’s voices are distinct: they lack the gravity and earnestness of the adult imitations. They are playful, almost lilting—gleeful, even. The enthusiastic “vuv-vuv, zzzzz” of one child’s performance might easily be mistaken for the sound of an American child playing with a miniature Hot Wheels car. I realize that it is impossible for me, a Western listener, to divorce my interpretation from this schema for American childhood, which may or may not exist for the child in Mismar’s piece. But regardless of my own expectations, the difference in affect between the child and adult participants is unmistakeable. While the adult imitations convey feelings of frustration, terror, and anxiety, the child imitations suggest habituation due to lifelong repetitive exposure to the stimulus. What other daily sounds might be more foreboding to adults than to children who have grown up with them? In what other ways are violence and surveillance normalized in the collective imagination?

[hallowsound-blog]

Narrative/Plot

King, Emily. “Scripting Podcasts: Three Tips for Writing Podcast Episodes.” Radix Communications. 2014.

King points out that podcasts don’t necessarily have to be scripted, but a good outline is always helpful.

“Where Have You Been?” The Truth. 2015.

“We already mourned you.”

“Where Have You Been” is a piece of fiction narrated by voice actors in which a woman who has been missing for seven years returns to her friends and family. We hear the story through the voices of her loved ones, each of whom grapples with a unique mixture of anger, grief, desire, and acceptance.

[SPOILER ALERT] 

The unexpected twist in this story is that the previously missing woman is a survivor of abuse at the hands of her father. She left her partner and son, she says, because she was afraid of becoming like him. The erasure of the woman’s lived experience is effectively illustrated by the focus on her loved ones’ voices to the exclusion of her own (apart from a phone call to her son near the end of the piece). This had the effect of giving me literal chills, especially because these voices are so accusatory and indignant. The ending of the piece, however, seemed like a poor resolution to the tension established in the rest of the story; the woman, having discovered that she is terminally ill, simply retreats into anonymity again. I’m not sure what I expected to happen, but the vagueness of this ending was unsatisfying. Perhaps it is so unsatisfying because it mirrors the reality of living with trauma and/or illness: people’s problems, and sometimes the people themselves, get disappeared. In any case, my reaction is evidence of what we expect stories to be--unlike our own lives.

[hallowsound-blog]

Visit Original Link

This is a collection of the actual sounds I heard during a week-long break from classes. Sounds include: traffic outside my house, Joan Baez’s rendition of a traditional Yiddish folk song, wind howling during a storm in Tilden Regional Park, footsteps on gravel and birdsong in Joshua Tree National Park, the Melvins live in Pioneertown, Echo Park neighborhood sounds, my best friend’s voice, and an MRI machines.

[hallowsound-blog]

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)

Waldron, Emma Leigh. “Mediated Sexuality in ASMR Videos.” Sounding Out! 2015.

“I argue that ASMR videos broaden the scope of what we understand as ‘sexuality’ and provide a means for bodies to gain access to certain other bodies in particular ways, and thus serve as an outlet for people to enjoy those (sexual) pleasures alongside of what is deemed appropriate in the mainstream.”

Andrea Seigel talks about ASMR on This American Life.

“...it was like a starburst in my head that opened on the crown and then sparkled down to the nape...like this warm glittering water rushing.”

Why does ASMR need to be categorized as either sexual or nonsexual? Why does Waldron feel comfortable asserting that ASMR is sexual despite the ASMR community’s insistence that it is not?

Waldron argues that ASMR videos, which often provide viewers with access to a conventionally attractive, feminine-presenting woman who is acting out a caretaking role for her audience, are inherently sexual—just not in a socially acceptable way. For Waldron, it is the involvement of another human body combined with the experience of physical pleasure and the necessarily chest-centered camera angle (the ASMRtist is usually demonstrating something) that makes the videos sexual. But I disagree; if a community of people to which I do not belong is communicating something about their experience or identity that challenges my outsider perspective, I am inclined to believe it rather than argue that their interpretation of their own experience is wrong. Waldron takes the perspective that ASMR is just another form of sexual expression that is not sanctioned in hegemony, and while I don’t disagree that conventional representations of sexuality are often hopelessly limiting, I am also wary of the tendency to oversexualize women in media. Given that feminine bodies and voices are already hypersexualized, it seems possible that Waldron’s argument contributes to this problematic view. The subtext is that a woman’s adoption of a caregiving role, her use of a soft, soothing voice, and her chest are all innately sexual. This has dangerous implications when we consider the frequency with which expressions of femininity are inappropriately glossed as sexual, often with harmful consequences.

[hallowsound-blog]

Scripted/Unscripted

Sounding Out! Podcast #46: Ruptures in the Soundscape of Disneyland

On the “It’s a Small World” ride: “Music becomes the mechanism by wihch these Western ideologies of unity...are delivered to the audience.”

This episode of Sounding Out! features recordings that Cynthia Wang made while walking through Disneyland. Wang deconstructs these soundscapes, noting that the immersive audiovisual landscape of Disney is frequently interrupted by the unscripted sounds of conversation and mechanical equipment.

Though I was engaged by the content of this podcast, what I noticed most as I listened was the mounting tension between Wang and the interviewer. The interviewer frequently attempts to summarize Wang’s ideas, but almost invariably either misinterprets, overgeneralizes, or misses the point. Wang spends a lot of time saying things like, “Well, I don’t think I would say that,” “I think that’s a pretty big jump,” and “No, not really.” I was surprised that these moments of tension were not edited out. The interviewer is a noticeably disruptive presence--in fact, the interviewer might be unnecessary here, as Wang seems to have a fairly concrete sense of what she wants to communicate about Disney’s relationship to sound and to middle-class American consumerism. That the seams are left showing is a reflection of the “ruptures in the soundscape” that Wang highlights about Disney. My irritation and frustration with the interviewer may be an indication that I expect media to be like the experience Disney intends for its audience: a magically spun story in which the storyteller is obscured.

[hallowsound-blog]

Visit Original Link

A queer polyamory enthusiast recalls his first experience of failed monogamy.

Transcript:

“I don’t even know if I understand your question or whatever. When I was 19 I was approaching what would end up being the end of a 2 1/2 year relationship with my high school sweetheart, the only ex of mine who I still have a positive, active relationship with. You know, we had been having some problems, and, you know, it was kind of on the down-slope of the relationship. The night it happened, I knew. She cheated on me, and he was a short white guy, and I just like knew that something had happened. That something had happened, like physically, between the two of them. I walked around the corner to her place. Just asked her, like, did something happen. You know, just kind of that thing of, like, did you do something with this person, blah blah blah, like, the whole thing. And I asked her and she said no, and I said okay, but I didn’t believe her. And within a week or two, I think, I broke up with her. I was so frustrated for a variety of reasons, but I also felt like at the end of the day that I broke up with a person that I loved very much and spent a very long period of my life with...on a hunch.”

[hallowsound-blog]

Archive / Song

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham U.P.: Durham, 2003.

“I was not...willing to accept a desexualized or sanitized version of queer culture as the price of inclusion within the national public sphere; I wanted the sexual cultures that AIDS threatened to be acknowledged as both an achievement and a potential loss” (5).

Three Songs

Nina Simone: “Ain’t Got No (I’ve Got Life)”

“What have I got that no one can take away?

Le Tigre: “Hot Topic”

“Don’t you stop / I can’t live if you stop”

X-Ray Spex: “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!”

“I wanna be a victim / for you all”

Jones, Josh. “See the Curious Score for John Cage’s ‘Silent’ Zen Composition 4′33″.” 2013.

“I love sounds just as they are. And I don’t want them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological” (Cage interviewed in attached video).

If Cage’s 4′33″ had no audience, would it still be a song?

These three classic songs by Nina Simone, Le Tigre, and X-Ray Spex exemplify Cvetkovich’s “demedicalized and depathologized model of trauma” in which “memory becomes a valuable historical resource” (12; 8). To witness these performances is to participate in the therapeutic deconstruction of trauma; we recall, we make lists of what has been taken from us or what was never given, we name the people who share our experience and whose neurology may be forever altered in the same ways that ours is. We shout out the all the ways in which we wish we could erase our own personhood in order to shoulder the collective burden. But where does John Cage come in? Watching a concert pianist close the fallboard during 4’33” seems like a far cry from screaming along with Poly Styrene. However, Cage’s “silent” piece redirects our attention from the stage to our fellow audience members. We now notice the sounds that people make when they are supposed to be paying attention: the rustle of clothing, throats clearing, legs crossing and uncrossing, the sounds of lungs expanding and contracting. We are reminded that we’re in this together.

[hallowsound-blog]

Affect/Story

Moten, Fred. “Resistance of the Object: Aunt Hester’s Scream.” In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. 2003.

“In the end, what I’m interested in is precisely that transference, a carrying or crossing over, that takes place on the bridge of lost matter, lost maternity, lost mechanics that joins bondage and freedom, that interinanimates the body and its ephemeral if productive force, that interarticulates the performance and the reproductive reproduction it always already contains and which contains it.”

Glass, Ira. “How to Tell A Good Story.”

“Ted Koppel’s already on TV. They don’t need you imitating Ted Koppel. There’s a real Ted Koppel on the same TV that you’re gonna be on.”

Ira Glass explains the two primary “building blocks” of a good story: the anecdote and the moment of reflection. Ideally, Glass says, these two elements are staggered and interwoven in order to create a piece that is “larger than the sum of its parts.” Along with the storyteller’s ability to discard bad work, these are Glass’s essential components of good storytelling.

Glass emphasizes the importance of practice—putting out “a ton of work” in order to gradually “close that gap” between a storyteller’s good taste and their mediocre output. “I think that not enough gets said,” he says, “about the importance of abandoning crap.” Because Glass fails to define “good taste,” I presume that he believes in a single, universal concept of it. I, on the other hand, have no idea what it is. Those of us who have been abandoned and excluded by white, moneyed heteropatriarchy, who have been treated like crap and who identify as garbage, may have a particularly difficult time “abandoning crap” when we tell our stories. In contrast with Glass’s formulaic approach to storytelling, Moten writes about “lost matter” and the importance of telling the kinds of stories that don’t usually get told. Who gets to decide what good taste is? Who says this story is bad? And when the crappy story we are telling needs to be told, can we get a new set of rules?

[hallowsound-blog]

Noise or Sound?

Oyola, Osvaldo. “Living with Noise.” 2013.

Oyola addresses “the anonymous intimacy of city living,” equating noise with the overheard emotional outbursts of teenage neighbors, while sound is associated with trains’ “soothing...rhythm of the clacking rails.”

Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noise. 1913.

“Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound.”

Serres, Michel. Genesis. 1982.

"Background noise may well be the ground of our being. It may be that our being is not at rest, it may be that it is not in motion, it may be that our being is disturbed” (93-94).

Generation Anthropocene. “The Soundtracker.” 2015.

  “When I truly listen, I disappear.”

This piece is a self-conducted interview by Gordon Hempton, also known as the Soundtracker. Over the last thirty years, Hempton has traveled around the world (three times) recording sounds. Now, as he faces rapid hearing loss, he reflects on the difference between sound and noise. The former, according to Hempton, assists the conveyance of meaningful information, while the latter disrupts it. 

“When I listen,” says Hempton, “I have to be quiet. I cannot listen for something. I just take every sound in with equal value.” Hempton speaks about listening in terms of centuries, observing that noise pollution from trains, traffic, machinery, and airplanes actively interrupts the biologically ingrained practice of passive listening in order to receive information about our surroundings. The earth-shaking screech of the train approaching the platform, for example, drowns out the sounds of conversations, footsteps, incoming weather, or the coos of pigeons. Hempton posits that humans’ particular ear for birdsong is an evolutionary adaptation; for our nomadic ancestors, the presence of birdsong may have indicated a hospitable environment. Thus, listening is a kind of “homing in,” a way of locating shelter, sustenance, and self. In Hempton’s view, through our contributions to noise pollution, we inadvertently impair our ability to be at home, to find safety, and to seek comfort.