Unsettling Sound Studies

Sound Studies is a remarkably heterogonous field. And yet, it does tend to center Western humanist notions, what Marie Thompson, in her entry on “Sound Studies” for the Oxford Bibliographies, has called a “colonial core.”1 One artifact of that core persists in the name of the field, which posits sound as an object of inquiry: the study of sound. By contrast, each of the four works I discuss below invites critical reflection on the field of Sound Studies, an invitation to think with sound otherwise, primarily by unsettling ideas of sound as object and attending instead to embodied practices of listening.Though each work centers on listening, they speak in different voices and disagree in important ways. As Anthony Reed, citing Kofi Agawu, notes: written language, unlike music, “’lacks the plane of simultaneity’” (Reed 168). Rather than a layering of sound, the book review typically proceeds paratactically. And yet, as Dylan Robinson asserts in his taxonomy of musical encounter, a decolonial approach to sound—to listening—requires the creation of “structures that allow for a coexistence of difference that refuses integration” (Robinson 123). Thus, in this essay, I utilize various formal attempts to signal potential harmonics, juxtapositions, and notes of discord. I begin with a series of paragraphs in which I listen to each of the books one at a time. In these paragraphs, I am not attempting to provide an overview (a sighted metaphor with pretensions to mastery, the act of surveying) of the books’ contents. I am, rather, allowing the phrasing, riffs, and rhythms of others to thread through my words. Following these opening paragraphs, I listen again, this time attuning myself more fully to the places where I think I hear the voices in the books speaking and listening to one another, questioning and clashing against one another. This does not always go smoothly. But what is at stake throughout is the active unsettling of sound studies. What I mean by this should become more resonant as you listen (if you listen), and I return to it again in the closing breaths. I listen first to Jane Geaney’s Language as Bodily Practice in Early China. The keynote I hear is that her project wants to formulate sound as an embodied relation. She begins by sampling from key texts from the early period (ca. 500 BCE to 200 CE) to develop an autochthonous set of terms for talking about listening, speaking, music, and poetics. Foremost among these terms are yan (言, speech) and ming (名, “naming”). Early Chinese texts describe yan as “being ‘emitted’ (出) or ‘issued’ (發)” from the human body (Geaney 252), rendering some part of the speaker’s yi (意, “what is on the heartmind,” 255) as an aurally perceptible force. Speaking is a way of sharing a part of oneself, the sounded transformation of “a single (or unified) bit of qi” (life force 氣), with one or more other humans (256). Speech is within one’s control and thus can be cultivated. The texts that Geaney works with “do not describe language in relation to a world of sensory experience and mental ideas; rather, early Chinese texts are repeatedly seen to create pairings of sounds and various visible things” (ix). This is the function of ming (名, “naming”). Language in this sense is less like a system of signs and “more like sounds that issue from the mouth and enter the ears. It is bodily utterances that are emitted and heard—not an abstraction” (ix). In this conceptual framework, where social regulation is founded on the matching of speech and behavior, the soundedness of governance overlaps with, extends into, and must be understood in relation to yue (楽). Though most often translated as “music,” Geaney further glosses yue as “a sagely knowledge of sound” (151), positing “sageliness” (sheng 聖) as an audient form of knowing that partners with visual forms of knowing (zhi 知・智).I listen next to Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. His project focuses on black aesthetic production—particularly the interrelation and overlaps between phonographic poetry, free jazz, and the political—from the long Black Arts era (1950s–1970s) to the post-Civil Rights and post-Ferguson present. The “abiding ambition” of Reed’s Soundworks is “to learn to listen to phonographic poetry as a practice of black sound” (2). As he argues in the Introduction, “Listening to black sound beyond the herding effects that discipline any experience of sound—starting with those epistemological and ideological mechanisms by which we separate music from random noise—requires reconceiving it as an evolving, open set of aesthetic practices that develop alongside the ideological and material forces that give those practices dimension and meaning” (3). To that end, phonographic poetry allows Reed to “track the changing practical and theoretical relationships among sound, text, and speech; among sound, song, and meaning; and among the sensuous, technical, and ideological forces that comprise the black sound object” (4). Attending to the media in which those sound objects are nested (liner notes, interviews, etc.) helps him to index how these productions “constitute and shape struggles within and against language” (4). Reed’s definition of “voice” in Amiri Baraka’s phonopoetry lays bare some of Reed’s central concerns with the constellation of speech, music, racialization, and power. Reed encourages us to hear “a different theoretical function of voice in [Baraka’s] thinking, not just as a sign or reflection of racialized presence but the continual production of racial difference as inchoate political consciousness, mobilized against the standardizing impulses of mode of life built around the alienation of labor power from the laborer” (107, italics in original).Now I listen to Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Robinson is interested in thinking against sound as a resource for extraction. Situated in the contemporary settler colony of Canada, Robinson “focuses on a range of encounters between Indigenous song and Western art music (also called classical music or concert music)” and “examines how we listen to such encounters in the moment of their sounding, and how writing allows certain moments of sonic experience to be heard by while foreclosing on others” (1). Through unpacking instances of “compositional violence” (1)—such as early twentieth century practices of state-funded salvage ethnography that extracted and archived Indigenous music and the later appropriation of that “incarcerated” (161) sound in the creation of settler colonial classical music of Canadian multiculturalism, a process Robinson refers to as “plunderphonic” (130)—Robinson theorizes and critiques what he calls “hungry listening.” He writes, “As a form of perception, ‘hungry listening’ is derived from two Halq’eméylem words: shxwelítemelh (the adjective for settler or white person’s methods/things) and xwélalà:m (the word for listening). shxwelítemelh comes from the word xwelítem (white settler) and more precisely means ‘starving person’” (2). Thus, “hungry listening” names “settler colonial forms of perception” which assume that all sound is available for listening and that desire for a sound necessarily implies the right to extract, possess, and consume it (2). Guided by Indigenous framing that intersects with feminist, queer, and critical race theory, Robinson situates sound primarily as “an act of listening [that] attends to the relationship between listener and listened-to. Hungry Listening here conceptualizes the space of sonic encounter as a space of subject-subject relation,” thereby reorienting the act of listening “toward the life, agency, and subjectivity of sound” (15).Next, I listen to Kim Haines-Eitzen’s Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—And What It Can Teach Us. Haines-Eitzen examines the soundscape as an agential force in the development of early Christian monasticism. She is interested in thinking through some of the ways in which the locations of early retreats shaped the development and experience of monasticism. Between the third and seventh centuries, Haines-Eitzen notes, “the desert became a sacred place—set apart as a place for contemplation, asceticism, and prayer. These developments changed the course of Christian history” and exerted particularly strong shaping pressure on Christian monasticism in the Middle East (Haines-Eitzen 2). Her voice is essayistic and autobiographical in nature: she describes various locales she has visited for field recording (the Negev and Judean deserts of Israel-Palestine, Mt. Sinai in Egypt, the Mojave Desert, and the Chiricahua Mountains of the southwestern United States), pairs these experiences with a consideration of short passages from early Christian desert monasticism (sampling from texts written in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, and Latin), and discusses how the object of her own listening practice has changed over time, from a quest for pure silence to an understanding of human embeddedness in a wider acoustic ecology. Each chapter blends attention to Jewish and early Christian text, a consideration of the monastic terrain, an engagement of modern ecological writing, and the offering of an acoustic intertext from Haines-Eitzen’s own experience. Though they all attend to sound in their different ways, none of these studies is about sound as object. Rather, each of them focalizes listening as practice. Attending again to Geaney’s argument: In her estimation, early Chinese texts conceptualize sound primarily as a human activity. In a successful, sounded interaction, “two different things might occur: the recipient might get (de 得) something from a person’s speech; and yi 意 (intentions, what is on the heartmind) might become tong 通 (unobstructed)” (113), bringing the listener into harmony. Early Chinese texts often evoke metaphors of nets, traps, and snares to describe the tricky prospect of trying to “get” what is on someone else’s heartmind.Power relations do come into play here, as a careful listener tries to match what is audible (speech) with what is visible (behavior). As Geaney notes, “people speak for a reason: to express their heartminds. In doing so, they make themselves vulnerable to others—listeners who are not detached observers—who might want to catch their yi,” a model of communication that “is not neutral nor is its operation smooth or inevitable. When throwing in a net for fish, one might get nothing, or one might get something the speaker does not want to reveal” (Geaney 121). One upshot is that a speaker might become quarry, caught in the entangled mismatch between words and deeds.Another possible result, of course, is that of cooperation: a speaker’s words and deeds match, their speech is unimpeded, and their sounding has the desired result: the listener perceives what is on the speaker’s heartmind, shows a “willingness to cooperate and to persist in posing questions,” and thereby harmonizes with the speaker, such that speaker and hearer share feelings, aims, intentions, desires, preferences, inclinations, and tastes (137).Certainly, the implications of Geaney’s work for the field of Sound Studies are several. First, in contrast to Western philosophical dualisms of reality/appearance or material/immaterial, early Chinese texts posit an aural/visual polarity. “The ears hear things like names, fame, speech, and music, whereas the eyes see things like walking, action, forms, shape, colors, and patterns. Speech and writing inhabit opposing sides of this polarity,” seeming to “depict a sensory world that is a spectrum of varying degrees of materiality ranging from visible condensed things to less condensed sounds” (xi). In this conceptualization, sound (speech and naming) is not disinterested, posited in relation to a realm of ideals. Rather, human sounding is always embedded, embodied, relational, and As Geaney from one person’s to another, it is not and by the sound can and does us speaker and and sound is embodied, Geaney as than as an audible and a visible for of their and their names or Reed sound and the study of sound as with poetry, music, and a which he through a on practices of for Reed’s definition of as “the not of thinking but of The musical act has two First, is the materiality of sound and within a where the sounds to to one in one musical and must their own experiences and to a set of they or the sense of where the music has come from of and where it might be he “is a and it which in Reed argues that of about the of a music, than The a of for the the of one might the music that Reed has in as a of But a of alienation in which the practice of listening” and musical that than and free comprise practices in which listening a of an act of such as a of at in the This is Reed studies not sound but sound as and attending to the that shape to and other of sound, further for the ways race as a social it to for the forms of theoretical reflection and at stake in black is a political act which a space for and its is the (a of listening, not the from sound to object of knowledge to of for Reed as he situates his study to black for This Reed to conceptualize what he calls a relationship between as of and a to those who in the that the themselves as a a to posits voices as “a from the of from the of the a beyond the To voice as thus thinking of it not as of the the of a but as a the creation of the opening of of In Reed of as an to think the notes to on the center of the in the at like a with or four the like music or But a each can play his notes in that and it him a he has more on or music a practice of listening to one’s a musical that “the of the and of time, is The free and phonopoetry from the of sonic that its as or object and an embodied practice in which the speaker or to be part of the must with this moment of and it Thus, Reed writes, be of as a of the as the is to be to and through time. it with the for a at social relations that to in the world to be his Reed between of phonopoetry as a theoretical object of and phonopoetry as a of or what Reed terms an of the One of Reed’s is that he some of the ways that the of the Western a mode of social of the function to those forms that be or notes that the listening names a sensory that has on Indigenous for in the of and Western (3). As an act of writing, Hungry Listening of writing that allow experience or to and provide space for Indigenous to to and the work of Guided by Indigenous framing that intersects with feminist, queer, and critical race theory, Robinson situates sound primarily as “an act of listening [that] attends to the relationship between listener and listened-to. Hungry Listening conceptualizes the space of sonic encounter as a space of subject-subject relation,” thereby reorienting the act of listening “toward the life, agency, and subjectivity of sound” Robinson more Indigenous things or for Thus, Indigenous are more than sonic and the of Indigenous song might in not be a of it an of power through the of an of and in doing a of Indigenous and Robinson conceptualizes the practice of listening as by as an of and Thus, sound is not more Indigenous song, sound, and comprise and practices of Indigenous knowledge sharing by not all sound is who the Indigenous Hungry Robinson to to “the work of music studies by and forms of listening within settler colonial listening and the of critical listening italics in As he notes, forms of listening some of what we we are listening to we listen to Indigenous music and art But forms of listening the and of listening with more listening practices that listening as a that not between listener and but between the of practice that Robinson calls listening” with “the creation of a of to listening and to the of music and forms of and the of listening” such that might in a different of engagement One of such might be the understanding as a or object form is different than the of or has important implications for and practices of listening, which he argues is not (or should not about the of what is or the of a musical form or language of snares and traps, for does not listening Robinson in that musical practice what in he does that listening in relation with other knowledge is a practice. His writing thus places listening from his own and into with those of from the on which a and practices practice of listening which the act of listening as into a sound which is not but is through experience of for the of and italics in Robinson’s through that the words as and In all the work that to called as an means that you to the form that and Robinson thus glosses xwélalà:m as “a form of in and “a practice of that place in ways. does not mean that we listen but that the work of listening is not on the or the to knowledge This listening does not the but “is a form of attention in which we are not just to sound but to the range of sensory experience that us to for sound is from space is often as the within which an encounter I it here as an active in some of the of Sound Studies might do to attend listen Indigenous of sound, and not sound, in Haines-Eitzen’s is with that which can be heard with human the calls of and in the human Her to sound is by she notes, the of attending to the of and which with the of the in that Haines-Eitzen’s begins with a quest to silence and an from and an to the of and to hear the of the sounding Haines-Eitzen is that deserts are not but rather, and This Haines-Eitzen to of sound as a as “a that and and as a way of she a monasticism can be understood as to and experiences of In this particularly as in the texts by the word can describe not the and that the but a the place he or she within a and for how should with one such that one at a for Haines-Eitzen and for the early Christian she silence is not the of all sound but rather, an embodied, experience of “a of a to where we one of the from the The of of the that she discusses in In the a of his one of and the other of to Following their the is trying to which to he has a in which the with all of and of a that while the is and with and and on Haines-Eitzen notes, silence and here Christian of and the of but it is that place is by an of sound. Rather, the sounds of each place are the and be by sounds of and while the and and It is not but that to develop in the of a and on the Haines-Eitzen that early Christian that some places than others for the of that as The to describes to from Haines-Eitzen her about the silence of she go of her that deserts are for the of and early that she the desert is a of experience with the but this be as a of as she does monasticism from Christian the most The of monastic of course, the The word a by a for the of the of monastic and and that the can to a of like “a of or to a other the desert not be one of the that Haines-Eitzen’s study is that into the of early Christian monastic of these are the presence of the of and a of to of human to not to be But she argues that of sound as often built the of a between and below that an with Haines-Eitzen’s own of sound shows throughout the early Christian and in the of places where as any of might from the In this material Sonorous an against of in which power to name and power over the thereby “a sense of as a resource for human Haines-Eitzen argues that of to the the and the monastic texts are with what might be called sense that the material world is that it is with that can into song, that they and with and with in concert and moments of and these four books us to practices of listening than of sound as an or to be or as a listening practice among other with the that human and ears hear is not the of silence is not a Rather, of silence is an important the of silence is a sound to which we not is a sign that we not be and should than on to listening as practice that we who we with what we are in relation or how we might for listening and or at that all to which we to listen might not to be of Sound Studies are interested in unsettling of colonial they might to do to listen with works such as

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