Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound
Independent Scholar (Canada)
“That quality we call beauty . . . must always grow from the realities of life.” This statement by Japanese novelist Jun’ichirou Tanizaki, from his essay In Praise of Shadows, evokes a sense of the aesthetic being rooted in lived experience. Having experienced, we then categorize, judge and assign value to the “reality” our senses provide. It is on this phenomenological foundation that author Salomé Voegelin builds Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound. The central tenet of Voegelin’s work is that traditional musical compositions and contemporary sonic works are investigated through separate and distinct critical languages (and histories), and thus no continuous study of both as a unified field is possible. Thus, she proposes a new analytical framework that can access and investigate works across genres and times, enabling a comparative engagement, including soundscape composers whose works involve a visual context. But in the process of sound creation there can arise great discrepancies concerning what we believe we have listened to versus what we have heard, revealing more sophisticated sonic life realities from which our personal views on aesthetics and truth grow.
Methodologically, the book is a philosophical project: a philosophy “not about objects and ideas but about the transient ephemerality of sonic materiality and subjectivity. It aims to create a philosophical experience that might not convince in terms of philosophical orthodoxies and histories but through the reader as listener’s own experience, her simultaneity with the heard, from where he struggles between language and listening, producing a philosophical place made of sounds and words” (5). This, as Voegelin states, is directly built on Theodor Adorno’s concept of the essay as a formless form of text that “makes no claim of being anything other than an experiment, a suggestion, a provocation maybe, and relies on the fact that as an essay it has no obligation to be all inclusive . . . and does not have to come to firm conclusions either” (4).
Indeed, this reflects the idea that the “quest for certainty ends up narrowing and ‘colonizing’ the realm of the possibilities, in terms of diversity of approaches, and ways of being and thinking” (Williams 2015: 28). Thus Voegelin states that her aim is “not to listen to understand, judge, categorize, or preserve the soundscape, but to illuminate and generate the plural possibilities of the landscape as an environment that involves everything that is and that could be” (13–14).
The book begins with a fascinating quote from Voegelin’s blog entitled “My Room”. In it she describes how sound enters her room from all angles, and is invisibly present in her visual world: a set on which “sound plays invisible narratives (cheerful, sinister, unnoticed, etc.), testing notions of intimacy, neighborliness and so on. Unseen protagonists who might really be there, or just invented by me play out fantastic scenarios that might be real . . .” (1). Similarly, she quotes a later post wherein she describes an autumn walk through fallen leaves as a “sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold, sounding the idea of autumn as an ‘iconographic’ sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation, and thus is clearly not an icon at all . . . I activate it and hear it sounding us together, a socio-symbolic relationship” (9).
Such descriptions of sonic presence in visual space are referred to by Voegelin as “textual phonography”, which produces not a recording of the heard but of listening, which “produces another sound in the imagination of the reader that is not the sound I heard but the sound generated in her action of perception of reading about sound”. This “recording in words” does not create recognition of an object or subject, but triggers a generative interpretation, what the reader imagines or remembers of what Voegelin heard, and what one might go on to hear as a result of these words (1). This textual phonography Voegelin describes is not only a fascinating manner of writing, but also has a practical aspect in research on sonic materiality that supports Voegelin’s thesis of critical language lacunae. Thus, Voegelin contributes a valuable rubric that has already shown itself to have practical use, one such lacuna being made apparent recently during a personal visit of my own to the Temple of Confucius in Hanoi, Vietnam. Văn Miếu – Quốc Tử Giám is a Hanoian Confucian Temple that also held the ancient Imperial Academy, Vietnam’s first national university. Built by emperor Lý Thánh Tông in 1070, Văn Miếu is a place of serenity and history: its various gardens, courtyards and stele aimed at honoring its cultural heritage and inspiring Vietnamese to “follow the traditions of respecting the [sic] teachers, talented scholars, fondness of learning, and high ethical behavior” (Văn Miếu Center pamphlet).
Walking through the various pavilions and courtyards, my intention was to document the temple’s architectural and aesthetic features to complement similar research I have done in East Asia. But this effort was interrupted by loud pop music blaring into the temple complex from an adjacent store located on the northeast side of Văn Miếu Street. The music, with its cheery electronic beat, filled courtyards and gardens: its presence inescapable and embedded within the temple’s spatial and acoustic ecology. Immersion in its sonic materiality created a very real socio-symbolic presence (intrusion), a new social relationship within an environment meant to be its opposite: quiet, scholarly and ethical. Văn Miếu, in this moment, ceases to be an inclusive, well-defined conceptual Confucian whole, and becomes something different. Being present in Văn Miếu as a site of unintentional pop music meant I was occupying it as a socio-acoustic plurality, a reality of its milieu, and Voegelin’s textual phonography would provide invaluable insight into this circumstance.
Such phonography truly succeeds in making her case both plausible and imaginable to the reader, due to its alterity, its “otherness”, beyond standard epistemology employed by ethnomusicologists, for example. Thus, Voegelin makes a very practical, thoughtful contribution to philosophical aesthetics, and inclusion of engaged textual phonographies would surely broaden and revitalize current debates in ethnography, ethnomusicology and musicology.
Voegelin’s phonography, though, unfortunately becomes problematic as the book progresses. Not because her approach yields ineffective conceptual or imaginative alterities, but rather that it treats traditional musical composition and the academy heuristically in anti-disciplinarian rhetoric, a kind of methodological monism that assumes that current formal structures of music composition, ethnomusicology and so on are universally agreed upon to be the sole correct approaches. Thus, her writing does not achieve the goal of providing an organized structure for formal analysis that is free of the very bias she proceeds to suggest in the preceding traditions.
For example, Voegelin defines music as the organization of sound into a shape “privileged by history and canons, set apart by virtuosity and the esoteric knowledge of the discipline: knowledge built from inside the discourse to retain control from outside interference, to remain self-sustaining within its own ideology that justifies its existence to an outside world, while keeping it out” (122). The culprit in this case is “the professional”, who is “allowed to define the very standards by which its superior competence is judged”. This professional autonomy allows “the experts to select at will the inputs they receive from the laity”, their autonomy isolating them. Thus, in part, professionals live in “the ideologies of their own creation, which they present to the outside as the most valid definitions of specific spheres of social reality” (187).
Voegelin also asserts that “having lost our measure in the dialectic authorities of God and science means that our own identity has lost the transparency that it held in opposition to them also. So now a contingent subjectivity needs to be found through the obscure mobility of sound in the mirror of silence that does not hold still” (47). She does not name specific individuals, institutions, Gods or scientific fields that are responsible for identity loss—those who organize sound into privileged shapes that resist alterity—but proceeds nevertheless to characterize organization of sound as inherently esoteric, set apart, controlled and self-justifiably isolated from an outside world by “experts” (187). Voegelin even goes so far as to state that in her plurality of possible worlds, music itself “loses its hegemony and discipline” (14).
Since there are no given exceptions to this characterization, this is a categorical proposition lacking any evidence to the contrary. Lacking such evidence, Voegelin commits a conjunction fallacy, assuming that the co-occurrence of professionals and acts of superiority, controlled input and ideological validation is more likely than a single act by a single professional. This representative heuristic eliminates the possibility of proof to the contrary, and thus weakens Voegelin’s case for a comparative language. As a result, there is now “no longer a need to locate musical value in the score, the musical text . . . this is a musicality not delineated by genius, perfection, and the right interpretation of a piece of work, which protects a specialism from outside influence and interference” (124).
This supposed lack of musical value being a necessity in the creation of a score, sounding everything without becoming anything, is not the comparative study Voegelin promises, but might be read as prima facie iconoclasm, appropriation by negation, or a socio-centric privileging of a purposefully uncritical aestheticism within which Voegelin acknowledges “right from the start that we might as well misunderstand each other and that it is only through the effort and desire to be understood and to understand that temporarily, with a lot of good will and timing, in moments of coincidence, shared understandings will be found, while the rest remains experience” (5). She also does not address motor-intentionality, and how the body (dancing) might play a part in textual phonography of EDM or other genres that share intimate group socialities.
But Voegelin herself is a senior academic and critical participant in the very structures she examines, thus Sonic Possible Worlds is best understood not as an organized structure for formal analysis, but rather a useful aesthetic manifesto on sound and textual phonography that will no doubt provoke meaningful debate on epistemology and aesthetics.
2016. Văn Miếu – Quốc Tử Giám: Historical And Cultural Vestige. Hanoi: Center For Scientific And Cultural Activities.
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirou. 1977. In Praise Of Shadows. Sedgwick: Leete’s Island Books.
Williams, Hakim M.A. 2015. “Fighting a resurgent hyper-positivism in education is music to my ears”. Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 14(1): 19–43.