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Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology

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Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology AN39CH20-Samuels ARI 13 August 2010 18:8 Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology David W. Samuels,1 Louise Meintjes,2 Ana Maria Ochoa,3 and Thomas Porcello4 1Department of Music, New York University, New York, NY 10003; email: [email protected] 2Departments of Music and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0665; email: [email protected] 3Department of Music, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027; email: [email protected] 4Department of Anthropology, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York 12604; email: [email protected] Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010. 39:329–45 Key Words First published online as a Review in Advance on aurality, film sound, listening, music, recording technology, sound art June 21, 2010 The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at Abstract anthro.annualreviews.org A generation of scholars in multiple disciplines has investigated sound in This article’s doi: ways that are productive for anthropologists. We introduce the concept by Amherst College - Serials Section on 01/17/12. For personal use only. 10.1146/annurev-anthro-022510-132230 of soundscape as a modality for integrating this work into an anthropo- Copyright c 2010 by Annual Reviews. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:329-345. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org ! logical approach. We trace its history as a response to the technological All rights reserved mediations and listening practices emergent in modernity and note its 0084-6570/10/1021-0329$20.00 absence in the anthropological literature. We then trace the history of technology that gave rise to anthropological recording practices, film sound techniques, and experimental sound art, noting productive inter- weavings of these threads. After considering ethnographies that explore relationships between sound, personhood, aesthetics, history, and ide- ology, we question sound’s supposed ephemerality as a reason for the discipline’s inattention. We conclude with a call for an anthropology that more seriously engages with its own history as a sounded disci- pline and moves forward in ways that incorporate the social and cultural sounded world more fully. 329 AN39CH20-Samuels ARI 13 August 2010 18:8 INTRODUCTION a publicly circulating entity that is a produced effect of social practices, politics, and ideolo- In 2004 Feld commented in American Ethnol- gies while also being implicated in the shap- ogist, “Until the sound recorder is presented ing of those practices, politics, and ideologies. and taught as a technology of creative and an- Soundscape opens possibilities for anthropol- alytic mediation, which requires craft and edit- ogists to think about the enculturated nature ing and articulation just like writing, little will of sound, the techniques available for collect- happen of an interesting sort in the anthropol- ing and thinking about sound, and the material ogy of sound” (Feld & Brenneis 2004, p. 471). spaces of performance and ceremony that are What would a sounded anthropology be? How used or constructed for the purpose of propa- might the discipline of anthropology develop gating sound. if its practitioners stopped thinking of the field recording only as a source of data for the writ- ten work that then ensues and rather thought FROM SOUND TO SOUNDSCAPE of the recording itself as a meaningful form? The history of the soundscape concept is in- What if discussions of recording moved beyond timately linked to histories of mediation and inquiries about the state of the art in recording to changing technologies that make particu- technology to how best to present and represent lar kinds of listening possible. It is insepara- the sonorous enculturated worlds inhabited by ble from the critical encounter with sound that people? these changes themselves enable. Indeed, after A generation of scholars in various disci- World War II a number of concepts for think- plines has been asking questions about sound, ing about sound emerged simultaneously. Each listening, the voice, and the ear (Erlmann 2004, responded to recording technology by address- Feld et al. 2004, Finnegan 2002, Kruth & ing sound’s intimate connections to contexts of Stobart 2000, Nancy 2007) in ways that make time and place. Following Latour (1993), we such reflection in anthropology both possi- infer from these overlapping concerns that the ble and possibly productive. Prominent among invention of sound machines was part of a col- these questions is Clifford’s provocative jibe, lection of epistemological practices of purifica- echoed by Erlmann (2004), “but what of the tion of sound, which sought to abstract sound ethnographic ear?” (Clifford 1986, p. 12). We from its immediate surroundings while noting propose that an alertness toward sound and its connectivity to place. sound recording and production is useful to We trace the term soundscape to Schafer anthropology at large. First we outline and con- (1994 [1977]), who brought it into wide circu- textualize genealogies of the theoretically gen- lation when he called for “a total appreciation by Amherst College - Serials Section on 01/17/12. For personal use only. erative concept of soundscape. Then we re- of the acoustic environment” (p. 4). Soundscape view emerging ethnographic work on sound was somewhat analogous to landscape insofar as Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:329-345. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org and sound recording through which the rel- it attempted to contain everything to which the evance of the soundscape concept to anthro- ear was exposed in a given sonic setting. Like pology is made explicit. At the same time, this “landscape,” as well, the term contains the con- ethnography refines theory about soundscape, tradictory forces of the natural and the cultural, even if it does not all make use of the term. the fortuitous and the composed, the impro- In combination, soundscape theory and ethno- vised and the deliberately produced. Similarly, graphies of sound prompt us to call for an aural as landscape is constituted by cultural histories, reflexive turn in the discipline and offer tools ideologies, and practices of seeing, soundscape with which to do it. We build on the model of implicates listening as a cultural practice. Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1994 Schafer’s concern with the noise pollution [1977]), which we contend has advantages for of modern technology dictated the form anthropologists. He frames the soundscape as of his presentation: The soundscape moves 330 Samuels et al. AN39CH20-Samuels ARI 13 August 2010 18:8 historically from natural to rural to town to of science, technology, and communication city and thence through the industrial and (Bijsterveld 2008, Sterne 2003, Thompson electric revolutions, becoming ever louder and 2002). less tuned to a human(ist) scale. In its historical Soundscape studies has had particular trac- movement from “hi-fi” to “lo-fi” soundscapes, tion in Scandinavia, where radio documentary, this presentation masks the ways in which the sound art, and interdisciplinary scholarship concept of soundscape is itself anchored in a have intersected in formative ways ( Jarviluoma¨ form of listening that became possible only 2004). With some exceptions, however (Feld through the development of technological 1990 [1982], Helmreich 2007, Rice 2008, forms of mediation and recording. Ridington 1988), the soundscape concept has Schafer’s initial engagement with the circulated more widely outside of anthropol- concept thus emerged out of a somewhat ro- ogy than within it and more widely outside of mantic materialist environmentalism, and his North America than within it. This failure to presentation performs a recurrent worry about take root could be in part because Schafer’s technology’s dismantling of the natural sound- neologism was broadly contemporaneous scape. This concern manifested in two ways: with the publication of Spivak’s translation of First, Schafer often returned to a discussion of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976), which her- technology’s ability to drown out the human alded a disciplinary turn away from voice and scale of the natural soundscape—“noise” is sound as presence toward a focus on textuality represented as the enemy of “sound”; second, and inscription. Another reason may be the his desire for the holism of the soundscape loose way in which the term has sometimes led him to critique the ways in which sound circulated. Some music scholars have employed recordings could time- and place-shift the “soundscape,” either explicitly (Shelemay 2006) sources of a sound’s natural context—from a or implicitly (Dudley 2002, Jones 2003, Manuel specific “here” and “now” of natural occurrence 1994), as a new cover term for “the context in to a multiplicity of “heres” and “nows” through which music occurs” but without exploring the the aegis of mediation. For this sundering of sonic aspects of that context that the sound- sound and scape, Schafer coined a second term, scape concept can activate. Others, especially schizophonia. As a result of Schafer’s concern in the realm of popular music studies (Albiez with noise pollution and the composition of 2003, Kronengold 2005), use the term to refer the emerging city soundscape, one place that to the internal sonic or tonal texture of a musical the concept has found a fertile home is in performance or ensemble, a usage that overlaps urban studies (Arkette 2004, Atkinson 2007, with the way electroacoustic composers have Gidlof-Gunnarsson & Ohrstr¨ om¨ 2007). used the term (Truax 2008, Westerkamp 2002). by Amherst College - Serials Section on 01/17/12. For personal use only. The concept overlaps and layers with a more These uses invite an unfortunate reductive ap- Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2010.39:329-345. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org widely circulating academic discourse about proach to both ethnography and the theory of sound, under such rubrics as “sound studies” the soundscape and limit the possibilities for a and “anthropology of sound” and in scholarly cross-fertilization of music studies and anthro- attention to listening. Some of this work uses pology of sound.
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