Recording Gleaning
As I stood with Aissatou in the knee-deep water and saw her fingers, hands, and large parts of her arms plunge into the water time after time, I did not want to completely miss out on what was happening there below. So I followed her into the wet and the ground, mimetically aligning my gestures to hers, the GoPro Hero 7 action camera with its microphones in hand, delving into a technological transduction of what lies beyond our own everyday visual and auditory experience. Moreover, Aissatou and I started to put the camera in sieves, buckets, and bags, letting it swirl around with her movements. Meanwhile, another microphone, wired to a recorder, remained above the water with me. At some point, however, it malfunctioned, leaving me with only the recording of the camera microphones.
When listening to the above-water recordings of the camera’s microphones, I noticed the presence of wind biting into the recording again and again.
In the underwater recordings, in turn, I noticed how a static hiss permeates them, pointing to the limitations of the GoPro’s microphones in recording the crackling of the water.[2] The hiss then gives way to Aissatou’s muffled voice and the sound of her sieving as well as the voices and sounds of sieving by others. Moreover, there is the sound of bubbling water, arising from Aissatou’s movements of her arms, hands, and fingers; the high, piercing sound when a mollusc occasionally dropped down into the water; the sound of my touch on the camera; the deep, grainy sounds of the pressure and the flow of the water; and the even deeper, vibrating sound of the mud being scrapped and pulled across the underwater surface.
Also, there are the sounds of the camera swirling around in sieves, buckets, and bags, in direct contact not only with the materiality of the water but also with that of the different tools, the sand, and the molluscs. They are crunchy and rumbling, overdriven and distorted.
The recordings where I lifted the camera from beneath to above the water form a special case. On them, rather than a quick and smooth transition, the underwater tone lingers on. It is as if the camera microphones behave like human ears that, reminiscent of diving experiences, sometimes need time for the water to run out and shift from dull to clear hearing. The water, exerting pressure on microphones or eardrums before trickling away, affects the perceived quality of the sound above water. For instance, in the recordings of Aissatou picking out dead shells from the sieve, the sound and image do not match as I remembered or expected. This asymmetry between sound and visual,– where the sound “lags behind” – reminds us of how often our perception of sound and image are interdependent. In situations where they do not sync, we often think of echoes – a reverberation from a past sound into the now or of sound preceding and introducing its visual counterpart – such as in the case of a film cut or when we hear something and then turn our eyes towards its source. The sound here, in contrast, is progressing and tied to a concurrently progressing visual, but with a tone carrying over from the past. The effect is that the visual, which is not met with the expected tone from the now, feels as if “held” in the past, too. Or, in other words and considered apart from the visual aspect, guided by tone, one can almost hear above water from an underwater perspective – that is until the tone “clears up” and we as listeners (or as listener-viewers) emerge from our liminal experience and reconnect with sound’s familiar surroundability and directionality (Ihde [1976] 2007). This underwater tone lingering in the above-water recording gestures towards the wet-dry intermingling in the amphibious Sine-Saloum Delta and expresses the materiality of water in how it acts on microphones or eardrums.
The various sounds described here, recorded above and under the water, acting as mediums as well as material realities and “things thinging” (Ingold 2007; Voegelin [2014] 2021), convey a distinct haptics that echoes the haptics of gleaning. As Philippa Lovatt (2013: 65, drawing on Coulthard 2012) states, haptic sound, characterized by the foregrounding of “texture” – through “excessive amplification, vibration or distortion,” for example – is closely associated with touch and can evoke sentience. Touch, as the Aristotelean heterogeneous field of sensing and feeling, has depth and moves us (Elo 2012; 2013; 2018, drawing on Waldenfels 2002) while also revealing the limits of self and other and engaging us in an exploration of the stranger within (Manning 2007; Barad 2012). Thereby, touch can bring forth pathic experiences (Waldenfels 2002), with pathic being derived from pathos, referring to sensitivity, sentience, affectability, and suffering but also including the exposure to something excessive and unexpected (Waldenfels 2002; Elo 2018).
The haptic sounds recorded from deltaic mollusc gleaning, considered as evoking a pathic experience, thus play at the limits of (human) self and world, inside and out (see also Marks 2000: 183).[3] They make tangible a multispecies reality in excess of everyday human experience and at the same gesture towards the “imperceptibility” (Lynteris and Stasch, 2019: 6) and ultimately the unknowability of the world. Haptic sounds can touch us while causing us to temporarily lose all spatiotemporal references and to experience a sense of alterity and unpredictability. Moreover, they can convey the forcefulness of human action in its contact with this multispecies world as well as the materiality of technology (compare e.g. to Leviathan 2012). Thus, the excessiveness of recordings themselves becomes palpable. These recordings often display the “indeterminate” that concerns localization and categorization, the “disproportionate” that concerns comparability, or the “imperfect” that concerns the quality of the sound’s recording. They make tangible how camera and microphones operate within or at the edges of their own limits, how their mediation is constructive and selective (Samuels, Meintjes, Ochoa and Porcello 2010) and as much a question of flow and revelation as it is one of resistances, turbulences, distortions, and concealment (Grasseni and Gieser 2019: 10, 11). Haptic sound therefore is as much about the expansion of our worlds as it is about boundaries and inaccessibility, as much about sensuality and experience as it is about consciousness and reflection.
Aissatou moving her hands across the mud and sieving molluscs, some of which fall into the water, all recorded underwater
Aissatou talking while moving her hands across the mud and shoveling molluscs into the sieve, followed by sieving, recorded first underwater and then overwater