“Old” Materialism and the Sonic
While keeping these ideas in mind, to interrogate the notion of sound’s materiality further, we might usefully return to “old” materialisms, to disciplines other than philosophy, and to reference points beyond the sonic arts, experimental music, and environmental sound – touchstones for recent discussions of sonic materiality. Hiding in plain sight in my own disciplinary areas of film studies and art history are the Structural films of the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes referred to as Structural/Materialist film (Gidal 1978). While the focus of Structural/Materialist film practice, and the critical and polemical writing associated with it, was often placed on the visual, the ideas developed within this branch of radically experimental filmmaking provide a valuable resource for thinking about sonic materiality, not only in relation to cinema but also for other forms of media. Part of this resource’s potential value lies in the way in which it illuminates the materiality of technologized or mediated sound. While everyday environmental sound is often privileged in discussions of listening in sound studies – perhaps because of the centrality of acoustic ecology to the evolution of the discipline – in fact, many of us spend a lot of our time listening to recorded or technologically mediated sound, including works of sonic art and experimental music.
Structural/Materialist film pursued a non-narrative “film as film” aesthetic, developing forms of creative practice that attempted to draw primarily upon what were understood to be the medium’s essential, defining characteristics. Like the minimalist art of the period, Structural/Materialist film focuses on the materials of the artwork, foregrounding their material qualities. Filmmaker and artist Birgit Hein’s characterization of Structural/Materialist film proposes, “These works are basically exploring the whole reproduction-process that underpins the medium, including the film material, and the optical, chemical and perceptual processes” (Hein 1979: 93). Here Hein’s formulation of film’s materiality centers on the qualities of what was then the medium’s physical substrate: the strip of celluloid film and its unique photochemical properties. In a discussion of experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s film History (1970), writer and curator Regina Cornwell proposes that film’s material dimensions can be conceived in terms of light acting on film emulsion in time (Cornwell 1972: 111). According to this model – and once again thinking in terms of cinema’s pre-digital history – film’s materiality reveals itself primarily in visual properties, such as grain and color, and in the phenomena of movement and flicker, all of which locate film’s materiality exclusively in relation to its photochemical support and its passage through the projector. If we consider these ideas from a sonic perspective, then the visual grain of the image finds its direct equivalent in the audible ground noise of optical film sound, since the soundtrack is encoded photographically as patterns of light and dark on the film print itself. Here, film grain is heard as the hiss of the soundtrack, which forms part of analogue sound film’s materiality, alongside the crackle that results from the damage a film print suffers over time, the system noise generated by projection and amplification systems, and even the mechanical noise of the projector. All of these are aspects of optical sound film’s sonic materiality, located directly in relation to what Cox describes as “the materials through and against which [sound] is transmitted.”
However, the materiality of recorded sound lies not only in the background noises generated by a particular technology but also in how that technology renders the sounds it seeks to foreground. Every sound heard in a recording bears the trace of that technology’s sonic signature. If we were to analogize the soundtrack of a film in terms of its voice, the materiality of recorded sound also resides in what cultural theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes famously describes as the “grain” of the voice. Central to Barthes’s formulation of grain is a sense of connectivity and relationality that brings us close to ideas proposed by both New Materialism and the sonic materialisms of Cox, Voegelin, and Cobussen. Barthes formulates grain in terms of “the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language” (Barthes 1977: 185). Here, the notion of friction is suggestive of a form of connectivity and entanglement that is echoed, in more materialist terms, in Barthes’s description of the sound of the voice of the Russian bass: “as though a single skin lined the inner flesh of the performer and the music he sings” (Barthes 1977: 181-82). The relational aspect of this formulation is directly relevant to the notion of film sound’s materiality, for permeating every sound heard in a film is the audible trace of an entanglement between technology and sound – to rephrase Barthes, as though a single skin lined the technology of film and the sounds it produces. This rendering of recorded sound (its grain) is heard, for example, in the frequency and dynamic ranges of the recording, both of which are technical measures of sonic qualities that might also be considered aspects of sound’s materiality. And should I be tempted to think for a moment that the digital is somehow less material than the analogue, I have only to peer behind my computer screen to observe the chaotic tangle of cables concealed there to remind myself that the digital is also material.
The temporal dimensions of the materiality signaled by Cornwell in her formulation of film as light acting on film emulsion in time is not limited to film’s ability to reproduce or generate movement. The physical aspects of film’s celluloid substrate form not only the basis of the film image but also the medium’s structure in time. Accordingly, artist and filmmaker Malcolm Le Grice proposes that some forms of Structural/Materialist film “establish experience of duration as a ‘concrete’ dimension of cinema, and as the dominant dimension of cinematic experience” (Le Grice 1977: 118-120). Similarly, for filmmaker and film theorist Peter Gidal, duration is understood to be a “material piece of time” (Gidal 1978: 8). We might, therefore, take Gidal’s pithy statement – “Material must not mean just that which you can touch, some object” (Gidal 1989: 46) – to propose that film’s temporality and its becoming in time might also be considered dimensions of its materiality. This proposition, of course, aligns closely with the sonic materialisms developed by Cox and Voegelin. However, what Structural/Materialist film also brings to this discussion is the notion of structure. Returning to the issue of sonic materialism, if we understand structure to be the concrete particularity of the distribution of sonic events within duration rather than an inferred or imposed abstract paradigm, then structure might also be considered a dimension of sound’s materiality.