Sonic Methods: Sound Through (Whose) Body?
I understand methods as sonic when they generate knowledge from listening to a sound’s “sonority” (Voegelin 2021: 273), which is to say, to the qualities and textures of sound as rich and fleshy, of sound as vibration, of sound as sound, instead of merely perceiving these forms and aesthetics as carriers of abstract signal. In my understanding, sonic methods further require the researcher to acknowledge how they are affected and touched in contact with what they are listening to – they solicit a sensibility for, and openness to, relations between listener and sonic event that render each in positions of “proximity, implication, and vulnerability” (Campt 2021: 105) to and through each other. In short, sonic methods produce knowledge from the researcher’s physical and sensual experience of sound. Knowledge from sonic methods forms in processing sound as it passes through a researcher’s own body and embodied perception. Situating such sonic thinking, as addressed above, thus requires naming the positionality of this body who processes. From when and where do they perceive? When, where, and how can frequencies materialize to register with whom? In which world? And how do they reciprocally shape each other?
Tina Campt’s “listening to images” (2017; 2021) offers a sonic methodology that allows very precise positioning of the listening subject in the world that shapes it. By physically engaging with inaudible but “felt” frequencies that silent images invoke (Campt 2021: 136), Campt’s method reaches for associations: which histories do specific sounds recall in relation to specific images? How can sound be felt as in touch with the world, as of the world, as of concrete locations and times? What relations to visuality, to visual culture, to representational regimes can sounds suggest? How can they open space for relating otherwise? Inviting a sonic sensibility that points beyond the logic of signification while at the same time demanding accountability for questions of representation, Campt’s method clearly resonates with Bilir-Meier’s audiovisual aesthetics, and below I will build a significant part of my argument by placing them in dialogue with each other.
Semra Ertan is a film that sounds and I encounter it as a hearing person. As Campt developed her method in dialogue with silent photographs, her work provides littler guidance for addressing the sonicity of sound heard. With that in mind, I will also employ Voegelin’s “sonic methodologies of sound,” which invite detailed descriptions of sensory textures, affordances, and intensities as heard in encounter with audiovisual artworks. For the aim of this paper, though, Voegelin’s approach needs grounding in Campt’s, for, in striving to “reach beyond locations on a map or dates in a chronology” (Voegelin 2021: 271), it tends to gloss over differences in power relations in the sonic encounter (Hofer 2021).
The method I propose and perform here – materially based figurative interpretation – borrows from both Campt and Voegelin as it diffracts their suggestions through my encounter with Bilir-Meier’s film. Following Voegelin, I will first provide a detailed, personal, descriptive exploration of the particular sonic textures I perceive in Semra Ertan. I will attend to what material textures I hear and how I hear them. I will then describe what I hear signified in and by them. This is where I will leave Voegelin’s framework and return to Bilir-Meier’s representational concerns. Unlike Voegelin, I am interested in sounding out how exactly traces of concrete locations and dates materialize and resonate, even and especially in embodied, personal encounters with remediated archival material. I will trace how the routine racisms of 1980s West German Dominanz media discourse have sedimented sonically in Ertan’s estate, and how they continue to shape Bilir-Meier’s encounter with her aunt’s poetic work as presented in her 2013 film. By introducing Campt into this dialogue, I then turn to a “quiet” sound: a soft, haptic, small, underlying sonic texture that calls its listener to “attend […] to the unspoken relations that structure” the story an artwork tells openly (Campt 2017: 8). I will do so by amplifying a quiet sound impressed upon me while listening to Semra Ertan: tape hiss.