The Radical Plurality of the Real
The conditions under which a sensorial engagement unfolds inform how the spatial and temporal aspects of the sonorous are rendered audible. As Ganchrow writes:
To materialise sound is to make corporeal artefacts from durational flux. To hear space is to derive a spatiality from a temporal event. [...] There are no spaces fastened to either side of the ear just as there is no absolute sonic-spatiality that needs to be defined, but rather heterogeneous and intermittent contextually constituted materialisations of sound. (Ganchrow 2009: 70)
The spatial aspect of the audible is informed by the listener’s perceptual rendering of the oscillatory mass that their ear is engaged with. As Raviv Ganchrow elaborates, there is no such thing as an absolute spatiality – or form in which the spatial is rendered – but rather different spatialities contingent to the form in which sensorial engagements are produced. In the realm of human–animal perception, the spatial character of sound is primarily informed by environmental cues that inform a listener’s cognitive processes. The fundamentally different form in which the spatial aspect of sound might be rendered audible can be exemplified by attending to the perceptual experience of a single sinewave oscillation as is proposed by composer Alvin Lucier in his performative piece Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas - Part IV. The text score of this piece instructs the production of “standing waves in space caused by constructive and destructive interference patterns among sine waves from loudspeakers” (Lucier 1995: 358). The piece encourages performers and/or audience to wander around in a room where one or more sinusoidal waveforms are produced by one or more loudspeakers. They are asked to search for the places in the room where near-silence occurs – as a product of “destructive interference patterns” – and where a noticeable increase in the sound’s amplitude occurs – as a product of “constructive interference patterns.”
The phenomenon deployed by Lucier is a well-known one. The wave-like propagation of an oscillation in the air medium is reflected and refracted in its encounter with the walls, generating new waveforms of equal frequency and different direction and phase patterns. When the original and reflected wavefronts collide, areas of dynamic reinforcement – at those points where the original and reflected oscillation patterns are in-phase (or approaching it) – alternate with areas of cancellation or near-cancellation – where these wavefronts are out-of-phase or close to being out-of-phase.
The consequence of this experience is significant: listeners are not only prompted to become aware of the inseparable material-spatial intricacy of the sonorous, they are simultaneously prevented from relying on the cognitive operations that they most habitually use to make sense of space through sound. As listeners traverse the room, they become aware of the actual dimensions of the rapidly contracting and expanding air that produces the experience of sound as the fixed points of reinforcement and cancellation reveal the wavelength of the oscillating pattern across the room. At the same time, the singular nature of the sinewave and its dynamic constancy renders the listener incapable of localizing its origin.
The capacity to localize a sound source is rooted in a number of cognitive actions generally known as localization cues. One of these cues consists of the difference in decay times and patterns produced across a room at different frequencies, which the brain then analyzes with the capacity to distinguish their dynamically diverse arrival at both ears, known as interaural time and level differences (Wittek 2007). In this case, the single sinewave does not provide enough spectral variety of decay patterns to be distinguished by the brain, and as a consequence cannot process this cue. Additionally, the constancy of the sinewave masks the sound reflections in the room, limiting the brain’s capacity to process another critical cue: the energy ratio between direct and reflected wavefronts. As a result, the habitual processes through which the spatial is rendered audible are impeded – the listener cannot efficiently localize sound – while a different kind of spatial awareness is enabled. The listener is prompted to experience the intricacy of sound and the spatial conditions in which it occurs, in relation to the scale of its embodied presence.
In enabling a different spatiality (a different form in which the spatial aspect of sound is made audible), the experience of Still and Moving Lines shows how inaccurate it is to talk about a sound in space, not only because the spatial aspect of any sonorous circumstance is inseparable from its material oscillatory nature, but also because the spatial-material aspect of the audible can be experienced in incompatible and diverse ways determined by the relationship established between agent and milieu. Opportunities for such diverse experiences of space populate everyday life: a tone produced by an oboe, a chirping cricket, or a door slam will each shape spatial awareness in different ways. These differences tend to be obscured, though, as predispositions to an authoritative and predominant spatiality – anchored in the identification of objects – shape the protocols of identification usually performed during everyday tasks. Acknowledging this allows both the commonly assumed indexicality of sound and the possibility to extricate a sound from “the space where it occurs” to be problematized. When addressing the material condition of sound, one must account for the circuit in which the sensorial is produced rather than for the presumably stable and transparent manifestation of sound as a projected entity. In order for the notion of sound image that I propose here to accomplish this, this notion needs to be detached from the optical models that have primarily shaped the notion of the image until now, and it needs to be expanded to embrace the particular manner in which the audible is constituted.
Media philosopher Mark Hansen has applied Simondon’s concept of the image to the outcomes of neuroscientific research, which have demonstrated that visual images in the brain are produced by the temporal synchronization of parallel excitation patterns. In this context, Hansen has referred to the mental image as a “micro-temporal pattern of cognitive activity” (Hansen 2011: 87). He cites a “consensus that color and motion, if not location and orientation, each have specialized cortical centers and neural pathways and hence each possess[es] a certain degree of functional autonomy” (Hansen 2011: 87). Hansen recalls experiments by neuroscientist Semir Zeki that depict the brain in constant processes of adjustment to temporally overlapping streams that produce what is commonly understood as visual images. As Hansen continues, the stability of the mental image, then, is not derived from the stability of a material circumstance, but from a particular condition of synchronization produced during the act of perception. In Hansen’s elaboration, the production of the image assumes the subject not as the holder of the image but as one phase in a processual reality. His reconceptualization of images - following Simondon - as “temporalizations of light-matter” also suggest that the image exceeds the mental instance: “Images – whether mental or material, micro-temporal or macro-temporal, proto-conscious or phenomenologically conscious – are irreducibly temporal entities or processes” (Hansen 2011: 89). This is useful to further challenge the assumed stability of the image (in its more prevalent visual guise) and address its productive, operative, and temporal nature, that bind it more palpably to the realm of the aural.
As I alluded to previously, my reconceptualization of the image resonates with the scrutiny that the image in general has undergone in the context of current technological transformations. Images are nowadays often the outcome of the synchronization of interactions between human and material agents, computational infrastructures, and sensing devices. Pictorial instances that are still referred to as photographs are often “actually composites of various overlaid materials: Satellite records, laser scans, vectors, and maps” (Peraica 2022: 61). The image is constituted by the association of sets of data that capture aspects of “visuals, sound, heat, movement, biometrics” that “need to be processed, correlated, fused, and matched with a database” (Hoelzl and Marie 2017: 73). In this context, the transduction of visual, aural, or other sensorial triggers initiate a series of operations that inform the (nowadays more complex) sensing circuit. Furthermore, the distinction between images and real entities has also become blurred, to the point that images are sometimes even considered as embedded in the everyday fabric of the real, thereby losing their “essential otherness” (Purgar 2015: 163).
The notion of the operative image championed by filmmaker Harun Farocki has become widespread and fundamental to many analytical contexts. Farocki coined the term to address the then novel technological practices in which visual images were not used to “represent an object, but rather [as] part of an operation” (Farocki 2004: 17). This condition – first described by Farocki to address military technologies “where the image functions as a guiding tool for target tracking and the real-time adjustment of a missile’s trajectory” – concerned the use of photographic artefacts as input for parametric analysis and computational calculations. Simondon’s operative understanding of the image, though, exceeds this perspective. In Simondon’s model the image is an operation, not merely an action applied to a pre-existing image conceived of as a material artefact, as in Farocki’s original model. Simondon’s perspective rather corresponds with visual scholars Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie’s identification of the image in the current technological paradigm as “an operation and as a process rather than a representation, […] an operation of data gathering, processing, rendering and exchange” (Hoelzl and Marie 2017: 73). The image as a process is defined by the circuits that make it possible. It is through this process that a singular instance of sensorial awareness is produced. This demands a reconsideration of the role of technology across the history of the image concept, for it becomes clear that the image is not perennially fixed in its mode of operation but is rather an operation that exists across different protocols and exceeds its sole ascription to the assumed autonomy of the human mind. As image scholar Hans Belting has claimed: “We need to remind ourselves […] that the ‘traditional sense’ [of understanding what an image is] was itself subject to historical forces that constantly altered it” (Belting 2011: 25).
As claimed above, the articulation of a new a notion of sound image that I propose is meant to supersede the reliance on the projection of identities onto the sonorous, and to account for the protocols, circuits, and infrastructures which enable such an image to take place. Whenever the expression a sound is employed to address singular instances of the audible, the coalescence of spatial and temporal aspects that renders what is heard remains unacknowledged. Processes of ascription and identification obscure the components, protocols, and circuits that inform the production of the audible. One case in which this can be observed pertains to the realm of the voice. For example, the sound of a vowel can conventionally be understood as a reference to a phonatory source, bound to the subject that utters it. However, this same sonorous circumstance, can be addressed as the coupling of spaces that belong to the vocal cord-mouth cavity system. The alternative notion of sound image that I have proposed accounts for this unstable and productive character as well as for its inherence in diverse configurations of sensing. These concern technologies as much as cosmologies (which entail forms of participating in the world). Such a diversity is essential to an account of the ecological dimension of every act of listening.
Ochoa Gautier has called for a more fundamental appraisal of the articulation of sound and how knowledge is produced that relies on “exploring different forms of relationality and alterity” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 132). Rather than “dissolving the human into the natural through a transhuman extension of music or sound,” – as has been done in accounts that strive for a universal understanding of music or sound as capable of expressing relations – this would entail “the exploration of different ontologies that do not take the idea of nature and culture for granted” (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 132).
In her book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia, Ochoa Gautier demonstrates how the fundamental production of the audible occurs in various ways in the context of different cosmologies and, by extension, through different forms of participation in a milieu. Ochoa Gautier addresses how listening was performed by the bogas (the rowers that transported colonial botanists and explorers from the coast of the Caribbean Atlantic over the rivers to the Andes) in the early nineteenth century (Ochoa Gautier 2014). Through an investigation and analysis of the diaries of these colonial explorers, which include figures such as Alexander von Humboldt, Ochoa Gautier exposes the clash between the listening practices of the European settlers and those of the bogas. The colonial explorers imposed their own listening categories upon the bogas’ seamless alternation between language, music and the imitation of the sounds of animals. As Ochoa Gautier states, though:
[T]he capacity of the bogas to move between the world of the human and the nonhuman by envoicing animal sounds is not a ‘lowly condition of animality’ but rather is due to the shared capacity of humans and animals to have a voice, sing, and speak. (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 63)
Ochoa Gautier brings attention to the diverse roles of the voice in these two cultures and, more fundamentally, points towards the link between voice, listening, and an ontology of the self that the culture of the bogas shared with other aboriginal societies. In this case, an alternative understanding of the voice emerges from its construal as the “locus of a ‘transpersonal self’” rather than as the property of an individual. She joins cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins as he argues that “the self in these societies is not synonymous with the bounded, unitary and autonomous individual as we know him […] Rather, the individual person is the locus of multiple other selves with whom he or she is joined in mutual relations of being” (Sahlins 2008: 48).
The voice becomes the locus through which different understandings of the self unfold. As Ochoa Gautier claims, the voice is necessarily engaged with the environment:
the voice is materially constituted simultaneously through the body (by means of vibrating vocal cords) and the world (by means of air that makes the chords move) yet does not fully belong to either. […] [It] hovers at the juncture of the differentiation between the human and nonhuman and that mediates between the world and the person. (Ochoa Gautier 2016: 209)
Here, the voice provides an example of a sonorous circumstance through which two diverse forms of the audible – hence two different sound images - are produced. The act of listening performed by the bogas participates in a different circuit. As a result, what is heard also differs. Whereas the botanist explorers identified the bogas’ sonorous emissions as the product of individuals against the backdrop of their environment, the bogas themselves conceived of and listened to their own utterances as immersed in a processual constitution of the self via an act of re-envoicing. As a consequence, one could speculate that the bogas would not have considered their own (or the animals’) sound as distinct against a backdrop. Rather, they would have engaged with these sound emissions as the coupling of vocal cords, oral cavities, and the resonating bodies of the earth, trees, water, boats, or air. As the sensing agent and their milieu are co-constituted through the bogas practices of sound-making and listening, they reveal a different production of the audible.