Blog #1: Learning to Listen

PART 1 - Schafer Analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbzU-1oiCgk

I myself have heard the "haunting moans" of the Canadian train whistle, as R. Murray Schafer describes (81); when I was a teenager my parents sold the home I grew up in, moving our family into a rental house at the edge of town. It was close enough to the railroad tracks and far enough away from everything else that the piercing, mournful wail of the train whistle frames nearly all my memories of laying awake in the quiet of the night for the 6 months we lived there. Schafer references the sad voice of the Canadian train whistle in comparison to the more upbeat cry of the European train whistle, and the deeper lowing of the heavy-hauling American trains (81). The nostalgia of what Schafer characterizes as "The Lore of Trains" (80) fits into what he generally lays out as the development of modern noise, replacing the Sacred Noise that was transferred from the roaring power of natural forces in the crashing of tidal waves pulled along by the schedule set by the moon, the thunder of storms brought on in cyclical seasons, and the seemingly spontaneous eruptions of volcanic fissures that represent several millennia of slow but steady creeping (76). While I don't think that the sounds humans have invented to demarcate our existence can ever fully supplant the sounds that have existed on a longer timeline than humans can even really conceptualize, I appreciate that Schafer defines "Sound Imperialism" by the intention behind the noise-making as much as the power of it (77). The train whistle can be seen as presenting a kind of synecdoche for the noise of industrialization on the whole: beautiful, distinct, communicative, meaningful, and at the same time bounded to the clattering, noisy conquering of the engine that transports the whistle across the country at 85 dBA (Schafer 76). In "Imagined Communities" Benedict Anderson argues that the societal perception of time is at once delimited by inventions like clocks and calendars, and yet is conversely experienced "simultaneously" in its conceptual measuring (24). Our relation to the world is innately palimpsestic with each attempt to organize the chaos reverberating forwards and backwards with each new attempt at understanding, swelling into layers of propagation. While I do not agree with everything Schafer posits in the chapters included in this week's reading materials, I think that the mix of personal attachment and empirical analysis that he uses to frame the development of sound in the course of recent human history provides much needed balance to the attempt of explaining how the sounds and mediation of our surroundings deeply impacts our existence.

The first documentation of the discovery that noise causes deafness in 1831 (Schafer 75) seems unthinkably long ago given the ever-growing prevalence of noise in the world as compared to the lack of common protection against it, especially in modern workplaces. Schafer uses acquired deafness as a demonstration of the estrangement humans generally seem to exhibit from the noises produced by the world we develop and inhabit (76). I think that the way he ties these points together is interesting, especially since it's a phenomenon that continues on today in much the same application as we continue to react, too slowly in many cases, to the ramifications of technology in our changing world. In 2019 it was revealed that almost 1 in every 4 interpreters employed by the Federal Translation Bureau have complained of some form of acoustic shock, which can result in symptoms similar to those seen in concussions; the solution that the government has put forward to deal with this issue is the development of a system that "better controls sound" (The Translation Bureau, cited by CBC News). The fact that they've waited for signs of detrimental, long-term health effects to appear consistently in their interpreters before taking action speaks to the lack of consideration paid when the short-term effects were first reported, but also to the continuing phenomenon that befuddles Schafer: the sounds that are causing the damage are made by people, and transmitted through man-made devices, yet the quality of the technology is the thing blamed for the damage caused as if human intervention had nothing to do with the problem but could somehow provide a solution to this spontaneous issue.

Schafer's concept of "schizophonia" (90, original emphasis) is similarly preoccupied with what Walter Benjamin refers to as "authenticity" in art objects (218). Just as "[w]e have split the sound from the maker of the sound" (Schafer 90) with the development of recording technology, so too "the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition" (Benjamin 219) in the practice of visual representation through photography, video, and print. If I have any complaints about Schafer (and Benjamin, for that matter) it is that like much academic writing, the preserved revolutionary ideology eventually becomes withered and mothballed by the ravages of time. While I generally enjoyed the central tenets of Schafer's assertions, some of the points made in these chapters are left in the dust by changing acceptances of what constitutes respectful engagement, such as how we refer to certain ethnic groups and cultures (83, 84, 95). Schafer could not have likely predicted at the time of writing the malaise that has grown in place of the indignant "Counter Revolution" (87). The lo-fi soundscape has not abated; if anything, it's gotten worse. But that's the thing about over-inundating the "signal-to-noise ratio" (71) - if you don't know what you should be listening to, can you be bothered to listen to anything at all? This is a question that in my mind still doesn't have a sufficient answer, and maybe it never will.

PART 2 - Listening Exercise Review

I think the biggest thing I learned in this exercise is how much time I spend explicitly NOT listening to the world around me. I'm the kind of person that puts headphones in and start listening to a podcast or music the second I'm by myself, regardless of the setting. Paying more attention to the sounds that make up my little world, I think this is probably a method of preservation: it's a noisy place. Even in somewhere like a library, there are many intrusive sounds; some of them peaceful and enjoyable like the whisper of pages turning, but others are just plain annoying and hard to shut out. For instance, I found myself getting very annoyed by the crumpling of a newspaper as it was being read, despite the fact that the sound is not that dissimilar from the sound of the book pages turning (at least in theory, if not in practice.)

I think I can safely say I undertook all three modes of listening that Michel Chion describes - or tried to, at the very least. Though I tried my hardest to not focus entirely on causal listening, it is very difficult to conceptualize sounds without trying to pinpoint the source as the primary identifier. I made a concerted effort to make this listening exercise in the library less causally-based than the first exercise I undertook in the street, but even as I attempted to ignore the impulse to look around and see for myself what the source of the sounds I was hearing were, I found myself dwelling on the other forms of causal listening, like tracking the "evolution" (Chion 27) of the sounds without necessarily knowing what was making the sound itself. On the second floor of the building I heard lots of noises from below that I couldn't visually verify, but I could infer some noises from the patterns of the library soundscape without seeing them, like the opening and closing of doors and drawers, and the thudding of winter boots that people had to wear to get through the snow but were clearly heavy against the wood flooring.

The most semantic listening I took part in was trying to parse out the conversation that was happening in the meeting space on the second floor. Behind the closed door the voices were muffled, but I could judge from the emphasis and tone that the conversation was between new acquaintances - it seemed to me that the defining feature I was able to extract was not the semantic meaning of the words themselves, but the general sense of a lack of familiarity. I was later gratified when the twosome left the room and I was able to hear their goodbye clearly; "Nice to meet you!" Though I used the semantic meaning of their tone more than the lexical extraction of their words, I was nonetheless taking advantage of the "objectivity" (Chion 29) which allowed me to gain understanding of the interaction through a combination of different sound qualities of that conversation.

I found it incredibly difficult to achieve the focus for the reduced listening that Chion describes. The vacillation between causal and semantic listening as a means of going beyond both these methods is of itself a challenge, never mind then trying to describe the sound that you're reduced-listening to; as Chion also states, however, it can be "quite an instructive experience." (29) I think the best opportunity I had to try out my reduced listening skill was the different sounds of a man receiving a phone call. The phone rang several times, and at first I looked up to determine the cause of the sound, especially since it changed in volume as he took it out of his pocket before placing it back in again. As much as the disruption was out of place in the relative quiet of the library, I rather enjoyed the ringtone that played and found myself trying to write down a copy of what it sounded like phonetically. As Schafer describes in his exploration of the "Electric Revolution", the telephone allows sound to be un-tethered from the space that it originates from; and he too expresses both awe and annoyance at it's ability to intrude into modern life (89). The phone rang again a few moments later, and this time the man picked up, talking loudly and causing even more disruption - drawing further from Schafer, perhaps it was a call happening at a distance that made him feel he must speak up to be heard properly (89). I think he started the conversation in English, but before I could really extract any semantic meaning he switched into another language. I caught myself struggling to determine the semantic meaning of the conversation as I had done earlier with the two acquaintances, and then I caught myself - what if I just listened, without trying to extract any meaning? So I did. I listened instead to the pitch of his voice, the trill of his words. Providing a break from the hum of the overhead lights, the "flat line" that inundates our every breath with some form of industrial white noise (Schafer 78) but also joining it, roiling the sounds into a kind of unintended conversation, a negotiation of the shared, enclosed space.

Generally, I think Schafer's trepidation at the noises of the world is reasonably founded; however, employing the listening modes that Chion advocates made me feel more willing to listen without judgement, and instead just focus on the experience of being in that space with the ability to hear it.

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Anderson, Benedict R. O. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Routledge, 1982.

CBC News, with files from Estelle Côté-Sroka. "Federal interpreters suffer 'acoustic shock,' other concussion-like symptoms." CBC, 18 Feb. 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/federal-interpreters-raise-alarm-on-hearing-problems-1.5021258

Chion, Michel, Claudia Gorbman, and Walter Murch. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press, 1994.

Schafer, R. M. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Alfred Knopf/Random House, New York, 1977/1994, pp. 71-99.