Sound studies: dominant paradigm, cultural studies, soundscape, and the historicity of listening Bryce Peake Proseminar Final

Sound studies has long occupied a precarious position in media studies, occupying a middleground between communication studies and musicology. Norma Coates, a sound studies scholar and professor appointed in both fields, notes this precariousness in an address to the Society of Cinema and Media Studies: As Cinema Journal and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies welcome sound studies into their midst, I cannot help but wonder what the fallout will be for the study of popular music Sound studies, as it coalesces as a field under the auspices of SCMS, runs the risk of becoming Soundtrack Studies. [] If a screen is necessary for SCMS inclusion, then popular music and its industry could remain forever marginal. Seeing the field as being rejected by musicology because of its emphasis on the cultural context of sound, and rejected from communications because of its emphasis on the sounded media popularly associated with (ethno)musicology, Coates concern is less about the epistemological project than the disciplinary institutional mechanism that legitimates the field. Current trends locate sound studies scholars in communication departmentsas well as those with more an epistemological investment than an ontological investment in an object of study (i.e. history, media studies, English). While some scholars like Coates focus on mass mediated sound as a form of contentmany of whom are entrenched deep within the musicology/communication chasm, others focus on the different ways humans experience sound and its technologies, and how sound is embedded in history, culture, institutions, and technologies. As such, sound studies acts as an important framework for furthering cultural research related to issues of the everyday. In this paper, I will outline what could be taken as an archeology of sound studies as it exists in communication and cultural studieswith a few ventures into history and cultural/linguistic anthropology. What I do not wish to provide is a sort of false teleological history that arrives at sound studies, but instead show the intellectual strata that lie beneath the now-time of the field. To do so, I begin with what has been called dominant paradigm communication studies of radio, the earliest engagement with the technological form of auditory mass communication. I then describe a historical shift from the study of mass communication that happens to be auditory, to scholars focused on the unique implications of the mass media aural/oral form. Within this field are both classical studies of sound and studies of the spatial implications of oral/aural technology. Coupling this historical shift with innovations in American cultural studies, I end with a description of scholars presently studying not sound, but listeningmade particularly clear through the work of Jonathan Sterne and Emily Thompson. Radio and the dominant paradigm The idea of the dominant paradigm in communication studies signifies more a political economic positionality than an intellectual legitimacy. The term refers to research that is most closely associated with the social sciences, born primarily out of the financial and ideological primacy of psychology as a human science. Beginning in 1915, John Watson pushes psychology into a new positivism, discrediting the work of Wundt as pure metaphysics, and bringing psychology into the behavioralist stage. In this stage, all actions are measurable and thus predictable along a general law of the social. Such research is of the utmost value to both the State as an institution of control and

corporations as institutions that profit from prescript behaviors. Psychology, as a result, becomes a hotbed for American funding from both the State and corporations, pushing all consequent social sciencessociology, anthropology, and not least of all early communication studiesto quantitative studies of prediction. Such was certainly the case with Hadley Cantril and Gordon Willard Allports study of radio consumptionwhich carries a very pronounced corporate-driven research agenda. What they do not know, however, and what they would like very much to know, is the reason for the tenacious grip that radio has so swiftly secured on the mental life of men Why do people like to listen to hours on end to the impersonal blare of their loudspeakers do the broadcasting of concerts and church services keep people away from concert halls and places of worship? (4) To understand this question, Cantril and Allport turn to psychology, in order to understand the ways in which the mind is affected by mass mediaimportantly, not sound, but mediation in general. In research on voice and personality presented in the same study, Cantril and Allport examine the mental imagetied to the persuasivity and trustabilityof a character brought about by the broadcast voice. Utilizing scientific experimentation in the same vein as the psychological science, the two researchers utilize scientific methods to declare the supremacy of presencewhich better technology, read more profitable corporate spending on the social dynamics of reception, can fix: It may be said that listeners are quite successful in hearing through the inevitable burr which accompanies the transmission of the human voice On the average, the natural voice is somewhat more revealing of personal qualities than is the radio voice. The loss represents perhaps only slight imperfections in transmission which mechanical improvements may in time remove. (119-120) Cantril and Allports study is progressive, in the sense that it fights the moral crisis of the time to mourn the loss of the human soul to mass mediation, as Aristotle does in the Phaedrus. Despite this awareness of, and push against, the social bias of the time, the study does over-simplify in the other direction: Cantril and Allport see radio as mass mediation without any attention to its characteristic as sound. While an important distinction is made between the voice on the air and the voice in person, no emphasis is placed on the difference between the voice signified by the telephone and that of the radio, nor that of the telegraph or the newspaper, or any other medium. What is lacking is the specificity of sound as an object in and of itself. Studies of radio, however, have evolved. Susan Douglas Listening in: radio and the American imagination (2004) is one such study of the unique relationship between mass mediation and radio as a particular sonic object in historyshe is, after all, influenced by the authors with which I will close this essay. Douglas states its not what people listen to that defines generations. Its how they listened as well that shaped peoples memories, associations with others, their sense of who they were and their place in history (6). In other words, listening cultivated different modes of listening historically boundthat constitute us as individuals. Doing so, Douglas pushes the study of radio ahead by combining that unique and foundational work of Cantrill and Allport with a second stage in the study of sound: the importance of sound qua mediation, not simply in mediation. Sound representations and representations through sound As was the case with communication studies, the 1970s signaled an interruption to the dominant paradigm: the increasing exploitative nature of the capitalist economy, coupled with the failure of social scientific laws to maintain a social equilibrium satisfactory to all members of society, gave rise to an (often leftist) intellectual class skeptical of quantitative social scientific studies that

attempted to explainfrom a universalist positionthe experience of mass communication in general. The focus of this crowd became the ways in which representations of truth in the media were a medium for power over groups of people. Scholars in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies examined the ways in which mass media were a reflection of social relations. One such study is Dick Hebdiges (1979) analysis of subcultures. Although Hebdige does not engage directly with sound production, his work is in address to subcultures situated around a particular sound: punk and reggae. Imbedded in the music of these subcultures, as well as the rest of their cultural production, is a struggle over signification and representation. In punk music, with the punk juxtaposing the sounds of rhythm and blues with that of the aristocratic Edwardian style, one can find a frozen dialectic between black and white culturesa dialectic which beyond a certain point is incapable of renewal, trapped, as it is, within its own history, imprisoned within its own irreducible antinomies (70). Moving away from radio in particular, and concentrating on the content of sound, this mode of analysis carries on today, from Larry Grossbergs (1983) studies of heavy metal music; to Patricia Roses (1994) study of masculinity, race, and hip hop; and Victor Coronas (2011) study of the music of Lady Gaga as an articulation of the interlacing of Warhol pop irony with contemporary anxieties over sexuality and technology, much can be found in the sonic representation of societybe it the over-valuation of the auto-tuned voice, or the racializing of misogyny in hip hop and representations of hip hop. Again, a problem arises, and is omnipresent in this approach even today; the medium soundbecomes invisible. The uniqueness of aurality and audition fades in service to a critique of the image constructed by sound. Also absent, in both studies, is a consideration of the place of listening. Places in listening, places through listening In the United States, the dominant paradigm begins being challenged by, first, Leo Marx (1964), and then more famously by R. Murray Schafer (1977), with studies on what has most popularly been referred to as soundscape studies. Marxs The machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in America begins challenging the quantitative sociological approach to sound on its own ground; returning to Karl Marx, Leo Marx (1964) argues for understanding sound as a set of social relations. All of the sounds of laborclocks, cowbells, and the noise of the factoryare what create the pastoral ideal of the American landscape, and not what intrudes upon it. Coming over a decade later, with no reference to Marxs work, was composer-scholar R. Murray Schafers hallmark book The Soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world (1977). The book has been cited as the bible of the field, as it is the first to define what has occupied the sound-scholastic imaginary for the past 20 years: soundscapesor sonic environments. Audiotry space is very different from visual space. We are always at the edge of visual space, looking in with the eye. But we are always at the centre of auditory space, listening out with ears. [] visual awareness faces forward. Aural awareness is centered (1993:164). Where Schafers book was highly conjectural, and represented a moral intervention into what was perceived as the sonic polluting of the world, anthropologist Steven Feld (1982) would base his 1982 study of Kaluli soundscapesentitlted Sound and Sentimenton much of what Schafer had suggested. For Feld, the meaning of sounds are not derived from the relation to other sound signs within a particular systemi.e. the meaning of flutes in relation to drums but instead originates outside the sonic symbolic system, particularly with the sound of the environmentflutes and birds. The sounds of the Kaluli, according to Feld, are regimented by the environment; Kaluli hear themselves by hearing the Other. Furthermore, adopting the Schafer-ian ideal, Feld argued that a direct

relation exists between the total sound environment and the healthy functioning of the environment. Numerous scholars would follow suit, and continue to do so today, notably Alain Corbin (1998) and Charles Hirschkind (2009). There is, however, a problem in both the work of Feld and Schafer, resulting from the imprecision of Schafers tool. For Schafer, it is from depictions of the noble savage that the ideal soundscape arrives; natives, whose sounds were a sign of non-alienated social relationsto use a turn of phrase from the Marx that Schafer ignored. The thesis [of sound/social relations] is also born out well in tribal societies where, under the strict control of the flourishing community, music is tightly structured, while in detribalized areas the individual sings appallingly sentimental songs (7). One would perhaps be remiss to simply attack Schafer for a lack of relativity in his use of politically charged descriptions of tribal music, and later on, tribal soundscapes. However, there is a larger structural issue at hand: for Schafer, it is the ancient peoplestribesthat are left unmarked and imagined white that have natural and good soundscapes. Oppressed people of colorwhether their technology, or their labor, or their sorrow songsare noise pollution. After all, how is the Protestant church bell signifying the start or end of a service any less noise pollution than the thumping bass of two 22 sub-woofers signifying the commute home from workaside from the implicit racial formation that underlies the two. In addition to signifying an implicit racism, Schafers study also implies a universal listener. And this is what Feld must be held accountable for; where the soundscape may or may not reflect social relations, who has defined the soundscape in Felds study? The anthropologist? The term is not born out of cultural logic, and thus is not a cultural definition. What might the Kaluli count in the soundscape that Feld would not have? What does Feld count that they have not? The central issue then, with both Feld and Schafer, is who is listening? Listening studies Michelle Hilmes, one of the US most prominent scholars of radio, has commented that the work of Emily Thompson and Jonathan Sterne are not simply additions to the sound studies corpus, but rather redefine the parameters of the field altogether, less as the study of sound itself, or as practices of aurality within a particular industry or field, than of the cultural contexts out of which sound media emerged and which they in turn work to create: sound culture (emphasis added, Hilmes 2005:252). The work of Sterne and Thompson formulate what some have called the listening studies branch of sound studies; where some scholars are focused primarily on what sound might mean, and the effects of sound, Thompson and Sterne, and those who follow, argue for a study of the very cultural preconditions that make sound possible; listening. Furthermore, both Thompson and Sterne are focused on the technology that circumscribes the listening process. For Sterne, it is the technology of sound reproduction and the stories that surround them that make up the cultural practice of listening, for Thompson, the technology is that of architectural space. While it is tempting to situate these scholars as a revolution that comes out of the ongoing project of dismantling dominant hierarchies of knowledge productionspecifically the occularcentrism of modernity, they are instead a product of two intellectual flows: the first being the intellectual return of the Frankfurt School critical theory, and its formalist analysis of mass consumption, and secondly the questioning of the grounds of communication reception marked by the work of Jonathan Crary Bernard Gendron (1996) marks the early revival of the Frankfurt school, out of a crisis in communication and media studies to address the role of pop music as one of many lines of force something mainstream musicology has emphatically left out, along with numerous other discussions of

power. Adorno argues that consumption is a way to structure the mind so that the consumer becomes perfectly attuned to the system of production; Adorno argues that the consumer is structured exactly like the mass product, naturalizing the trading of labor (Adorno & Horkheimer 1944). Gendron (1996), however, describes Adorno as emphasizing the production of an aesthetic object: the popular song, in particular. Gendron argues that Adornos conceptualization of producing the song is wrong; and, indeed, had Adorno been talking about the popular song he would have been wrong. However, Adornos focus, as made clear in his essay on popular music (1941), is on listening; his is a theory of how listening to a song naturalizes the relations of production, not how the song itself does. Adorno claims that if one is listening to a piece of music, like a Cole Porter musical, and it is a 35-bar form instead of 32-bar form, the listener says hey, thats not a 32 bar form because they are so inculcated into the system. They are concentrated on the form of the piece as it fits within a structure, because according to the consumer everything must fit into the structure, as opposed to listening to the parts of the song and the ways in which they interact; just as, the consumer understands their relationship to the world in terms of being a person who is alienated from its part, because the structure of society as a system of alienation is natural. The focus on Adorno raises very interesting questions about the process of listening, and its place in communication studies. In one sense, the Adorno-ian strain of understanding the role of listening as a form of subjection is a qualitative, and indeed much more philosophically rich, form of media effects analysis. Listening to x in such a way, yields z behavior. Furthermore, like media effects research in the classic sense with which we began, Adorno posits not simply a universal listener who is automatically interpolated into the system with no sense of awareness, no sense of pleasure, but also a listener that is ahistorical. Such is why it is important to also reflect on another trend in communication and media studies: the questioning of the historicity of the senses. In his study of the process of looking, Jonathan Crary (1990) argues that the study of art through a universal, uninterrogated understanding of the observer yields only contemporary interpretations of the past artifacts, not the visuality of the time period represented by said artifacts. As such, Crary sets out to argue that the technique of looking is just that: a technique, which must be historically situated. Observers, according to Crary, became a site for new discourses that practiced how one should look by situating vision within various fields of power relations. Looking, vision, is inseparable from the operation of social power within a society, and is as much culturally constructed as any other technique. It is arguable that it is the Adorno-ian emphasis on listening over that of the product, and Crarys situating of visuality as a constructed by discourses outside of the field of art, that come together in the formation of the work of Jonathan Sterne (2003). Sterne argues that scholars have more or less ignored the period between 1750-1925, particularly in terms of how the world became audible in new ways, with new listening practices and epistemes of sound giving rise tonot resulting from the stethoscope, the telephone, and the phonograph. The Audible Past explores the ways in which the history of sound contributes to and develops from the maelstrom of modern life: capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of industry In modern life, sound becomes a problem: an object to be contemplated, reconstructed, and manipulated, something that can be fragmented, industrialized, bought and sold (9). [] the history of sound must move beyond recovering experience to interrogating the conditions under which that experience became possible in the first place. (28) Simultaneously, Emily Thompson (2002) writes that we must historicize the ways in which space is listened to, and understand the architectural technology of acoustics as marking a fundamental

epistemological shift in the ways in which sound is thought about within space, and that musicians and engineers act as bricoleurs, creating a new culture out of the noise of the modern world (9). Radios, electrically amplified phonographs, public address systems, and sound motion pictures transformed the soundscape by introducing auditors not only to electrically reproduced sound but also to new ways of listening. As people self-consciously consumed these new products they became increasingly sound conscious, and the sound that they sought was of a particular type. Clear and focused, researchers issued directly toward them with little opportunity to reflect and reverberate off the surfaces of the room in which it was generated. Indeed, the sound of space was effectively eliminated from the new modern sound s a reverberation came to be considered an impediment, a noise that only interfered with the successful transmission and reception of the desired sound signal. (234). Just as Jonathan Sterne emphasizes that new technologies of self give rise to new technologies of sound reproduction and not vice versa, Thompson argues that technology gives rise to new ways of listening which in turn give rise to new ways of understanding space. This arises from Thompsons definition of the soundscape, drawing not from Schafer, but Alain Corbin, arguing that it is simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment (2). A soundscape is because it is listened to. The historicity of listening continues to ring throughout post-Thompson/Sterne sound studies, in the work of Stefan Helmreich (2007), who studies how seafloor scientists create and maintain worlds of immersion through sound; Tara Rodgers (2010), who analyzes how misogyny embedded in scientific discourses about sound alienates women as electronic music composers; and Hillel Schwartz (2011), who analyzes the evolution of the category of noise and the anxiety produced by sounds that violate the strict auditory regimentation of modernity. Conclusion In order to avoid the legacy of media effects that is deeply embedded in Adornos critical interrogation of reception, and similar to Crarys focus on discourse, listening scholars seem to explicitly avoid discussions of power in terms of listening: how, and in what ways, is listening a technology for the maintenance and operationalization of power along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, etc. Sterne, for example, argues that ways of listening, the symbolic coding of the process of sonic reception, precede technologies of sound reproduction; we are left wondering whose understanding of the listening process, articulated in what political conjunctures? Listening as both product and productive of social divisions and hierarchies, as a practice in the reproduction of lines of force, is what I believe to be the next analytic step in sound studies. However, to be successful, such a theorizing of sound must be attentive to those things forgotten along the path of developing the field; be it the ahistoricism corrected by the listening scholars, or the favoring of content over form corrected by the scholars of the soundscape. A study of listening as a technique and technology, first and foremost, must be both historically and culturally situated (Sterne & Thompson), attentive to the role and relationship to spaces of listening (Marx, Schafer, Feld), and, finally, the ways in which empirical realityhowever that might be defined (scientifically or in a Marxist field)should inform our theorizations of sound and the listening subject.

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